Ratfucking grifter gets Chotinered

Peter Daou, having taken a uniquely pathetic journey from Hillary Clinton attack dog to Marianne Willaimson’s campaign to Cornel Wests’s fascism>liberalism campaign, sits down with Chotiner and the results are as amazing as you would expect. All of the responses are equally stupid and incoherent, and like all of the best Chotiner victims he think’s they’re brilliant. I don’t even know where to begin, but how about this:

Would the Iraq War and the war on terror be a good example of what I meant? You have a President now who’s pulled us out of the war in Afghanistan, who’s drastically reduced drone strikes, who’s tried to tamp down the war on terror, whereas, in the Bush era, even if the majority of congressional Democrats voted against the Iraq War, many voted for it, and both parties supported the war on terror.

I don’t see it that way, but I know a lot of Democrats do. I see Joe Biden and the people around him, some of the neocons he’s getting advice from, as sabre-rattling warmongers who are actually making the world a more dangerous place. Now, I’ve always said that I don’t support, as a leftist myself, any imperialist invasion, and that includes the invasion of Ukraine. I believe the war is a criminal imperial invasion of another country. However, having said that, this Administration has rattled and provoked and escalated the rhetoric from Day One. From my standpoint, I look at this Administration as bigger warmongers than what you’re talking about in the period prior to 2008.

I see. So even compared with Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who supported the Iraq War and a huge range of American military interventions, you think that the Biden Administration is more warmongering?

Well, I just gave you an example. More or less, it’s difficult to assess. This is why I keep coming back to Dr. West’s position of dismantling the empire.

“Who is a more warmongering president — the one who invaded Iraq and ran a worldwide network of torture prisons, or the one who pulled out of Afghanistan and grounded the drones?”

“Impossible to say.”

And it somehow gets much worse:

I realize we might just have a factual disagreement now. What’s your interpretation of what happened on January 6th?

I’m not going to talk about the details of January 6th. What happened on January 6th was wrong. People died, and it was certainly a threat to a process. But here’s the problem: the premise is that we had a vibrant democracy and then a bunch of people stormed the Capitol and threatened it. What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t even believe we have a so-called democracy. What we have is a duopoly, or an oligarchy, in which the vast majority of people suffer.

Just to clarify, you seem to be saying that before January 6th we had maneuvers such as Obama making backroom deals in the primary, and so when people say that we were about to lose democracy on January 6th, you think we actually were not at risk of that. Instead, we were at risk of losing a system where Barack Obama can call people up and get them to drop out.

But it’s not just the Barack Obama part. My main point is that there has been a systemic eradication of all the routes that third parties can take, which is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Let alone this constantly propagandistic vote shaming. Vote shaming is voter suppression. When you tell someone you cannot vote your conscience because you will ruin the world, that is voter suppression.

“Telling me that it’s stupid to support a ratfucking campaign whose sole purpose is to throw the election to a fascist is worse than January 6th, and violates my 14th Amendment rights.”

It’s all like this, I swear. Amazing content.

…and yes, I wanted to leave this nugget for you to find, as many of you did, but this I think might be peak Chotiner:

We are stifling democracy itself, Isaac. This is the problem. From my standpoint, there are things that Biden has done that made the world more dangerous than Trump, and there are things Trump did that made the world more dangerous than Biden, and both of them go back and forth. You see what I’m saying?

I maybe need a different pair of lenses to totally see it.

You have to look at it through a systemic lens—the entire system, the structure of the system itself versus a binary view of which party is better and which one is going to be more dangerous. It’s a completely different way of looking at the picture.

It’s almost like “The Matrix,” where you’re either in it or you’re not, you know?

I don’t think even the Dersh was this oblivious,