Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has got to go

This is not going to be a weighty, in-depth post. It's only going to be an expression of my continued bafflement as to why House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from a safe-blue New York district, has any position of party power whatsoever.

The man has the political instincts of a tropical fish. Of a walnut tree. Of a late-1990s Casio digital watch. If the Democratic Party intends to ever win elections again, please get this man off American television sets.

The corruption charges against Cueller were not thin! Adding a convicted Democrat to Trump's continued orgy of pro-corruption pardons is not "the right outcome!" It is, as Levin notes, purposefully intended to broadcast elite impunity and both-sides political corruption.

Donald Trump is engaged in a yearslong campaign to use presidential pardon powers to erase consequences for politically-tinged crimes. Bribery, embezzlement, working for a foreign government—even nation-scale drug trafficking is being pardoned away, as Trump's pardon of the crooked Honduran ex-president lays bare.

It makes no sense, under any circumstances, to whitewash that campaign of corruption with an assertion that it is "right" when one or two convicted Democrats get their own tickets to crookery punched.

Are you stupid? Are you actually stupid? Is this a skill issue? The outcome of a drinking game? A dare? The highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives is validating Trump's incoherent bellowing about the border being supposedly secure now that he's mounted a virulently anti-American, anti-immigrant, eugenics-laced fascist campaign of terror that consists of rounding up legal immigrants with no criminal record and tossing them into squalid makeshift fake-prisons? There has been no change in border "security" at all; the efforts are all being focused at suppressing and unraveling legal immigration.

This, more than anything else, is why Democrats continue to lose elections and why, despite running against an immeasurably vulgar coup-attempting seditionist rapist convicted felon American voters could still not muster themselves to the polls in 2024 to vote for Not That. Hakeem Jeffries is the poster child for "it doesn't matter whether we vote or not, both parties are corrupt, both lie to us, and both will pursue the same broad agenda in which elites can do whatever they want and the rest of us are expected to shut up and suffer."

The message of Jeffries and other Democratic institutionalists has been that Donald Trump is a dangerous and impossibly corrupt madman, one who is degrading American institutions by the day, a man who will end democracy itself if we allow his acts to continue, the pivot point around which a great national catastrophe is whirling, and that Democrats look forward to working with him and the man maybe has some good points when it comes to pardoning rich people and engaging in his national campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Would you vote for that? Are you itching to haul yourself out to a voting booth to give that your microscopic little electoral boost?

I can't even identify what Jeffries thinks his "brand" is, other than being the Democratic voice for maintaining the status quo always and abiding corruption sometimes. His snubbing of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a clear message that while candidate Eric Adams might have been exposed as shamelessly corrupt and Andrew Cuomo a perpetual sexual harasser who had to resign in disgrace, neither of those things was any more troubling than being a left-leaning Muslim American. Jeffries made an ass of himself then, is making an ass of himself today, and makes an ass of himself at least twice a week even when the second option, shutting his piehole, is the more straightforward choice.

Jeffries has been especially bad in that seeming indifference to corruption, and it has been a consistent enough trait to make more than a few of us suspect that the man has a scandal of his own to hide—and that his weird episodes of Trumpian praise are attempts to keep his options on the table, if he ever is in the pardon market himself.

That clawing suspicion aside, Hakeem Jeffries' political messaging is atrocious, atrocious to the point where the man is costing Democrats votes every time he opens his mouth. A party that considers this to be leadership is lost. Truly, perhaps irreversibly lost.

This buffoon has got to go. I don't mean Democrats have to remove him from House leadership, I mean Brooklyn Democrats need to stop sending this party-sabotaging bollard to Washington in any capacity.

Donald Trump is a lawless, crooked, dementia-addled malignant narcissist who already attempted to overthrow our government once and who continues to destroy America's institutions, economy and future with every new day in office. Democratic leadership should not tie themselves to his corruption. They should not praise his fetid anti-immigrant thuggery.

Do. Fucking. Better.