“DESCENDS?” THAT’S BEEN HIS STATE FOR QUITE SOME TIME: Bowman Descends Into Lunacy.
He’s losing his mind,” Jon Lovitz’s character says in The Wedding Singer while watching his rival experience an emotional breakdown. “And I’m reaping all the benefits.”
I suppose that’s how George Latimer is feeling right now.
Latimer, the Westchester County executive and former New York state senator, is running against incumbent Jamaal Bowman in his district’s Democratic House primary next week. When Latimer first entered the race, his sanity relative to his rival’s eccentricity was the subtext of the campaign. Now it should be the text.
Bowman is the squadnik whose anti-Semitic obsessions have occasionally culminated in semi-violent fantasies about Israelis. From a policy perspective, Bowman has turned against funding for Iron Dome—a purely defensive system—and the Abraham Accords, which expanded normalization with the Arab world and increased Jewish integration in formerly hostile countries. He is against every instrument of peace and every expression of American allyship with our fellow democracy.
In other words, his voting record contains no redeeming qualities whatsoever. No one loses anything by Bowman getting booted from Congress.
But of course it goes beyond policy. Temperament-wise, Bowman is volatile. He was recently censured—a rather serious reprimand in the House—for trying to disrupt congressional business by pulling a fire alarm and then lying about it, even though the whole fiasco was on video. (Does Jamaal Bowman not think Congress has security cameras?)
As Bowman spins out, he keeps losing backers, such as the left-wing J Street and the progressive erstwhile ally Mondaire Jones. And so he has doubled down on whoever’s left in his camp, which he assumes to be exclusively made up of rabid anti-Semites.
His rhetoric has become indistinguishable from that of the Ayatollah Khamenei. Recently he was caught on video saying to a crowd of supporters: “Because I am fighting against genocide, I am being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.”
A conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, Bowman can be seen ranting that the documented rape of Israelis on Oct. 7 by Hamas is made-up “propaganda.”
As Steve wrote last month, “Aside from CIA time travel, secret frequencies, and alien technology — plus his previously known predilection for terrorists, antisemites, and democratic socialism — Bowman seems like a perfectly reasonable fellow.”