In the season 5 episode of the Simpsons, “Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood,” Bart, at the end of a sugar-fueled Squishee bender, makes the error of joining the Junior Campers. Over breakfast with the family, wearing his uniform, he explains, “Okay, look: I made a terrible mistake. I wandered into a Junior Camper recruitment center, but what’s done is done: I’ve made my bed, and now I’ve got to weasel out of it.”
It is perhaps this same thought process that led Ro Khanna to take the ill-conceived trip to a settlement zone in Israel right when he needed to get out from under something much bigger.
In the event you haven’t heard yet, on or about July 11th, Representative Ro Khanna, of California’s 17th congressional district, decided to take a fact-finding trip to a settlement zone/Palestinian conflict zone. It was there that he claimed to have been detained by settlers and the IDF. The New York Times subsequently published a piece on the event.
The group had entered a closed military zone in the West Bank without prior coordination with Israeli authorities. They were stopped by armed settlers, after which IDF forces arrived on the scene. According to multiple accounts, the entire encounter lasted only a few minutes before the group was told to leave and the road was reopened.
Nadav Weiman put out body cam footage on X showing what actually happened.
Of course, if you actually watch the video, it shows the opposite of what Weiman and Khanna claimed. The whole thing lasted a few minutes. They were told to leave. That was it. One wonders why they posted it in the first place. I assume low IQ was a factor.
Eyal Yakoby put the whole thing in perspective with this post:
An entirely correct analogy. Essentially, nothing happened to Ro Khanna except he was told he wasn’t allowed to go somewhere by a sovereign nation and then threw a sissy fit about it.
Even fellow Democrat Josh Gottheimer called bullshit on the whole thing. He straight-up called it a publicity stunt, pointing out that Khanna deliberately entered a restricted area without coordinating and ignored requests to meet October 7th survivors while he was there.
Now you’re probably asking why any of this matters. The answer is simple: this event has nothing to do with what notorious left-wing liars had to say this time about Israel, but why they did it. Here’s the timeline and the context that makes the whole thing click: the Platner endorsement, the scandals that were already out there, the ones that blew up later, and how fast Khanna tried to create distance once things got radioactive.
In June, Khanna endorsed Graham Platner (he had been publicly supporting him as recently as mid-June). Platner, up until recently, was the Democrat nominee to run against Susan Collins for Senate in Maine, when he was finally ousted amid sexual misconduct and rape allegations that made the mainstream news after a Politico article detailed a woman’s claim that he sexually assaulted her. Platner has denied the most serious claims. The problem, of course, is that Platner was scandal-ridden from the word go, from other sexual misconduct allegations—from the wrong people, of course—to the glaringly obvious SS Nazi Totenkopf/death’s head tattoo.
Every Democrat under the sun not only defended Platner but made excuses or plainly didn’t care he had a Nazi tattoo. In one video that went viral from a Graham Platner rally in Portland, a voter said she didn’t care about his Nazi tattoo. When asked if an Israeli flag tattoo would be a deal-breaker, she said, “Honestly yeah, because I don’t support genocide.”
The logical incongruities aside, it was clear that Democrats were okay not only with an actual Nazi but also with an alleged rapist to boot, including Ro Khanna. Now that Platner is radioactive, the dance of distancing has begun. Khanna withdrew his endorsement around July 6 (after new allegations surfaced), but that clearly wasn’t enough for him.
Khanna’s been bitching about the West Bank and settlements for years, so it’s not like the trip came completely out of nowhere. He’s made that part of his brand. Still, running into a closed military zone and making a whole thing out of it right after he got caught endorsing a guy with a Nazi tattoo who’s now facing rape allegations feels a little too convenient. Platner was already a mess—the tattoo, the Reddit posts, the stories from ex-girlfriends—and Khanna was fine with all of it until the latest accusations made it impossible to ignore. Then suddenly he needed a new story.
It was time to weasel out of it, and what better way to clear the news cycle and make everyone forget he endorsed a Nazi rapist than to defame Jews Everyone hates Jews. But who am I kidding; the left got its news story and the excuse to hate on the Jews again.
“Marge, don’t discourage the boy. Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals!…except the weasel.”
Maybe Homer had a point after all. Weaseling out of things really is important to learn, unless you’re this obvious about it. Khanna tried to dodge the Platner mess by running into a closed military zone and crying “detention,” and all it did was make the story bigger. Now instead of just having endorsed a guy with a Nazi tattoo facing rape allegations, he’s also the congressman who got caught staging a publicity stunt in the West Bank. Sometimes the weasel doesn’t get away clean. Sometimes he just digs the hole deeper.
