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slapmeagain-blog · 3 years

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Five years ago...

11 November 2021

Trump won. And I posted the following on Facebook. Excuse me, is it Meta, or Facebook now? I see one thing on TV and another online. Does it matter?

Quoting myself, from five years ago, only because now, after having lived through his presidency and looking at what I wrote then, I don't feel the need to change a word of what I said. The words ring true still, and if anything, it's even worse than we had feared then:

"I'm still angry, almost 72 hours after it became apparent Trump would win. I'm angry at the people who's vision of America is so radically different from mine. People voted for Trump for many different reasons. But there was one reason why no one should have voted for him: he finds it too easy to promote hate. Put aside for the moment the he finds it too easy to disrespect and denigrate people of color, people who may worship differently or not at all, or have a different sexual orientation. Put aside that with the same seed capital he was given by his family, a mutual fund would now be worth 10 times what he's worth. Put aside that he was quoted in a national TV interview (I saw it) as saying that if he were to run, he would run as a Republican because .."They're the dumbest group of voters in the country." That they, "..believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd eat it up." (and they did.).

As a New Yorker, I have watched Donald Trump for over 30 years. To 90% of us, he is as he has always been, 'the local billionaire buffoon,' an attention-starved narcissist, and a tasteless characterization of all that is wrong with American culture; its hedonism, materialism, its excess, just one more deviant from our core values. I would never have believed in a million years that a nation of people who, as a whole, have more to be thankful for, more freedom, and more economic and social opportunity than any nation on earth or any nation in the history of man, would be completely fooled by a man who appeals to our basest natures, who lives a life in direct opposition to Christian ethics conservatives so passionately claim directs their lives (where were they hiding during this election).

As this juncture, I fear for my freedom, I fear for the freedom of all of us, not just Muslims, gays and lesbians, Latinos, women, for the sick, for the poor, for our immigrant communities, all of whom should be treated with respect and dignity, and shown that we believe they, too, are just as American as anyone of us, and that we are valued for the things we can contribute to our society. I am afraid for the environment. I am afraid for the planet as those engaged in 'willful denialism' feel vindicated about global warming because a charlatan is now president of the United States.

I am afraid for my grandchildren, for the message that this election sends to them. That bullying is ok, that it's ok to hate blacks, that it's ok to treat girls as objects, transgender or gays as if they aren't human. I fear they will lose respect for the office of the President, and the government he represents, our government, that they will cease to believe that they can make a difference in the lives of their neighbors, family members and their community, that they will become more insular and less community-oriented because what they are trying to achieve is not valued by our leaders or a majority of the members of society.

Many people I know and respect voted for Donald Trump. I can understand that some people have problems with Hillary Clinton, and with Bill Clinton. I do too. I am angry with Hillary as well, for not being as open or as likeable as she needed to be so that people could get past her flaws to see that she was obviously the best qualified person to be our next President, on all counts. But, to vote for a man who is so clearly unqualified, who has so many personality disorders as to make him dangerous, who lives a life that, if it were a movie, you would walk out of the theater either laughing or sick to your stomach, leaves me thinking that I have been sucked through a vortex into some dystopian alternate reality, and landed in zero-star SciFi film.

Leaving the outright red necks, neo-Nazis, KKK types, and schizophrenics aside, I am trying to figure out what motivated people who, in all other respects seem to me to be rational, well-educated, friendly, kind and well-meaning family types, step into a voting booth and do something so contrary to everything we hold dear as a nation and a people. Ignorance? Greed? Fear of 'the other'?

This is why I don't feel like I want to be in the same room with you. I'm disappointed in you, and I'm tried of trying to understand why you did what you did, and why you felt it was ok to do it."

#donaldtrumpwon #five years ago #relivingthenightmare #willheevergoaway #november 2016

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Trump's SCOTUS pick scares the ever loving shit out of me. I'm trying not to have a full blown panic attack actually.

Sigh. I know.

I’m not going to say that picking someone literally, un-exaggeratedly out of The Handmaid’s Tale for SCOTUS, especially to replace someone like RBG, isn’t mother fucking terrifying. It is. Especially since Mitch McConnell is trying to set her final confirmation vote for October 29, literally five days before the election. Yes indeed, that would be a third Supreme Court seat filled by an impeached president who lost the popular vote by three million votes, (possibly) confirmed by Republican enablers (some of whom are absolutely going to lose their seats in this election) who represent a sizeably smaller fraction of the US population than their Democratic counterparts, in a display of outright, staggering, truly breathtaking hypocrisy about the protocol of election-year vacancies on SCOTUS, which they themselves shouted about to no end with Merrick Garland in 2016. This is how tyranny by minority rule works, and... yeah. It’s bad. It’s awful. When is this going to end.

That said, however: we do not yet exist in this theoretical grimdark future where some dystopian 6-3 (or even 7-2) conservative SCOTUS strips us of our rights at every turn, with no recourse except for us to sit passively and take it, and there are a lot of things that we ourselves can do between now and then to make sure that it never happens. First off, House Democrats have proposed a bill to introduce 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, rather than it being an automatic lifetime appointment. This would also give every president the ability to appoint two justices per four-year term. Because SCOTUS has become such an instrument of partisan warfare, and because the obvious implications of having a partisan head of state pick the senior federal judges for a lifetime is part of what has fucked us up now, this would be a GREAT improvement. House Dems can’t make it into law right now, because Democrats do not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress and they do not hold the presidency. You know how this COULD be passed? If Joe Biden was elected with a blue House and Senate. That way, even if God forbid the GOP horror show snuck Coney Barrett onto the bench just before the election, this could be fixed.

Here’s another way to think about it. I myself have a HUGE problem with catastrophizing: a bad thing happens, and then it seems like an inevitable chain of nonstop bad things until everything gets irredeemably, unfixably even worse. This year, obviously, has not done much to help that, because yes, the bad things keep coming. But they’re still individual events and have not yet crystallized into some unbreakable, unavoidable future. History is made up of thousands of millions of choices, accidents, unforeseen developments, total random bullshit, and much more, as much or more as it is made up by the macro-scale actions of oligarchs. Obviously, globalization and capitalism have made us all more connected to each other, and thus changes to the system can ripple more broadly, but they are not the only people who make history. If there’s one thing I can tell you as a historian, it’s this: the future is just history that hasn’t been made yet, and it is subject to the exact same unpredictable bullshit that has constituted history throughout, well, history. Nothing is unavoidable and we have never existed in a world where we can’t do anything at all. Also, authoritarian regimes (especially those imposed without the consent of the people -- willing subjection to authoritarianism is one thing, but the other, yeah) have a relatively short shelf life, historically speaking. That won’t help all of us who could be hurt right now (though we can STILL fight back and speak up and help our neighbors), but it’s the truth. Authoritarian rule (especially when it’s not balanced by economic security, which sure as hell isn’t happening right now) can last for a while, sure. But it is always its own worst enemy, and it will always be ended. How that ends is a choice we can make.

This isn’t the “get out on the streets and Start The Glorious Revolution!!!” nonsense that the armchair internet leftists, none of whom are actually starting a glorious revolution or doing anything except bitching on Twitter about how Biden and Trump are alike, are fond of. This is an active choice to realize that there are always things you can do, that there are things you can do right now, and one of them, most obviously, is voting. This mess was all completely goddamn avoidable if people had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But well, they didn’t, and we get one last shot to fix this by democratic process. Trump is already openly setting up to contest the election results/try to invalidate them/throw out ballots. This is all old-school fascism. This is what is happening. He is counting on another razor-thin margin of votes that he can then contest in his hand-picked SCOTUS; he wants another Bush v. Gore very, very badly. The only way to blow away any legitimacy for anything like this is to vote in such overwhelming numbers that there’s no question of Biden’s victory, no need to wait for mail-in ballots (another reason the GOP has been trying so hard to destroy the post office) or anything else. At heart, Trump is a coward. He’s also an egomaniac. If it comes to stepping aside peacefully or being dragged out of the White House by the FBI for everyone to laugh at for the rest of time, hmm, I doubt he’s going to go for that. (And if he does, well, I will also savor the sight of him in handcuffs for all eternity.) However, that doesn’t mean the GOP machine won’t TRY, because Trump is not just Trump, but is his entire miserable cabal of enablers. I have written my fingers raw about how badly people need to vote. This is literally your last chance to do it.

I’ve seen a lot of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-doomed, they-have-the-votes-so-don’t-even-bother handwringing in the last few days. To some degree, yes. We all feel doomed. We have all been asked to find strength to deal with massive and unending waves of terrifying bullshit past anyone’s normal capacity, and we’re tired. We want it to end. But it’s SO CLOSE to ending, if we can all just get out and vote for Joe Biden in massive numbers on November 3 (or if your state has early voting, sooner; BANK YOUR VOTE). That’s such an easy thing to do. Nothing is set in stone. We can still fix things and make it so, you know, we’re not living in a fascist state ruled by Gilead. (And besides, all this Chicken Little rhetoric is super easy for the Russian troll farms to exploit. Don’t listen to it. Shut it down. Reject it.)

They want you to think you’re powerless. You’re not.

They want you to think this will never end. It will. We decide how.

They want you to think this is a foregone conclusion and you should just go back home and let it happen. You don’t have to.

They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter. It does.

They want you to think your rights are gone. They’re not.

They want you to think this future is inevitable.

IT’S NOT.

Hang in there.

Lots of hugs.

#politics for ts #anonymous #ask

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robertreich · 4 years

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The Democratic Establishment is Freaking Out About Bernie. It should Calm Down.

The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don't believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today's main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.

With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders -- a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary -- came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything -- won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition -- but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.

A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).

He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today's primary.]

The “socialism” moniker doesn't seem to have bruised him, although it hasn't been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won't care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.

Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.

Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called "moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.

#bernie

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howtotrainyouragents · 3 years

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Things I Noticed in the Hamilton Film

Soooo, I was supposed to have posted this last year when the film first dropped, and I forgot...

Anywayyyy, things that were new, from the album, or was obvious to everyone but me. This is literally just me listing details I loved for my own keepsake later on

I hope this film’s success (and the play’s hopeful continued success on stage), shows that Broadway plays can and should be filmed for everyone

Lin Manuel Miranda is a brilliant writer, scriptwriter, musician, rapper, singer, and a genuinely lovely person, but I think my favorite part about him is his acting. He has such a pure naturalness and sincerity in his acting. He nails microexpressions/gestures and sometimes I forget that he’s acting

E.g., Lin’s devastation after Washington kicks him out

There’s some songs I wondered what their purpose was, but watching it I understood. For example, Story of Tonight sets up the purpose of the revolution. Like, My Shot is Hamilton’s ‘I want’ song, but Story of Tonight is all of the revolutionaries ‘I want’ song, and that’s why it comes up again for Laurens and Hamilton at their ends

Samuel Seabury’s acting was gold

In Right Hand Man the way the backup stage/cast lights up as they sing ‘not throwing away my shot” and Hamilton agrees to work for Washington

The fact that Helpless ends with “You’ll be a new man” because Hamilton is still so obsessed with his own ascendency

HOLY FUCK RENEE ELISE GOLDSBERRY

They way they start Satisfied, it’s like Angelica doesn’t know the true extent of her devastation until she gives her toast and says “satisfied”. Like, she knows what she’s done but she’s still thinks this is fine and this is for the best, and it’s not until this moment that the weight of it fully hits her. By the end of it, it’s like she’s barely holding it together for this toast

Towards the end of the song, Eliza kisses her cheek and Renee’s expression is like she’s about fall apart in that very moment from the sheer overwhelming joy and pain

So in Helpless when their talking about letters, Peggy does a cute random shimmy while handing Eliza the letter. But then in Satisfied we see that she’s doing the shimmy to the beat of Satisfied, meaning that she knows how Angelica feels and knows about the love triangle

I’m trying really hard not to scream about the rewind of all the dance and action in Satisfaction but please know I am internally screaming about this forever.

Almost forgot, Burr and Hamilton were friends at one point. Burr shows up for his wedding to wish him well :(

I wasn’t gonna scream that much here, but LESLIE ODOM JR.

Leslie’s smile- amused and scoffing disbelief- when singing about Hamilton in Wait for it

Speaking of Wait for it, the way the whole cast is waiting on stage and the balconies as Burr sings. and the way the dancers shift to Hamilton’s direction when Burr talks about him

Also the lighting creates boxes on the stages, like Burr is trapped. But then this reappears in Your Obedient Servant

I never knew the lyrics were “This is commonplace, 'specially 'tween recruits” and not “’tween corps” in Ten Duel Commandments...makes more sense

I think there’s 10 people in that line up in Ten Commandments

The way Stay Alive conflicts Hamilton’s precious notions of sacrifice, and forces him to shift his focus from dying to legacy

The mimic of the bullet in Stay Alive

The way that Eliza is also so excited about the war and the scholars in The Schuyler Sisters and that excitement goes away after she has the actual risk of losing someone she loves because of the war

Who’s the choreographer because DAMN (btw it’s Andy Blankenbuehler)

Also the dancers lifting up other dancers for whole bars? Incredible

The way women are interwoven into the story of the war, singing the chorus and setting the scene and rejoicing with the soldiers at the end

The fucking red lighting in Yorktown. Also, the shot in the song’s pause is one of the best shots in musical history.

The fact that ‘black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom’ ‘not yet’ is a commentary on slavery and the line is said by Washington

The brilliant way What Comes Next undercuts the gravitas of Yorktown .

Also, King George loses more and more of his costume and moves around more as the show goes on. Also, blue lighting with “I’m feeling blue” hahaha

Lafayette and Hercules getting the same letter about Laurens + Hamilton’s sobbing. And Laurens’ singing ‘there will be more of us’, referring to the future generations who will fight and win abolition.

Nonstop:

Burr’s disgust while Hamilton rants. Hamilton’s pouting then childish glee at the beginning

Burr stays at the bottom of the staircase after Hamilton climbs it. Also, Jefferson descends the staircase after Hamilton ascends it, indicating their statuses

The refrain of “How does a....” shows up in Nonstop as Burr’s “How do you write...” (other characters sing their own personal refrains but Burr sings this), and it’s like this ongoing, jealous, incredulous questioning of how Hamilton became so successful, and part of the answer of how he did it is that he doesn’t stop writing and working.

Regardless of which sister he ended up with, love was never gonna be enough for Hamilton

The way Daveed Diggs jumps and dances and dives across the stage in just about every song he’s in. The man truly deserved the Emmy

Jefferson’s being surrounded by his slaves because he sucks

Hamilton’s costume goes from white --> brown-->blue-->green-->black and someone with more color scheme expertise needs to dissect this for me please

The fact that even Burr peaces out when it comes to the affair, like, nope, this is too messed up even for me

An in-universe explanation as to why the Ten Duel Commandments and Phillip’s count is the same is that Hamilton’s killing (metaphorically and literally) in order to stay alive is a part of their family’s DNA.

Anthony Ramos is phenomenal at playing 9 years old then having to switch to 19

The fact that Phillip was probably so determined to defend his father is that this is after the Reynolds Pamphlet and everyone was humiliating and scorning Hamilton

The Room Where it Happened

Hamilton is like an apparation to him, and Burr is both scared and begging the ghost to reveal the truth

The fact that this song is a plot song and a ‘i want’ song and a villain song all at once. Also, the song picks up speed to signal the shift from historical recounting to ‘i want’ song

They replay the beginning where Jefferson/Madison call for Hamilton

Jefferson being the one to ask “Don’t you remember Lafayette”, and there’s like a slight change in his demeanor that’s more Lafayette then Jefferson

Burr, Madison, and Jefferson discreetly talking to each other in Washington on Your Side representing their nefarious schedming. Also, Daveed Diggs keeps Jefferson’s limp even without the cane. Also Madison is angry at Hamiilton when he says “the bill of rights, which I wrote!”

One Last Time:

How perfectly the Bible verse reflects Washington’s opinion of legacy. The younger men are obsessed with preserving their own memories in history, but for Washington, his legacy would be that everyone would be safe and at peace.

Washington’s practically crying at the end

Hamilton asking Washington here to teach him how to say goodbye because Hamilton genuinely doesn’t know how: people left him before he could ever say goodbye

We Know: Jefferson’s pure WTF face when he says “my God...”. In this reaidng, Burr definitely threatened him (I didn’t always intepret that way when listening). But Hamilton’s still an idiot.

Hurricane: Once again, Lin’s facial expressions. The way the the chorus stands around and watches him. But also the freaking brilliant way that the dancers mimic the hurricane, and Burr and Maria are the only other people in the hurricane with Hamilton. But at the end, it’s just Hamilton and the desk

Reynolds Pamphlet: The way Washington can’t even look at him, but Angelica gets in his face to yell at him. Also, Jefferson hands a pamphlet to the conductor

This reading, Phillippa Soo sings Burn with so much rage and fury and that is pretty much my favorite part of this entire film

Hamilton’s face at “Alexander, did you know?”

The fact that Angelica narrates Uptown because it’s too intimate for Burr or anyone else to narrate. Eliza’s changing facial expressions as she slowly lets him in. The way Hamilton just completely breaks down and sobs

The Election of 1800:

Jefferson shaking his head when Madison suggests Hamilton

Burr’s falseness is hilarious. He hands Hamilton a pamphlet.

Jefferson’s look of resignation when Hamilton is making his decision, then starts dancing around when he’s won

The close-up of Burr’s face falling when he realizes who Hamilton has voted for

The whole “runner-up becomes VP” thing made me think about if we could have had Hillary Clinton as VP, and I made myself sad.

Your Obedient Servant: I always saw this song as a reflection of the custom, but I never fully appreciated how it reflects their relationship: their relationship has completely disintegrated, but their working to maintain this false appearance of friendship/civility that no longer has a place in their relationship.

Also, Burr’s increasingly incensed and it does not help that Hamilton sends like a 12-page letter and the dancer even teases Burr

The guy who gives Hamilton Burr’s duel challenge plays Charles Lee. Karma

The World Was Wide Enough

Burr’s POV then Hamilton’s POV, like this story has become less and less about Hamilton and he is no longer in control of who’s telling his story

The shot of Eliza walking away and in her wake, it’s Burr shooting

Burr’s alone in the stage, finally realizing the world (aka the stage) was wide enough for the both of them, but it’s too late. Also, in part foreshadowing his own future: that he had the world before him regardless of Hamilton, but he was completely ruined after this duel

I definitely cried at ‘the orphanage’. Also I interpret the gasp at the end as her breaking fourth wall and seeing the audience and realizing that Hamilton’s legacy has continued even to today.

#hamilton #i know it's cool to hate hamilton now #but i dont #so forgive me for putting this on your dash #agent report #agent h

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somerandomg33k · 4 years

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I still don’t know who to vote for?

This election is going to be a weird and frustrating one. It is the first presidential general election where I am an Anarcho-Syndicalist. And this election in the darkest timeline has a Fascist as the incumbent. But the candidate that is opposing Donald Trump is Joe Biden. Almost everyone's last pick in the primary. The only worst candidate during this primary was Michael Bloomberg, who was trying to buy his way into the election. Possible to take votes away from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but that is damning with faint praise that Joe Biden is better than Michael Bloomberg.

The most likely results of this election are either the continued reign of a dictatorial Fascist, causes and continuing chaos and mayhem, or just straight up Neo-Liberalism. We are going back to a normal under Obama, which was terrible as well. Just not as awful as under Fascism. And we won't fix the problems that allowed Trump to rise to power. Since those are core systematic problems that the current Democratic Establishment is not interested in correcting. And the Republican party is just worse as they are OK with Fascism. Some of them want Fascism.

And let's not forget, serval people have very good personal reasons not to vote for Joe Biden. Joe Biden helped co-wrote the 1994 crime bill. In some issues, he was to the right of Regan on drug enforcement of the Drug war. He was always the most conservative Democrat in the Senate during his time there. He voted against busing 19 times. That is why many Leftists say that Joe Biden is Republican-lite. He is just the 'correct' color for Liberals and is the candidate the Democratic party chooses. So yea, there are two Republican tickets this election. The difference is one is not Fascist. Liberals know this. They are just in denial or flat out refuse to believe it. Because boy, don't say that Joe Biden and his running mate are anything but Progressive to them. Because they really hate that. "I think it is unfair to Joe Biden to judge him by International standards. I would prefer that he is judge by American Political standards," one Liberal said. Why can't Liberals admit that America's Political standards are shit?

Liberals have to believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are progressives because they can only think of voting for progressives and progressive causes. They can't accept they are voting for a Conservative on the Democrat ticket, because they would have to admit that the Democratic party has moved towards the right as has American's Overton Window. Joe Biden is against Medicare 4 All. On that issue, he is to the right of Boris Johnson and other conservatives of the UK and Canada. Liberals have to believe they are voting for progressives on the Democrat ticket. Because if they didn't, they would lose faith in the whole Ameican Electoral system as well as Reform. It is almost like Capitalist Realism. People can imagine the end of the World before they can imagine the End of Capitalism. Liberals probably have an easier time visualizing the end of the World before they could imagine a different system than the current governance of Liberal Capitalist Democracy.

Let's not forget, something we already know, that Joe Biden is a bit creepy. He is a Patriarch and treats women differently than men. Whenever he meets families at the White House who have sons and daughters, he would say to the sons, "You have a critical job. You got to protect your sister from all of the boys. That is something my Dad told me." The women must be protected, and it is the men who must do the protecting. Joe Biden has a habit of creepily smelling women and girls' hair and touching their bodies on the waist and shoulders. Serval women have said that Joe made them feel uncomfortable. And this was all before Tara Reade allocations. #IBelieveTaraReade.

As for Kamala Harris, she did put trans women in men's prison, which resulted in one of them getting killed. "Kamala Harris couldn't do a thing." Is something Liberals need to stop saying. What they really mean is, "Kamala Harris choose to uphold an unjust system by blindly following rules instead of using her power and influence to change them." She attempted to block two Trans women's requests to get gender confirmation surgeries. Which, as far as I know, she hasn't really made amendments for. She wasn't good about slowing down The New Jim Crow. She was fierce to Sex Workers too. One of my comrades said, "As a trans woman and a Sex Worker, how should I feel about voting for Kamala Harris." She increased convictions for things like merely drug procession. She also wanted to jail parents for truancy. She has been called the Democrats Top Cop. Someone who is "Tough on Crime." Just like how Bill Clinton and Joe Biden were in the 90s. And that still has devastating effects on Black and Brown communities.

So many people have many good reasons not to want to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And Liberals want to think that they simply "have their flaws." Again, I think it is just all to make it easier for them to be excited to vote for them. All of those issues, including their voting record on increasing Military spending too, are "merely flaws." And they will also shame people into voting for Biden/Harris with, "It is the lesser of two evils." Which again, is more of an indictment of the system we have. "But we have an election, and we should all vote." So we can't talk about changing the system right now during an election. So when can we talk about change this entire system? And Just like with 2016, "A vote for a third party or a no vote is a vote for Trump."

Further shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris. "Do you want four more years of Trump?" FUCK YOU AND SHOVE THAT DISINGENUOUS QUESTION UP YOUR ASS!!

Merely bringing up all of these complaints are being associated with supporting Trump. Another by-product of the binary way of thinking with the Two-Party system and First Past the Post voting. Liberals have 'accepted' Biden/Harris is the ticket. And they honestly wish we do too. And since we are vocal with our complaints, they hate us for not 'accepting' Biden/Harris is the ticket. They hate us for not 'accepting' the way the system is as it is. "I have accepted all of this. Why haven't you?" This can explain how so many Liberals would go "URG" at the thought of Joe Biden as President back in January during the Primaries to skipping to the polls to vote for Biden for the General Election. "Well, he won the primary." "I get to vote Trump out of Office" is more what it is about and not how great Biden is. They tell themselves how great Biden and Harris will be as a recon.

And with all of the shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris, instead of voting for the Green Party or not voting, it completely ignores the fact we did vote for Hillary in 2016. She 2.8 million more votes. But it is the Electoral College that gave Donald Trump in the win. Plus, in Washington State, my state, four of the Electors didn't vote for Hillary Clinton when they were 'supposed to.' Washington State is likely to go blue again. So I don't know if it is essential for Me to vote for Biden/Harris. The fivethirtyeight poll from Sept. 22 shows Washington voting for Biden at 58% vs Trump at 36%. A 22 point difference. I think I can safely vote for Howard Hawkins and feel like I didn't help Trump win. But that won't be what Liberals think.

Now with all that said, Donald Trump is still a Fascist wannabe Dictator. He is almost the worst. His administration is just letting massive amounts of people died because of Covid-19. He is encouraging people to shoot BLM protestors. He told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," at the first Presidential Debate. He said there wouldn't be a peaceful transferal of power because there won't be a transferal, but a continuation. Donald Trump has sewn doubts about voting by mail. He will doubt any kind of election results where he doesn't win. So Liberals argue we most vote in such high numbers to show that it is the will of the people they want him out of office. To which he can easily say "Fake News." He did doubt the 2016 popular vote results claiming 3 million "illegals" cast fraudulent votes.

Another convincing argument is we most show that Trump's ideas can't win elections. Because if it continues to win elections, more people will adopt Trump's views and policies. It is sort of convincing. But since a Qanon supporter will win a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming a rising star in the GOP Party. The GOP Party has backed Trump throughout his time in office, Trump's views and policies will continue whether he wins or not. Even if Trump loses, we are not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Trump base will still be here in this White Supremacist CisHetro Patriarchal Ableist country of the United Corporations of Imperialism. Who will always vote for the GOP and are not going away. Many Democrats will even speak highly of them. Nancy Pelosi prays for the Republicans. Liberals believe having an opposition is part of a functioning Democracy. Will the GOP no longer be Fascist? I doubt it.

"We have to get rid of Trump at all costs." I understand that urge. But the system gave us Trump and protected him. So how is voting and participating within the same system supposed to help? I know that Liberals think voting is very powerful because "So many people had to fight for their basic right to vote." And that is all true. The GOP only wins because of dirty tricks like gerrymandering and voter suppression. Hence, Trump is encouraging his base to watch the polling stations for "suspicious people wanting to commit voter fraud" and "rig" the election. It is straight voter intimidation and is happening already in Virginia. Part of the convincing reason to get Trump out of the White House. Biden will not encourage White Supremacist of all types to commit acts of violence against "The Radical Left terrorists" and "Antifa." Antifa is not an organization; it is an idea. Even Biden got that right.

Knowing how terrible Trump is, brings me back to Biden and how bad he is. Not as bad. Trump and Biden aren't the same. Trump is a Fascist while Biden is a Neo-Liberal, and Neo-Liberalism isn't Fascism. Neo-Liberalism just leads to Fascism, as we have already seen with Trump. I simply see Neo-Liberalism worse than how Liberals see it. Not enough to make a false equivalent, but still. Remember, if Trump loses, he could pull a Grover Cleaveland and run again in 2024. Imagine that.

What bothers me the most about Liberals changing their opinion of Biden, by the mere fact he won the primary, is that Biden is granted votes from Democrats and Leftists. I am sure Democrats do love old Uncle Joe. There were a lot of memes from the Obama years. And many Liberals just love Obama. Even though they fully well know about his War Crimes. It is that acceptance that I don't have in me. "Well, he is the candidate. So I will support him to get rid of Trump." And what makes it worse, Biden isn't really offering anything as well. He is against the Green New Deal. He is against Medicare-4-all, even during a Pandemic. What is Biden/Harris offering? Even Biden, when asking these questions and about his record, says, "If you are questioning whether to vote for me or not, you ain't black."

So Leftists will get nothing and will receive all of the blame for of Trump winning if we don't vote for Biden. "If you are questioning whether to vote for Biden or not, you must want Trump for four more years."

Remember, I live in Washington State. A super blue State. If I live in any battleground state, even within a ten points difference, I would vote for Biden/Harris. But since Biden is ahead by 22 points in my state, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, I am considering voting for a third party. Howard Hawkins of the Green and Socialist party is closer to my position. I would prefer there is no State at all and no President at all. Especially no single person having that much power, especially being the 'leader of the "Free" world' by virtue of being the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism. If the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism is the 'leader' of the 'free world,' then how come the World doesn't get to vote in this election. The UCI, Imperialtopia bombs the hell out of the middle east so much, I think the middle east has a right to have a say in our elections.

I do have to acknowledge those platform holders, people with a Youtube channel, a Podcast, or have a large following on Social Media, feel the need to tell people to "to out and vote. Vote as if your life depends on it because for some, it actually does matter." Although for some people, much won't change materially for their lives, like the impoverished and the disabled. For some, it is life or death. For others, it is a shit show, regardless. But platform holders want Trump out of the White House. They don't know who lives in what state. They don't know if their audience's votes matter or not. Since they are speaking to a vast audience, and they must keep it simple, they have to say, "VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!"

But, I am thinking, if they acknowledge that some votes are more important in some states than others, they will have to admit the whole in the United Corporations of Imperialism is unjust. Votes are weight more heavily in some states than in others. The whole system has to change. But that can't happen in a year. However, folks can vote on Election Day. So, it is easy to encourage people to vote instead of organizing to abolish the Electoral College. It would take too long to do it. It would take a lot of effort. So even bother trying. Liberals would rather pretend that isn't the case and just badger and shame people into voting for a candidate they have 'accepted' won the primary, even though Biden was one of the worse candidates in that field. Everyone's tenth or so pick.

With all that said, vote for whoever you want to or whoever you feel comfortable voting for. I won't vote shame anyone. Except if you vote for Trump and the GOP. Then you are a Fascist because you are voting for a Fascist and the Fascist party. Pure and simple.

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onlythehours · 4 years

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On Hillary...

It seems to me that one of the most obvious statements of the 21st Century is that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a divisive figure. But to unpick this divisiveness raises many questions, and cracks open the tides of contradictions that swell within the Hillary discourse. Nanette Burstein’s new four-part documentary Hillary (available on Sky in the UK) goes a long way to capture what makes HRC such a compelling figure, someone who seems to be at once ‘ahead of her time’ and behind the times. The documentary is structured in a way that offers glimpses of her 2016 presidential campaign woven through a chronological telling of her early years; Bill Clintons’ gubernatorial and presidential campaigns; her role as First Lady; her tenures as senator for New York and Secretary of State; and, her ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign.

I really should say that I have long been a fan of Hillary. I’m not objective (who is?). I find her inspiring, funny, charming, endearing, and yes, likeable. I know these statements alone will raise the ire of many, and perhaps justifiably so. Hillary, like many politicians, straddles a very tricky chasm – one’s personality and persona as a living feeling person, and their role(s) in global political decisions which adversely impact many people. Part of what makes Hillary such a complicated figure to explore is the way her life is a metaphor for so much. She is so many things to so many people: feminist hero, political maverick, betrayed wife, knowing accomplice, hard-nosed career woman, corrupt career politician, dedicated public servant, and the list goes on. The point I find interesting, that I really want to capture, and that Burstein’s film settles into is the fraught relationship between Hillarys’ role in history and her role in the present.

The ways in which we can observe generational, social, and historical changes through the stages of Hillary’s life (as well as observe how Hillary herself played an instrumental role in shaping American consensus, and dissent, on many of these very topics) reveals much of what makes Hillary’s legacy so complex. Hillary is in the unique position of being both one of the many women who lived these changes, as well as having the public notoriety and fame to be a ‘historical context map’ for these changes. Her persistence to not exist in history makes her very difficult to grapple with. We are used to exceptional woman who shaped history, remaining just that – figures in history. We are less accustomed to these women continuing to live their compelling lives publicly and presently, and with little regard for their detractors. It is often easier to view problematic figures more favourably in retrospect, one wonders if the temptations to view them more harshly in present tense is also true? Maybe not, but it’s an interesting thought in Hillary’s case. Whether said outright or not, I think a reason behind much of the venom directed at Hillary is a response to the ingrained, implicit bias we (read western, specifically American) as a culture have for women who demand to be heard, and not only that, but women who have the audacity to want to lead – to desire to build, shape, and remake the very apparatus through which voices are heard and decisions are made.

As Burstein’s documentary shows, Hillary did forge paths (alongside a sea of exceptional women). However, the course of Hillary’s life pushed her to the front line in terms of exposure. I am not blaming internet culture, social media, and advances in technology and news media for the problems Hillary faces. But I do think there is something to be said for the inadequate ways in which we can incorporate the past of someone’s life into their present endeavours. Burstein captures so clearly this tricky paradigm – Hillary spent the better part of two decades navigating attacks that painted her as ruthlessly politically liberal and radically feminist (effigies of her were burnt), to then have to spend the most recent tenure of public life proving herself as liberal enough, feminist enough. As the final episode suggests in its title “Be our champion, Go away”, Hillary faces a unique problem (possibly created through such a protracted time in the public eye, and a determination to continue to rise higher): she doesn’t fit well in the current media discourse. The vastness, and notoriousness, of her history seems too unwieldy to be handled in a consumable way that allows her to not just represent the past but also play a role in the future.

Burstein’s documentary highlighted another specific problem Hillary faces – the perception of herself as false, scripted and performed. For instance, at their rallies both Bernie Sanders and Trump scream, shout, their voices course and determined. The documentary, nor Hillary make this defence, but it is clear through so many micro-aggressions and misogynistic rebukes that Hillary (like so many female leaders) is not permitted the same performance of anger and frustration as her male political counterparts. Hillary has to moderate her performance in ways others simply don’t. It seems the consequence of this male/female double standard is the view of Hillary as false. Hillary’s own team highlight her apparent ‘lack’ with public speaking. Hillary herself remarks that her relationship with the press and public was inevitably worn down as a result of years of media controversies.[1] Her awareness that she will be attacked for a raised voice or spontaneously chosen word cannot not have an impact of her public performance, and as such its reception by the audience. In a scene from the documentary one of Clintons aides describes how one of Hillary’s biggest strengths is also her biggest weakness. He uses her vast knowledge of policy as both a pro and a con. He gives the example of healthcare. During debates when Bernie and Hillary are asked about healthcare, Bernie’s response may be ‘free for all” and “universal”, whereas Hillary’s response may be a twenty-sentence-long description of her healthcare policy that she knows inside and out. A policy formed with the knowledge of how difficult it is to pass legislation. But this doesn’t read as well.

This brings us to one of Hilary’s biggest problems, her pragmaticism. This pragmaticism is also noted when a young woman attending a rally asks Hillary if elected president would she ban fracking. Hillary replies ‘No I would not do that. A president can’t just ban fracking, that’s not how our system works”. These moments typify a problem with Hillary. In the current media landscape, adoration for leaders not always based on articulated policy comes a misunderstanding of how certain legislative systems work (which is not a defence of these systems). One could argue there isn’t much difference between Bernie Sanders blanket commitments to bans, and Donald Trump’s executive orders. Yes, their intentions, and ideological views, are entirely different, but the ideal that any political leader is the fixer of all is shared, it seems, by both the right and the left. In 2020, and indeed 2016, Hillary’s pragmaticism was never a positive. I am trying hard not to make this a Hillary vs Bernie debate. I’m not a fan of Bernie (and that’s fine), I think his 2016 and 2020 campaigns did a great deal of damage[2], not just to Hilary’s chances of beating Trump after she secured the democratic nomination, but also to political discourse in general. But that is a debate for another time.

I think Hillary will be a difficult watch for people who feel they are aware of her political leanings and regard her as a war-monger, bought-and-paid-for corrupt politician and Wall Street conduit. The documentary does defend some of these charges, but it doesn’t fully engage with Clinton’s political choices, especially on foreign policy and her tenure as Secretary of State under President Obama’s administration. Hillary’s ideologies, while not uncommon in the American political landscape, are observed with a different rigour, and tone, compared to her male counterparts (Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden etc). Hillary, according to media discourse and online opinion is something of a war hawk[3]. Burstein’s documentary doesn’t spar with Clinton’s policy stances. It doesn’t explore her ideological viewpoints. It is focussed on her as a woman. It wants to paint as comprehensive a picture of Hillary as a woman, and how her life fits within a series of social and political changes throughout her more than three-decade role in public life, as possible. It of course goes without saying that politicians cannot be excused of their harmful decisions based on the fact we like them alone. I accept Hillary is a problematic figure. I also accept I am no expert. I have little comprehension of the global political challenges that underpin many political and military decisions. It is worth pointing out, not as a defence of Hillary per se, but rather as added context regarding the way gender is embedded in supposedly straightforward profiles, that decisions taken by President Obama are often laid at Clinton’s feet. The men who have supposed ‘good’ public images, like Obama, face less scrutiny than Hillary.[4] This brings us to a key point visited upon in Burstein’s documentary Hillary, and a woman’s, apparent need to defend, be complicit in, and take undue responsibility for, the actions of men.

The baggage of Bill Clinton’s affairs is never far from discourse on Hillary. Burstein’s documentary explores this and offers some critical insight into the ways in which women are exploited in media discussion in ways men are not. The requirements are different. This leaves Hillary in a difficult situation – on one hand she is at times defined by the men in her life (the media and public demanding her response and rationale), and on the other the actions of men are used against her, or as representative of her. It is a lose/lose double standard.

I suppose the root of Hillary’s issues is that she has lived life so publicly and with such a period of time that she has gone from being a scary liberal, to a right-of-centre moderate, without her views necessarily changing that much. Her pragmatic approach may not have changed, but the contexts surrounding it undoubtedly has. I’m unaware of many other western political figures who have enjoyed (although Hillary may choose a different word) such a duration of not only public notoriety, but also political influence, and power. There is such a gulf between who many see Hillary as (split into vociferous ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps) and who Hillary sees herself as. Ultimately, I think these conflicting ideas of Hilary are so firmly built that many won’t go near this documentary. I suspect it won’t persuade Hillary detractors, and it certainly won’t dissuade Hillary fans. It may, however, provide extra context for this compelling and clearly trailblazing figure. It might remind many, or indeed show for the first time, the remarkable achievements HRC made (and continues to make) throughout a lifetime of work. Even if it doesn’t provide enlightenment, it could calm the choppy waters surrounding the brand of Hillary Rodham Clinton, allowing for a brief moment an acknowledgement of her and towering achievements, and the determination and resilience that accompany them.

[1] Her ‘Tea and Cookies’ scandal a prominent example. https://qz.com/762881/the-blatantly-sexist-cookie-bake-off-that-has-haunted-hillary-clinton-for-two-decades-is-back/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-damage-bernies-hillary-bashing-may-do-1460995155

[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/27/hillary-the-hawk-a-history-clinton-2016-military-intervention-libya-iraq-syria/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html

#hillary clinton #doc #documentary #Film Review #review #criticism #hillary rodham clinton #us politics #documentary review

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hillaryisaboss · 5 years

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A Clinton-era gem to repolish: How Bill and Hillary helped economically empower communities across America

By Errol Louis

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

LITTLE ROCK — It’s a pity that the latest Democratic presidential debate coincided with a day-long conference at the Clinton presidential library — co-hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton — to talk about strategies to attack income inequality.

Every one of the candidates for 2020 — and a lot of mayors, governors and legislators — ought to make the trek to Arkansas to learn how Clinton rose from governor of an economically distressed state to preside over the greatest economic boom of the last half-century.

“This is a small state. If someone got laid off, there’s a 50% chance I knew them, practically,” Clinton told a packed auditorium of bankers, activists and ex-administration officials. He recalled how the need to revitalize the state in the 1980s led him — along with the state’s First Lady, Hillary Clinton — to partner with local business and charitable leaders to co-found Southern Bancorp, a community development bank that provides loans and other services to distressed areas.

“We started hearing from businesses that they no longer knew their banker,” Hillary said, recounting the dire need for credit in Northeastern Arkansas. “More dreams die in the parking lots of banks than anywhere else in America.”

From humble beginnings, Southern Bancorp has grown to $1.2 billion in assets with more than 43 branches across the mid-South. Last year, the bank extended 7,000 loans, half of them for less than $10,000.

Each of those loans has a story behind it. Credit allows a small business to keep its doors open, or a day-care center to expand or repair a leaky roof; loans for families can send a child to college or stave off foreclosure.

After Clinton was elected president in 1992, his formative experiences in Arkansas became the basis of a little-known piece of legislation, the Community Development Financial Institutions Act of 1994, that provides seed capital and other assistance to a national network of community-based banks, loan funds, credit unions and micro-credit programs.

At the time, I was working full-time as an advocate pushing for the legislation. My boss at the time, Cliff Rosenthal, was (and remains) a tireless organizer and visionary who got me to spend countless hours drafting memos, op-eds and testimony for Congress and sitting in strategy sessions.

I will never forget sitting in the Rose Garden of the White House in July 1993, watching Clinton announce plans to get the CDFI Fund up and running — a promise that he kept by signing the legislation a year later.

The law led to the certification of more than 1,000 community-based institutions that operate in all 50 states, with more than $180 billion in assets. Companion legislation led to the creation of empowerment zones and New Market Tax Credits that provide additional credit to loan funds and businesses that need them.

That close attention to small business and family-level economic development is part of why 22.9 million jobs were created during the Clinton years — the most under any single administration — along with seven straight years of income growth and record-high homeownership.

A quarter-century later, the president remains a true believer in grassroots financial institutions.

“What helps Brooklyn also helps Appalachia,” he told me, arguing that getting back to economic basics can help heal America’s cultural divisions.

“People ask me all the time: ‘Well, there’s all this division. Is this economics or culture or race or whatever?’ And the truth is, it’s everything,” he said. “Once you uproot people and they feel economically insecure, socially looked down on and personally disempowered, it really doesn’t matter what the first feeling they had was. You know what I mean? You’ve got to fix it.”

This year’s crop of candidates for president should learn from the Clinton experience and give themselves a crash course in how loan funds, credit unions and micro-lenders can help revive the economy in troubled areas. Sound economics, it turns out, is also good politics.

#hillary clinton #bill clinton #elizabeth warren #bernie sanders #donald trump

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cle-guy · 4 years

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I am disappointed with Bernie Sanders

Which brings me to Joe Biden. I supported Biden this campaign less because his political positions align with mine; in some ways they do, but in other ways they fall short. I support Biden for two big reasons. The first is how Biden desires to govern. Biden calls for national consensus, which is important. All of our best legislative achievements (and the founding of the country itself) rests on reaching a consensus that a majority of the country backs. I support consensus, and hope we can find a way to reach it again, as we did in 2009-10. The second is because I firmly oppose political revolution as a vehicle for change. From my experience with Bernie supporters, I find them intractable and obstinate in their refusal to accept any path besides their own. The charitable reading is this is a hard negotiating position, which can be walked down. The straight reading is its a hill to die on, which will achieve little. For me our country faces numerous problems, and they require a national consensus to fix. Bernie Sanders, and his supporters, argue for specific fixes to these problems. Some of them are reasonable, but with problems. A single payer healthcare system is a reasonable system, and it has immense benefits, but it also runs into numerous problems. If your goal is universal coverage, its one method to achieve it but clearly it is also not the loan method. To many Berniecrats: single payer and universal healthcare are one and the same, and I reject the notion. If healthcare is a problem which requires attention (and it is) then we need to reach a consensus on how to fix it. Medicare for All is only one potential solution, not the only one. Other issues stand out on this as well. Climate Change being a big one, but others as well. Consensus must be reached to fix these problems, and Bernie's movement is not a movement to reach consensus: it's a movement to shut everyone else out. Joe Biden already displays his ability to build bridges by adopting proposals from his rivals. He adopted an Elizabeth Warren plan to address insurance, and a Bernie Sanders plan on education. He's shifted some positions on his healthcare platform since Bernie dropped out. Throughout his career, Biden has done the same with the Republican Party. Biden is also the candidate preferred by the most marginal Democratic members of the US House of Representatives and Senate. It is notable that the people who flipped the House support Joe Biden and his message, and not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Doug Jones, the most vulnerable senator, also supports Biden. This is important because consensus does not just require reaching agreement with your ideological opponents, but also your peers. The ACA and Social Security Act required a massive consensus effort to get the Democratic Party on board due to differences within their own caucus. Joe Biden has the coalition building ability to reach that, Bernie Sanders has not shown this strength (which is not to say he does not have it). For me, Joe Biden is less a man I yearn for, but a politics I pray for: the country cannot survive if we continue to retreat to our factional sides and snipe at the other side. Biden promises a return to consensus building, and an opportunity to address problems which require redress. In some ways, it's a restoration of the political soul of the nation. It's a message I support, and feel the country needs now more than any time in my lifetime. No, not because he lost: the positions he chose for the 2020 cycle pushed me away emphatically. I am disappointed because Bernie did not have to choose the path he did; he chose vitriol when an embrace was available. He chose truculence when the party remained persuadable. In short: Bernie's revolution chose its path. Purity was preferable to victory, and now Bernie is not the nominee.

I am disappointed because Bernie could have reversed course. Despite what many of his supporters claim: I do not believe their movement extends far beyond their personal candidate, and I offer a clear recent case for why: Elizabeth Warren. Warren's platform was in lock step with Bernie's, she ran on Medicare for All (and even provided a clear path to achieving it, one I feel was superior to Bernie's). However, despite the fact Warren clearly fell in Bernie's camp she was consistently victimized by his camp. The cases of Bernie supporters decrying Elizabeth, calling her a snake, and rejecting here are too numerous to recount here. Which leads me to believe, even if Bernie's supporters think the revolution extends beyond Bernie: they've struggled to find other politicians they're willing to trust with it. The reality is: Bernie could have ran differently. He had four years in the Senate to convince his colleagues to back him. Four years to actually join the party he yearned to lead. He chose, instead, to fight. Jim Clyburn could have been approached, Obama could have been mollified, Chuck Schumer convinced. Bernie did none of these things. He, instead, continued the 'revolution' which he started in 2016. As a result, the Democratic Party allowed the primary to largely continue on its own.

Lets consider: there were four major elected leaders in the Democratic Party before voting started: Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House), Chuck Schumer (Senate Minority Leader), Jim Clyburn (House Majority Whip), and Dick Durbin (Senate Minority Whip). Other leaders included Tom Perez (leader of the DNC), Governors of some big US States like Andrew Cuomo (New York Governor), Gavin Newsom (California Governor), and Illinois (JB Pritzker). Major Senators (who did not run for President): Debbie Stabenow (Michigan), Mark Warner (Virginia), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), and Chris van Hallen (Maryland). Former presidents and Vice-Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Walter Mondale, and Barack Obama. How many of these leaders endorsed Biden before his win in South Carolina? Answer: two, Jim Clyburn and Andrew Cuomo. A majority of these leaders still have not endorsed a candidate. So, in fact, the Democratic Party largely allowed the primary to function normally. Furthermore, it is not at all clear Biden was the favored choice of the party. Many of the above endorsed other candidates; Gavin Newsome endorsed Kamala Harris, for example. Unlike 2016, many party leaders hoped Biden wouldn't run including potentially (it must be said) Barack Obama.

Obama picked Biden as his vice-president for many reasons, but one of the biggest was Biden's age. Obama wanted a veep who would not run as his political heir. Obama also discouraged Joe from running in 2016. There is also evidence Obama doubts Biden's political ability to win the primary. Obama, of course, was not alone. Biden doubters were common, and loud, in both 2018 and 2019. Entire primary campaigns were built on the idea of Biden's collapse. The fact so many senators and governors ran in spite of Biden's entrance suggests the party was not convinced Biden was the right choice.

Furthermore, unlike 2016, Biden (now the presumptive nominee) did not benefit from much money. Biden not only raised less money than Bernie Sanders, he also raised less money than other leading rivals. The 60 billionaires who donated, donated the max to his personal campaign. On Super Tuesday, Biden won in states he never campaigned and spent almost nothing in advertising. This cycle, in short, is fundamentally different than 2016 when Hillary Clinton benefited from early, and resounding, support from the entire Democratic Party, and was fueled by business interests (and grassroots support). Joe Biden defeated Bernie Sanders without the party apparatus shoving him over the line. This occurred in part (not entirely) because Sanders chose to run against the establishment, and push away his rivals. After his victory in Nevada, when Bernie was the presumptive nominee, Bernie chose to thumb his nose at the party he wanted to lead, and did nothing to persuade his rivals to back him. It is telling of Bernie that Warren, for example, chose to not endorse Bernie when she left the race, not of Warren.

To close, Bernie could have ran to unite the party. He chose not to, and that choice had consequences.

On Joe Biden

I supported Biden this campaign less because his political positions align with mine; in some ways they do, but in other ways they fall short. I support Biden for two big reasons. The first is how Biden desires to govern. Biden calls for national consensus, which is important. All of our best legislative achievements (and the founding of the country itself) rests on reaching a consensus that a majority of the country backs. I support consensus, and hope we can find a way to reach it again, as we did in 2009-10. The second is because I firmly oppose political revolution as a vehicle for change. From my experience with Bernie supporters, I find them intractable and obstinate in their refusal to accept any path besides their own. The charitable reading is this is a hard negotiating position, which can be walked down. The straight reading is its a hill to die on, which will achieve little. For me our country faces numerous problems, and they require a national consensus to fix. Bernie Sanders, and his supporters, argue for specific fixes to these problems. Some of them are reasonable, but with problems. A single payer healthcare system is a reasonable system, and it has immense benefits, but it also runs into numerous problems. If your goal is universal coverage, its one method to achieve it but clearly it is also not the loan method. To many Berniecrats: single payer and universal healthcare are one and the same, and I reject the notion. If healthcare is a problem which requires attention (and it is) then we need to reach a consensus on how to fix it. Medicare for All is only one potential solution, not the only one. Other issues stand out on this as well. Climate Change being a big one, but others as well. Consensus must be reached to fix these problems, and Bernie's movement is not a movement to reach consensus: it's a movement to shut everyone else out. Joe Biden already displays his ability to build bridges by adopting proposals from his rivals. He adopted an Elizabeth Warren plan to address insurance, and a Bernie Sanders plan on education. He's shifted some positions on his healthcare platform since Bernie dropped out. Throughout his career, Biden has done the same with the Republican Party. Biden is also the candidate preferred by the most marginal Democratic members of the US House of Representatives and Senate. It is notable that the people who flipped the House support Joe Biden and his message, and not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Doug Jones, the most vulnerable senator, also supports Biden. This is important because consensus does not just require reaching agreement with your ideological opponents, but also your peers. The ACA and Social Security Act required a massive consensus effort to get the Democratic Party on board due to differences within their own caucus. Joe Biden has the coalition building ability to reach that, Bernie Sanders has not shown this strength (which is not to say he does not have it). For me, Joe Biden is less a man I yearn for, but a politics I pray for: the country cannot survive if we continue to retreat to our factional sides and snipe at the other side. Biden promises a return to consensus building, and an opportunity to address problems which require redress. In some ways, it's a restoration of the political soul of the nation. It's a message I support, and feel the country needs now more than any time in my lifetime.

#politics #election 2020 #bernie sanders #joe biden

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quakerjoe · 4 years

Link

In the end, not even the Progressive Bernie Base showing up for Hillary in larger numbers than her own supporters did for Obama in 2008, could prevent the inevitable. A massively flawed candidate who failed to electrify the Democratic base and make the case to Rust Belt voters- why she is the better option than the Populist candidate spraying out anti-trade rhetoric.

Blame whatever you want. The blame rests squarely on all of us. But there is so many lessons to learn from the 2016 Primary and General Election. Populism and Progressive policy became the central topic. Healthcare is a right. The ultra-rich are KING in America, and they must be reigned in. Primary process should be more fair. Flowery platitudes aren’t enough to generate excitement for the poor to turn out, etc.

Literally ZERO of these lessons were learned. Even in the face of an ACTUAL Corona-virus pandemic, with over 30 million unemployed, more and more uninsured at the time of writing this- the Democratic party has done nearly nothing to fix the problems from 2016. Actually, in all my shock- they’ve made them worse. The Democratic party pulled every string it could. Bent over backwards to not only stop Bernie Sanders, but stifle Progressives and our policy agenda. All in an orchestration to crown their nominee just years after a 2016 lawsuit said the DNC can meddle how ever they like in their own “Democratic process”. All to push a man who did next to no campaigning in any states past South Carolina. A man who didn’t actually work for your vote, but instead- coasted on “Hope and Change” establishment nostalgia, for when times weren’t so chaotic.

So for pragmatism sake, let’s push all that aside for just one moment. We can debate all day about how “fair” Joe Biden’s path to the Democratic Nomination has been. But let’s view Biden on his own merits for his candidacy’s sake. What’s the incentive for Progressives to vote for Joe? Well- unless you’re sticking to the concept of the very first paragraph of this article, the answer is: There isn’t one.

If Hillary Clinton were a flawed candidate, Biden may just be the worst nominee in history. A long history of terrible behavior including coddling racists, racist behavior, repeated threats at slashing the safety net, warmongering for a devastating Iraq war that’s helped kill endless innocent civilians all based on a lie, the nomination of Justice Thomas and controversial treatment of Anita hill, the Obama administration’s failure to even pass a Public Option with a Super Majority government, while pushing a healthcare plan that was little more than barely a small step in the right direction.

Now- Biden stands as the presumptive Democratic Nominee, and with a sizable Progressive Bernie Base up for grabs, what has Joe Biden done to earn our vote?

Answer: Nothing. Well, at least nothing significant.

Three items come immediately to mind on what Joe Biden is doing to “reach left”.

1: Joe wants to lower the Medicare age to 60. By comparison, Hillary Clinton wanted to lower it to as low as 50.

2: Joe Biden wants to eliminate student debt for those making under $125K. By comparison, Bernie Sanders wanted to eliminate it universally.

3: Nebulously- Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have created “working groups” on various policy issues focusing on education, criminal justice, climate change, immigration, the economy, and health care policy. As of yet, nothing has come of these “groups” on policy.

As the Primary was coming to a close, I as a Progressive- was completely open to Joe moving (not reaching) left on policy positions.

Overwhelmingly, if you ask Sanders supporters what they care about most, it’s Policy.

What will you do for the underprivileged working class people of America?

What will you do for my children and grand children facing a Climate Change future?

What will you do for your Mass Incarceration mess, ending the drug war, legalizing Marijuana, and freeing non-violent drug offenders?

What will you do for the upwards of 45K people who die each year because health care is not affordable?

The 67% of American bankruptcies being due to health care costs?

BUT. Sanders supporters also believe in principle. Consistency. History. Fighting for change. Decency. Human rights. We’re also majority young people (a group Joe Biden did not do well with). Perhaps these things could be talked out. But now there’s a bigger elephant in the room. One that establishment Democrats and Joe’s supporters are ignoring.

Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape.

Democrats spent months yelling about “Believing Women” during the Kavanaugh Confirmation hearings. Rightfully fighting for Christine Blasey Ford’s story to be heard- knowing it would be a fruitless task at the hands of a twisted Senate Republican majority. Now, establishment Democrats are making the media rounds with Biden campaign talking points with denials and every attempt to downplay Tara Reade as not a credible accuser, even as several corroborations of her story have surfaced, 1 of which was an archive video of who Tara Reade alleges is her mother discussing the issue with Larry King on CNN in 1993. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s campaign has it’s surrogates and supporters on news networks shielding Biden. Nancy Pelosi downplays the accusations, Kirsten Gillibrand (who helped cancel Al Franken) is downplaying the accusations. Alyssa Milano, prominent #MeToo voice, who made a performative appearance at the Brett Kavanagh hearings, now wants to “change the rules” on the movement in favor of a sort of ‘Due Process’- a process that many perpetrators cancelled by #MeToo never got, in favor of protecting Joe Biden.

What this means to me is that Democrats think it’s perfectly fine to be selective on who and who doesn’t deserve to be heard and taken seriously, based on who’s on your team. As if it should be that easy to just shed your principles like Snake skin, hypocritically protecting one predator, while gunning for another that doesn’t fit with you politically.

In 2016, I was perfectly fine voting for the “lesser evil”. Now that the party has loudly stated that not only does my values, principles, and policy demands for the poor and sick of America, not matter- I should fall in line with a candidate that has helped endless innocent people die overseas with America’s imperial military reach, helped endless people die at home because they cant afford a doctor, said that he has “no empathy” for young people- the same young people that have to live and suffer under the conditions of Climate Change while he’s dead and gone, sexually assaulted and violated multiple women, said that nothing will fundamentally change for the same rich people who are now gaining BILLIONS under pandemic conditions while their workers get sicker, if they’re even employed at all.

Moderate establishment Democrats and voters tell me that Trump is the number one threat. That we need to “vote blue no matter who”. Just how “blue” is Joe biden? Just how dissimilar is Joe Biden and his supporters from Trump and his following? For all of the cries of the “angry Bernie Bros” online, I see countless accosting and abusive discourse examples from Biden supporters calling any dissenters “Russian Bots”, or “MAGA Hats”. Being told that I’m somehow a Trump voter by default, for not immediately supporting Biden. All this when all I’ve ever seen from “the Bernie Bros” is aggressively holding smear artists to facts and truth in a thick environment of misrepresentation of Bernie Sanders and his platform.

So- Why shouldn’t Progressives vote for Joe Biden?

This Democratic party doesn’t give a damn about you. Nor does it care about Progressive policy. The party and its supporters spend all this time, smearing Sanders and his base as “Not democrats”, angry “socialists who want free stuff”, “How are you gonna PAY for it?!” etc etc, all while claiming to support SOME form of our policy, and then dropping it the second it doesn’t feel politically advantageous. This party threw everything it could into stopping YOU. With tactics like voter suppression, using a silly app suspiciously funded and supported by shady actors in Iowa, taking WEEKS to give final results, running Super PACs against Bernie and our movement, fear-mongering about Bernie when he did win states, gas lighting the public on “elect-ability”, using a literal pandemic against Bernie to guilt him into dropping out while attempting to blame him for continued spread of COVID-19, while they sent voters to the polls and we didn’t.

And after zero policy concessions, zero good will, repeated demands we fall in line after more than a year of being slammed and disrespected, showing up for Hillary Clinton and then being blamed for her loss anyway, which is inevitable again if Joe loses? Are we just going to keep allowing that? Just how long do we have to hold our noses, voting for Moderate do-nothing lite Republicans who would sooner see you die, than provide you affordable and universal healthcare, because a Billionaire would stand to lose money. Even NOW, during a Pandemic this party has done next to NOTHING to secure the livelihoods of American citizens, as more and more die, get furloughed, and cant pay their bills. All while Trump and Republicans take credit for pitching more common sense plans (even though they want to send us all back to work/school to feed the machine).

This- is the “resistance” party? THIS is the best we can do? Performative rage against a fascist clown while propping up an accused rapist warmongering corporatist with cognitive decline and previous racist tendencies? THIS is what the party keeps telling us we better support or be shamed as somehow supporting the “bad guy”?

Listen, #NotMeUs- this will never stop. This party will NEVER stop using us as a prop for our ideas and passion, then throwing us under the bus when they think they no longer need us. They cannot continue to be allowed to drag us further to the right with guilt trips and shaming. They will NEVER take you seriously unto you take serious action. We’ve been preaching about “action” this whole campaign. Why should that “action” stop in the ballot box? Have some foresight for just a moment and envision how this plays out in future elections, unless you stand up and make them WORK for your vote.

I, for one will not vote for Joe Biden. But I wont shame you for your vote, no matter who it��s for. Why? Because the party did a terrible job at earning -your- vote. I’d maybe only criticize you if you don’t show up at all. There’s so many down-ballot candidate who need support. Even if you leave the President box unchecked, at least show up for the other races.

But consider: There are other options that have been stifled for way too long. Perhaps its time we give them a shot, no? Green Party is running Howie Hawkins and a platform that is much closer to our principles that Biden would ever try for. Justin Amash just jumped into the race if you’re a little more on the Libertarian side. Jesse Ventura is also discovering running on the Green ticket as well. Just imagine Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura on the debate stage with Donald Trump? Popcorn for DAYS.

In order for us to be taken seriously, we must prove that we’re capable of holding the party accountable. Not voting for them is the ultimate accountability, and you get to keep your principles intact.

Now- to the ultimate argument you’d inevitably get: “You would be helping Donald Trump secure 4 more years”.

My response? You don’t have to bare the blame for that. You wont be at fault for Joe Biden losing any more than those who chose not to vote at all. It’s on the party to earn these votes. That’s how elections work. If you hate the candidate and don’t feel good about them as a person, why is it your responsibility to put them in office? To me- one of the most personal things a person has, is their vote. Not their dollars, or their Tweets. It’s checking a box for the person YOU chose to represent you. If that person doesn’t believe in hardly anything you personally believe in- why is it that they deserve your vote, again? How is it that they’re are somehow entitled to that vote? They don’t, and they aren’t. I’m looking at you too, Republicans.

In closing…

Progressives, I’m sorry to break it to you but- Medicare For All is not on the ballot. Taxing the rich is not on the ballot. Ending corruption and crooked politicians is not on the ballot.

But- ending a terrible two-party system IS on the ballot. Taking your personal vote back, IS on the ballot. In my opinion- the only wasted vote, is the one you were demanded in giving up to what you don’t believe in.

-LZ

https://medium.com/@legacyzero/why-sanders-supporters-should-not-vote-for-joe-biden-a9146bee189b

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evilelitest2 · 5 years

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"None of the 5 front runners are that disliked or that inept at campaigning" this is why I laugh at anyone who thinks Trump can magically bring down the nominee, whoever they are, they especially think he can do it to Warren because she's apparently exactly like Hillary because they have the same hair color or something. Doesn't matter how many times he calls her Pocahontas, anyone who seriously thinks he can replicate a decades-long smear campaign in 12 months: I have a bridge to sell you lol

Basically a lot of the left feels really traumatized by 2016 and they are acting on their fear far more than they are acting based on an understanding of what happens. This is actually a big issue when laymen try to understand history, and they get stuck on narratives rather than focus on the details. And honestly, the left really tends to overhype the power of Fox news, ironically Clinton stans did that to Bernie in the General, and it ignores the fact that Obama won twice over their objections.

So lets be clear here about the facts of the 2016 election

1) Hillary Clinton was an extremely unpopular candidate, a result of both the Republicans running a smear campaign since 1992, the mixed legacy of her and Bill, along with her lack of Charisma

2) Clinton had an extremely controversial record as a politician and also had to answer for her husbands even more controversial record

3) Nobody thought Trump could win. I will repeat that, Nobody Thought Trump Could Win. This meant that a lot of people, including Clinton herself, didn’t take the general election seriously, and that many people who (rightly) didn’t like clinton (wrongly) decided not to vote.

4) Clinton ran a very poor campaign, marked by amateur moves and shocking mistakes. A few that struck out to me were

Praising Henry Kissinger

Claiming Nancy Reagan handled the AIDS crisis well

The response to the Speeches to Wall Street

Not Holding any Press Conferences

The Pnemonia Debacle (not her fault, her staff’s fault)

Not seriously considering Michigan and Wisconsin as swing states

Over commiting to Georgia rather than Florida

Tech failures (long story its frustrating)

Not picking a good campaign slogan

Picking Tim Kaine as VP

the list goes on. Hillary Clinton has never been a good campaigner, she made similar errors in 2008. The 2016 Democratic Primary is another indication, Clinton should have crushed Sanders like a bug but that became a long drawn out primary against a 74 year old socialist from Vermont nobody had heard of

5) The Email Scandal. While it was mostly bullshit, the fact that she had a scandal around her dragged her campaign down

6) Bad luck, the healthcare prices dipping and Comey’s letter just two weeks before the election was a mess

7) And utterly unprepared media. Trump got over 2 billion dollars of Free Media and got to host SNL in 2016 in large part because everybody thought he was a novelty items and was good for ratings. As President this isn’t true

8) Voting against a hypothetical trump is different than voting against the reality of Trump. With Detention centers, a trade war, multiple investigations, corruption, incompetence, an unpopular tax cut, impeachment, and possibly an economic recession, Trump has a record to defend now which he didn’t before. his base will stay with him, but some independence who stayed home might not this time around

9) His Trade war has directly hurt the very swing states that Clinton lost and as we saw from the mid term elections, he isn’t doing so hot there now.

Despite all of these factors (and Russia’s interference) Trump barely won in 2016, by 30k votes. And by barely won, I mean lost by 3 million. For dems to win in 2020, we only need to win in a few of the Swing States, while he needs to win all of them.

The only major factor in Trumps favor in 2020 that was there in 2016 is the Russian interference. Of all these factors this is the only one that might come back in 2020, though people are more ready for it and Putin might have difference concerns. The 2016 election was a major operation for Putin, he might not do it again. But even if he did, the other factors are still

As of now, none of the major democratic candidates are no where near as unpopular as Clinton, and as you said, none of them have decades of life in the national eye to squire that.

#ask evilelitest #2016 election #2020 election #Trump #GOP #Hillary Clinton #Democratic primary #Fox News #Elizabeth Warren #Bernie Sanders #Joe Biden #Mayor Pete #kamala harris

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maswartz · 4 years

Link

IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave.

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

#bernie sanders

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robertreich · 4 years

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THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNION

An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.

It’s not unprecedented for an impeached president to give a state of the union address. Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union in 1999 while in the middle of his Senate trial. But that’s where the similarities end. Clinton was not up for re-election when he gave his speech, so he didn’t need to employ any campaign-style rhetoric. Trump is a polarizing, divisive president who is addressing an America that has never been so divided. But this begs the question: why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, abortion, and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. So why are we so divided now? Ferocious partisanship is not new. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who led the House’s impeachment investigation into Clinton, pioneered the combative partisanship we’re used to today. But today’s divisions are far deeper than they were then. Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists — keeping everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming, and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division. But that begs another question: Why have we been so ready to be divided by Trump? One theory is the underlying tension that an older, whiter, and less educated America, concentrated in rural areas, is losing out to a “new” America that’s younger, more diverse, more educated, and concentrated in urban areas. These trends, while much more prominent these days, have been going on since the start of the 20th century. Why are they causing so much anger now? Another hypothesis is that we are geographically sorting ourselves into Republican and Democratic regions of the country, surrounding ourselves with like-minded neighbors and friends so we no longer talk to people with opposing views. But why are we doing this? The rise of social media sensationalizing our differences in order to attract eyeballs and advertisers, plays a crucial role in exacerbating the demographic and geographic trends I just mentioned. But it alone isn’t responsible for our polarized nation. Together, all of these factors contribute to the political schism we’re experiencing today. But none of them alone point to any large, significant change in the structure of our society that can account for what’s happened. Let me have a go. In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina for a research project I was doing on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. What I heard surprised me. Twenty years ago, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now, that frustration had been replaced by full-blown anger — anger towards their employers, the government, Wall Street. Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power. I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, and growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party, while a few others had been involved in the Occupy movement. With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, Democratic Party insiders favored Hillary Clinton and Republican insiders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush. They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.” In the following year, Sanders – a seventy-four-year old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a registered Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses. Trump – a sixty-nine-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin). Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They have come up with myriad explanations for Trump’s ascendance, some with validity; some without: It was hatred of Obama, it was hatred of Hillary, it was people voting third party, it was racism and xenophobia. It’s important to note that although racism and xenophobia in America date to before the founding of the Republic, they have never before been so central to a candidate’s appeal and message as they’ve been with Trump. Aided by Fox News and an army of right-wing outlets, Trump used the underlying frustrations of the working class and channeled them into bigotry, but this was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this cynical ploy. Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by the powers that be that he was their champion. Hillary Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive: She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that had left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.) A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. By 2016, Americans understood that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”), which he quickly reneged on once elected, delivering everything big money could have imagined. The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. Vicious partisanship, record-breaking economic inequality, and the resurgence of white supremacy are all byproducts of this rigged system. The biggest political battle today isn’t between left, right, or center: it’s between Trump’s authoritarian populism and democratic (small “d”) populism. Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement that tackles runaway inequality and heals the racial wounds Trump has inflicted. Even though he’s a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich – giving them all the tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks they’ve ever wanted – he still has large swaths of the working class convinced he’s on their side. Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. We must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities, and classes, and band together to unrig the system. Trump is not the cause of our divided nation; he is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery. For now, let’s boycott the State of the Union and show the ratings-obsessed demagogue that the American people refuse to watch an impeached president continue to divide us.

#video #videos #democracy #American capitalism

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Of Lesser Men Imagine yourself in school. You are 8 years old and it is recess time. You look for your friends, for the boys it is baseball or football, and the natural leaders set up teams and it begins. This is humanity, from its roots as hunter-gatherers so many hundreds of thousands of years ago, this is the natural order of things. Then, some would not survive. Guile and weakness was seldom rewarded. With the onset of “civilization” that changed. Where, at one time, the natural leaders became royalty or nobility, the need to pass on power though lineage went awry and these bloodlines through inbreeding and degeneration became the Deep State, physical weaklings, moral reprobates, tasked with selecting more of the same and moving them into positions of authority. The goal has been division, entropy, suffering, and managing the expectations of those of promise, pushing them into piracy, banditry or killing them in wars. Thus, when we find ourselves, even the strongest of us, the best of the best as it were, subject to rule by our lessers, “under the thumb” of those who, as children, we shunned as cowardly or vile, why do we recoil in surprise? What was left runs Washington, London and Paris, other capitols as well, the “lesser men,” damaged, confused, inferior, pushed up the ladder, the chosen people, a class of “Untermensch.” America’s ruling elite, when examined, for the most part resemble a form of reverse Darwinism. We are going to be calling the comic tragedy of the Muller investigation what it really is, “MuellerGate.” Any possibility that there was ever an investigation of anything intended is gone but the real reasons might well startle all but the most paranoid or well-informed watchers. What began as RussiaGate is playing out as not just fakery, but a complex and well-crafted intelligence operation intended to destabilize both the United State and Russia with full complicity of the press, those who control the press from the inside. It was always not only a wrong assumption by insane as well to assume that somehow, the controlled corporate media, would declare war on a presidency that has been so friendly to the oil industry, Wall Street, big polluters and the big pharma “poisoners.” The only other force handling this much cash is the CIA/Deep State worldwide heroin ring run out of Afghanistan and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, with the help of well known and powerful American families, names very much like Romney, Bush and Walton, according to an FBI whistleblower who came forward in 2012. When Mueller investigators interrogated me in 2018, I brought the debriefing recordings with me and offered to play them. It nearly cleared the room. Here is what is playing out as of mid-April, 2019: Democrats who control congress are planning to subpoena the entire Mueller Report and to question both Mueller and Barr. Legal experts are saying that only a preliminary impeachment process provides needed statutory authority for this effort. The public, perhaps a majority approaching 60%, is hanging on this drama, waiting to “get Donald Trump” as though he were a masked villain in a fake professional wrestling match, which of course he is. What has been purposefully forgotten is that both Mueller and Barr are “lesser men.” Both, according to sources, were CIA recruits early in life. During Vietnam, the CIA began profiling a new generation to carry them past their roots. The CIA’s roots are Nazi Germany’s Abwehr. Their profile included intellectual ability combined with a bevy of negative traits including social psychopathy, feelings of inferiority and intense guilt, and a powerful need for approval and affirmation from authority figures. Two of my good friends, one a senior Army intelligence officer and the other a high-ranking FBI official, both “the best of the best” tried to get into the CIA and were turned away. They weren’t crazy enough. According to sources, both Barr and Mueller were “crazy enough” and for 4 decades or more, have been close personal friends while operating in and out of the corridors of power on behalf of what is now termed the Deep State. Similarly, Mueller and Comey as FBI directors were close friends. Remember, it was Comey that only days before the 2016 election put out highly derogatory and utterly unnecessary statements about the Clinton email case. That case, of course, was a fabrication of a GOP congress that spent endless millions concerned about “classified emails” that, thus far, were utterly without substance. Moreover, anything from the State Department that a Secretary of State wants to make pubic or declassify, has the full authority to do as the President does the same for the White House. Trump does this continually. Before that it was the phony Benghazi investigation and before that, Hillary Clinton was accused of personally murdering Vince Foster. Let us not forget the Clinton impeachment and the role of Kenneth Starr as prosecutor. Starr was a longtime acolyte of Richard Mellon Scaife, a typical James Bond bad guy, scion of one of the biggest Deep State banking families who simply bought Starr and spent millions hiring thugs of various kinds to smear the Clintons. Starr had been promised a seat on the US Supreme Court if he got Clinton. He failed but his “man,” Brett Kavanaugh, now holds a seat on the high court as a surrogate, we are told, for failed and disgraced Ken Starr. A key to understanding the dynamic is knowing that everything the public sees or is allowed to see is scripted. Comey went after Clinton not to damage or influence the election but to create the appearance of doing so while, as had happened in 2000 and 2004, Deep State operatives working with local election officials, literally thousands of them, simply hacked the election count. This has been investigated, studied and written of so many times and is forgotten and shelved. Everyone is complicit. Past that, every candidate is always from the same pool, either hopelessly insane like Trump or Bush 43 or deeply flawed or crippled like Bill Clinton or Barak Obama. When someone different sneaks in like Jimmie Carter, the answer is simple. The Federal Reserve cuts off the money supply, collapsing the economy and the CIA stages a coup in Iran in order to move Reagan in. Part of America’s suppressed history is the truth about Reagan, BCCI, Iran Contra and the collapse of America’s industrial economy, all done while America’s middle class disappeared. This was no accident. MuellerGate is a critical component of a “lesser man” ploy. Mueller and Barr, we assume, are in continual contact as they are constant companions, lifelong companions, who have planned and executed Deep State operations over and over during their careers. Barr exists to fabricate childishly absurd legal opinions. Read one of them. His early letter on the RussiaGate investigation, castigating his best friend Robert Mueller as dangerously incompetent, is classic deception and cover. Then, lo and behold, Mueller finishes an investigation that takes forever. The nation focuses on little else while everything that can be broken or stolen in the nation is broken and stolen. There are 3 White Houses, one in New York at Trump Tower, now a Secret Service protected home for the headquarters of the Kosher Nostra while at Mar-a-Lago, Chinese billionaires are buying America on the cheap. The White House in Washington is now “Tel Aviv on the Potomac.” Making it all work is the three-act play staged by the worst actors in the world, villain Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi of the fake left, and a cast of thousands. It was evident what was going to happen from the get go with the public sucked in the Mueller drama, taking it all seriously, while the GOP’s control of the Senate and the generalized agreement that a sitting president cannot be indicted. In fact, there is no such provision in the constitution whatsoever. The legal concept is the creation of now sitting Federal District Judge Raymond Moss, written in 2000 at the behest of then Attorney General Janet Reno. Was Reno expecting Bill Clinton to start murdering White House visitors on live television? That is, perhaps, the only rationale for a legal opinion that has entrained itself as a keystone of Deep State security. This is from Lawrence Tribe, perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the constitution: “In a recent opinion piece, I argued that the text and structure of the Constitution, a serious commitment to the rule of law, and plain good sense combine to preclude a rigid policy of “delaying any indictment of a president for crimes committed in winning the presidency.” My op-ed argued against the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos opining that the Constitution prevents the indictment of a sitting president. Nearly everyone concedes that any such policy would have to permit exceptions. The familiar hypothetical of a president who shoots and kills someone in plain view clinches the point. Surely, there must be an exception for that kind of case: Having to wait until the House of Representatives impeaches the alleged murderer and the Senate removes him from office before prosecuting and sentencing him would be crazy. Nobody seriously advocates applying the OLC mantra of “no indictment of a sitting president” to that kind of case. The same is true for any number of other cases that come readily to mind. Among those, in my view, must be the not-so-hypothetical case of a president who turns out to have committed serious crimes as a private citizen in order to win the presidency. Whether the president committed such crimes in collusion with a shady group of private collaborators or did so in conspiracy with one or more foreign adversaries, it should not be necessary for the House to decide that such pre-inaugural felonies were impeachable offenses and for the Senate to convict and remove the officeholder before putting him in the dock as an alleged felon and meting out justice.” Conclusion Are people like May or Macron or Trump little more than circus clowns? Is everything scripted, where the chance of peace breaking out, of justice and righteousness infecting the absurd global processes inoculated against? Are the current moves around the world to criminalize expression of these very thoughts an indication of how blatant and egregious the lesser men have become?

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wrongfullythinking · 5 years

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And then there were five...

The numbers say 20. Or maybe 21. It’s hard to tell. But in reality, I think we’re down to five. Five’s a good number, the same amount you can fit on a basketball floor and really know who is out there. Let’s face it, nobody but the most die-hard fan knows who bats 8th and plays left. Five? Five’s a number we can deal with. And looking at the state of things, we’re down to five realistic candidates. Maybe some of the other 15 or 16 will get a nice mike-drop moment, and maybe they’ll get a chance to advocate for a cause they believe in. But if your party is so oddly out that you need to use the presidential nomination as a way to get your ideas across... well, it worked for the Bern, but rarely do imitators have the same success as the original.

In this piece, I’m going to give brief thoughts on the five candidates, and then assign my own completely arbitrary “chance-of-winning-the-nomination” percentages.

The Frontrunner: Biden (50%) At this point, [5/2/2019], preliminary voters are presented with a choice: Joe Biden, or somebody else? It is very much Biden vs. the Pack, and if Biden is the nominee, he’ll make it very clear that it is actually TheObamaLegacy vs. EverythingNotObama. Without an Obama endorsement, that’s a tough one to pull off. Frankly, I don’t think Joe Biden is the strongest candidate, and I don’t think he will make a great president. But he’s also not going to go away until the very end of this, and if he loses, it will be because everybody else decides to unite behind another candidate.

There’s this fiction that Biden is the most “electable” candidate. He’s not, he’s the third-most electable. The second-most electable is Michelle Obama. She is a sure-fire nominee and general election winner, pulling southern states, the female vote, Florida and Michigan away from Republicans and guaranteeing there is no red path to 270. Does Biden do any of that? Probably not. He’s not Bill Clinton, with charisma to go with midwestern history. He’s not Obama himself, with a genuine melancholy and a realist outlook. He’s a meme more than a politician since 2008.

But let’s get straight what matters about Biden and what doesn’t. Nobody really cares about what he said to Anita Hill or his tough-on-crimes stance in the 90s. The media will keep dredging up these issues, and the fact that they’re having to dig this deep to find some pretty thin soil tells you a lot about Biden. He’s pretty hard to object to, and Trump is very easy to object to. There is no doubt that Biden will garner the vote of everybody who hates Trump. But can you win an election with just “Not-Trump?” Apparently not, if I remember the 2016 final tally. [But let’s not get started into how Democrats can bungle this thing, if they don’t learn from their “ignore the whites and the heartland, whine incessantly about the other guy, and then say that we should thank them for raising taxes” plan from 2016, they’re hopeless anyways.]

How can Biden win the nomination? The longer everybody else stays in, the more likely Biden wins. Let’s be clear: Biden is going to be the “least objectionable” candidate in both the Primary and the General. Biden’s chances also go up every time somebody else goes low, but his years of experience as Washington and his long, long list of friends, combined with strong association with Obama, make him the most resilient and easily-forgiven of the candidates.

How does Biden lose the nomination? The rest of the field unites behind one or two other candidates who pound Biden with policy expertise, passionate speeches, and a presidential air. Or, frankly, Biden himself disengages. The more time Biden has to prepare (and hire the best speech-writers), the more Biden is likely to be president. The more time the media spends showing his off-the-cuff gaffes (and there will be plenty), and we could see a Howard Dean scenario emerge, provided there is another strong candidate. The other danger to Biden is that the young vote deserts him in favor of another candidate, and the older generation stays apathetic for the days of Obama.

What to expect from a Biden presidency: First, a lot less headlines. Wouldn’t it be nice to open CNN on any day and see that the webpage’s headline was not about the President? That’s not a ringing endorsement of Biden, nor will it excite the often-raving-horde of young politicos. But let’s be honest... young politicos have always been a bit of a raving horde, and this generation really isn’t different. They just tweet instead of march and browse webpages instead of newspapers. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Biden establish a legacy as the “infrastructure President.�� And that’d be fine with most Americans. I certainly would love to see some high-speed rails, because **** the airline companies. They’re terrible. The American Highway System is a wonder of the modern world, and improving it with a series of electrical refueling stations and solar-powered rest stops couldn’t hurt. Infrastructure is an easy win, and Biden’s going to take easy wins. As he should.

The Rabble Rouser: Bernie Sanders, 15% The Bern seems to be a better candidate on paper than he actually is; right now, he’s benefitting from the same early-momentum wave that carried Hillary to the Chair of the Anointed One at the Democratic Convention. Bernie’s always had bad timing though, and I’m not convinced this is any different. Had Biden stayed out of the race, I’d put Bernie’s chances at 30 or 40%. But with Biden in, I’m not sure there are enough Obama-era democrats who actually prefer the Bern. Sure, the young/gay/urban/unemployed/coastal [pick two] crowd who wants to reshape the country into a Scandinavian one loves him. But how many of us want to weigh our trash and be charged 6$ for each pound of it the garbage guy has to pick up? How many of us want to be told by a bank that they can’t offer us a loan, because we didn’t attend a prestigious enough university [coastal degrees only for investment bankers]? Let’s not even start on 55% tax rates for the middle class or subsidizing a 29-year-old’s NYC apartment as he trucks through a medieval literature degree one-course-at-a-time. This is obvious hyperbole, but “democratic socialism” starts with “democratic,” and that means “the beliefs of the people” are synonyms with “the will of the people.” Could some of the Bern’s policies work in America. Sure. But there’s no evidence that he can convince any except his already die-hard advocates that they all can, and a policy doesn’t make a system. I’m not convinced Americans, be they blue or red or the purple-murky-middle, are really excited about this sort of sea change.

How to Sanders win/lose the nomination? If the “woke” wing of the party fails to find a demographic-win in Harris or Buttigieg, and decides to yell loud enough to keep the Obama-era democrats from crowning Biden, or if Biden drops out as well as Harris/Buttigieg, Sanders could end up engaged in a rhetorical battle with Warren that neither of them want, but the country might need. At that point, it’s a coin-flip and a nasty convention, and lines in the sand may become tracks on the ground, separating the haves-and-have-nots in the Democratic party. Still, Sanders could emerge in such a scenario with a win, though I’d tip my hand towards Warren.

What to expect from a Sanders presidency: There’s a small chance we get a lot of everything, and a large chance we get absolutely nothing, depending on how Congress plays out. It is always amusing to me to watch candidates at this stage talk policy, because, you know... the President doesn’t write policy. Okay, he [or soon-to-be “she”] does, but not really. You’ve got to go back to the 70s/80s to find Presidents who were really able to institutionalize their policies in statute, and unless Sanders picks up a majority in both Houses, and even then, it is tough to see most of his ideas actually making it into law. I’ve critiqued Obama before as being “the Toothless President,” because his “signature accomplishment” of the AHCA is already mostly dust-in-the-wind, and it wasn’t even much of a victory to start with [he didn’t even get a government-based option!]. Sanders’ ideas are likely too big for any political reality, and remember, he’s been in the Senate for a LONG time. How much of his work do you see in your daily life?

The Best: Elizabeth Warren, 30% One of the strangest (and most chilling) realities of this election cycle is how dismal Warren is polling. What we’re seeing here is what I call “The Hillary Effect,” where an unlikable-older-white-woman is conjuring up all our memories of nasty assistant principals and that mean piano teacher who kept whacking our fingers. Warren is neither of those things, but her image is not, at this point, helping her. Warren needs the rest of the electorate to come to Warren-land, where what matters is your policy chops, and it remains to be seen if the Democratic party (no racism, no slander, no ableism!) allows itself to move past her white-and-rich appearance.

So, let’s have that experiment. Let’s get past the appearance and the fact that she listed herself as 25% Native American in order to get a law school scholarship. What do you have left? What you have left is a woman who can be President. She’s been a far more successful politician than either Sanders or Biden, and she’s the candidate with the best touch to the realities of the parties from coast-to-coast. Warren’s policies, although a bit left-of-center, are clearly centered around the groups she wants to elevate: small businesses, Americans with children, and all of us who are willing to work for a living but want to be able to live like we want if we do. Warren’s the president who believes in exchange: you put in your time with her, and you feel like she’ll give you something back. That’s a big difference from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Look at the Clinton slogan: “I’m with her.” Compare that to Trump’s slogan (Make America Great Again), and we know which one won. On a slogan level, the second one SHOULD win. You want a president who is about making the country great. Warren’s the politician who gets that, and understands how Trump is appealing to people’s needs, rather than setting out for a list of “the world should be like this.” The fact that her policies are so well-defined and solidly based in the needs of Americans is what sets her so far apart from the rest of the crowd. I have no qualms in saying that of the current pack, I would much rather have Warren as my president than any other candidate, and it isn’t close.

How does Warren win/lose the nomination? Warren’s path to victory starts by convincing Obama-era democrats that she is more Obama than Biden is. That’s a tough sell, because she looks more like Hillary... who, let’s not forget, lost a nomination to Obama before she lost to Trump. Warren needs to separate herself from Hillary and align herself with Obama. Frankly, an Obama endorsement might be the thing that lands the race in her lap. Warren also needs the conversation to revolve around policy. She’s the best at that, and she needs to convince people that she can get her policies not just in front of Congress, but through it. The less talk is about policy, and the more it is about nebulous ideas or demographics or social media or broad philosophical stances, the worse Warren will do.

What to expect from a Warren presidency. We might get some high-speed rails, but we’ll likely see taxes go up on the rich, stay stagnant on the middle class, and see some supplement for popular welfare-type programs (college aid, family aid, etc.). I’m not convinced Warren can make a difference in healthcare, and I’m fine if she doesn’t; we’ve wasted 12 years on the topic now and it just may not be the window. But there are so many other issues that Warren can tackle that would make a difference to Americans. I’d love a tax credit for putting solar power on a roof, and Warren’s the one I see making that happen, not Sanders. I’d like to see university students get some more support federally [good job on Summer Pell!] and that is most likely to come from Warren. Generally, I think we’ll see the “B” versions of her stump-speech policies become realities. The middle-50% of Americans will pay 20-30% in taxes, not 15, and the highest-1% will pay 40%, not 50 or 70. Small businesses will get their health care burden for employees subsidized, but won’t be able to write off all debts for a decade. Farmers may again be able to make a profit off a cow, though we may all pay an extra 25c per gallon for milk and an extra 30c per pound of beef.

((My wish list for Warren: rein in credit card companies and payday loans. Nobody but a bank should be able to give you a credit card, let’s stop all this “Sears Card, Best Buy Card, Kohls Card” nonsense that keeps American families in debt from their late-teens to retirement. And banks need transparent policies about awarding credit cards and loans, and be forced to stick with them, not making nebulous decisions about eligibility based on who-the-lending-officer-is and the skin color of their applicant. /rant end))

Bernie 2.0 or Trump 2.0???: Buttigieg, 3% Buttigieg may have the most energy, but the primary process may be the most damaging to him. I mean, it let him get into the race in first place, and he does look a bit like a Kennedy, doesn’t he? And his charisma is first-rate, his qualifications trump Trump’s at this point in the last election cycle [low bar, right?] and he’s just non-white enough [because he has sex with men, so that counts] to keep some of the Democrat’s own bloodhounds off his back. The weaknesses are also glaring: he doesn’t have the policy of Warren, the political capital of Biden, or the funds and the rabid fans of Bernie. But he is from a Midwestern state, and the Democrats could do worse than considering that. The trouble here is that no one really sees the energy lasting for another year. But hey, it worked for Trump, right?

The trouble is that Buttigieg needs a Trump-like groundswell of support to carry him to the nomination, and right now, that base is going Sanders, and may squash any non-Sanders candidate who should appeal to them simply by virtue of them already having Sanders bumper stickers. To get it, Buttigeig may have to be the one who starts to go low, and he’s shown a reticience to do so. At some point, Buttigieg will need to argue that he’s the Midwestern candidate, and the Democrats need the Midwest. How he makes that argument, who he convinces, and if anybody can be convinced, will all dictate how long Buttigieg stays relevant.

How does Buttigieg win/lose the nomination? Frankly, I don’t see this happening without Sanders dropping out the race, and that likely means a Sanders health problem. That’s not an exciting prospect for anybody, but if Sanders drops out and then endorses Buttigieg, we could see a late-term surge for him past the other remaining candidates. He has to raise enough money to be in it for that long, and he’s got to continue to have great town halls and debates, which are two areas where he shines. I think Buttigieg is going to be a player in the democratic party for years to come, but I don’t think this is his race.

The Californian: Harris, 10% Harris is not likable. She wants to be Michelle, and she’s not. Oh yeah, earlier, when I said that Michelle Obama was the second-most electable person in America? That’s because she’s behind Beyonce. And let’s be clear, Harris is NOT Beyonce. That’s not a dig against either of them, it is a reality of the situation: there are a number of high-powered black women easily in the public eye (in addition to the above two, let’s not forget Oprah, Whoopi, and Stacy Abrams), and Harris is less-likeable than all of them. She comes across brusque, aggressive, and well... a little bit like Trump. That’s not what we want, right? Right? The point is, the Democratic party vilifies unlikeable women, and if Warren is struggling with this, Harris is absolutely going to drown in it. We can talk about feminism and compare waves all we want, but people are going to pay lip-service to that in public, and in private, quietly mark ballots for Biden. That’s always a concern of the Democratic party, and I’m not sure Harris is the one that cures it. I am sure that Harris does not carry the female vote away from Biden, Sanders, or Warren. She’s not a woman’s candidate.

What’s really difficult for Harris is that she’s not anyone’s candidate. California? Sure, why not, but any democrat carries California against Trump. Who cares? The black vote? Last I checked, it was what, roughly 8% of America and not enough to carry Pennsylvania or Michigan? Nor any of the Deep South (that Obama won) against a Trump campaign. The nice part of this is that Harris has the potential to make in-roads with a lot of groups. She’s a professional, she has a presidential air, and she has a prosecutor’s wit. She’s unashamedly intelligent and not afraid of a big moment, like we saw with the 13,500-to-teachers announcement or the recent Barr hearings. She’s less good in-the-moment, where she comes across as a lawyer and not a politician, appealing to the paper rather than the audience. And there’s not a good sound-byte here yet. But Harris could be all those things. Maybe.

How does Harris win/lose the nomination? Harris gets 10% here because she may be the one with the most obvious route past Biden, if Sanders and Warren get out of her way. She needs to improve her on-stage performances (that Town Hall was dismal) and she needs to make sure her focus is where it needs to be, and not get caught talking about things like medical care or Yang’s tech-policies that are clearly not her wheelhouse. It is a matter of sticking to her lane, and then including as many people as possible in her car. She wants to pull people towards her, and the better she can do that, and avoid her lawyer’s instinct of defining boundaries of “Yes” and “No,” the better she’ll do. Harris has the real potential to use this race to grow up from prosecutor to politician, and if she does that, she could be a force. I don’t see her as a serious challenge to Warren or Sanders if it comes down to them as the final two, but I do see her challenging Biden if it ends up with the two of them. Harris needs to stay in the race, keep practicing her presence, and start avoiding troublesome questions like a politician, while maintaining a few key clear policies that people can tie to her name. The bump-for-teachers was a great start, and if she could become “the education candidate,” we might really have something here.

The Rest: 2% I feel like the rest of the field isn’t trying to be President, they’re trying to use the nomination process to make money/crusade-a-cause or just stir up feelings. I’m disappointed this is happening to democrats, because it keeps the five real potential candidates from offering powerful distinctions. Does the party want to move towards Bernie-socialism? Can we believe in Farmers? Do Democrats actually value the MIdwest (according to Hillary, no... does Biden change that narrative)? What is the role of the US internationally, specifically with regards to China and a post-Brexit UK? Was is the reasonable path towards renewable energy, and how does it help me lower my energy bill next January? Will I be able to claim Social Security, and if the system is poor, how do we fix it [or incentivize workers and companies to start doing a better job with retirement plans]? What does a rising interest mean for American home-buyers, and do we want Americans to buy homes? There are so many questions that the candidates differ on, and I worry that we won’t be able to hear from the important candidates on them, because we’ll be hearing somebody’s own hot take on Putin or how Universal Basic Income is something we should pretend to care about for the next 12 minutes. That’s a disservice to the party and the voters, and I hope the debate moderators, pundits, and press over the next 12 months give us a clear view of where the candidates stand and the differences between then.

The afterthought: AOC. Well, we’ve got to talk about her, right? The thing is, we don’t. She’s not a political force, she’s a social one. So, let’s get the obvious out of the way: she’s not eligible to run for President now, though she might be in four years (I’m actually not clear on where her birthday lines up with inauguration day, and I don’t think she’s important enough to check). The very real flaw here is that AOC is not representative. No person is. Yes, I get that she’s non-white and female. Guess what, our country is about 50% male and somewhere around 50% white. So by virtue of being not, it is impossible to argue that someone is. However, the real problem with “representative” is that AOC is coastal and urban, and her perspectives are entirely based on those realities. This is a shame, because for all that people can tout her LatinX heritage, she is very much out-of-tune with high-LatinX states like New Mexico, Texas, and even the non-coastal parts of California. Does that matter in an electoral college world? Maybe not... no Democrat is expected to carry Texas, and no Democrat will fail to carry California. But she’s not a candidate (like Harris, or Obama) who can expect to pull a huge amount of votes simply based on her demographic information. That math has never worked out as well as pundits want it to... remember the Palin experiment? That certainly didn’t persuade the female vote to go Red. And this is one place where I think the American electorate is sadly underestimated; it is assumed we vote for people who look like us, and I find American voters quite a bit more savvy than that. AOC doesn’t pull the LatinX vote as a block, and she certainly doesn’t carry Texas. Alongside the coastal-based policies and city-only mentality she carries, there is no reason to nominate AOC in four years.

#politics #democratic presidential nomination #nomination

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