This is quite possibly the best thing ever. From the Trump campaign:
Mr. Trump made Megyn Kelly look really bad — she was a mess with her anger and totally caught off guard. Mr. Trump said “blood was coming out of her eyes and whatever” meaning nose, but wanted to move on to more important topics. Only a deviant would think anything else. This related to the debate, which because of Mr. Trump had 24 million viewers — the biggest in cable news history. According to TIME, Newsmax, Drudge Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill and many others, Mr. Trump won the debate.
By the way, the guy (Erick Erickson) who made the decision about RedState called Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat [expletive] child molester” and First Lady Michelle Obama a “Marxist Harpy.” He was forced to make a humbling apology.
Also, not only is Erick a total loser, he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event. Mr. Trump is an outsider and does not fit his agenda.
Many of the 900 people that wanted to hear Mr. Trump speak tonight have been calling and emailing—they are very angry at Erickson and the others that are trying to be so politically correct. To them Mr. Trump says, “We will catch you at another time soon.”
This is better than I could have possibly imagined. It’s so much better than a car wreck.
haha! Here’s a quote from one of the commenters:
It wasn’t me who said it, but this was good…
Train wrecks are stopping to look at the GOP nomination process.
The lack of self-awareness by another commenter was notable as well:
“Kelly was quite unfair and condescending to most of them on stage in the debate, a castrating type moderator is how it came across.”
No, this conservative movement doesn’t have a problem with women, nooooo not at all.
I agree with BooMan here: to see dozens of RedStaters take Trump’s lead and rage on in the comments attacking the RINO wimp institutionalist Erick Son Of Erick Erickson is pure comedy gold.
Erick will be made to care.
We’re gonna need a lot more popcorn.
Mmmm. Skinny Pop alternated with Lay’s Kettle Cooked Mesquite Barbecue chips. For those with iron throats, the 4-0% less fat Jalapeno and cheddar. Actually, for myself I’m coming to like the childhood memory invoking greasy taste of Lay’s low sodium chips. You get used to the low sodium, especially with a nice salsa or corn dip.
Hey, I only intended the first sentence, but it’s getting close to supper and delicious aromas are arising from my Filipino neighbor’s grill. Maybe if I bring him a bottle of wine from the basement, he’ll invite me to stay. He’s really a good neighbor. I think in his birth country they still teach kids to respect old people.
More popcorn
From twitter https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/630002398035968000
Emails from Trump supporters upset with me have called me “queer,” Megyn Kelly something awful, and the President the n-word.
Wow, who is doing their writing? An eleven year old boy? All they need to add is a “neener-neener” to top it off.
An eleven year old boy with anger issues apparently.
First thought was how much of a commission Kelly will get for setting this up. Now of course the process of eating their own will continue to chew up and spit out any kind of talk about issues. The party that hates driving a hatemobile with no brakes.
when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers
I wouldn’t be dancing on the GOP grave just yet
No, I wouldn’t either. Somehow or other it’s half of the country.
That’s because of massive failure of the Democratic Party to serve the middle.working class when they had the chance. Now they are just republicans with a human face.
Unfortunately you can say the same about most center-left parties in the world, as most have been bought off by the rich. The worst right now is probably Labour.
Corbyn may never be Prime Minister but he has a good chance of taking Labour permanently back from the Blairites.
Corbyn is the Bernie Sanders of Britain. Except that he has a more plausible path to leadership, at least of his Party. Right now he is smoking his three Centrist, Neo-Lib, Con-Light rivals.
I don’t know if the British eat popcorn. So maybe buy crisps futures.
And we were this close to tearing down the existing late-capitalist mode of production, too.
What a lost opportunity.
I blame Obama.
with you on that, Davis, and see my sig for my comment; also it didn’t italicize itself
so, what’s the score on how many scalps the guy with compromised hair on his head has taken so far?
Shouldn’t we be keeping a tally of those Trump has attacked and at least landed a blow or two because they seem to be coming so fast that it’s difficult to remember more than a day or two?
Who came before McCain?
Was Lindsey Graham before or after McCain?
Luntz before or after Kelly?
Erickson is the splatter screen du jour.
He’s going to need to come up with something other than loser if he stays in this contest very long.
Well it has to be printable. The Megyn Kelly remark was barely printable.
I honestly can’t say that if I’d heard/read Trump’s “blood comment” on its own without any headline or text editorializing, that I’d have leaped from “blood eyes” and “whatever” to menstrual blood. It was more like he lost what he intended to follow from she was so angry that her eyes were inflamed with blood, but then I made her cry bloody tears.
Agree. Trump is fully capable of saying some female he’s fighting with was on her period. And he would say it directly. This was a verbal fumble.
I thought was what he said.
Notice how none of the top GOP candidates are not available to address what The Donald said. Think any will show up on the Sunday talk shows to expand upon opinions expressed during the debate?
Even more amazing is that one poll lists Ben Carson has having won the debate. Carson is a remarkably venal and terrible candidate, as he is a physician who makes comments that are medically bad ideas.
Not amazing. The Fox folks weren’t nice to Carson and Carson said that he supports torture.
All of them are remarkably venal and terrible candidates, but some rock the boats of the GOP base better than others.
“not going according to plan” news:
`Abject failure’: Pentagon-trained Syrian force under fire after first battle
And the GOP want the US military to take out Iran?
Shades of the 1960’s! Fifty years later only we fossils remember the mistakes that were made.
Re Iran: It’s all in the price you want to pay. I heard an ex-pentagon guy say that five missiles would kill over 90% of the population of Iran. He said this in the context of “they wouldn’t dare nuke us even if they had the bomb and missiles”. So, yeah, we could obliterate them, with one FBM submarine and only a quarter of it’s load. People stopped being afraid of the Nuclear exchange, but the next nuclear war won’t have only two kiloton range bombs exploding. And forget putting the genie back in the bottle. We can’t even put the poison gas and land mine genies back in the bottle. All it takes is a True Believer or Total Idiot in control on both sides. Mix and match true Believer and total idiot.
Erickson is a twit with a boombox. No one gives a shit what he says, he just has command of a site that RWNJ love. He believes his own press and I think he just shot his foot off.
Like Breitbart and NewsMax and Worldnutdaily his site got a ton of funding from the right wing billionaires and used that to build an audience. But also like any other writer for the right wing, he’s disposable the moment he steps out of line.
What’s unknown now is whether supporting or dissing Trump is stepping out of line. This is a proxy war between wingnut billionaires.
Fun comment under one of Boo’s links: “it’s like poe’s law on acid around here these days. conservatives are going to dump fox for the commoe news network?”
This isn’t about defending Megyn Kelly, this is finding an excuse to diss Trump by mainstream right-wing nuts.
I completely agree.
I think Booman got it wrong in the last post. The wingnuts don’t love Megyn any more than they do any of the Fox blondes – which isn’t very much. To a wingnut – male or female, hetro or homo – the Fox blondes are there for decoration. In case you hadn’t noticed, other Fox talking heads were blasting her – as were the hate radio guys from Limpballs on down.
I doubt very much Trump was referring to menstration – this was more of a verbal fumble than a comment aimed at that. And Trump is very capable of saying some woman he is fighting with was OTR – it’s just that he’d say it much more directly.
So, it’s manufactured outrage. We’ve seen that before – reminds me of the “lipstick on a pig” being turned into “Obama called Palin a pig” bullshit. Yes, the party elders are desperately trying to take Trump down – but of course their base – male and female – uses phrases like OTR for Hillary all the time, they don’t see this as a problem.
A quarter of the population and half of the media have already descended to the dystopian twilight of live reality politics; this touches on our state as well.
Wow! Blast from many pasts.
CNN: Trump campaign claims it fired top adviser — who says he quit
Who knew this SOB worked for Trump? He’s like a zombie that keep popping up whenever GOP political dirty tricks surface.
Could be the “mastermind” of the “Clinton urged Trump to run” hoax. As I noted earlier, it did have that Rovian touch.
Roger Stone would almost HAVE to be involved in a Clinton-Trump scenario, but he couldn’t be fired if that were the case.
Don’t you mean that he could only be fired if it were his unapproved by the boss and personal ratfucking operation?
But it’s not quite his style. Unless, he were a double-crossing agent for another candidate — say like Jeb.
I guess Trump has out-bullied Chris Christi, and Christi’s bully-powers were the last thing he had going for him.
Meanwhile, Trump is moving to dismantle the Republican Presidential nomination machine.
nailed it, Ricky.
I’m beginning to think that maybe, for once, the conspiracists got right, right, right.
Occam’s razor: That explanation that satisfies ALL the available conditions and is simplest is probably correct.
Trump IS a stalking horse for the Clinton Machine.
Meanwhile, out here in Seattle, #BLM activists took over the stage and shut down a large public Bernie Sanders rally downtown (with several thousand people in attendance). He cut short his talk and left.People are pissed. Some traveled a long way to hear him. And this was a mainstream event, not a convention of obscure liberal bloggers where media didn’t much care outside the lefty bubble. Not good.
Clearly, this is the way forward.
Here’s an initial Seattle Times report, plus brief audio: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/black-lives-matter-protesters-shut-down-bernie-san
ders-rally/
This all happened about two hours ago. Local Twitter is blowing up. Apparently one of the protesters controlling the stage mic, responding to audience member calls to let the senator speak, called the entire audience “white supremacist liberals.” Jesus Fking Christ, those people are either stone idiots or they’re missing out on a good paycheck by being unpaid agent provocateurs. Sanders never did get to address the crowd.
Incidentally, the speaker immediately before Sanders was Kshama Sawant, the enormously popular local socialist city council member (full disclosure: and my boss, I’m one of her legislative aides) – and a woman of color who speaks eloquently on racial as well as class issues. So the #BLM folks came off as especially petulant and disconnected. Very discouraging, all the way around. It’s not just the RWNJs who can destroy a movement by tearing each other apart over purity tests.
The white Progressive – Black coalition is falling apart.
The teabaggers were right. A race war is coming.
The least measured people in the Black Lives Matter movement do not represent the Black members of our electoral coalition, which makes the authoritative statements here off-base, in my view. I’m certainly concerned about the alliance holding together well in the face of all that is happening, but to declare it is falling apart seems overdetermined.
The best leaders in the Civil Rights Movement of the ’40’s thru the ’60’s were plenty radical, but they had much better strategical skills than Sisters Johnson and Willaford displayed today. That said, the Sisters certainly deserve better than the completely unfounded suspicions/claims here that they’re part of a ratfcking operation; those claims seem very condescending to and disrespectful of Johnson and Willaford.
I’d also like leaders like Sanders and his shockingly unprepared campaign team to react better than he did today. And yes, I’m looking forward to BLM leaders delivering some of this heat to Hillary and the GOP candidates as well.
“A race war is coming.”
Certainly hope you’re channeling Davis X Machina here.
… Sanders and his shockingly unprepared campaign team to react better than he did today
What, pray tell, would have been a “better” reaction?
I’ve watched the video and can’t formulate any response that would have effectively made for better optics.
Should Sanders only speak when the stage is surrounded by 20 beefy guys? (And yes, it would have required that many yesterday because those two had backup — two of who appeared to make it onto the stage and more that appeared ready to take their places if need be.)
Is he supposed to be “prepared” as he begin a speech for people to suddenly pop up and scream into his face and grab the mic? People that in that moment wanted nothing other than for Bernie to relinquish the podium and mic to him. (Maybe you’ve never been a similar position to what confronted Bernie, but I have and the only response that doesn’t inflame the situation is to back up.)
What I took to be the organizer, another older gentleman, attempted to reason with them. While the two women continued screaming but into his face. He offered to 1) shut down the rally or 2) let them speak after Sanders. They continued screaming. He asked them how much time they wanted. Again, they continued screaming at him. Like Sanders, he too was left with the least bad option. Back up.
While not pleased to have an event so rudely interrupted, that may have required much effort to attend, the crowd accepted the letting them have their say was the least bad option. The woman with the mic first demanded full attention from the crowd, proceeded to proclaim that BLM was the largest grassroots movement in the country today (what, Sanders and his campaign are chopped liver?), demanded four and half minutes of silence in honor of Michael Brown which they did comply with, and then screamed that the audience was but a gaggle of racists. Crowd tolerance plummeted at that point.
It wasn’t apparent until then that they had no intention of allowing Sanders to deliver his speech and weren’t leaving the stage. Should there have been “security” at that point to physically remove them from the stage? At the risk of “BLM” backups taking their place?
One major complaint about LEOs in confrontation with black people is that the LEOs don’t employ deescalation procedures. I agree with that in many of those incidents, but not all. Sanders and his team did exactly what BLM activists claim they want to see from LEOs. And then they get shit for it from people like you.
Regardless if one agrees with the social/economic formulation of Sanders for reducing the divides among us or one views that racism will be significantly reduced by eliminating all LEO shootings of black people, the BLM activists are socially and politically naive, at best. Do they not get what happens to their “movement” is a Walker, Trump, etc. is elected next November? They’ll be crushed just like all the other unorganized and/or strategically stupid movements that came before. With Clinton — it won’t be quite as brutal — unless one considers the Obama administration shutdown of OWS brutal. (Which I actually do.)
I’d agree that the BLM protesters in Seattle yesterday were difficult to respond to effectively, and that the response from Sanders, his campaign team, and the event team was not outrageously bad or disrespectful. I’d also agree that the protesters did much to alienate those they were attempting to persuade, and that they were by far more responsible for escalating the situation. In fact, that appears to have been a predetermined calculation on their parts, borne from the naivete I agree they were displaying. But a couple of thing are worth noting, because I’d like Sanders and others to deal with this more effectively.
First, Bernie backed up at first, but his subsequent direct intervention on the stage wasn’t helpful. When two African-American women have been allowed to take the stage outside the public meeting agenda as determined by the event leaders, which is almost exactly what took place to Sanders and O’Malley at Netroots Nation, it’s not helpful for Bernie himself to come up to one of the women and begin with “Hold it, hold it ma’am, excuse me…”. That may seem a reasonable human nature way to begin the discussion if the people your were attempting to communicate with weren’t displaying the urgency these women were displaying, but the women had just completely blown their top at one of the people on stage when he said the people running the stage show were trying to “be reasonable” and give them an opportunity to speak. The women each took that as a sign that they were being told that they were being unreasonable.
What Bernie did, and what his campaign team allowed him to do, was to personally intervene in a way that was extremely likely to escalate the situation and send him away griping about the protesters’ “attitude”, as he’s heard to say on the mic.
Second: this wasn’t a Sanders campaign event. It was a celebration of Social Security and Medicare, and by implication the leftist movement which successfully got Congress to pass them. Yes, people were expecting to hear Sanders speak, but the event hosts were the primary ones responsible for the agenda and the stage security necessary to move the agenda forward. They were the ones responsible for providing the security necessary to defend the stage. Sanders and his team could have stayed back and fallen on that explanation.
Regarding POTUS campaign events, candidate campaign teams are responsible for restraining people’s rights as is necessary to allow the candidates to campaign as they wish. That usually doesn’t require anything close to 20 beefy guys surrounding a candidate visibly as they speak, but is is reasonable and necessary for POTUS candidates to defend themselves and their event agendas physically.
wasn’t QUITE the most respectful thing those women could have down.
Give Respect Get Respect.
It is one thing to say Black Lives Matter. A good and powerful thing.
It is also good and powerful to make BLM your focus as an activist and a PoC. Because maybe there shouldn’t be anything more important to you.
But telling everyone else “Hey fuck ya all, your issues are unimportant compared to mine and everybody should just get the hell into line right now!” Is not acceptable.
This was a Social Security rally intended to mark the 80th anniversary of a program that often represents the only income support most elderly poor have, including PoC. Basically these four women came in and said “The Hell with My Grandma, Young Men are Dying”. Well it doesn’t take away from the importance of organizing against police brutality and the murder of young men of color to recognize that they are not the only people in the community that need our care and attention.
This was selfish thuggery. Perhaps well-intentioned but self-absorbed assholery all the same.
Grandmas Matter.
do you know that they’re not paid?
Yeah. And that’s why in real time Nixon’s and GWB’s dirty tricks couldn’t be detected and exposed. Those with “spidey-sense” experienced as real but had no ability to figure out where it was coming from, why whom, and who was paying for it. And others dismissed us as nuts (later renamed CT freaks to put us in the groups that see alien spaceships and massive building pre-planted with demo explosives that nobody noticed).
While my gut screamed that the NN BLM action wasn’t unplanned and uncoordinated, my head said, give them the benefit of the doubt as they are passionate about an important issue and may be politically and strategically naive.
My head may have been right, but the Seattle action looks like authentic ratfucking. Those that have been around long enough to have seen crap like this in the past have a nose for dirty tricks.
I generally don’t like to plug my own blog – or quote myself – but I made that exact point this afternoon: http://geov.org/gp/?p=226
“If any of the white supremacist yahoos who showered Dylann Roof with money for his defense fund this summer actually had two brain cells to rub together, they could have spent a fraction of the money they pissed away on Roof to instead hire a few agent provocateurs to do exactly what was done today. But hey, why pay someone when there’s young, angry activists happy to unwittingly damage their own movement for free?”
The women who took the stage in Seattle were younger and less experienced than the Phoenix protesters. I had tips in advance from local #BLM folks that something was planned – this wasn’t spontaneous – but that doesn’t mean the original idea didn’t come from someone getting a per diem for their troubles.
Nice blog post, Geov. But I can’t believe they weren’t hired– the #BowDownBernie tag seems like a dead giveaway that they’re also trying to take down Black Lives Matter. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could be that narcissistic and that stupid at the same time.
Believe it.
It is planned and coordinated. Of course it is. A candidate’s marketing plan going off on schedule is not a priority for #blacklivesmatter.
Bernie either figures out how to gain populist support for civil rights or he tries to duck facing white working class racism and dealing with the social psychological dynamics of white working class racism that keeps Rush Limbaugh and the clown cars in business.
Otherwise a Bernie victory is another hollow victory.
What the hell did he learn when he marched with Martin Luther King 50 years ago?
Maybe he learned that Dr King was most effective when he was able to keep in check some of the more radical, emotional and confrontational elements in the movement while continuing to work with, persuade and press the liberal leaders he needed to bring about actual results.
The idiots that commandeered the stage didn’t even give Bernie a chance to speak. According to him, he was going to speak on blm-oriented issues, but was shut down at the outset.
Sanders gets my backlash sympathy support, while the far far left morons at BLM turn me off from considering them a serious movement. I almost sense that some guilty white liberals here would have wanted Bernie to step up to the mic and take his verbal punishment when one of the BLM radicals tried to order him to step up and hear how he had been complicit in keeping blacks down. That sign of weakness would have ended his candidacy.
Get back to me when you figure out how ANYONE can do that.
You are asking for the impossible from a political candidate. And probably from American Politics.
As long as police keep shooting unarmed black men at the rate of one, two, three a week, Sanders better face up to the fact that these protesters are going come at him as well as others. No more politics at usual until the killing stops. If folks are not yet getting that message, they are sitting in a privileged position.
The Sanders and Clinton campaigns especially better listen to the music here. Surging forward on autopilot is not going to work any more than dissing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party worked for LBJ. There are some things more important than the next rally with the next canned stump speech.
Bernie either steps up and comes alive as a leader or he remains just another candidate going through the motions.
The imperative for progressives in this cycle is transformation of the political culture. The vapors over these confrontations look like an attempt to keep business as usual.
Usually I agree with you, TD, but not here. This will be bigger news than Phoenix – mainstream outlets don’t dignifying bloggers by mentioning their convention if they don’t need to, and it got seen as an internecine spat among progressive and therefore of no concern to Real Americans ™.
When it’s a public event like this, though, the news spin will be much different. “Protesters shut down most prominent leftist politician in America because he isn’t leftist enough!” automatically positions #BLM on the fringe. It delegitimizes those issues to the (white) public. You can’t have a debate on the issues if the tactic has already convinced most (white) people that the issues aren’t important or even legitimate. And it’s not like White America (including white newsroom editors) need much prompting to think in that direction to begin with. It also puts black elected leaders in the awkward position of having to back or disavow the tactic, when to disavow means to dismiss #BLM as well. You know which way most of them will go.
In the modern era, a few people shouting “No business as usual!” pretty much always leads to more business as usual. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.
And by the way, I’m not really much of a fan of his – including because he’s weak on racial justice issues – but Sanders is a sitting senator and a serious presidential candidate. Where the fk was the Secret Service? Is the next person to rush the stage going to have a concealed weapon? Seriously.
If Bernie’s campaign and progressives can’t get a change of pulitical culture that totally delegitimizes the clown car and puts issues like #blacklivesmatter on the political agenda, why are we bothering with electoral politics at all? Hillary Clinton is not that narrow cliff to boost up that John Kerry was seen to be in 2004. This is Sanders moment to grow in stature or to wilt; the spotlight will be on him if what you say is true. Either he beats the media now (Trump knows how that’s done) or the media knows how to get him.
Yes, where the eff were the Secret Service – considering him not a serious candidate yet is my bet.
His next play of this beyond the immediate response will be at Liberty University. If it gets interesting, it gets interesting there.
To do what he has to do, he has to make a practical argument that catches the Trump fans’s attention and yet can be welded to the progressive and African-American base of the Democratic Party. If he can pull it off, it will be a political miracle and more deft political action than he has yet shown. If not, we know we’re in a mell of a hess anyway.
Continued business as usual digs the hole deeper. No business as usual risks digging the hole even deeper.
It’s not because he’s not leftist enough; it’s because he’s too much of a political candidate and too little of a politician.
Black leaders better push back on the continued deaths.
If progressives win this election even in some limited sense, it won’t be through the media. No use worrying about white editors and newsrooms; let folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates deal with them to the best of their ability. Bernie has to grow in stature and fast. How he responds to this and through the Liberty University speech has the potential for building the white-black working class framework that his campaign is predicated on or just being another candidate. Can Bernie step up to the plate? It’s there if he can pull it off.
Well, he can’t pull it off now, can he? If he tries to marry economic justice (his theme) to racial justice (their theme), he will be seen as
This was well played by BLM. They have not only fucked themselves, but the rest of the left. Naderiffic!
Absolutely. The better play is to shut off the mic, escort them out, acknowledge sympathy, but mention that intimidation is what we are fighting, not a method to be employed.
And for G-d’s sake– don’t forgo speaking out of deference to saboteurs.
As a security matter, he might not have a say in this.
Well, he does need better security. Almost none at the moment, judging by recent events. Hire his own, or check out whether SS protection is available at this stage.
Not all bullies are on the right, and if some crazies on the left are going to be disruptive, they need to be kept off the stage.
That will be VERY tough for Bernie to do. If you know the history of the Liberty Union Party in Vermont, the idea that he needs to shut off access to the microphone would he a hard one for him to accept.
And that is PARTICULARLY when that group is BLM.
I do think this is the weakness of a candidate from Vermont who doesn’t have the connection into the African American community that others have. If they did this to Bill Clinton, Clinton would have picked up the phone and called Jessie Jackson. Clinton would have also known people like the group that disrupted his Seattle are speaking for themselves, period. And he would have said just that.
That is harder for Bernie to do.
This is terrible optics for Bernie.
He needs better security. And he needs to not give up the microphone at his own event.
I was wondering about the socialist black political official, the woman who spoke at this event earlier. She could have stepped up, seems to me, to help Bernie, told the group to at least let the man speak, see if he was addressing their issues.
But did she suddenly lose her courage, not want to alienate some she considered her base constituents?
At least Bernie had the good sense to walk away at an important point. Probably should have left sooner though.
He needs allies in the African American community who would get up and say this is not fair and stop it.
He was pretty close to the Black Congressional Caucus – it would be helpful for him to get support from them.
I do think this is the weakness of a candidate from Vermont who doesn’t have the connection into the African American community that others have.
What does “connection into the AA community” mean? Someone like the Clintons that have been taking the AA vote for granted for like forever while throwing many AA colleagues under the bus when convenient and playing the race card against Obama in ’08? If I were AA, someone like that would never get my vote.
This is a meme constructed in the bowels of the DLC. Dragged out in 2004 against Dean — apparently because the quality of a person’s character is irrelevant to AA voters — and carried forward by having Al Sharpton jump into the race as a reminder of Dean not having kissed all the right butts in his political career up to that point.
Dragged out again in 2008 — against Obama. Who at this point in that election had limited support in the AA community. He had Oprah and a bunch of (racist according the “BLM” activist in Seattle yesterday) white liberals (aka honkies). Among the AA Superdelegates that had endorsed at that point, most were supporting Clinton.
Now we see it again. Against a man with lifelong bonafides in support of AA civil and economic rights. Many AA voters aren’t stupid enough to fall for that “Bernie has no connection to the AA community” crap. But many others are as accustomed to following whatever their local AA pols and preachers tell them to do as the fundies follow their white pols and preachers. Trump has shaken up that dynamic on the right (probably won’t last), but on the left, whites and POC are doing their best to reinforce the status quo.
Barack Obama had been elected several times to the Illinois Senate from a Black district. He authored several pieces of legislation while in the Senate that could be seen as having a Black focus. The base of his primary victory for the US Senate was Black. Bernie is from a state that is at least 97% White. If you don’t see the difference, you don’t want to.
And you don’t see that Obama’s early AA institutional support was provincial — exclusive to IL. He wasn’t a figure in AA communities outside IL. And Bobby Rush and the Jacksons were more prominent in IL than Obama prior to his run for the Senate.
Very discouraging that you and others in the leftie blogosphere are judging Sanders and his constituents based on the color of their skin and not their character. Do you prefer crooks like Jesse Jackson, Jr. (he sold out solid principles for freaking luxury watches like the VA GOP governor), Chaka Fattah, Kwame Kilpatrick, et. al.? Not saying that AA pols engage in more corruption than white pols, but they don’t seem to be any better either at least recently. (I still have high regard for black leaders up until the late 20th century because they did demonstrate higher principles and values — but for the most part, so did a high percentage their white counterparts during those periods.)
First, I completely agree that this couldn’t be better for the DLC types.
Bill Clinton ran in ’92 on welfare reform. And yet there is no doubt he always enjoyed strong support in the African American community. Part of that reason I think is he built a history in Arkansas. Hillary is benefiting from that connection.
But why is this happening to Bernie? He doesn’t poll well among African Americans. His favorables are upside down among them. You can say this is all name recognition – and I would tend to agree with you – but I do think something else is going.
Sanders polled very well among AA that were familiar with him through the June surveys.
That’s why this propaganda that he doesn’t had to be put out there before the wider AA community was exposed to him.
Guess the AA community likes the sweet nothings from Clinton. Obama has been more friendly and kinder towards them and expanded Medicaid possibly exceeds anything they’ve been granted since Medicare/Medicaid.
The Clinton Democratic party plays to win and will play as rough and dirty as they think they need to do to win. Bill pulling out the race card in 2008 came from the same well as what’s currently being attempted against Sanders.
Last poll with cross tabs: PPP in late July
Sanders among African Americans
21 Favorable 40 unfavorable
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_72215.pdf
Well see the propaganda is working as intended.
Inevitable. The socialist-movement chickens of 100, 90, 80 years ago are coming home to roost.
There’s an ancient split in the American socialist movement over how to deal with racism — whether American racism is sui generis, or whether American racism is part-and-parcel of the late capitalist mode of production. The split was echoed in many of the national liberation movements of the last century.
If you follow the latter strand, then you address racism by changing the prevailing late-capitalist mode of production, in the wake of which change all social relations will also of necessity change, including race relations. Racism is a second-order problem, an epiphenomenon of the crisis of capitalism.
The tension here is a shadow of that older disagreement — to what extent will a general improvement in the economic condition of all Americans address the particular concerns of African Americans?
Gonna be real hard for Bernie’s campaign and progressives to get a change of political culture if “BLM activists” take over Bernie’s rallies and prevent him from speaking. Bernie doesn’t need to grow — the woman that was fine playing the race card against Obama in NH and SC in ’08 does but she lives in too much of a bubble for any authentic growth.
Presidential primary candidates don’t get SS protection unless they are the wife of a former POTUS, sitting POTUS or VP, or serious threats against a candidate, as determined by the SS, are received.
Black leaders better push back on the continued deaths.
This isn’t a new problem. There’s no available data to say that it’s recently gotten worse (and for all anybody knows, it could have improved). A shame that more Black leaders haven’t been demanding or demanding more loudly and effectively for collection of the data.
The US also has a comparatively high traffic related death rate”. Compared to the UK — adjusted for population — that translates into 25,000 more traffic death per year in the US. Or maybe France is a better comparison, then the excess traffic deaths in the US is only 20,000/year. (But all lives don’t matter.)
I’m not dismissing the inappropriate use of force and deaths by LEOs nor the necessity for major corrective action, only that to elevate it to a prime issue that will determine progressive political electoral success is naive in the extreme. If Black folks can’t take their chances with Sanders based on his lifelong record, then they should go for Clinton who won’t do anything about it or a Republican who is never going to do anything about it because they can’t even be bothered with little children getting shot up in a school.
Agree with you right up til the end. It’s not the newsroom editors I’m worried about – it’s the people who get news through mainstream sources. (Not dKos, and for the sake of this discussion, let’s consider Fox viewers a lost cause). If you’re going to blow off media messaging, you’d better have an alternative way planned to get your viewpoint not just circulated, but seen as legitimate. To the extent that’s happened with #BLM and law enforcement deaths, it was because of compelling video of shootings and other deaths (especially Eric Garner) that went viral. How does this tactic lend itself to that, or to shifting the conversation from the tactic (shutting down a presidential candidate) to the issues at hand? Answer: It doesn’t. At all. Instead you’ve got boorish video of protesters shutting down Sanders and dissing and flipping off the predictably upset audience. That’s one of the reasons it’s a terrible tactic.
You want some lifeboat ethics talk? 2016-2020 is the make-or-break moment for America and arguably human civilization. First and foremost is climate change. There really needs to be some progress made here and this is almost humanity’s last chance. 100 or even 20 years from now, from a planetary perspective no one is going to give a shit as to whether an extra two thousand or so American blacks needlessly died. What they will care about is 50 million Bangladeshi being permanently displaced thanks to a 1.5′ C rise in planet temperature.
But beyond the looming specter of climate change, there’s also the fact that if progressives fail, the centrists will be the ones stepping up to the plate. If you think that Bernie-style progressives are insensitive to racial justice, Clinton-style centrists are completely apathetic to your movement. The Very Serious People actually control the media and if you think that BLM is having a hard time trying to get their concerns noticed in a movement that has no media power, why don’t you try reusing this strategy against the people who control the content of the Sunday paper and afternoon political talk shows?
Thirdly, looking back at our centrist friends again, there’s the real chance that putting them back into power is going to fuck over everyone via issues that have nothing to do with social justice; white, black, and brown progressives and centrists. See, centrists have a tendency of screwing the pooch with their centrist delusions. We have the economic ones like ‘like a household, government must learn to control their debt’ and the foreign policy ones like ‘America is still exceptional and is a generic force for good overseas’. I’m still not convinced that centrists learned anything from the Obama administration, especially economically, so there’s the real chance that Clinton or whoever tries to give us Bowles-Simpson 2.0 or a surplus-induced recession and that enables a conservative counterattack.
Fourthly, I don’t think a lot of BLM noticed this, but the dichotomy between white and black progressivism is a false one. Because in about 12 years, Latinos + Asians will be literally twice the size of the black population. They are not going to be happy about eating a short-term defeat for a long-term victory that might never come and (in their eyes) won’t affect how they live. If you want Asians and Latinos to become the next Irish and Italians, nothing is going to chase them into the arms of white supremacy quite like making it seem that they won’t get increases in educational spending and minimum wage because of black leftists.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary effort and the issue of thousands of people being fed to the authoritarian engine of passive white supremacy is definitely worth fighting for. However, BLM is trying to justify failure in the time of great need. Just because you’re a victim and fighting for noble causes doesn’t make you not stupid.
Yes, I was going to say that you’re not going to delegitimize the clown car by driving up in a clown car of your own. And yes, it’s not hard to think of other activists who would have just as much justification for disrupting people’s rallies. Climate change activists for sure, if you want to talk about an issue that really can’t wait a second longer. And of course there are millions of other people for whom immigration reform is an urgent issue in their daily lives.
An identifiable difference between climate change, immigration reform and Black Lives Matter is that poor government policies on those issues have the ability to kill people, LOTS of them, but those killings are abstract and less literal than watching on video and audio police officers execute unarmed Americans and hearing about other incidents where unarmed citizens are killed unnecessarily in direct encounters with government officials.
I can understand some Americans deciding, “My God, we’re watching our people get murdered on the news and still no accountability for the murderers? No, Americans and our institutions must be forced to stop now and deal with this.”
That may explain why the reaction to police killing is more visceral, more immediate, but the deaths from climate change are no less real. The only difference is that the relationship to government policy is slightly less direct.
I’m just saying that I can equally understand some Americans deciding, “My God, Florida is going to be underwater pretty soon and we’re still talking about Keystone XL. No, Americans and our institutions must be forced to stop now and deal with this.”
Agreed with your last point. Some advocates of policy responses to immigration law and climate change have held actions, including civil disobedience.
Re. your reference to “the only difference,” we must admit that is quite a visceral difference.
…protesters are going come at him as well as others.
Exactly when do they start coming after others?
Say like the guy that supported locking up a hugely disrproportionate number of young men of color? Ten of thousands per year. How many of those lives were ruined? Lives shortened?
Violence is a huge problem in this country, but it ain’t gonna be solved by a narrow and disorganized focus on one small slice of it.
And BLM doesn’t get that a 50% AA youth unemploynment rate is killing more young black men and women than the cops can. MLK, Jr. got that and that’s something Sanders learned from him.
I’ve seen this story before, and I know how it turns out.
I would not be too quick to judge what #blacklivesmatter does or does not understand about the black experience. And the current focus of #blacklivesmatter is not on abstract violence or even abstract violence against black people, it is on very particular, specific, and concrete extrajudicial murder of black people by police that is happening at an epidemic rate. And likely is related to a domestic terror network that has the capabilities to provide massive legal and economic support to cops who face even a smidgen of accountability. The issue is the persistence and growth of lynching, to be direct about what is going on. And the evasion by the authorities, including the progressive mayor of New York City of seeking accountability.
Mark Twain reminds us that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In 1964, it turned out that LBJ put momentum on for civil rights bills and used that and the nostalgia for JFK to overwhelm Goldwater’s conservative pitch. And LBJ delivered voting rights, but not a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party establishment to Fannie Lou Hamer. That is where we are scanning in the verse right now.
The question is whether progressive white people are ready to deal with working class white people as capable of inclusive and coalition-based action on the economy with a multicultural work force whose unity brings prosperity. Yep, that sounds crazy. But if that isn’t what democratic socialism is about, what is?
The mobilization question is not black people; it’s white people. The establishment Democrats are willing to just hand them over to the Republican Party. Now that doesn’t mean pandering; it means direct talk about what is happening that white people know is happening but do not have confidence that any political really is committed to changing it. And working people who have given enough at work already, thank you very much. What’s required is real unity, not rhetorical unity.
A multi-locational reactive focus is not disorganized. It very rapidly responds to the new random location of the most recent extrajudicial killing. It is the appearance of the incidents that are disorganized. Almost random, except they occur in fairly predictable slice of the social geography. An almost predatory situation, whether urban, suburban, or exurban.
In fairness they are targeting Sanders because he is getting press, though I wonder just how organized “they” are.
I have seen this movie too, Not a happy ending.
When will they interrupt a Clinton or O’Malley event? O’Malley has done some events since Phoenix, right? Or is he cool now that he talked with people after the Phoenix stuff? Do people forget his record as mayor of Baltimore and as Governor of Maryland? What about Hillary and the money she is raising from the private prison industry? I’d take them more seriously if Bernie’s events weren’t the only ones getting interrupted.
What others? Are they attacking O’Malley? How about Clinton? How about the Jeb!ster? Or Trump?
No, only Sanders. always Sanders. Because he’s been a much bigger racist than Clinton or Trump, of course.
They’ve really got in for Bernie. i see Hillary’s hand in this. Why did Bernie become the bad guy to them. because he’s an old white guy? Fuck them! I have no respect for their cause any more.
Because he pitches himself as an alternative to politics as usual and then is so tied to his stump speech that he cannot respond to the political challenge they issue. People in this country are angry because they are not being listened to; Trump is exploiting that feeling. Bernie has the opportunity to show how it should be done, and he has not yet.
You think that extrajudicial killing of unarmed black men and women is an issue that you can ignore? Who do you think is going to vote to preserve pensions, Social Security, and a prosperous economy? It’s not the Trump voters.
Again, WTF is Hillary doing? Why is she getting off easy? She actually has a horrible record, like O’Malley.
Where is your evidence that he is ignoring the issue?
He isn’t. IT ISN”T TRUE>
I personally heard him talk about the issue of race and crime.
In 1981.
Can’t say I’ve been impressed at all with the BLM movement. If they’re alienating people like me, they’re doing it wrong. The people in Charleston have done the most to garner support from white America for the cause of racial justice. These BLM bozos just antagonize people and turn otherwise possible allies against them. Is Trump their strategist?
Black Lives Matter has been hijacked by Black Morons. This is the second time some morons have done this – the first at NN. I no longer support BLM.
In the pile-up it may have been overlooked that John Ellis turned in a mediocre performance which must have his donors concerned.
Mediocre yes, but in the context of the Trump brouhaha, his below-average performance won’t matter for much. And part of it can be written off as being out of politics for almost a decade.
And, interesting dynamic, he did get some tough direct Qs from the Fox panelists. So, it’s encouraging that the GOP-TV outlet may not be entirely in the tank for another Bush.
Meanwhile Rubio got maybe one semi-tough Q over two hours, and I don’t think that was by accident. No wonder the initial post-game analysis, even on Msnbc, was so ridiculously praiseworthy — unlike most of the other top tier candidates, he didn’t spend much time dealing with arrows and daggers directed at him. But when you look at the transcript, it’s clear that he was treated with kid gloves.
Poor Marco, “”If I comment on everything [Trump] says, I mean, my whole campaign will be consumed by it. That’s all I’ll do all day.”
Has Trump figured out a way to monetize those 24 million viewers? Or did Fox make a boatload of cash off him for free?
Meanwhile our neighbor who just visited her son at Camp Pendleton reports back about the cause of the drought in California. It’s all the immigrants. Lady never heard of Father Junipero Serra. Or the Anglos and their swimming pools.
Thanx theDonald. But frying Roger Ailes’s wires might be worth it all.
Is it too early for Trump to pick Colbert as his running mate?
hope he does because jebya resembles colbert; stephen could do some fun imitations
To be fair, Erickson’s sexism is just as gross and runs far deeper to fundamental aspects of female-oppression. Trump (like Megyn Kelly) is a gaping asshole, but Erickson, if he ever got any power, would be truly dangerous.
The downside of this whole trainwreck is the danger that people will take Kelly seriously.
Who benefited from the Black Lives Matter interrupting Bernie Sanders up in Seattle today?
I’m guessing this is a dirty trick financed from someone inside the Beltway. Hillary, or maybe further up the chain of command.
kind of a twofer since hurts BLM also
Oh those devious evil Clintons! Always scheming to destroy their enemies. Where’s the outrage!!
First they arranged to insert Donald Trump into the GOP race to disrupt and destroy that nomination process, the better to smooth the way for Hillary in the fall and usher in a restoration of the Clinton Dynasty.
Then when they saw Bernie starting to get traction, they decided to persuade a group to go all Sixties Black Panther and shut down Bernie so he can’t get his message out and get him all ruffled and off his game.
Brilliant. What other scheme will the multimillionaire Clintons cook up to ensure Hillary is our next president. Can we start an impeachment investigation before she’s taken office?
I think Bernie needs to do his version of Obama’s “race speech”. He could say – “you know, like many white liberals, I assumed my long history of civil rights advocacy was sufficient. I was wrong – now that I’ve studied this movement seriously …” – and then launch into a Bernie-esque straight talk speech about why progressive whites living in progressive white communities are insulated and don’t take this issue seriously enough. I’ve gone through this evolution myself lately. I always assumed that racism was essentially over (in civilized areas) because everyone I know was never racist to begin with and wishes they were black because all their musical heroes are either black or totally black-influenced (like The Beatles, for example). My evolution stemmed from the movie “Lincoln”, when Tommy Lee Jones is arguing that the North needed to finish the war, occupy the South, and divide the slave owners’ land among the slaves. Had they done that, we’d now have many generations of “old black money” that would have been inherited down the line. That’s the core of racism in America nowadays. By reason of ancestry, blacks are drastically poorer. No ancester ever owned a house that got super-inflated by real estate bubbles and left it to their deadbeat kids and so on. Inherited wealth (even if you don’t consider yourself “wealthy”) is what separates white lefties from blacks. In terms of advancing the erroneous idea that racism is over, John Roberts is the highest profile offender. All of the old racist prejudices are gone (in civilized areas) but the core economic disadvantages are hard-wired into the system. That’s why affirmative action is so important and why we should really do reparations for slavery. The thing I love most about Bernie is that he says what everyone else realizes but is afraid to say. I don’t know if even he would be willing to make the reparations argument, but he could at least lay the logical groundwork for it. You have to get your head around the real problem before you’re ready to adopt the real solution.
He could do that. But will he get live TV airtime for it as Obama did? No.
No, I think it is much simpler. Most of the BLM folks are genuine morons.
Say what one will about Trump he’s barely missed dominating a daily news cycle for six weeks; other candidates, especially those anointed with money or prestige, are not getting necessary oxygen. Not saying how long Trump can keep it up but it seems like a contest among others to hold their breath longest.
If I was the GOP I would be ‘calling all ratf*ckers’ too.
Last 24 hours, since his off-color remarks about Kelly, it looks like the mainstream GOP is beginning to organize to take him out. He’s embarrassing the party and their nomination process, taking all the oxygen out of the tent, way too much of a loose cannon who can’t be controlled. TPTB in the party do not like truly independent types.
They will probably be successful using various attack approaches, quietly inserting negative stories about him in the press, most true and some exaggerations, in order to end the circus. Sexual, financial, past ties to the Clintons and Ted Kennedy, whatever it takes.
But will he retaliate later, next year, by forming a third party candidacy?
It wouldn’t take much. Wouldn’t cost much, either … at least not much of Trump’s $$$. The 6 finger TP will be glad to bring down the R establishment.
All Trump actually need to do is take:
100K votes in NC
and 50K votes everywhere else to TOTALLY screw the R candidate.
I cannot for the life of me imagine anyone who would vote for Trump would ever vote for Hillary. Win, Win, Win!!!
Donald Trump is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong.
It’s not what he says that matters … he knows what he is doing is mostly theatre. The scary part is how many merkins really want what he is selling.
There was a recent NYTimes article about how German prisons are enlightened compared to what we do here. Check out this comment:
Wow.
Here are the key grafs from that NYTimes article mentioned by that German person:
Well, whaddayaknow.
If, in the land of the free, big chunks of folks want to be free in very different directions, and, umm, guns, well then whaddayoudo?
??
Okay, Trump is now going hard with the non-denial denial that he was thinking True Blood vampire tears or whatever and specifically not menstrual blood, adding that anyone who interprets it as everyone has interpreted it is a “deviant”.
This may actually be true – if you think about it, it’s totally within character for Trump to say “on the rag” or some other unequivocal phrase if that’s what was going on in that “brain” of his.
Also, he seems to still be thriving in the new polls. I think there’s a circular dissing squad going on – Erickson disses Trump, Trump disses Kelly, Kelly (repeatedly) disses Erickson. So put yourself in the place of a double-digit IQ Tea Partier – whom do you side with? If you really dig RedState, you’ve gotta be pissed at Kelly for raking Erickson over the coals for all his infinitely more specific and dangerous misogynistic statements (more than statements – it’s a religion with him). Also, Kelly has a long history (not so much as Shep whathisnamne) of bucking the conventional tea party wisdom. Also, in their heart of hearts, the tea party base is deeply misogynistic and doesn’t want a female to be smarter than they are. Not that she’s actually that bright, but certainly moreso that the average tea party voter. In summary, I’d bet that most of Trump’s 23% is more than willing to toss Kelly into the trash alongside Chris “Obama-Hugger” Christie. Especially with Limbaugh in Trump’s corner.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again.
We can be a socially liberal party or an economically populist party, we cannot both. So when you decide what matters most, you know who in our party you have to take out before we can even start fighting the right.
Why not both?