Read the article below and then continue to tell me with a straight face that the Democratic Party can be taken seriously as any sort of “progressive” political party. At the top it is simply another group of political hacks who will make whatever deals necessary to stay in power. This recent Trump/Dem Congress alliance? A surprise of some sort? Naaaahhh…Trump’s a pragmatist who thinks that he can deal with any party (political or business) on the basis of promised short-term profits for that party. He also thinks that he can out-maneuver them when the infighting starts.
On the basis of his run from supposed clown to President of the United States in less than two years, he may just be correct in that assumption. He has no real affiliation to anyone but himself, and his goal is simply to win. By any means necessary. Essentially acting alone, he has no need of a coterie of sycophants to slow him down. He acts while his opponents dither about the best way to deal with his previous act, whatever that might be.
Sound familiar?
Stephen Vincent Benet knew. Deal with the devil and take the consequences. Or of course…get a good lawyer and ride it out. (“The Devil and Daniel Webster”)
So did Karl Rove, way back in 2004.
In the summer of 2002, after I [Ron Suskind] had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
I often have a vision of Donald Trump reading that quote in 2004 and deciding on the spot that he could do that better than could Rove and company. He leaves people to “just study what he’s done,” and meanwhile…since what he did yesterday has almost no easily divined bearing on what he is going to do today…those who study that reality (“judiciously, as you will…” ) cannot base their conclusions about what he is going to do based on a logical, “judicious” attitude about what would be thought to probably follow his last act.
Government by chance means.
The Aleatoric President
Brilliant, in its own selfish, twisted way.
Read on.
Read it and weep, if you have any honor as a “progressive.”
Hillary Hates Again – by Paul Street
When “mainstream” (corporate) media talks about the terrible role that hate is playing in American political life the discussion is usually about partisan contempt between Democrats and Republicans or heated conflicts between “radical extremes” like the alt-right and the so-called alt-left (Antifa). You don’t hear much about the longstanding and dripping contempt the Democratic Party’s neoliberal corporate and professional class “elite” has for progressive and social-democratic forces within that party – this even though most of those “progressive Democrats” generally line up dutifully behind the party’s ruling class masters at the end of the day.
This hate, too, deserves attention.
Smearing “Doofus Bernie”
Take the case of Bernie Sanders, currently the most popular politician in the United States. Bernie, it should be recalled, sheep-dogged for Mrs. Clinton (whose approval rating stands below even that of Donald Trump today) during the last quadrennial election cycle. He promised support for the party’s locked-in top-down nominee (Hillary) from day one. He gave that support to Hillary against the wishes of many of his backers in the summer and fall of 2016. He did this even after the spiteful Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee collaborated with other highly placed Democrats and their corporate media allies to rig the primary race against him.
He was treated in very shabby fashion the by those forces during the primaries. Bill Clinton in New Hampshire called Sanders and his team “hermetically sealed” purists, hypocrites, and thieves and mocked Sanders as “the champion of all things small and the enemy of all things big.”
Hillary sent her daughter Chelsea out to absurdly charge that Sanders’ single-payer health care plan would “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”
Former top John Kerry and Obama communications strategist David Wade used his perch at Politico to call Sanders “the zombie candidate” – a “doomed” challenger at risk of “becom[ing] Trump’s best ghost-writer for the general election” and a “Nader” who would destroy the Democratic Party’s nominee with “friendly fire attacks.”
In April of 2016, for example, Hillary told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that a dreadful hit-job interview and smear campaign conducted by the New York Daily News against Sanders “raise[d] a lot of questions” about Sanders’ qualification for the presidency.
Hillary’s prizefighter Paul Krugman preposterously likened Sanders’ common-sense and majority-backed health insurance proposal (Medicare for All) to “a standard Republican tax-cut plan and smeared Sanders as a practitioner of “deep voodoo economics” and “unicorn politics.” (Krugman enjoyed calling Sanders’ supporters “dead-enders.”)
Hillary’s good friend the blood-soaked mass-murderer Madeline Albright told female voters there was a “special place in Hell” for them if they backed Bernie.
The liberal feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s curiously claimed that young women were voting for Sanders because “when you’re [a] young [woman], you’re thinking `where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.”
The silly, power-worshipping Rolling Stone publisher Jan S. Wenner (the man who took childish fake-progressive ObamaLust to frightening new heights in 2008) insultingly and inaccurately described Sanders as just “a candidate of anger.” (“But it is not enough to be a candidate of anger. Anger is not a plan…”)
An endless stream of establishment “liberal” media talking heads and pundits (with Krugman as leader of the pack) treated Sanders’ moderately leftish neo-New Deal agenda as a radically outlandish pipedream beyond the pale of serious discussion. They constantly repeated claims that Sanders’ lacked Hillary’s supposed ability to defeat Trump despite one match up poll after another showing Bernie doing substantially better than Mrs. Clinton against The Donald.
This was all consistent with a February 2016 document Wiki-leaked in October of last year. It showed top Clinton campaign operative Mandy Grunwald suggesting that Hillary essentially red-bait and otherwise smear Sanders. Grunwald suggested calling Sanders a false promiser of “socialist…free stuff” that “middle class” Americans would only pay for with higher taxes – and to denounce Sanders for supposedly advocating giant slashes to the military budget (Sanders made no such demand., sadly). The main idea – standard centrist neoliberal Clinton-Tony Blair-Barack Obama-Bob Rubin-Lawrence Summer “pragmatism” – was to portray Sanders as an impractical leftist dreamer and then to present Hillary by favorable contrast as the “progressive” realist who knew how to “get things done” (Obama’s recurrent boast) in the real world.
A different Clinton campaign e-mail released in October showed Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta referring to Sanders as “doofus Bernie” because the Vermont Senator had the basic decency to note that the Paris Climate Agreement fell short of what was required to stem global warming.
Clinton operatives and media allies repeated over and over the false charge that Sanders’ supporters at the Nevada state Democratic Party convention became a raging mob of “chair-throwing” thugs on par with the worst hooligans at Donald Trump’s rallies.
The Clintonistas invented the ugly, identity-politicized smear-term “Bernie Bros” to falsely paint out Sanders supporter as a bunch of bitter old sexist white men (there were plenty of women and people of color among Sanders’ disproportionately young base).
Rigged
Beyond the insults, put-downs, and smears, there was of course the rigging of the primary nomination process. There are abundant reasons to believe that Hillary benefitted from electoral and administrative shenanigans across the (seemingly endless) primary season. The fixing process was evident in Las Vegas, when the Nevada Democratic Party chair “shut down debate behind a screen of uniformed police” after the party excluded 58 Sanders delegates with sudden “rules changes” clearly made to block Sanders’ rightful claim to have won Nevada.
In July of 2016, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign from her position after thousands of Wiki-leaked emails showed the DNC exhibiting a clear bias for Hillary over Sanders and other Democratic Party presidential candidates.
Wasserman-Schultz’s successor was interim DNC Chair Donna Brazille, who was later shown by WikiLeaks to have used her position as a CNN commentator to have relayed questions ahead of primary campaign debates to the Clinton campaign.
Then there was the open mockery of democracy behind the fact that much of Hillary’s convention delegate lead over Sanders – enough to give her the nomination without a contest on the convention floor – derived from the 525 explicitly unelected and so-called superdelegates pledged to her before Sanders even declared his candidacy.
Sanders Stumps for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger
Despite all this and more, Sanders did his best, as originally promised, to try to drag Hillary Clinton’s horrifically bad and noxious neoliberal campaign across the finish line in November. As the Democratic National Convention approached, Sanders endorsed Mrs. Clinton and dropped his totally reasonable criticism of her as captive to Wall Street billionaires and the moneyed elite. Re -directing his “populist fire” against Trump, the Senator travelled to Wisconsin, Michigan, and other battleground states (some of which he’d won during the primary campaign) on Hillary’s behalf. (Queen Hillary never deigned to set foot again in Wisconsin after she got nominated.)
I saw Sanders speak in Iowa City the Friday before the general election. With former liberal Iowa Senator Tom Harken at his side, Bernie bellowed, pleaded, and begged for folks to vote for the “lying neoliberal warmonger” (Adolph Reed Jr’s all-too accurate words, not Bernie’s). His brief primary tussle with the reigning corporate Democrats was forgotten as he warned an at-best mildly enthusiastic crowd about the all-too real evils of Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton was always a tough sell. The strain of trying to bring her across was evident on the Senator’s face. The contrast was remarkable between the relatively small and polite gathering he attracted barnstorming for dismal Hillary and the giant and raucous crowds he’d attracted here when running on his own.
Still, Sanders hit the trail, beseeching voters on her behalf, with full knowledge that she was running a terrible operation. The Friday before the election he told some of his friends in Iowa City confidentially that he wasn’t sure he could bring her across: her campaign was just so awful, so clueless, dull, and conservative. She didn’t really have a serious policy agenda, Sanders noted.
Yet still he came out, ever the good Democratic Party company man (beneath the “Independent” veneer), swallowing his pride and fearing the Republican candidate enough to say over and again that “we must defeat Donald Trump, you must vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Ingratitude: “The Worst Kind of Asshole”
How does Hillary pay Bernie back for his dedicated and energetic efforts on her behalf? In her soon-to-be-released political memoir What Happened? she accuses Sanders of causing “lasting damage” that opened the door to Herr Donald. She claims that Sanders “had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character” because the two Democrats “agreed on so much.”
“Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros,” Hillary writes. “took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist.” The “Bernie-Bro” smear repeated.
“When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything,” Clinton wrote. “Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s `Crooked Hillary’ campaign.”
So primary challengers aren’t supposed to challenge at all. They are supposed to be thoroughly cowed patsies for the front-runners. No, they are supposed to act out the same role The Washington Generals played vis-a-vis The Harlem Globetrotters: perpetually failed props. As one correspondent wrote me last Tuesday, reflecting on Mrs. Clinton’s cold ingratitude: “How dare [Bernie] have acted like a primary was meant to be anything other than a foregone conclusion? Really, Hillary Clinton is giving the strongest support for the concept of `sheepdog candidate’ that I’ve ever seen, and she’s offering it willingly.”
In What Happened, Clinton says that Sanders “isn’t a Democrat,” claiming that “He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.” Never mind Sanders’ repeated promise from the day he enlisted in the presidential race as a loyal Democrat that, in his words in January of 2015: “No matter what I do, I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States.”
After discussing how she disagrees with Sanders’ view of the Democratic Party, Clinton writes that “I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”
Wow. This is the thanks that the Hillary Clinton has for Sanders’ energetic and self-effacing efforts to save her sorry, vapid, sold-out, and uninspiring political career. After everything Bernie did for her, after all the exhausting campaign stops he made for her, she still has the sneering sociopathic audacity to lay her abject failure partly at Sanders’ feet. As a different correspondent wrote me last Tuesday:
“Reprehensible. The worst kind of asshole kicks their own sheep dog when he/she left the pen door open. Madame Deplorable simply cannot face the fact that she alone is responsible for achieving the seemingly impossible i.e., allowing the crass, bloviating, two-legged toxic waste dump Trump from defeating himself. Her closest aides have confessed that she could not even name the reason that she desired to become president, other than, `It’s my turn. Gimme. Gimme.'”
One thing Trump got right: Hillary is “nasty.”
Conservative, corporate-imperial Hillary continues to look for others to blame for her longstanding pre-existing condition of severe unpopularity. It’s Russia’s fault. It’s Comey’s fault. It’s Bernie’s fault: the sheepdog just wasn’t sheepish enough. He wasn’t supposed to do what politicians do during primary and other election campaigns, which is find and exploit their opponent’s main weaknesses.
—snip—
A Goldwater Democrat
“I’m proud,” Hillary says, “to be a Democrat.” But what kind of Democrat? The kind who has spent the great bulk of adult life helping push the Democratic Party ever further towards the corporate and imperial right – well to the right of the post-World War II Republican Party, in fact. In 1964, when Hillary was 18, she worked for the arch-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Asked about that high school episode on National Public Radio (NPR) in 1996, then First Lady Hillary said “That’s right. And I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don’t recognize this new brand of Republicanism that is afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. I am very proud that I was a Goldwater girl.”
It was a revealing reflection. The right-wing Democrat Hillary acknowledged that her ideological world view was still rooted in the anti-progressive conservatism of her family of origin. Her problem with the reactionary Republicanism afoot in the U.S. during the middle 1990s was that it was “not conservative in many respects.” Her problem with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay was that they were betraying true conservatism – “the conservatism [Hillary] was raised with.” This was worse even than the language of the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) – the right-wing Eisenhower Republican (at leftmost) tendency that worked to push the Democratic Party further to the Big Business-friendly right and away from its working-class and progressive base. Bill and Hillary helped trail-blaze that plutocratic “New Democrat” turn in Arkansas during the late 1970s and 1980.
The rest, as they say, is history – an ugly corporate-neoliberal, imperial, and racist history that I and others have written about at great length. (I cannot reprise here the voluminous details of Mrs. Clinton’s longstanding alignment with the corporate, financial, and imperial agendas of the rich and powerful. Two short and highly readable volumes are Doug Henwood, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency [OR Books, 2015]; Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton [CounterPunch Books, 2015]. On the stealth and virulent racism of the Clintons in power, I highly recommend Elaine Brown’s brilliant volume The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America [2003].)
And yet strident “liberals” I know here in Iowa City are seriously and enthusiastically talking about Madame Deplorable running yet one more time in 2020.
Stop Hillary before she hates again!
—snip—
Like I said…if you are a loyal Democrat, read it and weep…if of course you have any conscience left.
Later…
AG
Bernie Sanders is responsible for having moved a significant amount of the country “left”, changing the conversation about what is politically possible, and energized a youth movement that has its eyes set on taking over the Democratic Party and doing the hard work of organizing. Because they know they can do all that, and also be members of Democratic Socialists of America and participating in direct action like in New Orleans.
You know, having a positive impact on their communities.
Meanwhile, hacks like Paul Street masturbate about Hillary Fucking Clinton omg I don’t care. Bernie Sanders is changing the health care conversation, Paul jacks off. I am so glad the actual organizing on the ground is ignoring toxic shit like this.
If “Hillary Fucking Clinton” and the other old-line Dem operatives are still in power by 2020, we can kiss Donald Trump hello again for another reign of (
t)error. Then where will your young, idealistic workers be?Behind the 8 ball, just like Bernie Sanders and his workers in 2016.
Let the truth roam free.
ASG
So it was a campaign.
In any primary campaign I have EVER been involved in, there is all sorts of nasty and dumb things said. Tad Devine said some of the most idiotic stuff with respect to the southern primaries.
The simple truth is that for the most part 2016 is remarkable in how it WASN”T dirty.
There was no 3:00 AM ad
There were no Whitey tape rumors
No one was fired for circulating rumors about cocaine use.
If you go back and look at the polling it was clear Sanders supporters always viewed his campaign as part of a larger effort to build a movement. The Quinnipiac polling was quite clear about this.
I never had a conversation that lasted longer than 10 minutes with anybody on the Sanders campaign – and that ranged from Jeff Weaver to people going door to door – who didn’t talk about building something that would last.
Bernie is going to introduce a Single Payer Bill today. He already has three co-sponsors who are major players in 2020.
He has fundamentally changed the health care debate in the Democratic Party. It is an immense accomplishment, and it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t have run.
I actually am part of the DSA legal group. The amount of creative thinking coming from that group is inspiring.
I read accounts of how Bernie somehow was weak and caved in supporting Clinton.
It is the dumbest criticism ever. I don’t take it seriously.
If you want to m,easure the level of stupidity, paranoia and entitlement present on all levels of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, all you need to do is read the following foolishness from a mid-level Clinton operative. The upper-level people are too experienced and too devious to actually come out and say shit like this…hell you an’t get them to come out and say anything straight out, it all has to be camouflaged in lawyerspeak and politicized, neocentrist nonsense, but here it is, up close and personal.
“Wow” indeed!!!
And bet on it…this level of self-seving idiocy is still in place at thye highest levels of the Democratic Party. You know…the ones that will once again stymie all efforts at real change in 2020 if they are not swept out of the offices and positions of power that they now hold very, vey soon…someting that becomes less and lesslikely with every approving word written about people like Nancy Pelosi, Check Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The old line gotta go. Now!!! It makes no difference if what comes in doesn’t look like it might win. The old line? Even if it “wins,” the people lose.
Every time.
AG
ASG
They are still studying the 2016 reality. It was supposed to be defined by them.
There are people who make things happen,
there are people who watch things happen,
and there are people who wonder what happened.
>>Who is Adam Parkomenko?
someone who doesn’t matter any more than I do.
You actually matter more. I don’t think you sell your viewpoints for apparent power.
We know that that is the game with political advisers. Team comes first.
Say Arthur, seeing as how you’re so keen to attack people for not having “progressive” bonafides, perhaps you would like to explain to us just how your support for Ron and Rand Paul demonstrates your progressiveness.
I don’t actually expect you to answer this, of course. Instead you’ll attack me with some inane label like “neo-centrist” and go back to trashing Hillary Clinton. You know, it’s funny, Arthur, but for you, the fact that Ms. Clinton made the political journey from Goldwater supporter to where she is today is not to be commended, but rather condemned. I guess if she were still a Goldwater Republican, you would be singing her praises.
In the default newsfeed of my Microsoft Edge browser, there is a CNN article: “Sanders prepares to reveal ‘Medicare for all’ bill”. It looks like the concept is going more mainstream. Here’s a quote:
“After a summer that has seen so many of the party’s most ambitious officials and brightest prospects line up in vocal support of what was so recently a fringe cause, consider again how the single-payer question will be received on a Democratic debate stage. Here’s a hint: Expect to see a lot of hands.”
CNN reminds the reader what Clinton stated during a 2016 debate with Sanders:
“People who have health emergencies can’t wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass,” she tells voters in Des Moines, explaining her campaign’s focus on preserving and expanding Obamacare, while dismissing the progressive insurgent’s more ambitious pitch.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sanders-prepares-to-reveal-medicare-for-all-bill/ar-AAryS2I?l
i=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp
Hillary Clinton has only herself to blame for her loss because she was incapable of reading the tea leaves in 2016. It was obvious that the people wanted a big change, and she only offered tweaks. Clinton has always been too cautious–not a good trait for a leader. If the Democratic party does not make some big changes it too will be a loser.
I repeat from above:
And now the Weekend News:
Didn’t care for the article when I read it (poorly crafted and too emotional) and this diary isn’t any better. However, as you’re never open to constructive criticism, will leave it at that.
Just wanted to drop this tidbit here:
Shouldn’t all those that laughed at Romney for not having drafted a concession speech laugh about this one as well?
You certainly never miss a chance to trash a woman, do you?
.
I’ll give the constructive criticism a try. Arthur: You often make good points, and certainly often bring a colorful, entertaining angle to your posts and comments. Especially the clever visuals, which I usually find amusing.
But would you mind putting away the tiny nail-clippers and start using an industrial-strength power chain saw when you quote from another article. 10,000-word “excerpt”‘?? If I want to slog through the whole frikkin’ article, or just 95% of it, I’ll go to Counterpunch myself and help their click count as the actual producers of that content. That’s only fair
As for Hillary, not to worry. She essentially took herself out of further runs for the presidency in her interview the other day, as close to Sherman-like as we can probably expect. Yes, she ran a lousy campaign, yes she holds some awful FP positions, yes she once backed Barry and still seems to have kept a small-c conservative attitude from her impressionable early years. But she’s done, a two-time failure for the Big Job, and it’s mostly all been said by now and is getting rather tedious.
Far more important in terms of domestic politics are the GOP/Trump-led continuing efforts at suppressing Dem voters, and secondly the sorry, weak state of current Dem leadership, still following the neolibcon line on FP and still too mealy-mouthed and feeble in promoting and protecting liberal values.
My 2 cents.
You write:
I would like to be able to do that, Brodie. I really would. But…I do not trust this generation of internet addicts to go to the trouble of clicking to a source, especially if the source is not necessarily in line with their beliefs. They are clicked-out, most of them…overburdened with an incomprehensible amount of “news,” most of it total bullshit. I work on the premise that those who really need this kind of information are unlikely to click to go to new or challenging places…especially the die-hard neocentrists, who seem to me to be averse to anything that might challenge their picture of the Democratic Party as the last, holy hope for the left, a rose floating in the DC shithole waiting for its chance in the sun. But…they might just possibly at least skim something that is already right in front of their face.
And…perhaps a case of wishful thinking…they might learn something.
I do keep trying…
AG
Just a suggestion — less is more. Give the folks out there a few choice quotes to whet their appetite, and leave ’em hungering for more. Otherwise, in this era of shorter attention spans, you risk just laying down a vast sea of words, causing the typical reader too easily to assign your posts to the “TL;DR” category.
And — no charge for this added bit of unsolicited advice — you might consider choosing just one phrase for your signature tagline, and giving the others a rest for a while. You know, like Ed Murrow had “Good night and good luck,” Walter Cronkite had “And that’s the way it is”, and even Dan Rather, briefly, had “Courage.”
“Bet on it” and “WTFU” are possibilities for you. I happen to like your clever line from a post above — “I personally do not trust the NY Times any further than I can throw the Sunday print edition on a rainy day”, though I’m not sure if it should be “further” or “farther”. Rumi doesn’t quite fit with your personality, and the quote offered is too much of a mystical head-scratcher.
Rumi…and people who live in that way of thinking…”fits” my personality better than you can possibly imagine, Brodie. Forty years and counting in that tradition.
As far as my sig is concerned?
It hit me like a ton of bricks when I first encountered it. It took me a quite a while to even begin to understand it, let alone live it.
Think on it.
A rephrase:
Not until one’s faith in the societal norms of one’s formative upbringing (like say the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church and the idea of “America-Home of the brave and land of the free” for me) turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust-can any human being become part of the truth.
After the betrayal(s) comes the realization that there is a greater set of powers than those that we normally consider powerful, and they are totally dedicated to slow evolution. Of everything.
“The life of Life” as one of my teachers put it.
Then one becomes part of a greater truth than that which is foisted upon us by normal, everyday societies, no matter what they may be.
Later…
AG
P.S. I like “further.” Why? Because it sounds better.
To me.
By her own statement, Hillary Clinton is now irrelevant to future politics. If that is her continued commitment, it might help save the Democratic Party at this point.
The election of Trump moved American politics into some as yet unforseen outcome of political realignment that will affect both parties as much as Goldwater’s loss in 1964 affected both parties.
At this point, neither party has conclusively framed their new identity. Trump and the Freedom Caucus of the GOP overestimated their ability to create their own reality. They both underestimated the power of TheResistanc(tm) and the broader actual resistance to defeat their juggernaut in Congress on Obamacare. It turns out that most Americans don’t want to go back to the health care of 2008.
It might be that removing the language restricting Medicare to people “over 65” is popular enough to pass Trump’s Congress and get Trump’s signature because it “repeals Obamacare”. Watch your fingers and your wallet around Trump, but it could happen as he weakens. His deal with the devil Dems on a three-month suspension of hostilities has gotten a slight uptick in his rush to total unpopularity.
At this point, no one knows what that realignment will look like, but if the Democrats can succeed at forcing Repubicans to vote for taxes and also push through Medicare for All during the Trump presidency, Democrats might set the post for GOP reaction instead of themselves remaining reactive and subject to corporate manipulation.
All of the thrashing around of the Hillary camp is from this point irrelevant. Either the Democratic Party opens itself leftward as it did in the 1930s (actually an attempt to co-opt outright socialism) or it continues to lose. Either the GOP stops being the slave of corporate interests and cultural revanchists or it begins losing. We have seen in Charlottesville where further rightward movement of the American center leads. Guys with AR-15s patrolling every street in search of alleged criminals.
Increasingly the party committees are going to be irrelevant in shaping this political realignment and should stop trying.
And yes, some full disclosure of what has been going on in secret for the past 30 years would be beneficial to clearing the air. There are no choirboys and angels in American politics of the past half century.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to welcome this realignment or make it easy. But it will happen, or we as a nation will be in a heap of a bigger mess.
Either party could become the counterpart of the Federalists and Whigs. The situation is just that fluid at the moment, now that the Trump juggernaut has been slowed.
I can’t believe I’m actually agreeing with this guy, mostly, but the other night one Steve Bannon declared that Dems need to undergo a “civl war” in their party to become a political player again.
One part I disagree with: we don’t need a Breitbart of the Left, if by that he means a place to dispense mostly fake news and analysis based on dubious reporting that amounts to an online version of Fox News.
What we do need is a more vigorous discussion intraparty that eventually moves it in a more progressive direction. On this, there is a clear opening for a few of our better leaders to be even more outspoken about the need for modern liberal reform. Bernie and Eliz Warren come to mind as two who could seize the moment even more aggressively, beyond just calling for Medicare for All.
As usual, there is still the gigantic opening for those two and other liberal Dems to finally step out of the dark shadows of destructive and costly neolibcon policy promotion and guide the party to a new progressive direction in FP. Currently, only Tulsi Gabbard leads that parade of one.
Contrary to what I thought a decade ago, we don’t need a FoxNews on the left or a Breitbart. When blogs have taken on that role, it has grated and turned off the expanding audience that they were getting. The left is not like the right in this.
The left can tolerate flaws, but it cannot tolerate either expedience or duplicity being cover up as the motive for consistently avoiding progressive actions on issues.
Medicare for All might come in two waves: the first is merely eliminating “over 65” age restraint and leaving Medicare essentially as it is now but with funding to cover the additional patients; that would make the rest of Obamacare unnecessary. The second wave will be fixing the out-of-pocket costs and the way that health care is billed and will require rejiggering the billing and payment software–hopefully to make it simpler. That will have to take a universal and infrastructure approach. Once done and paired with an infrastructure approach to professional education key to public infrastructure of all kinds, that has the possibility to provide the best result-to-cost system of health care in the world. I’m not predicting who finally will sign on to get this done.
What causes politicians to seize the moment is the certainly that there is a large constituency demanding these very changes. Given the fact, that constituencies in the US are still manufactured by the media instead of being developed by local open political conversation, we are a little way from that certainty. Actually closer than before Obamacare. Likely still closer if the simplest and most understandable Medicare for All proposal passes — you get what grandma and grandpa get. They will still cuss the deductibles and out-of-pocket costs and the Medicare Advantage ripoffs. But some of the most expensive procedures will be handled. Quickly on the heels of the simple change will be added obstetrical, dental, and ophthalmological coverage. Also optometric coverage (free glasses) for elementary school children.
And then we can start having a what’s in-what’s out of infrastructure conversation.
re foreign policy, please don’t forget to credit Barbara Lee, for years now a lonely voice against stupid wars.
Tulsi Gabbard does unfortunately seem to be a parade of one; good on a couple of issues and weird on others.
Yes, credit Rep Lee for standing up boldly years ago against Junior’s rush to war at the expense of diplomacy.
She was doing just fine until recently when she strangely tweeted an anti-diplomacy line wrt Trump just meeting and talking with Putin at the summer G20 confab. She also seems to have bought the Russiagate nonsense hook line and sinker.
Disappointing to say the least.
As for Gabbard, I’m not familiar with the “weird” stuff — she’s Hindu, and likes to surf, ok. I probably wouldn’t agree with her on 100% of the issues, but par for the course, and am not aware of any weird positions or behavior.
Of course, take it from me, someone who doesn’t buy the Russiagate propaganda, which probably makes me “weird” on this blog, not to mention a stooge of the Kremlin.
Its not that she is Hindu that makes her weird among Democrats – its her Islamaphobia (eg, extra checks for some Moslem immigrants) and prior hostility towards gays.
Also, although she is Hindu, it should be mentioned that she subscribes to a Hindu school from which the Hare Krishnas originated, and they represent the most fundamentalist strain of Hinduism, somehow managing to combine south Asian practices from prior milleniums with evangelism that didn’t really exist until recently (the concept of conversion was formerly alien to Hinduism). They even manage to combine ancient south Asian social traditions (which were not gay-hostile in the sense of the Pentateuch) with Victorian British Empire views on gays. As far as I know, Gabbard herself has not shown practices of such fundamentalism in her life, though her supporters include Indian diaspora BJP types who support her mainly because they think she is one of them (I’m not saying she is).
The shut-down term “Islamophobe” gets thrown around rather loosely these days, usually from PC libs. I don’t find it unreasonable for her to have voted in favor of a bill to require extra scrutiny for refugees coming from certain terrorist-infested areas of the world, like Syria and Iraq. That seems like a prudent step to take. Especially given the recent news, per German authorities, that ISIS and probably similar terrorist groups are in possession of many thousands of Syrian blank passports.
As for her Hinduist beliefs, I would need to see actual evidence that a) she subscribes substantially to a wacky fringe of that religion, and b) she is bringing such beliefs into her decision making in the public sphere. If she were ever to be seen hopping around in public in Honolulu or in front of the Capitol in D.C., clanging a tambourine and chanting Krishna Krishna Hare Hare — well, that would have me concerned.
From the Wikipedia entry, I was having a difficult time determining on what issues Gabbard would be considered weird. The optics of her meetings with Assad earlier this year and her meeting with then-President-elect tRump last November were not particularly good, and personally I found those actions to be a bit off-putting, to say the least. Earlier in her career she was not particularly kosher with regards to LGBT issues, but changed her tune by the turn of the decade. At worst, she flip-flopped, at best she saw the error of her ways. Hard to say. She appears to be a kindred spirit of indigenists with regard to native Hawaiians, but nothing that would really stick out as especially out of the Democratic mainstream. That’s really it – she seems as far as I can make out to be within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and more specifically someone sympathetic to the Sanders wing of the base.
As near as I can tell, her meetings with Assad and tRump turned some rather weird individuals on to her as a candidate (neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and right-wing loon Steve Bannon), though I am not sure how much that reflects on her and how much that reflects on Spencer and Bannon. I can’t say that I have really payed much attention to Gabbard. Is she out of step enough with her constituents that she’d be easily primaried? Is there something newsworthy that would be worth perusing – e.g., some off-beat views about vaccinations, fluoride, or Area 51? If she’s a stealth wingnut or a stealth moonbat she’s been pretty good at hiding it.
At the time of her return from Syria earlier this year, she got some considerable public criticism from the war party wing of the Dem Pty (notably from one Howard Dean, formerly “The Good Doctor”, now doing business as a bought and paid for member of the centrist Establishment commentariat) for committing the grievous offense to the established order of talking w/Assad, but that seems to have died down.
Frankly, if Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and Charlie Rose can go there and talk with Assad, I don’t see the problem with one of our Reps doing the same. In the 2008 primaries, one of Obama’s finest moments was when he expressed a preference for talking, even with our most despised adversaries, as opposed to the alternative. Better to jaw-jaw than war-war, as WC once said.
But the US msm, led by the nose by our boys at Langley, have whipped up the public hysteria over the evil Assad to where he has become radioactive, just as they did with Hussein and Gaddafi and as they are continuing to do with Putin. These people are so extreme and ruthless, they cannot be reasoned with, we are told, and so perhaps certain harsh lessons need to be taught. Sadly, most of the Dem Party and its leaders have bought into this hysteria.
Part of it is the Dems, always on the defensive and concerned about what the WaPo and NYT and Morning Joe will think, do not want to be caught looking weak on strong man rulers identified as our enemies, especially against the backdrop of a New McCarthyism that far too many Dems are aiding and abetting. What courage.
Generally murdering 400,000 of your own citizens makes one radioactive, yes. The problem is not that Tulsi Gabbard visited Assad — although her way of doing that was problematic — but that she continues to shill for him with “we can’t know who gassed who” and denying that a genocide has taken place. She is also a promoter of the war on terror — as are most liberals these days because no one of any real prominence is opposing the drone war against ISIS. But she pretends and poses to be antiwar, and as we can readily see in this thread people fall for it, perhaps because they need to pretend that they are also anti-war despite supporting the drone strikes.
George Bush and the neocons have won, but you fail to see how much you support their agenda:
The ‘war on terror’ has won: George Bush’s brand of “war on terror” has spread internationally as a favourite tool to cover up of war crimes.
Again, you dutifully parrot what you’ve read in our msm, which is asserted as fact but which as yet is unproven/conflated with the inevitable civilian losses incurred in fighting a war. Hard to know with absolute clarity all the details, as it’s such a complex situation (or was until recently) and fraught with danger in many parts of the country, making getting reporters in there a very dicey matter, but still a necessary matter.
A few poorly-funded individual reporters — Eva Barrett comes to mind — have gone there frequently (obviously, not in the ISIS-controlled head-chopping areas) to give a starkly different perspective compared to our CIA-fed MSM which you subscribe to. She actually talks with actual ordinary Syrian civilians, gets their take on what is going on, what has happened. She has previously reported that she finds most Syrian civilians are rather favorably disposed towards Assad, and some have angrily noted how the truth of the war there, and which side is committing most of the atrocities, gets twisted by our western media.
Assad, though hardly an angel or softie (like most of our presidents), does enjoy high favorables in the polling that’s been done in recent years. He’s won at the ballot box in internationally observed elections. And now, as the war there winds down (still not completely though), we find hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees abroad returning to their country. Oddly, these thousands of Syrians don’t seem to be too concerned about western media allegations of Assad mass murdering or gassing his own people.
As for Gabbard, former vet who served in Iraq, I wasn’t under the impression she was so much “antiwar” across the board as anti-stupid war, anti-unnecessary war.
Btw, your link doesn’t work.
Lol, why bother? Are you going to tell me that Assad was democratically elected again?
Probably not much worse than some of our presidents in recent decades have been democratically elected.
And I’ve forgotten: did the US decline to send election observers or were they turned down? If the election were truly as you suggest, seems like it would have been a golden opportunity for the US to show the world how Assad manipulates things to stay in power. But the US was a no-show. Why? Did they fear the election might be a little too close to revealing actual democratic procedures of openness and fairness, spoiling the anti-Assad narrative?
Here is the link:
link
“Part of it is the Dems, always on the defensive and concerned about what the WaPo and NYT and Morning Joe will think, do not want to be caught looking weak on strong man rulers identified as our enemies, especially against the backdrop of a New McCarthyism that far too many Dems are aiding and abetting. What courage.”
The ghost of George McGovern still haunts the Democrats. Now with political campaigns being so pricey, I’m not sure there will ever be a recovery from this haunting. Not only are we sometimes still fighting the Civil War, we’re fighting the Vietnam War too.
McGovern: Yes, Dems in many respects have been on the defensive since he managed to lose in a massive landslide to one of the biggest crooks to ever occupy the Oval. Even GM himself was on the defensive in that campaign, certainly after Eagleton and “acid, amnesty and abortion”.
My first vote, and still one I’m proud of, even as George turned out to be not such a sharp pol or campaign strategist. JFK or Bobby he was not. But I proudly keep and occasionally wear my vintage McG campaign button.
As for VN, you remind me that the Ken Burns 18-hour extravaganza is about to get underway. Unfortunately, I’m already on the record here as committing to watching, at least a few hours, even as I strongly suspect I will see Bank of America and Koch Bros-friendly product.
the things I’ve read that I consider “weird” are the Syria issue that you mention, which bothers a lot of people, and connections to Hindu nationalists. I’m not sure where I read that item and I need to get work done today instead of researching that.
There is a faction of folks who seem to give uncritical knee-jerk support to dictators as long as they are tweaking the nose of the US because, reasons. It’s ridiculous, and I wish they wouldn’t but it happens. Defending Assad is not a good look for any public figure, and I suspect will come to haunt Gabbard if she tries for any higher office than the one she currently holds. Her holding a secret meeting with Assad earlier this year in a way that violated House ethics rules itself stunk. Regardless, that in itself is enough to be a deal breaker for me if she’s planning a Presidential run in 2020, given the already likely crowded field of otherwise acceptable candidates.
Other than some awareness that Gabbard is herself Hindu, I don’t know enough about alleged connections to Hindu nationalism to make an informed comment one way or the other. I’m guessing this would be from reliable journalistic sources that her allegiances go well beyond simply wishing to maintain a friendly diplomatic stance with the current Indian government?
Knee-jerk support only to those who view these things through simplistic black-and-white terms, the way the original McCarthyites did. I hate to have to break this to you, but sometimes our govt and MSM don’t tell us the complete truth. I know, for some of you this is a very harsh truth to swallow.
As for her trip or secrecy, she did clear it initially through the House Ethics committee before going. And has the US formally declared war on Syria? If not, I see no reason why she (and other Reps) shouldn’t go talk w/Assad.
Violation of House Ethics Rules? Sounds rather extreme. Has a House investigation declared such? Has an investigation even been approved? Please enlighten me on those undertakings. Or are you just declaring yourself judge jury and executioner?
So you’re okay with his war crimes? Classy. Keep being Assad’s apologist.
Probably every country that engages in war — or not by its choosing is forced into war, as with Assad and Syria — is going to eventually commit what could be considered war crimes, or what look to be such at first glance. Do we need to go through the long list of US and allies’ war crimes of the past 80 years?
The obvious question — since the US has vigorously opposed Assad and has sought his ouster going back at least a decade, and since our MSM willingly has gone along with the CIA-Pentagon-State version of the truth about him, with virtually no independent investigative reporting to verify the charges — is what is the actual extent of war crimes committed by Syrian govt forces and whether, hmm, just possibly whether our govt and MSM have been exaggerating. Most of you here eagerly, and lazily, accept and promote the US Deep State version of events, as if you have lost all ability to think critically about “facts” being fed to you by people who are in the business of deception.
Keep shilling. In the meantime, I prefer to remember the nonviolent protesters who were slaughtered by the Assad regime during the Arab Spring, thus paving the way for the – well let’s just call it what it is – genocide that has occurred since. If you need to defend the undefendable because of some hatred for the US, go for it. I’m done here.
Keep shilling for the Deep Staters, Don. Over and out.
I recall this article regarding the Syria issue. As for the Hindu nationalism angle – about all I seem to find is stuff published in Jacobin or citing Jacobin. I tend to be hesitant about that particular site. I’d love to find some documentation from independent sources. Right now, my impression of Gabbard is that of an opportunist, although she is hardly the first politician to ever be accused of such and will certainly not be the last. Goes with the territory. She seems to be trying to tie herself to the subset of Democratic voters who were most enthusiastic about Sanders, but there is something hollow about her. Her appearance on FauxNews a few years ago where she chastised Obama for not using the term “Islamic extremism” in the wake of terrorist attacks in the EU was practically identical to the rhetorical approach of right-wingers such as disgraced tRump insider Michael Flynn. That her talking points about
Assad regime opponents is identical to the rhetoric used by those advocating for right-wing nationalism/illiberalism, etc., is disturbing. Self-identified progressives should not fall back on right-wing rhetoric as second-nature. That should give anyone acting as an apologist for her some serious pause. She’s generally tried to stay in bounds of the Democratic Party mainstream for the most part, which is why I’ve been hesitant to label her a right-winger masquerading as a liberal or leftist. However, when right-wing nationalists see something they like in her, we should ask ourselves what’s up with that. It could be she’s more of a kindred spirit with some genuine deplorables than she’s wanted to admit, or it could be she’s been pegged as a useful idiot. Neither is a particularly good look for someone eyeing to be anything more than a Congressional back-bencher. I have little doubt she is eyeing a Presidential run, which is why early scrutiny now is worthwhile. The last thing we need is a front-runner so badly damaged that tRump or his GOP successor can merely stroll back into the White House for another term.
I am a little more optimistic.
In part because I think the consensus among the pols is that there is no place to go but left.
There is not a centrist agenda that means anything to voters.
And the pols know it.