Go read the original. It’s easy to find here, and Succuri…the site’s security app…is being very persnickety today.
I am replying to this post as a standalone article rather than a reply because:
#1-It’s quite long.
And
*2-Centerfielddj and his neocentrist cohorts have a disturbing habit of zeroing out replies and comments that oppose their pro-DNC positions.
The entity centerfielddj makes a number of points in that post. I am going respond to the one that is central to its argument. (Emphasis mine.)
Regardless of which candidates prominent Democrats choose to support, the candidate who persuades the most people to vote for them will be the winner. What the voters do will be the measure of the campaign. What Party leaders do will not be the measure of the campaign.
Read on.
In 2016, “the party leaders”…the neoliberal/neocentrist Democratic party leaders who were and had been deeply affiliated with the Clintons for a couple of decades…pulled bureaucratic string after bureaucratic string (including a number of under-the-table, old-school power politics strings, bet on it) to cripple the Bernie Sanders movement. They succeeded. HRC was the nominee. They then proceeded to run a presidential campaign that failed to reach roughly 74% of the eligible voters in the United States.
How do I compute that percentage? It’s simple math. There were roughly 250 million eligible voters in The U.S. in 2016. Hillary Clinton got almost 66 million votes. Do the math. (https:/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_election)
Donald Trump got an even smaller percentage of those votes, but there lies the other flaw in the Democratic campaign in 2016. They did not commit to effective campaigning in too many states that they considered “hopeless.”
Guess who won?
That plus a really bad candidate…sorry, neocentrists, but Hillary Clinton lost more votes than I can even estimate with her various gaffes…the most serious of which were the “basket of deplorables” remark (https:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables) that she made at a campaign fundraising event in early September, 2016 and the “public positions/private positions” speech to a group of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street hustlers that was itself supposed to be “private.” (https:thinkprogress.org/hillary-clinton-defends-telling-wall-street-in-leaked-speech-that-politic
ians-need-a-private-and-dd4a36432030) Like almost everything else in the post-social media world except things said in debugged, spook-operated rooms, it was leaked.
Duh!!!
Ain’t much that’s “private” anymore, as another baby boomer (Trump) is most painfully beginning to realize.
So it goes.
As I wrote almost a year ago in a still frontpaged (on the hotlist) post titled “Perez now chairman of DNC. Oh Well…There Goes THAT Idea!!”:
—snip—
This is a victory for the Pelosi/Schumer PermaGov/centrist axis of the Democratic Party, and a serious loss for the Sanders/Warren wing.
–snip—
Where is the new party coming from?
And when, fer chrissake!!!???
Because this old one ain’t worth shit!!!
AG
The answer to my question “Where is this new party coming from?” should now be quite clear to anyone with an ounce of honest common sense.
It is coming from the people who felt abandoned by the neoliberal/neocentrist-dominated, corporate-owned and controlled Democratic Party of the Clintons, Obama etc..
It is coming from people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat the pants off of a powerful, old-line Dem in 2016 by simply telling the truth about what has happened to this government, and has continued saying it…loud and clear…since her election.
And…it is coming from Beto O’Rourke.
Will it win in 2020?
I dunno.
I certainly hope so, but even if it doesn’t…short of some kind of coup…it’s only a matter of time until it does. There is a new majority rising in this country…a multi-racial, multi-cultural majority that in my opinion is the culmination of hundreds of years of efforts by a majority of those who live in the U.S. to actually bring to fruition the words of The Declaration Of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I repeat:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Now…this can be done peacefully, provided of course that the structure of said government has not been so ruined by corporate influences that no amount of campaigning will get it done.
Or it can be done less peacefully.
My own greatest hopes are for the former option.
Amen.
AG
P.S. While I am at it…since the much of the gist of centerfielddj’s post seems to be aimed at me and my own posts…one of the repeated falsehoods of that small cadre of neocentrist, DNC-affiliated posters here is that I am all for “breaking up the United States.” Centristfield pops that one out in one of his comments on his referenced post above.
Please click the link to read Arthur lay out his case to “BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!”
Yes indeed!!! Please click that link!!! (http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/9/12/1356/19864)
In fact…I’ll save you the trouble.
Below is the important part of what I said in it. It is a crie de coeur, not a call for the breakup of the United States. The plain fact that I am supporting Beto O’Rourke should put that fallacy to rest. Last I looked, he was trying to unite the entire population of the United States, not break it up.
Who are we to say that no “decent people” believe other things than do we?
My grandparents were “decent people” on both sides of the family. They went to church; they stayed married…sometimes for the sole reason of raising their children well…they fought wars in which they believed; they took care to harm no one who did not threaten them and their families. They also had no fucking idea about what it means to be a minority citizen in this country, thought that women belonged in the house raising children, would never have dreamed of voting for a black dogcatcher let alone a black president, lived in strictly segregated neighborhoods, had absolutely no use for people whose sexuality was different from their own…including people who had sex out of wedlock even if they were heterosexual…and cast a squinty eye even on Christians of other denominations. My parents…one a member of a rabble-rousing NYC Irish Catholic Democratic family, the other a member of a semi-rural, rock-ribbed Protestant Republican family whose history in the NYC area went back to the 1630s…had to elope and go join the Royal Canadian Air Force and fight in The Battle of Britain because their families were so opposed to the relationship. Do you not have “decent people” in your family who never evolved to the level at which you exist in terms of social beliefs? I’m betting that you do.
We all do.
So now…back to the problem at hand.
It is often said that you cannot legislate morality. I’ll go one step further. You cannot legislate evolution. It either happens or it doesn’t. How many millions of the roughly 325 million Americans (not counting however many millions of so-called “illegals” are here, most of whom work for people like you and me washing dishes and delivering food, etc. at wages so low that they that defy imagination) absolutely, positively resemble your ancestors and mine in their beliefs. Given the low tide 28% approval rate of people like Butch II when he was in office, it looks to me like fully 1/4 or more of U.S. residents are right back where my grandparents lived in terms of societal evolution. That’s pushing on 100 million people. Plus…they’re the ones who own most of the guns. Can we somehow “legislate” their obedience to what we consider higher socially evolved notions? On the evidence of the last 50+ years, the answer is a resounding “No!!!” Are they dying out? I sometimes wonder. Given the Trump phenomenon, I wonder more now than at any time in the past. So I say…give them their own damned country/countries and let’s see who wins that competition. My bet? The country/countries that operate on the principle of human ecology will win and the others will degenerate into satellite states like the many small Eastern European countries that now waver back and forth between being part of Europe and part or Russia.
But that’s a real minority opinion.
At least for now.
It’s a dream.
So it goes.
We will see how long it remains a dream.
Another 8 years of the bullshit in which we have all been forced to live by the oligarchy and there are going to be a lot of people looking for a way out.
On all sides of the societal evolutionary scale.
Watch.
In that post I included a Youtubed performance of one of my primary musical influences, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson.
I Had A Dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=QjB02aaAt9w)
Check it out.
He says it all.
P.P.S.
Please excuse the unwanted italics formatting on a couple of paragraphs here. It’s just another Succuri tic, and I have spent enough time today writing and then cleaning up this post. I always try to make my posts interesting and clearly formatted. Robots don’t give a shit. Even the human ones. Especially the human ones, apparently.
Clomp. clomp, clomp. clomp, clomp.
I AM A GOOD DEMOCRAT!!!
Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!!!
Could be, I guess…
We shall find out, soon enough.
Won’t we.
Respond directly to the post you useless troll. Stop polluting the diaries with these turds.
Also, too, if Arthur wants to avoid having his comments disappear because multiple community members bother to rate those comments as “Mega Troll”, he should think before he posts comments. With the copious amount of posting he does here in comments and diaries, he isn’t having his voice stifled here. His content takes up more space at this site than literally any other community member.
What’s the percentage of AG comments which disappeared from front page threads due to multiple Mega Troll ratings, around 1%? That’s too much for our bullying-yet-sensitive community member to abide. If he wants to make sure that content which multiple community members rated as “Mega Troll” keeps a permanent place on this blog, AG will damn well make it happen!
He’s gaming the system BooMan has set up here to encourage people to engage in respectful behavior. With his recent sharp increase in diary postings, AG’s also showing himself to be very anxious as the noose slips tighter around Trump and his associates.
Never forget that Arthur ran shitloads of attacks on Pelosi, Schumer and the DNC from August to November 2018. If he had his way, House Democrats would not have the strong oversight powers they have begun to use now. Arthur is giving us the stong impression that he is unhappy with this oversight, and he would like the community to talk about Democrats in Disarray instead.
Unfortunately, AG doesn’t have the courage to just come out and declare what he really wants. These behaviors are very unprincipled and cowardly.
As usual AG did not reply in any meaningful way to anything. Instead he caricatured centerfielddj, lied about his past and ongoing worship of Ron Paul’s pseudo-libertarianism, and insinuated that violent revolution was a option we ought to consider. He caricatured Joe Crowley, the incumbent defeated by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, as some sort of tool, when in fact Crowley had a long history of supporting progressive positions. As usual AG had the bad form to quote himself extensively, the sort of egotistical nonsense that would earn him an F in a college freshman writing class.
So Arthur has decided not to wait to find out if O’Rourke’s undeclared Presidential campaign gains the Party nomination; he’s just gonna launch his campaigning for Trump and Republicans now. Well, okay!
It’s truly remarkable that AG wants the community to read the extreme right wing declarations he made in his “BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!” manifesto and the links to other diaries provided in the comments thread. This is among the policy positions made by a man who wants to be the sole arbiter of whether Democratic Party leaders and institutions are sufficiently Left:
“The grinding stupidity of the welfare system in general? Of the inner city educational system? The police and justice system? I am beginning to think that you are some kind of social worker or other Big Gov employee trying to justify your occupation. Did I guess right? I got news for you. The system ain’t working, and it has not worked for at least 50 years. It simply keeps a bad scene in stasis. That’s not “working,” it’s just treading water.”
THAT is the point of view of an extraordinarily entitled old white male conservative. Shit, it’s a caricature of such a person.
Most of us here share the view of the progressive movement that the major problem with Federal social welfare programs and Federal regulations of local education and police programs is that they are insufficiently vigorous. Arthur makes the case here that Federal social welfare programs and Federal regulations of local education and police programs endanger people and make them weak and poor.
I’ll finish here with these additional points AG makes:
“”Welfare” and other giveaways rather than jobs, honest work and adequate pay hurt whoever they touch in the long run…If the overall system is used to create a stasis, to let people barely survive so that their children can only dream as high as being a clerk in a ghetto Walgreens?”
These points are contradictory. They also reveal a deep disrespect for “honest work”. Service work is important work. The person who works as a clerk at a “ghetto Walgreens” is providing an important and needed service. It’s wrong to disrespect that work. I concede that there are other careers which can be more invigorating and challenging, careers which rightfully deserve more compensation. But it’s revealing that Arthur gives us the strong impression that he considers this work inherently undignified. Labor law and its regulatory enforcements are important tools to help workers maintain base levels of compensation and safety for workers. If governments are dissolved and reduced to the local level, as Arthur demands, there is zero evidence that workers would benefit. In fact, I think that workers would be hurt if we stripped them of Federal and State protections.
The other bit of ignorance Arthur reveals in this last statement is that the vast majority of people on government welfare programs are working. If those people are not given sufficient pay for their work to allow them to live a decent life, I want my government to seek to regulate their employer through minimum wage and job safety enforcements and a realistically executable right to organize a Union so they can gain enough pay to live a decent life. I also want my government to provide welfare programs to people who need them, working or not, in the meantime.
Arthur’s vision here is extremely regressive.
. . . Dishonest Non-Response to . . . “
I watched the President vomit up his PIG IGNORANT RACIST HOT HORSESHIT when he declared his pathetic, lying justifications for his National Emergency declaration this morning.
Arthur declared here recently that he is prepared to campaign against the Democratic Party nominee for President in 2020.
The Democratic Party nominee will be the only viable Presidential candidate to challenge Trump in 2020. If Arthur Gilroy attempts to get progressives to deny their votes for Trump’s only viable opponent, he is an enabler of Donald Trump.
Arthur will not be allowed to come here and campaign for our horrible President, his terrible Congressional enablers and his dangerous political movement without firmer and more frequent responses from community members here.
He’s going to be called out relentlessly if he continues this behavior. His participation at this blog will not be responded to as it has so far. Our responses will escalate.
You write:
No.
Here is the truth of the matter:
Scylla and Charybdis, v.XIV.
Ask yourselves…is this country better off after the basically corporate-owned presidencies of Bush I, Clinton I, Bush II and Obama?
Not.
Continued corporate ownership of the presidency and congress…even if successful in getting rid of Trump…is not the answer to this country’s ongoing decline.
Only a totally new deal…green or not-so-green…is going to get the U.S. back on track.
Socially, politically and economically.
Short of that?
More slow…or not-so-slow…decline.
Your choice, people.
Scylla?
Charybdis?
Or turn the damned boat around!!!
The time to make up your minds is now!!!
AG
Stop lying.
. . . pathetic, failed — but nonetheless vile! — attempts at dehumanizing those humans who validly and substantively confront your lying and other toxic, trolling behaviors here, . . . i.e., “entity”, “it” applied to human commenters . . .
. . . is yet another trolling behavior that fully merits troll ratings. And will receive them from me if/when I see that.
Not having noticed any evidence (or even written reference) regarding its “him” or “her”-ness…in fact, no real evidence of its non-botness or actual existence as a single human being…what other pronoun would you like me to use?
Them?
At least y’all have some idea of who I am and what I do.
Booman knows, for sure.
AG
P.S. Who are you? Or maybe better…who do you claim to be?
More brilliance from Arthur Gilroy:
“Obama? Fail!!!???
OH yes!!! The single most potent evidence of his failure is that after 8 years in office there are still racial riots occurring in our cities. Riots that have real reason to occur, and not just because of trigger-happy white cops shooting unarmed black teenagers. Minority workers…including the so-called “illegals” are paid so little overall that there is no way that they can live even a just-get-by life on what they make.
Did he fail on purpose?
Maybe, maybe not. It really makes no difference.
The failure is there for all with eyes to see. He acceded in continuing the power structure basically unchanged instead of going on the attack the day he stepped up to give his first inaugural speech.
So it goes.
I personally think that he did what he did because he recognized the essential ungovernability of the U.S. as it stands but had no idea how to change it.
My idea?
Break the damned thing up.”
This is the old white man who has responded to the Donald Trump Presidency by continually trying to get members of this community to join him in his opposition to the Democratic Party and its candidates.
What a pathetic charade.
. . . the recent trend I’ve noticed in your confrontations of ag.
I’ve sometimes felt critical of those confrontations when they characterized/paraphrased or even quoted ag, but didn’t go all the way to document them (which in the context of this site = link to him saying what you said he said). (You may have noticed this is something I try to be consistently scrupulous about doing.)
Not because anybody here familiar with your output has any basis to question their accuracy. They don’t.
But rather because it leaves ag no wiggle room to either deny he said what he said or pretend you’ve misrepresented it somehow. (You may also have noticed that ag almost never attempts to rebut my refutations of his lies — he just runs away, either by not replying at all or by trying to evade the refutation by burying it under a tsunami of unresponsive, diversionary, irrelevant blather. I’m convinced this is not mere coincidence, but rather because it’s the only option left to him in the face of definitive refutation factually documented and linked.)
It’s sometimes worthwhile to quote Arthur without the link. That way he extends himself into further lies when he tries to deny he wrote something he wrote.
It’s noticeable that AG rarely attempts to deny his own statements when they’re quoted or summarized here. We’ve rapped him on the snout with his own words too often. Thanks for joining me in keeping all his receipts. This enterprise has value.
. . . make the cutoff for the “trainable” category in that old (now obsolete cuz not pc) classification of levels of what they used to call mental “retardation”.
At least I haven’t noticed him denying saying anything anyone quoted him saying since that one I documented in the link upthread. Which was a very telling case, though! I LOLed when I saw that denial, because it seemed virtually certain to me — from the fact that you enclosed a longish passage in double quotes to indicate you were quoting him verbatim — that he had in fact written what he was denying saying; and also that it would probably be child’s-play easy to verify as much. Which it was: maybe 30 seconds of googling.
But the most telling part of that was what it tells us about ag’s utter obliviousness to the nature and character of others here. Especially his utter inability to discern anything valid from interactions with others. (Else he’d have understood from experience that no, obviously, cfdj isn’t the sort who might just invent fake quotes and enclose them in double quotes that indicate they’re quoted verbatim. Which was immediately obvious to me. But then again, misleadingly mis-using quotation marks/blockquotes for things he’s in fact not quoting verbatim is an actual, habitual sin of ag, so I guess it’s kinda understandable he wouldn’t get it that decent folks don’t do that!) For all practical purposes, none of us exists, except as foils for ag’s brilliance — either providing something he can cherry-pick as a launching pad for the same endless streams of idiotic blather or as unfair “centrist”/”neocentrist” “DNC-loving” persecutors at whose hands he can feign grievance.
No, in this as in everything else, with ag it’s confirmation bias all the way down. You’ve been critical of him, therefore you must be the sort who’d invent fake quotes. QED
AG has written TEN diaries since the beginning of February.
The rest of the Frog Ponf has written SEVEN.
No wonder AG feels victimized.
. . . Impressive!
Well, . . .
. . . except . . .
. . . NOT!
When, for example, I look at the “Hotlist” on the “frontpage”, that “post” isn’t there. Nor, I would bet, does anyone else see that “post” when they look at the “Hotlist” on the “frontpage” — anyone except you, that is.
I should just leave you to puzzle over how/why that could be (or perhaps try to convince yourself I’m lying, or wrong, or just made that up). But for some inexplicable reason, I’m feeling just magnanimous enough to reveal my surmise from what I observe here (only surmise since as far as I can tell, the site info provides no explanation of what the Hotlist is or how it works): As with the porn-related ads you get served here because you surf porn websites; and the links at the top of the “frontpage” and on the right side above that Hotlist to your user pages; the frontpage gets personalized to each user based on their profile and past activity.
The relevant activity wrt the Hotlist being frequency or rate of your repeated clicking on individual Diaries.
While surmise, not only does this explanation fit with what I observe on the “frontpage” when I look at it; it’s also perfectly consistent with your extreme egocentrism, and perfectly in character that you would repeatedly click obsessively on a “post” you wrote “almost a year ago”, thereby inadvertently ensuring it’s “still frontpaged” . . . on your personal “frontpage” and nowhere else . . . to provide you that cheap thrill! (Picturing Skinner’s pigeons pecking that bar for their food-pellet rewards.)
Too funny!
I always wondered what algorithm sent that post up there and why.
Thank you, schoolteacher.
AG