Complaining that progressive bloggers are being mean to you is not a great look for a Democratic presidential candidate. Personally, I am not interested in tearing down the candidates with petty criticisms, but people are going to be critical and the Republicans will bring far worse. And if I decide I want to say something negative, I’m not going to be thrilled if candidates go whining to my editors.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Really thin-skinned(not a surprise). It’s okay for Bernie and company to bash and smear their opponents but if anyone says anything even slightly negative about them it’s considered way over the line. No thanks.
It’s not ‘over the line’. It’s counter-revolutionary, which is worse.
Did the Booker and Warren campaigns sign onto this complaint the Sanders campaign supposedly registered on behalf of their candidates? The answer to that is almost certainly No, in which case this complaint is both patronizing and made in bad faith.
Glad we can count on hearing from the Sanders campaign what comprises fair reporting on all the candidates for the Democratic Party nomination. Very convenient for them, eh?
Booker, Warren, the others are all running on ideas that Sanders championed in 2016. You’re being sarcastic, of course, but it does seem a early for CAP’s progressive bloggers to be taking a swing at the current front running Democratic primary candidate.
Warren is running on ideas she’s championed long before Sanders 2016 candidacy. And they’re quite a bit more seriously considered as well.
Warren has a lot of new ideas too, at least for top political levels. She is really the idea leader for the Democrats now.
You’re conveniently leaving out gun control, where the best progressive ideas are `guns like we have in Vermont’.
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In his Presidential campaign launch rally yesterday, Eric Swalwell identified gun permit regulations as the primary issue for his campaign. So at least one candidate will be attempting to elevate the discussion of the wanton mass and individual slaughters of children and others in our schools and on our streets.
Sanders’ campaign is going to be attacking Booker and Warren soon if they believe attacking those candidates will help them win the nomination. Those campaigns didn’t go crying to CAP about the stories ThinkProgress wrote. They, like I, don’t believe that paltry critical coverage is worth complaining about.
Warren’s providing tons of leadership running on her own ideas, most of which were not presented during the 2016 campaign. She has not and is not riding Bernie’s coattails on economic issues.
Bernie has been a significant net negative for the Democratic Party in the past 4 years.
Which is not a surprise because he’s just a free rider on the backs of others who do political infrastructure work. He’s not a Democrat, he’s an independent who wants to have it every which way he can – destructively if necessary.
If you really want to see how political infrastructure works in the rest of the country outside of California, come to Wisconsin. The infrastructure of the Democratic Party here is a dog’s breakfast. In that way at least, you’re fortunate to be living where you are.
Sanders took 71 of 72 counties here in the 2016 primary. There’s a reason for that.
And then went for Trump in the general election 60-12.
There is a pattern there, for those who want to see it.
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And you live in California, right? Tell me, what’s the pattern?
Like Trump, Sanders mainly appeals to a particular demographic, his own
and this
oops
And here is the absolute deal killer for me. OK, you don’t want to be `tainted’ by the demonstrations, I get it. Then stay home and enjoy your lake front porch. Never listen to what people say, watch what they do, because their actions reveal what they are. In this case, Sanders actions took him as close to the Canadian border as he could get, where there are no votes, so he could post up a picture with the demographic he appeals to.
This is no dog whistle, it’s a bullhorn shout out
Like the caption says `this explains everything’.
We simply cannot afford, with the resurrection of the KKK in America, to have Sanders be the nominee. The Democrats will lose a whole generation if that happens. Why? Because they know, better than anybody, what they see.
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Denied the socialism they demanded, the voters of WI were left with no alternative but to embrace Trump.
That’s the only pattern I see here.
That county tally for Trump vs Clinton in WI 2016 is misleading. Wisconsin is a state of a little less than 6 million people. The definition of a mid-size state with just 10 electoral votes. Hillary was bound to lose here going way, way back because, to most Wisconsinites, Republican and Democrat alike, she’s a terrible candidate that made it clear early on she thought she could win without Wisconsin’s electoral votes. Democratic Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) where a plurality of the votes are in Wisconsin were expected to carry the state anyway, but that’s only two counties. Like most states that aren’t on the coasts, Democratic voters here are concentrated in those two (and a small handful of other) counties. That’s true in coastal states, as well, but Wisconsin’s largest city is Milwaukee, population of only about 600,000. That you, and so many others, are squarely in the camp that believes Hillary lost because of yokels in non-coastal states is clear. Your ‘blame the voters’ over the Clinton failure to win in ’16 mindset is obvious, insulting, and unfair.
Everyone seems to forget that in 2008 we didn’t have voter ID yet here in Wisconsin, and in 2012 voter ID was still on hold by court order. So, Obama wasn’t just a much better candidate than Hillary, he had the rules on his side here still those years.
Add up where Democrats really lost the votes that cost Hillary the election here: namely black and other minority voters that were either unable, or too afraid to vote in Milwaukee and a few other counties in 2016 because of voter ID and the billboard advertised threats against them if they dared to show up at the polls. We carried those few counties anyway, but not by enough to put her over the top statewide.
I am sure this reflects my lack of knowledge but can someone explain to me why it could take more than two years (or whatever it’s been — I’ve lost track of when Bernie first said he was working on this) to release one’s tax returns? I mean, your tax return is whatever you filed that year. You don’t have to do any more work on it once you file it, unless you have to file an amended return. In fact, if you changed it, it wouldn’t be your tax return for that year. What is needed to release a tax return, other than retrieving it, getting it from the IRS if you’ve lost it, scanning it if it’s not already in electronic form, and publishing it on the internets?
I’m just mystified, or uninformed or something. What am I missing?
In light of Trump’s refusal to release his returns, anyone running for the democratic nomination has to know that releasing their returns is a de facto requirement. Failure to release returns should be an automatic dis-qualifier.
I’ve read it has to do with not wanting to reveal his 2008 tax returns because there is something hinky in them. Waiting until today to release 10 years provides cover for whatever it was he didn’t want revealed. Now if he’d release his financial reports from his run in 2016, that would be good.
Bernie can’t release his taxes, because the tax system is so corrupt and terrible, just releasing them would be all by itself a form of complicity in the awfulness.
Complicit is something you’re just not going to catch him being.
As Josh Marshall points out, CAP does not exercise any editorial control over ThinkProgress.
Worse, Sanders’ campaign manager was a former editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress and defended their editorial independence vigorously against similar accusations. Which suggests a cynical attempt to sow division and discredit Democratic institutions rather than an honest mistake.
Clearly, if you’re a “progressive blogger” for CAP, you’re not going to care about Sanders any more this time around than last time. They want his candidacy hobbled, clearly sooner rather than later. Sanders is doing CAP a favor suggesting that their bloggers might want to zip up their flies.
All this infighting and rehashing of 2016 is getting depressing.