US POLITICS XX: Stuck In a Caucus You Can't Get Out Of

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anitram said:
I'm sure they're howling behind closed doors.

But this isn't about him being "a clown" - he's neurologically impaired and degenerating at an increasingly alarming rate. Anyone who has taken care of elderly people with neurological impairment of whatever sort know that this isn't a linear progression, it's exponential.

And the truly horrifying part of this is that everyone close to him knows it and would rather "own the libs" than admit to it and have him committed into competent care.

Like I said, nobody should ever forget what these people did.
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I think this is very, very hopeful, potentially even a little naïve.
 
cobl04 said:
I think this is very, very hopeful, potentially even a little naïve.
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3/4 of my grandparents suffered from different variants of dementia.

Trump was not slurring his words like this 3 years ago nor was his tongue darting out and garbling his speech as if a dentist had numbed it.

It is honestly like re-living what I had to observe (heartbreakingly so) 10-15 years ago.

But I guess "naive" is another word for it.
 
I apologise. It is just that I've seen so much of this 'strategy' over the past four-five years - saying Trump is unfit for office because of some sort of mental health disorder, and, just like very other strategy tried, it has failed to make even a remote dent. If he truly is suffering from something like dementia, then I would like to think that would be a widely known, official thing, and that there would be an appropriate contingency plan in place from his team and the RNC, and not just left to a bunch of people to comment on video clips on Twitter but otherwise go ignored. But I apologise that my comment came across as insensitive.

At any rate, I am feeling ever more excited about the momentum Bernie is building, and laughing at the fact that someone with such relatively inoffensive policies is frightening the shit out of so many supposed liberals. So many mainstream media outlets who have been fighting Trump for five years are all of a sudden refusing to back Sanders.
 
cobl04 said:
So many mainstream media outlets who have been fighting Trump for five years are all of a sudden refusing to back Sanders.
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Yes. The “fake news/corporate media” narrative has strongly emerged in the Sanders part of the Internet this weekend and seized control. Apparently, CNN and MSNBC are actually bigger enemies of the people than Fox.
 
MSNBC has been all over the place.

CNN has been firmly divided but is coming around to the idea.

Of course, Anderson Cooper is still the best.
 
cobl04 said:
If he truly is suffering from something like dementia, then I would like to think that would be a widely known, official thing, and that there would be an appropriate contingency plan in place from his team and the RNC, and not just left to a bunch of people to comment on video clips on Twitter but otherwise go ignored.
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No worries, I know you didn’t mean anything by it.

But the above is sort of my point - today’s GOP is a criminal cabal at nearly every level of government.
 
Irvine511 said:
Yes. The “fake news/corporate media” narrative has strongly emerged in the Sanders part of the Internet this weekend and seized control. Apparently, CNN and MSNBC are actually bigger enemies of the people than Fox.
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I mean, this MSNBC - this is absolutely disgraceful. No professional journalist should ever do this: https://twitter.com/Ad_Inifinitum/status/1231333443461619718

And I'm sure you've seen or heard of the Chris Matthews footage.
 
So, it’s less about news networks that will inevitably do stupid things trying to fill 24 hours of every day with news and more about positioning networks that aren’t Fox as “just as bad/even worse” because they should be carrying water for Sanders in the way that Fox does for Teunp and they don’t. It’s about viewing coverage that is somehow less than favorable as part of a conspiracy to team up against one candidate or another in order to bring them down for amorphous reasons. Reading conspiracy into journalism — even though we all know that journalism is, like anything else, flawed and human — when we don’t like what or how something is reported is I think one of the worst developments of the last 20-30 years. The right wing started this in the 1990s with “the liberal media” charge, and it’s sort of reached its entropic endpoint with “fake news.” And now, the left is starting to do the same.

Sure, lots of cricticism is valid. Sure, anchors and hosts who are themsleves likely highly educated members of an urban elite class who are also likely highly educated in political science are probably going to be slower to embrace the new “nothing matters” mindset because the reason they are in these professions and studied these subjects is because they probably very strongly do think that something matters.

Just please don’t “fake news” everything.

This is disinformation. This is how it works. Getting you to believe that truth can’t be known so you disengage and think they’re all the same and all corrupt ... and that only one person knows the truth.
 
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I mean, honestly, maybe she sighed because she’s tired? That’s a lot of bias to read into one second of an 18 second clip.
 
I'm not saying anything to do with fake news. Others might, not me. I'm just observing that there appears to be some anti-Sanders rhetoric in prominent left-leaning/centrist media at the moment, which I think is quite unprofessional.
 
cobl04 said:
I'm not saying anything to do with fake news. Others might, not me. I'm just observing that there appears to be some anti-Sanders rhetoric in prominent left-leaning/centrist media at the moment, which I think is quite unprofessional.
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So dismiss the whole thing?
 
Irvine511 said:
I mean, honestly, maybe she sighed because she’s tired? That’s a lot of bias to read into one second of an 18 second clip.
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that would be quite the timing for a journalist to sigh at that very moment simply because she's tired at 4:30 pm.

what happens in vegas stays in vegas i guess.
 
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After Bernie Sanders' landslide Nevada win, it's time for Democrats to unite behind him
Nathan Robinson
No other Democrats can beat him at this point. Still, the liberal establishment is still struggling to come to terms with Sanders’ inevitable nomination

Sun 23 Feb 2020 15.56 GMT
Last modified on Sun 23 Feb 2020 16.03 GMT

It was a landslide. Bernie Sanders had been expected to win the Nevada caucuses, but not like this. With just 4% of the vote in, news organizations called the race for Sanders, since his margin of victory was so large. Sanders has now won the popular vote in all of the first three states, and is currently leading in the polls almost everywhere else in the country. He was already the favorite to take the nomination before the Nevada contest, with Democratic party insiders worrying he was “unstoppable.” His campaign will only grow more powerful now.

Importantly, Sanders’ Nevada victory definitively disproved one of the most enduring myths about his campaign: that it could attract left-leaning young white people, but was incapable of drawing in a diverse coalition. In fact, voters of color were a primary source of Sanders’ strength in Nevada; he received the majority of Latino votes. Entrance polls showed Sanders winning “men and women, whites and Latinos, voters 17-29, 30-44 and 45-65, those with college degrees and those without, liberal Democrats (by a lot) and moderate/conservatives (narrowly), union and non-union households.” The poisonous concept of the white “Bernie Bro” as the “typical” Sanders supporter should be dead.

Some members of the media establishment had no idea what to make of Sanders’ Nevada victory. On MSNBC, James Carville said that “Putin” had won Nevada, and Chris Matthews declared the primary “over” (ill-advisedly comparing Sanders’ victory to the Nazi invasion of France). Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post admitted that Sanders had been stronger with nonwhite voters than she expected, and it might now be “too late” to do anything about him.

The other candidates and their supporters did their best to spin a humiliating defeat. Amy Klobuchar said her sixth-place finish “exceeded expectations”—if sixth place is better than you expected, you’re probably not a viable candidate. Biden vowed, implausibly (and for the third time) that he would bounce back. Pete Buttigieg took to the stage to denounce Sanders, who he said “believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.” A Warren supporter rather charmingly said that while Sanders had won, Warren had the “momentum,” and the Warren campaign itself said the Nevada “debate” mattered more than the Nevada “result.”

Let’s be clear: the other candidates were crushed, and Nevada was yet more evidence that there is no longer much serious opposition to Sanders. Michael Bloomberg fizzled completely in his big debut, and Democrats would be out of their minds to enrage every Sanders supporter by nominating a Republican billionaire. Joe Biden has lost badly in all of the first three contests, and it’s very clear that he can’t run an effective campaign. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has nearly gone broke and in desperation she has resorted to relying on the Super PACs that she previously shunned. Pete Buttigieg can’t win voters of color or young people (and has accurately been described as sounding like “a neural network trained on West Wing episodes”). As Matthews says: it’s over. Bernie is dominating the fundraising, dominating the polls, and winning every primary. I am not sure Jacobin is right that “it’s Bernie’s party now”—for one thing, virtually the entire Congressional Democratic party is still opposed to Bernie. But it’s certainly Bernie’s nomination. There is simply no other credible candidate.

Democrats shouldn’t worry, though: Bernie has a strong organization and a lot of money, and can mobilize millions of people to support him in November. He’s exactly the kind of candidate you should want your party to have. And for all the fear of his “radicalism,” he’s really a moderate: his signature policies are a national health insurance program, a living wage, free public higher education, and a serious green energy investment plan. It’s shocking that there is such opposition to such sensible plans. On what planet are these things so politically toxic that Democrats are afraid to run on them? Voters like these ideas, and so long as Democrats unify behind Bernie rather than continuing to try to tear him down, they will have a very good shot at defeating a radical and unhinged president like Donald Trump. The polling looks good for Bernie in November, so now we just need to get this primary over with and focus on the real fight. The other candidates had their shot: they lost. They need to accept it.

One other takeaway from Nevada is that no future election should occur without significant reform to the caucus process. Nevada wasn’t an outright catastrophe like Iowa was—at least we got results on election night. But it was still plagued with “voting rules confusion, calculation glitches and delays in reporting tallies.” And the caucus process can be downright bizarre: tied results in the Las Vegas caucuses are resolved with a card game, and at one point Sanders lost a delegate to Pete Buttigieg because the Sanders team pulled an Ace and Buttigieg pulled a 3. (Aces were low.) From the electoral college to the Iowa caucus, American elections desperately need to reworked from the bottom up according to the simple principle “the person with the most votes ought to win.”

And yet caucuses also produce some truly inspiring on-the-ground stories, from the cab driver who spoke up for Bernie and kept billionaire Tom Steyer from being viable to the guy who switched from Trump to Bernie because he was convinced socialists were good people. Ordinary people gave incredible speeches as part of the caucus process—one reason why it should be fixed rather than ditched entirely. Members of the Culinary Union, whose leadership had prominently opposed Sanders over Medicare For All, ended up defying their leaders and pushing Sanders to victory at a number of caucus sites.

All in all, Nevada was an inspiring moment for American democracy, proof that ordinary working people of all races and incomes and genders can come together around a robust progressive agenda. Democrats need not worry: this is a good thing. It’s a night to be celebrated. The primary is not completely over, but hopefully it is now clear to every sensible observer that Bernie is cruising toward the nomination and needs to be supported rather than torn down.
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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...in-its-time-for-democrats-to-unite-behind-him
 
BEAL said:
In a good economy (even if propped up by the fed) and public support says the economy is good

Is this really the message you want out there ?


https://twitter.com/jamieogrady/status/1231746048315547648?s=21

Oh but this is AC’s fault. He’s former CIA, and out to get Bernie for wanting to abolish it
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Just ballpark it broseph. Tell em Mexico will pay for free college. You can say anything and our dipshit electorate will believe it. You can't say "uh uh uh I dunno we'll figure it out."
 
cobl04 said:
I mean, this MSNBC - this is absolutely disgraceful. No professional journalist should ever do this: https://twitter.com/Ad_Inifinitum/status/1231333443461619718

And I'm sure you've seen or heard of the Chris Matthews footage.
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Sorry, that's reeeeeaaaalllly stretching to try and find something. This just feeds into the narrative of even the smallest, perceived slight against Sanders (which I whole-heartedly don't believe this is) is seized upon to be able to play the victim.

This is solid Trump territory. I really would rather not be part of group supporting the nominee (if it is Sanders) that's acts this way.

For the record, I watch MSNBC for at least a few hours a day, and the coverage of Sanders and all the Dem candidates is really balanced. Every one of them is criticized, they all have their strengths, weaknesses and poll numbers debated about. I would say Sanders is almost always one that is talked about the most favorably, except for the valid concern of him not playing well with the down ticket races.
In fact it's Biden that pretty much gets smeared the most, then Bloomberg, and the Sanders critical people are usually guests on shows that are endorsing other candidates in the race. And all of them agree that they of course will back Sanders if he's the nominee.

Finding these little clips of things, out of any context, putting some meaning into a non-verbal sigh, and then saying a whole network is somehow the "establishment" or whatever, is not just lazy and martyr-ish, but just adds to the already bad taste people have of Sanders supporters.
 
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DaveC said:
okay so he's an author. cool.

really not sure what your point is here.
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It’s not a terribly convincing article, given the author, is it?

By all means, he’s entitled to his opinion. I’ve heard him rhapsodize about Sanders on several podcasts, and also attempt to explain Corbin.

So, sure, it’s fine.
 
The premise of the article is also false - i.e. "no other Democrats can beat him at this point." Sanders is likely the nominee, but it's by no means a guarantee. There's another debate, South Carolina and Super Tuesday left in the next 20 days. After that? If Sanders is the clear run away winner? Sure. But the knives will be out this week. He could be a run away nominee. Entirely possible. Probably probable. He could also be Tsongas or Edwards.

It also calls Bernie a moderate, which is silly.

It mocks Bloomberg for not being a Democrat, while ignoring that Bernie isn't a Democrat.

It oversimplifies the issues over opposition to Bernie's ideas, as is often the case when it comes to Bernie. Nobody is opposing the overwhelming majority of what he's selling - merely offering alternatives that might actually have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law. Oh, and, ya know, saying how'd they pay for it.
 
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