My twitter feed is still insane, which should surprise no one, but what is surprising is that this level of stupidity is happening in one of the most peaceful Democratic primaries I can remember. Now we’ve got Clinton campaign staffers claiming unless Bernie changes his “tone,” they won’t debate any more. That makes sense and is a surefire strategy for the general. Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign is public enemy number one for some pretty harmless spin about how Bernie can still win. That’s about it. Now granted, some people Hillary supporters have convinced themselves this is the ugliest campaign ever and that Bernie supporters are all diehard racist misogynistic BernieBro white privileged dudes, but that’s just nucking futs.
So, let’s compare what was going on in this day in 2008 to the tepid nonsense being ginned up today. How many of you remember the Clinton campaign attempt to blow up the DNC by demanding the Michigan and Florida delegates, which she won because she ran unopposed because they broke the DNC rules and both she and Obama agreed they should not count until she won because she ran unopposed. Y’all forget about that?
Sen. Clinton gave a pretty astonishing interview to the Washington Post in which she appears to say she will stay in the race till the convention in August, where she will take her fight to the credentials committee to have the delegates from the non-sanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries seated.
The convention of course starts on August 25th, roughly five months from now.
The key quote from the interview is this one: “I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong. I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don’t resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention — that’s what credentials committees are for.”
So she’s promising to remain in the race at least until June 3rd when the final contests are held in Montana and South Dakota and until Florida and Michigan are ‘resolved’. Now, that can have no other meaning than resolved on terms the Clinton campaign finds acceptable. It can’t mean anything else since, of course, at least officially, for the Democratic National Committee, it is resolved. The penalty was the resolution.
The Obama campaign has always been willing to ‘resolve’ the matter by splitting those states’ delegates down the middle. But of course that’s something the Clinton campaign can never accept since splitting them down the middle is the same as not counting them at all. It leaves both campaigns right where the started, i.e., with him ahead and her behind.
That leaves two real possibilities: seat the non-sanctioned January primary delegates or hold the primaries again, a revote.
So what Team Clinton was doing in 2008 makes whatever dribble Tad Devine has sliding out of his mouth at the moment look pretty innocuous.
What’s even more maddening is that CLINTON HAS THIS WON. Barring an asteroid or an indictment from the fever dreams of Trey Gowdy on acid, she is going to win. She’s far more ahead than Obama was at this point, and is going to clinch in short order, but some of these people just can not help themselves and have to whip the base into a froth over the pretty, at this point, harmless Sanders campaign.
TRUMP AND CRUZ, people. Trump and Cruz. Hillary is going to be our nominee, so stop with the nonsense. We’re going to need Bernie supporters to take down the real big bad.
Baud
I am winning among the voters that matter.
Hildebrand
I think we have some folks who are rather jealous about the dumbster fire over yonder, and are trying to find ways to replicate such fun and frolic closer to home.
lollipopguild
You are correct sir.
HinTN
Our short little spans of attention. You perform a real service, Cole.
Emma
Well, John, I would agree with you but perhaps being called a corporate lackey, a stupid person who doesn’t understand politics, and assorted other insults from the usual suspects has just gotten up people’s noses.
Brachiator
This is the kind of thing that hurts Clinton. Playing hardball and pretending to be an innocent.
And I say this as someone who right now, prefers Clinton over Sanders.
But this is exactly the kind of crap that plays into the the idea that Clinton is arrogant, untrustworthy.
Yep. Clinton should give as good as she gets, but there is no reason to be a sore winner.
singfoom
Well, this thread won’t devolve into a HRC vs. Bernie bashing contest involving the usual suspects. DAMN THE PRIMARY ICEBERGS, FULL SPEED AHEAD.
Yutsano
The Mouth from Noo Yahk and the Canadian with eligibility issues that no one in their own party can stand? Yeah. You’re panicking over molehills. I distinctly recall the PUMA crowd by this point claiming never to Obama and how did that turn out again? I agree the focus should turn to the general now, but going this meschugnah this early is not helping.
redshirt
Purity is more important than winning.
Eric NNY
I’ve been pretty amazed at the anti-Bern rhetoric by many. BUT, I stay out of the comments on all other sites but this one. So I’m probably sheltered.
Emma
@Eric NNY: On the other hand, I had to stop reading a couple of the sites I usually read because I had had it with the galloping mysoginism. But I guess my reaction was pretty much the same as yours. Stay out of comments.
Hungry Joe
I remain in Bernie’s camp because Hillary does NOT have it won: She’s ahead and will probably win. There is a difference. Once that happens, if it does, I’ll be all in for her, because … Trump and Cruz. Cruz and Trump.
Re fever dreams on acid: Does hoping that Hillary and Bernie team up for Prez/VP count?
dedc79
Part of the problem is that a vocal but proportionally small group of supporters on each side are searching for, highlighting, and returning fire on the most inflammatory statements they can find from the other side.
satby
I just want it over.
Baud
I wonder if the Steelers were up by 10 in the fourth quarter, Cole would agree that they should stop tackling so hard.
I really hate this argument. You can’t expect only one side to stop competing in a contested primary. And even if Hillary gets a majority of pledged delegates, I’m sure she’d want as many delegates as she can get in her corner at the convention when it comes down to voting on things other than the nominee.
chopper
now just get a whole bunch of the internet to realize that and we’re golden.
WarMunchkin
*pew*
Policyless conversation anyway. LUKE WE”RE GOING TO HAVE COMPANY!
You know who I miss? Candidate Jesse Jackson.
Emma
@Hungry Joe: I doubt Sanders would accept. Revolutionaries don’t like to play second fiddle.
Librarian
Every time I read Tad Devine, I think of Andy Devine.
Scarcelight
There’s sort of an annoying tendency among Clinton supporters lately to assume that Clinton is entitled by birthright to Bernie supporter votes. She’s not, btw. If she needs his votes to beat back Trump/Cruz, she going to have to do a little wooing. If she won’t do that, well…maybe the Democratic coalition is the untenable one.
chopper
@Baud:
of course. running up the score is only an asshole move when you’re on the losing team.
Technocrat
@dedc79:
This is exactly it.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
If Hilary sees she is going up against Trump it’s well within her interest to bring up politeness. A polite Trump is a Trump who loses his base.
Fred B.
HRC is certainly not stupid, but a corporate lackey she is. Or do you think the rest of us are so stupid to believe that the millions she took from the big banks won’t influence her. Please don’t insult us. As a life long Dem I will never vote for her because she is a neo-liberal war monger who doesn’t care about about the working class. THe Dem establishment abandoned the working class long ago. I saw how the Mass Dem establishment treated Warren, they did not want her elected.
The fact that Clinton dragged out Albright and Kissinger as role models killed any thought I had of voting for her.The fact that she is better than the insane morons on the other side is not enough. We are being played. The sooner you understand that the better.
Emma
@Scarcelight: So it’s all about the ego?
chopper
@Hungry Joe:
i think the chance of hilz asking bernie to be her running mate is basically zero.
chopper
@Fred B.:
nice try, doug.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
1) I think you give twitter too much time and too much weight
2) how do you decide what’s “harmless spin” and what sends you into a nail-spitting rage and demand that Hilary fire people or you’ll pull all your hair out?
Technocrat
@Fred B.:
The problem with this argument is that she took millions from non-banks also, yet you presumably don’t think she’ll be influenced by universities and women’s groups.
Marc
@Fred B.: You sound like a 2008 PUMA in April. We’ll talk again in the cold light of the autumn.
Basically, I agree that there are red lines beyond which withholding a vote is reasonable. I don’t think Clinton / Trump is a hard call.
Scarcelight
@Emma: Or possibly there are honest disagreements.
By all means, continue with Berniebro narrative, though. It’s sure to pay massive dividends. Between that and all the hippie punching, you’re sure to lock up the election, no problem.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
Baud bring up a good point. Clearly Clinton is in a near panic sensing the impending bolt from the blue Baud win were Baud will simultaneously win both the GOP and Democratic party nominations.
Baud 2016 “Who knew he could?”
chopper
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
as i’ve said before, it’s gonna be interesting watching cole over the next 6 months.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Why would you want him going to funerals and presiding over shit like REGO and dozing off in the big chair waiting for a tie vote instead of on Senate floor actually being the leader of an independent liberal movement in the Senate?
a serious question: Why this obsession with the bucket of warm piss?
redshirt
@Fred B.:
I’d like to frame this response as an example of Neo-Naderism.
But then, I’m sure a better one is coming along shortly.
I mean, Madeline Albright?!?>!?!
Emma
@Scarcelight: Funny, I’m the one on record as saying that I will vote for the Democrat, no matter who it is, because the issues are too important to vote on personalities.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think that exact phrase was used yesterday by a different nym, but I can’t remember which.
msdc
Magical thinking is never harmless.
One of the main things that drove me away from Sanders was his advisors’ insistence on using made-up numbers to sell his half-formed health care plan. Now he’s doubling down on that, encouraging his supporters to ignore the delegate math and keep those $27 dollar donations rolling in.
A decade ago, the netroots loved to proclaim themselves “proud members of the reality-based community.” Five years ago, we were all crowing about the Republicans’ epistemic closure. Today a lot of those same people honestly believe they can Green-Lantern Bernie Sanders into a nomination he cannot win.
I have no problem with Sanders staying in the nomination as long as he wants, and to a certain point he will help Clinton become a better candidate for the general. But when Sanders encourages the Clap Harder school of progressives to withdraw from reality that does lasting damage to the party, and we need to shut it down with a resounding loss at the ballot box.
A Ghost To Most
@Fred B.: Party Unity My Ass!
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@Scarcelight:
Maybe a lot of us remember Nader in 2000 helping that putz into the Whitehouse and the tragedy that resulted.
Of course Nader’s Greens lost that purity cool when it came up they were taking GOP money to ratfvck close elections.
trnc
That was the actual quote, and it strikes me as somewhat different than the more inflammatory headline TPM went with.
I haven’t seen whatever the Clinton campaign said that this was referring to, so a link would be helpful.
As far as the path to victory, the difference in delegate count for the candidates was closer in 2008 than it is this time around. That could obviously change, but it’s pretty unlikely. I remember being unsurprised that Clinton stayed in until June, although I was supporting Obama by then and had voted for him in the NC primary.
Mike in DC
The primary will seem especially mild compared to the general election campaign.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think it refers to this
Which I guess may be harmless, but it’s either delusional or dishonest. The idea that Sanders didn’t compete in (just for starters) Illinois, Ohio and Arizona is nonsense. I don’t remember if he campaigned in Florida, but he lost badly. And now they’re selling a receptive, Clinton-hating media that 200,000 votes on Saturday are somehow more important than the nearly five million (I think) already cast.
Fred B.
@Technocrat: Oh she got millions from universities – the for profit kind? Exactly how many millions did she get form women group?
M. Bouffant
@Emma: When did “sticks & stones, yada yada” stop being relevant/true?
Iowa Old Lady
Thank you, John. Eyes on the prize, people.
jl
The Democratic primary campaign is boring right now. Unless something very unexpected happens, Sanders will come in with enough delegates from primaries and caucuses for him to use that as leverage to try to move HRC towards some of his policy stands and political revolution goals, but he wont be able to make a serious case that he should get the nomination.
He won’t win enough pledged delegates to change anything with his current plans to woo superdelegates to supporting him. So, he will lose the nomination fair and square, and will look like a fool if he tries to argue otherwise.
There will be more-or-less successful negotiations to get his support, and to motivate him to campaign hard for Democrats and turn out his supporters for the polls in November (The Dems did that in 2008, which IIRC was far more rancorous that this year’s primary).
HRC will be the nominee at the head of a relatively enthusiastic and unified Democratic Party, versus whatever mess the GOP goon show produces.
Not one or two, but many, very unexpected upsets and landslides for Sanders must occur in order to change that scenario.
Alex.S
I’m so old I can remember when Sanders was refusing to debate Clinton before New Hampshire. He had made a list of demands about future debates and… then everyone just sort shrugged and they held a debate. Arguing over debates appears to be a tradition in primaries, mostly because no one wants to be 100% accommodating and lose control over the parameters of the debate.
——–
The reason many people are annoyed with Sanders is that the campaign explained that they weren’t trying to win the nomination (states, not delegates? States where Sanders wasn’t trying to win shouldn’t really count?) Much like Sanders’ supporters arguments of “Well, if you just give Sanders a bunch of super delegates, he’d be really winning”, they’re making bad arguments.
One of the basic realities of primary season is that campaigns tell the media how their strategy will result in their winning. The Sanders campaign has told the media that they are not pursuing a strategy of winning a majority of pledged delegates. And the media (and pundits and twitters) reaction has been reacting to that.
AkaDad
This Trump supporter is glad he bought extra popcorn last week. Please proceed.
Fred B.
@A Ghost To Most: Why should there be part unity – to a party that doesn’t care about me? There is no two party system. Its all about the oligarchy. The Dems have not supported unions or the workers in a long time, They have gone for the money. The difference is the dems will throw us a crumb or two
Hungry Joe
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: 1) To coax more Bernie voters (bros included) to show up in November; and 2) Gore threw out that bucket when he took the job — he accomplished quite a bit as Veep. Cheney, too (“accomplished” covers a lot of ground). AND Biden. And Vermont would surely replace Bernie with at least a somewhat progressive senator.
Anyway, I admitted that it might be a fever dream on acid.
But most of this Hillary/Bernie rancor is tempest-teapot stuff. They’re running against each other; of course there will be hurt feelings and accusations of this and that. Show me a contest free from this stuff. It’ll cool, then disappear by November.
Baud
@jl: Sounds about right.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It is campaign operative hack talk. Nothing more.
Fred B.
@redshirt: Clinton is the one who spouted Albright and Kissinger as important. Or don’t you know what Albright was about?
wonkie
I thought it was all pretty mellow, until I “lied” the Washington Bernie FB page. I found out that a perfectly good Democratic Congressman has drawn a primary challenger due to having endorsed Hillary! (He’s a superdelegate). I totally take offense at this because its a swing district and expected to be a close race.. So the Bernie brats might get us a Republican.
I caucused for Bernie, but I find I don;t have much tolerance for the you’re-on-my-side-or- you-are-a-sellout emoting. Maybe because I went through a phase like that when I was a volunteer for Eugene McCarthy. Of course, I was fourteen so I had more excuse for acting immature.
Scarcelight
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: I’m not sure how that compares. Nader ran as a third-party candidate. Sanders is running as a Dem. Presumably, if he loses, he’ll bow out gracefully at the convention. But I don’t see any problem with fighting for delegates before then, no matter how many comments sections get all worked up about it.
gwangung
@Fred B.: actually, non profit universities regularly pay large sums to big name speakers. They also pay lots to smaller name comedy acts; they firm a good anchor fir people on tour.
Clinton regularly commanded six figure speaking fees from many non profits. That’s part of her business.
Now how much of this was problematic?
jl
@Baud: Of course, things would be approaching some kind of Democratic political Nirvana if Baud! 2016! had panned out.. but…
Remember people, if anything goes wrong with the Democrats this year, remember to blame Baud! 2016!, especially when you comment.
Emma
@M. Bouffant: Try a steady diet of insults and see how much you like it.
M. Bouffant
@Librarian: As do I.
randy khan
@Baud:
I think the basketball etiquette rule applies : So long as the other team is still trying to win, and theoretically could win, you play like the game is in doubt. (So, dribble out the clock up 10 with 5 seconds left, but play to score when you’re up 10 with a minute left.) With statements like Devine’s (ridiculous on multiple levels, but exactly what someone who’s behind but still trying to win the game would say), it’s pretty clear that Team Sanders is still not conceding.
Besides, compared to most other contested primary campaigns in my lifetime, the Democrats are being positively genteel this time around.
mclaren
John, shut off your twitter feed. Shut down your Facebook account.
Inside those walled-garden hothouses, everyone gets crazy. Out here in the real world, Bernie supporters like me are perfectly happy to vote for Hillary in November, and have no special complaints about how Hillary run her campaign. If she wins, she wins. If Bernie wins, great.
I’m good either way. So are the vast majority of Democrats. All that nutball stuff on your twitter and Facebook accounts is noise. Ignore it.
opiejeanne
@Emma: Yes, but don’t you dare complain about the mistreatment you have witnessed by some Bernie supporters, because it’s divisive to even mention it. It’s just youthful enthusiasm. /sarcasm.
Dear lord, I am sick of being told this crap.
Baud
@jl: People better be nice to me if they want to woo my supporters.
@randy khan:
Agreed.
PaulWartenberg2016
Isn’t there something about Trump’s camp trying to invalidate one of Cruz’s states?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@jl: I mostly agree, though the calls for a Calvin-ballish rewriting of the primary rules should make Sanders and Devine laughing stocks.
Really I think the important thing is that Cole should go on a twitter-fast. There was a poll in ’08 (though it seems like a hard think to quantify) that said that about ten percent of Democrats regularly read political blogs. I suspect twitter, for all the screaming, represents an even smaller sub-group.
Baud
@mclaren:
And for God’s sake, stop posting here.
opiejeanne
@Scarcelight: I got up and made an impassioned plea at my caucus on Saturday for people to vote for whoever the nominee is.
Meanwhile, Bernie fans were threatening not to vote for that debbil-woman Hillary, but we’re not supposed to point out the bad behavior of a few because it’s divisive or something, and both sides do it. I met lots of nice Bernie supporters who were appalled by the behavior of a handful of their own and told me so, but that handful does exist, and both sides were not doing it.
M. Bouffant
@Emma: They only bother me if they’re true, & even then I may not feel insulted if the insulters are insulting from their sad conventional wisdom perspective. Not that anyone could call me a corporate lackey & possibly mean it.
mclaren
@Emma:
You, madam, are talking about Balloon-Juice — where everyone gets a non-stop all-you-can-eat buffet of gratuitous insults and name-calling, 24/7/365! Open on Easter! Open for Christmas day! Insults all the time, around the clock.
Yessir, Balloon-Juice is the breakfast of champions for connoisseurs of insults. From “You have butt rabies” to “You are a dog-fucking piece of sh!t of the lowest possible denomination,” it’s fun fun fun here in the Balloon-Juice commentariat! Better than ebola! More frolicsome than a pit bull with AIDS! More exciting than a 227-car pileup on the 405 freeway at rush hour!
Yes, ladies and gents, welcome to Balloon-Juice…where intelligent discourse goes to die!
jl
@Baud: It never occurred to me that Baud! 2016! supporters were the type of people who need to be wooed. In fact, judging from the campaign platform, that kind of thing would seem to violate their principles.
redshirt
@Fred B.: I guess I don’t. What was Madeline Albright all about? I know she likes giant broaches.
gwangung
Yeah, John, you’re pretty far down the hole when mclaren’s giving advice that’s actually pretty good.
A Ghost To Most
@Fred B.:
The system is what it is. You can dream wonderful dreams (as I once did), and whine about what isn’t, or you can accept that the way to change is to work the system as it is, and change it where you can. Eyes on the Prize, not on the skies.
Baud
@jl: Whaddya mean? I’ve always been pro-woo.
different-church-lady
“Hey you, fella… the guy who thinks I’m a corporate lackey; the one who called me a neo-liberal war monger and who’s going around telling everyone I don’t care about the working class… you’ve got nice smile, wanna get coffee some time?”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gwangung: I vote the thread is won.
greennotGreen
@Scarcelight: I don’t think Clinton is entitled to the votes of
Bernie’s supporters (is anyone actually saying that?) but I think the candidate of the Democratic Party, a.k.a. The Not Insane Party should get the votes of Bernie’s supporters. I voted for Hillary, but if Bernie wins I will work my butt off to get him into the White House. No more Republicans, ever!
gwangung
Huh. It seems to me that being ignored is going to happen even with multiple, more responsive parties…its just going to happen at the coalition level and not at the party level.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
AnotherBruce
@Fred B.: So, you gonna vote for Trump? You know you want to, I can see right through you, ya transparent bastard.
mclaren
@opiejeanne:
Like the Loch Ness Monster, we keep hearing about this mythical species…but no one seems to come up with any hard evidence for its existence.
Name me five (5) people on this forum who have said they won’t vote for Hillary in the general if Bernie isn’t the nominee.
You can’t. There aren’t that many people in this whole forum that crazy.
This is an ignis fatuus, a pure fantasy. There’s a tiny microscopically small group of Bernie supporters out there who won’t vote for Hillary, but all of ’em put together wouldn’t even fill an all-night diner in Boisie.
Folks, the real civil war is happening over at the Republican side of the fence. These people are doing a complete meltdown. They’re vowing to vote for Hillary if Hair Furor gets nominated. Grab a bucket ‘o popcorn and enjoy the show.
NotMax
In WoW terms, Twitter is horde, BJ is alliance.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: MY STRONGEST COMMENTS ARE AHEAD OF ME!
gwangung
@greennotGreen: Oh yeah…same here. Would gladly work for Bernie. (But not with some of his more assholish supporters)
Fred B.
@AnotherBruce: You are indeed stupid. As I said I will never vote for Trump as he is despicable excuse for a =human being. But thanks for playing. Better get glasses
different-church-lady
@mclaren: 1
chopper
my favorite part of this site is when mclaren shows up to complain about insults. just perfect.
mellowjohn
@Librarian:
i think of Ted Levine – the guy who played Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs.”
mclaren
@opiejeanne:
Hey! That’s a great idea for a T-shirt logo!
You know…that slogan applies in every possible situation in life — from kindergarten to graduate school, from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to a foxhole in Afghanistan!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@chopper: s/he is at least not posting in yards, so that’s something
AnotherBruce
@Fred B.: I’m perfectly willing to vote for and fund Bernie if he wins the nomination.So who is being stupid?
mclaren
@chopper:
Offered by the mastermind whose idea of a debate rebuttal is “fvck you, mclaren!”
Comedy gold.
trnc
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ah, OK. Thanks for the spot.
joel hanes
@Yutsano:
I distinctly recall the PUMA crowd by this point claiming never to Obama and how did that turn out again?
Not so well for the PUMAs.
F’rex, how long has it been since anyone paid attention to Taylor Marsh ?
Or Armando ?
opiejeanne
@mclaren: Ok, that made me laugh.
I was not complaining about the insults here, but I have shut off my Facebook and severely limited my Twitter contacts. It was a bit ugly for a few minutes at the caucus, and the perfectly nice Bernie fans around us told us these people were out of line.
Fred B.
@A Ghost To Most: What is the prize? To me it is a better life for my kids that what they are now facing. Neither party is going to help with that
Fred B.
@AnotherBruce: Then stop making stupid comments about me wanting to vote for trump. So the answer is till you
redshirt
@mclaren: Fred B. in this very thread; Bob in Portland in several others. There’s 2!
I’m not sure if I can count Goblue72 as another, but it feels like that’s the case.
different-church-lady
@Fred B.:
Neither are you, from what I can tell.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@joel hanes: Jerome Armstrong revived MyDD, of blessed memory of hearty guffaws, upper middle class racists and one crackpot who cheered on Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor, for a brief moment almost a year ago, but apparently gave up after one post and is now a full-time yoga teacher.
And did Hamsher pull the plug on FDL? I do hope her one-time partner (RedHead? Christy was her real name?) is doing well.
opiejeanne
@mclaren: Fred B is giving a good demonstration of just that but I wasn’t talking about this forum when I posted that; I said it was at the caucus. There were more than 5 of them in the room, 2 in our precinct out of 37 who showed up.
You can disbelieve me if you like, but if you come here I can introduce you to my next-door neighbor who has said that she won’t vote for Hillary because Monsanto.
And yes, I know the crazy is over there on the other side. I tried to make sure people realized that a non-vote or a protest vote is a vote for the Republican candidate.
redshirt
@mclaren: I think his point is you are often quite liberal with the insults, so it’s somewhat amusing to see you complain about insults here. But maybe that’s a chicken and egg debate.
Scarcelight
@different-church-lady: I don’t think Clinton, as thin-skinned as she can be, would make it that personal. It comes down to: does she need Bernie supporters votes to win. If yes, she can cut deals to her left or to her right to get the votes she needs, but she’ll have to make nice with someone. If no, she can blow em off. But taking it like personal affront is pretty silly and probably counter-productive.
For all the lecturing of “unrealistic” Bernie Sanders voters, the supposedly flinty-eyed realists in the Clinton camp sure do take things personally.
redshirt
@Scarcelight: Will you vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee?
trnc
@AkaDad:
LOL! We’re watching Mad Max with our bucket of popcorn. You’re watching Silas Marner and praying for the excitement of, well, anything else.
Emma
@mclaren: Hey we do good of health care, recipes, books, and pets. Not bad for a pack of snarling hyenas.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Scarcelight: what deals would she offer that would win you over?
mclaren
@redshirt:
(You mean “brooches,” by the way.)
Okay, here’s a recap:
Madeleine Albright is responsible for one of the most infamous one-liners summarizing the whole neocon/Project For A New American Century warmongering:
See the TIME magazine article “Madeleine’s War,” 9 May 1999, for details.
The irony is that Albright’s suggestion for the use of force was all about preventing a humanitarian crisis — ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. So even though Albright’s quip has now become the poster child for worldwide U.S. warmongering, Albright herself was actually a decent and responsible Secretary of State (as opposed to the sociopath Henry Kissinger, who sponsored the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile and conspired in the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the 1970s).
Fred B.
@different-church-lady: Well what the hell is that supposed to mean? Nice meaningless snark
different-church-lady
@Fred B.:
Good eye!
redshirt
@mclaren: So, there’s nothing to Fred B’s denigration then?
opiejeanne
@redshirt: Thanks. I think there are at least three more who are possibly trolls or maybe just lurkers who have come out of the woodwork recently. Honestly, last night was like troll-central for a while.
We rescued the neighbor’s dog and brought it inside until she got home from work, and he’s been gone for more than a half hour and the cat’s tail is on perma-floof; she is going from room to room downstairs looking for him with her hair all standing on end and making worried comments.
joel hanes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
FDL is indeed gone.
Dunno about Christie anything; the important work at that site was done by Marcie Wheeler aka emptywheel, and she’s now at
https://www.emptywheel.net/
and still doing important work.
dogwood
@wonkie:
That’s too bad about the primary challenge in a tight race like that. But many have seen how effective that strategy is for the right wing in forcing ideological purity. That ideologues on the left would start a movement like that isn’t surprising to me. Ultimately those movements aren’t about the common good, or sane policy. They’re about power. The Freedom Caucus is a minority high on power. They have the entire Republican Party scared shitless and the nation as a whole held for ransom. To deny that there aren’t people on the left who would love to do the same thing is to deny human nature.
PsiFighter37
This is what I do not understand most about the Sanders supporters. They are absolutely deluded in thinking he still has a chance, and Clinton has (rightly) pointed out that she is further ahead than Obama was at this point (or any point, frankly) in the pledged delegate count.
I suppose I will make a snarky aside here about it possibly not being the first time Sanders & Co. having fun with magical math, but in all seriousness, I think this primary season has exposed the biggest failing of Obama’s presidency, and one that I have only come to ponder more seriously – and that is the fact that we elected someone who is superb at selling himself but has been an absolutely TERRIBLE – in every sense of the word – leader of a political party. The absolute decimation of the ranks of Democratic congressmen/women, particularly in the House. The demolition at the gubernatorial and state legislature level. The fact that at the onset of debate season, only 40%(!!!) of the Democratic candidates for president were lifelong Democrats during their public career. The fact that the runner-up is going to be an independent who has never built any kind of political machine outside of himself in Vermont and is possibly going to tear the Democratic Party apart due to his run (which I think is a small but real possibility). The absolutely incompetent leadership of Tim Kaine and especially DWS at the helm of the DNC. Steve Israel being a terrible DCCC head. The list goes on and on…but the Democratic Party has withered immensely in the past 8 years, and small victories here and there don’t measure up to the damage that has been done.
The party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, just like it was after the 2004 election, after 2016. We might get the Senate back, and we will almost certainly have SCOTUS for a generation after 40+ years in the minority, but the Democratic Party seriously needs to figure out how to build sustained grassroots energy. 2004-2008 seems more like an aberration in hindsight in terms of engagement at the grassroots level.
M. Bouffant
@gwangung: Taking $250,000 from a non-profit seems awful in & of itself. She couldn’t do it for just a first-class ‘plane ticket & a five-star hotel room, & let the “non-profit” get some (a lot more) money out of it?
And trade associations for profit-seeking companies shouldn’t qualify as “non-profit”.
AnotherBruce
@Fred B.: I am willing to vote and fund whoever the Democratic nominee is, because I don’t want that monster anywhere near our representative democracy. I was him to get so fucking buried that he becomes the example of what our nation doesn’t want. You have already ruled out voting for Clinton if she’s the nominee. By doing so you are making it more possible, maybe only slightly so, but more possible that Trump wins the presidency. I would not want that on my conscience. How about you?
joel hanes
@Scarcelight:
Clinton, as thin-skinned as she is
In what universe?
Did you watch the Benghazi hearing ?
Kropadope
@msdc:
Clinton supporters talking about Green Lanernism is funny for its irony.
Hillary will get her whole agenda through a hostile Congress through sheer
willpresenting the perfect consensus plan that she basically developed on her own and no one will question it!!!!chopper
@mclaren:
yeah i’ve said that so many goddamn times. no, wait
Kropadope
@joel hanes: It’s easy to look tough when the incoming fire is that weak.
mclaren
@Scarcelight:
The supposedly flinty-eyed realists in the Clinton camp also have not explained to us:
[1] How Hillary will get any of her legislative agenda through a Republican House of Representatives dominated by obstructionist fanatics;
[2] What progressive policies Hillary actually plans to implement when we strip away all the bafflegab of “I support an increase in the minimum wage but it should be done at the state level rather than a federal law” AKA “I plan to do nothing at all, but won’t say that”;
[3] How Hillary is going to find the money to fund all those marvelous progressive domestic programs she touts when she’s going to be cranking up funding for all our endless unwinnable foreign wars (3 trillion and counting for the Iraq debacle — how much will Hillary’s foreign wars cost?);
[4] What Hillary is going to do about all those endless money-sucking foreign wars and that magnificent domestic progressive agenda she plans to put in place when that recession we’re overdue for hits hard and the crazy Republican congress refuses to pass any stimulus legislation and since we’re at the zero lower interest rate bound, the Fed can’t help by reducing interest rates, so the U.S. economy craters with 25% unemployment and half of the states in the U.S. declare bankruptcy.
Scarcelight
@redshirt: I will, yes. IMostly because the idea of Ted Cruz (or Donald Trump) with a practically guaranteed Supreme Court nomination terrifies me, but also because they would far cozier with Wall St and corporations than she is.
Nevertheless, she’s not great on those issues. I think Clinton is willing to make promises when challenged in a race, but her instincts are more to to financial deregulation and free trade pacts than she’s willing to admit when running against Sanders.
chopper
@redshirt:
there was never a time when mclaren wasn’t an insufferable asshole on this site.
joel hanes
@PsiFighter37:
[Obama has] has been an absolutely TERRIBLE … leader of a political party
Interesting. I blame Pelosi for much of what’s wrong — I think she is one of the greats who has outlasted her time, and has more recently done actual damage by insisting on people like Steve Israel at the DCCC. It’s no longer the 1990s or the W years, but Rep. Pelosi’s tactics have not been updated.
opiejeanne
@dogwood: Those little piss-ant bomb-throwers annoy the shit out of me. We had a group of them in the California Legislature back in the 90s and we couldn’t get a damned thing done because they voted “no” on everything. Just a handful of these idiots were able to stop almost all legislation until people got so disgusted that they voted them out of the Assembly. Curt Pringle was the leader of that pack of hyenas, Speaker of the Assembly. Term limits, passed in order to pry Willie Brown out of the state legislature took care of him and he went on to infamy as the mayor of Anaheim who wasted a couple hundred thousand suing the local major league baseball team for changing their name. He lost the first suit and went back a second time and lost again. It’s only taxpayers’ money, Mr Republican idiot.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Hillary will just stick her magic ring on top of that great big lantern she’s got and recite:
In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, Beware my power, Hillary Clinton’s light!!!
And the Republicans in congress will fall back like the horde of orcs retreating from Gandalf at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
mclaren
@chopper:
Yes, chopper’s ideas and facts ran out long ago…but his insults are still going strong. Yay, Balloon-Juice! NUMBER ONE FOR MINDLESS NAME-CALLING!
Kropadope
@mclaren: Nerdiest mixed metaphor ever.
cmorenc
@Fred B.:
Well then, if Hillary does win the democratic nomination instead of Bernie, the working class will do SO much better under Comrade Trump or Comrade Cruz as president. Under the electoral system in place for the 2016 election, either sitting at home because Hillary is too impure for your tastes or voting for a 3rd Party purity unicorn will have the net result of incrementally helping Trump or Cruz toward winning rather than doing jack-shit toward putting your pet unicorn in office or giving any meaningful help to the working class.
opiejeanne
@mclaren: I think her plan includes working to get the Senate back and take back a bunch of seats in the House, which she’s been doing. A lot of those fundraiser monies are going to help finance the down-ticket races.
Iowa Old Lady
I’d say most of this discussion proves John’s point.
How long before the primaries are over? On the D side, I don’t even care who wins because I’ll vote for them. I just want the nastiness turned against the real enemy.
redshirt
@mclaren: And President Sanders has any chance of getting his priorities through this congress?
A Ghost To Most
@Fred B.:
The prize is what is directly in front of us at the moment,not what must be accomplished down the road. Without a Democratic president, none of what WE want to happen can be. Without a Democratic president, we lose the Supreme Court again. Change happens incrementally, one prize at a time.
Applejinx
Well, John, you voted for her.
I see this ‘tone’ foolishness as tone-deaf, ironically.
By that, I mean it’s a decent tactical move to put Sanders on the defensive and make damn sure he doesn’t get even more full of himself and crowd-rousing. Everybody entering the debate audience is gonna get frisked for birds! She absolutely has to blunt any and all enthusiasms after suffering three blowouts in states she was going to sacrifice (if not, nobody’s ever going to admit it now: they were ‘gimmes’ for Bernie from this point on)
BUT, it only stokes the narrative that Hillary makes the rules, supplies all the coins for coinflips, and gets to play Calvinball with the DNC because it is her personal property. And she gets to call off any and all debates anytime she thinks it won’t benefit her.
Good fucking luck trying that one with Trump. He will show up and debate an empty chair and all the networks will fall over themselves to cover the circus. She just CANNOT get used to playing these bullshit moves. This has to be a bluff, to get the Sanders people to not push as hard, but it has horrible optics and is a seriously dumb thing to put out there.
And I am very disappointed in this move. Part of the way I resign myself to voting for Hils in the general (apart from just the ‘not trump’ part) is, at least she’s tough and hard to intimidate. The message of this one is ‘my old Jewish Socialist poorly-connected primary rival needs to play nice with me!’
Fuck that. Tone be damned. Beat him anyway, Hillary, it’s not like you’re shy or retiring as an opponent. If you have to arrange for a freaking 200-year-old-hippie to be muzzled, God help you when Trump goes after you. Bernie is providing a preview for what the general will be and if it’s too scary already… D:
Kropadope
@opiejeanne:
Oh, so what everyone with eyes, ears, and a pair of working neurons knows needs to be done. What some are busy pretending Bernie has no interest in?
redshirt
@Scarcelight: Cool. Thanks for the bit of sanity.
redshirt
@Kropadope: And what is Bernie doing to win back the Senate?
Kropadope
@Applejinx:
I fully expect the GE debates to be Trump and Hillary on the periphery debating a pair of empty chairs at center stage.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Fred B. is on the mark about Hillary Clinton as a warmonger. His hit at Albright was a cheap shot and not accurate.
But the larger problem isn’t with Hillary, it’s with the American electorate. Anyone in either party who proposes some endless stupid foreign war becomes hugely popular, while any politician in either party who says “Hold on, let’s not be hasty, let’s think this proposed invasion/bombing through…” tanks in the polls.
And once America gets mired in a war, it becomes almost politically impossible to get out. The opposition party screams “Treason! Commie peacenik!” and the antiwar people fold like cheap suits.
To me, that’s the real problem with American foreign policy. It’s the way the infantile gullible ignorant American people always adore pols who are ‘tough” and “strong” on foreign policy (i.e., propose burning brown babies in some third world hellhole) and despise any politician who is ‘weak’ and ‘vacillating’ (i.e., advocates common sense and restraint before invading or bombing other countries) that creates America’s failed and self-destructive foreign policy.
SiubhanDuinne
@mclaren:
??Oh, debbil-woman,
???Debbil-woman, let go of me.
??Debbil-woman, let me be
??And leave me alone, I wanna go home. ??
chopper
@mclaren:
dude, come the fuck on.
in all seriousness, come the fuck on.
if you’re going to be an asshole to people (which is you) that’s great. stuck was an asshole and people loved him for it. cole is an asshole about half the time. CS is an asshole. lots of people here are assholes from time to time. you’re an asshole about 95% of the time. you’re actually the biggest asshole on this entire site! which is great, you make it work. more power to you. it’s an achievement, believe me.
but at least fucking own it. the whole ‘other people are just so full of insults!’ victim shtick doesn’t wear well.
Kropadope
@redshirt: Raising money for the DSCC and doing his job in the Senate well, next question.
schrodinger's cat
Didn’t we just have this debate? Which iteration is this? I hope this series finally converges.
mclaren
@redshirt:
What is Hillary doing to win back the Senate?
Every one of these criticisms of Bernie Sanders applies equally well to Hillary Clinton, if not more.
chopper
@cmorenc:
never mind that someone who calls themselves a “lifelong dem” yet “will never vote for a neo-liberal war monger who doesn’t care about about the working class” wouldn’t have voted for kerry, or gore, or bill, or probably even obama.
redshirt
@mclaren: Fundraising! Millions of dollars from Wall St.! George Clooney!
redshirt
@Kropadope: lol. Give me an example of either.
gwangung
@Kropadope: you’re silly, as usual.
Deal making has to start within the party…Democrats don’t speak with one voice…as this primary has shown.
Kropadope
@schrodinger’s cat:
No the last one was about whether disagreeing with HRC on most Middle East interventions makes me a sexist or not.
SiubhanDuinne
@opiejeanne:
Awesome.
mclaren
@chopper:
Name me five (5) times when I’ve called someone an “asshole” without providing any facts or logic to back up my accusation.
You can’t. In fact, I don’t even use expletives — I don’t use terms like “asshole” to refer to other people. Neither do I use terms like “cvnt” or “fvckwit” or “asshat” or other no-neck slope-browed pithecanthrepoid substitutes for actual thought and reasoned debate.
Why?
Because I have actual facts to offer and genuine logic which proves not only persuasive, but overwhelmingly convincing. And people who disagree with me hate this. It drives ’em wild.
You, sir, have found yourself reduced to calling me an “asshole” over and over again for one reason and one reason only…
Because your insults are fact-free and your discourse is on the level of a cage full of hyenas listening to a recitation of Aeschylus and snarling hysterical yips and yarrs in response.
Go back to the little kiddies’ table, guy. Adults are have a conversation here.
Fred B.
@AnotherBruce:Naivete is so cute. You and all of us are being played. The other side is so bad we are willing to elect someone who doesn’t care about us? I have seen this nonsense for a long time. Here’s the truth. There is no two party system. There is no party that represents the average working person. They both represent the top 1%. I am old enough to remember when the Dens did support unions ands the working class.They decided that the future was the money, i.e. corps and elites figuring that the the poor and the blacks would never vote repub. So congrats long live the status quo and the slow disappearance of the middle class
Gin & Tonic
@Fred B.:
Why am I always skeptical about the “life long” part of these kinds of statements?
gwangung
@Kropadope: Snicker. Raising money for the Dems? Believe it when I see it.
Kropadope
@redshirt: Well, he attends the DSCC’s big fundraiser every year, so there’s that. There’s his efficacy in getting policy riders attached to bills. He chaired the Veterans Affair committee and passed the most expansive VA reform bill ever which, per Washington tradition, was simultaneously not nearly enough. His skill as a Senator is AT LEAST on par with Hillary and I would say that’s being charitable to Hillary.
patroclus
John is right here. This year’s arguments are pretty tame compared to 2008, with Harriet Christian et. al. In fact, even the insults are pretty mild compared to back then. The mild tone, I think is due to the fact that Bernie just doesn’t do negative campaigning all that much. And Clinton’s campaign seems to have deliberately backed off too – although the Clinton machine is certainly capable of it. The only insults I’ve seen are on the net – by supporters. I honestly don’t think there will be all that much of a problem unifying this year. And the reason is because a blatantly sexist proto-Fascist is likely to be the Republican nominee who honestly wants to torture, waterboard, target civilians, deport 11 million people, build a useless wall in the middle of Big Bend and all sorts of other stuff. It’s not gonna be Moderate Mitt from Massachusetts or the Maverick who, as terrible as they would have been, are/were not proto-Fascists. Yeah, I know, these threads are argumentative between Bernistas and Hillbots and people feel insulted sometimes, but big deal.
redshirt
@mclaren: How is Hillary a war monger when she’s never had the opportunity to wage war? Note, a Senator or even a Secretary of State cannot wage war.
gwangung
@Fred B.: do better for you ratfucking masters. At least pretend you listen to the critiques made of Sanders. Stop assuming you’re talking to just white people.
schrodinger's cat
@opiejeanne: How dare you bring the dog into her sacred space?Disapproving kitteh disapproves.
chopper
@mclaren:
i didn’t accuse you of calling people an asshole, dummy. i accused you of being an asshole. which you are. i mean, seriously. you’re an asshole. it’s all hey look, mclaren’s here! what an asshole!
which, as i said, is great. you’re the asshole of balloon juice. now that stuck is dead someone needs the title, right?
mclaren
@gwangung:
To the contrary, sir! Compare this primary with the one in 2008. This Democratic primary is the very model of modern political propriety. Why, it’s practical a ladies’ tea social in Surrey circa 1920, complete with lace doilies and knitted antimacassars compared to the meat-cleaver kung-fu frenzy of the 2008 primary.
And compared to the full-on balls-out hardcore throttle-open hammerdown mad-monkey terrordome crazyfest of the Republican primaries in 2016…?
Puh-lease!
The Democratic party is more united and exhibiting more comity and restraint than I’ve seen in my lifetime, bubba.
Fred B.
@gwangung: Well this is a pile of crap.
redshirt
@Kropadope: That’s an amazingly weak response and you should know it.
Winning the senate means actually helping those Democrats running for Senate this year. Does Bernie do anything? Does anyone want him to?
dogwood
@PsiFighter37:
I think the Democratic Party is pretty impossible to lead. It’s coalition to too diverse and its interests too varied to be able to sustain enthusiasm on all fronts at all times. It’s also true that by nature, democrats reject authoritarianism. Within a few months of Obama’s first term, elected democrats were on tv criticizing him. And this was during a huge financial crisis. It was 2007 before republicans openly criticized W.
mclaren
@chopper:
Shorter chopper:
Asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole!
Like an infant rubbing feces on itself, your shtick has very limited entertainment value. Take it on down the road, kiddo.
A Ghost To Most
@chopper:
I presume you are talking current commenters, and not historical. That competition would be fierce.
redshirt
I think this thread is very healthy for the communal BJ society. Let’s get this stuff off our chests!
Fred B.
@Gin & Tonic: You tell me.I have never voted for a single repub in my 45 years of voting. What doesn’t fit your narrow preconceived notions. Too bad
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
It has any entertainment value? I mean, not for nothin’, but that comment might say more about you than chopper.
chopper
@A Ghost To Most:
totally. i mean there’s brick oven bill, corner stone in his drunk-ass prime was pretty epic, shit i mean stuck was off the chain from time to time. there’s been some major competition for ‘site asshole’ over the last 13 years or so. damn, what else do we have from the day?
♩ ♪ of all the trolls i’ve loved online….♫ ♬
different-church-lady
@chopper: We’re not exactly here for the hunting.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
having raised several children, i can say there’s certainly some entertainment value in an infant rubbing shit all over themselves. then again, i have a sense of humor.
different-church-lady
@chopper: Having never raised children, I’m thinking I made the right decision.
chopper
@chopper:
there was a time when paul (ppgaz, later thymezone) ran the table. truth be told, if i were handed the legit title of ‘BJ asshole’ i’d be a bit let down compared to the historical trend.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
there are many times when i would certainly agree.
redshirt
@mclaren: You do recognize you use insults and demeaning language on a fairly regular basis, right?
redshirt
@chopper: Omnes called me an asshole (twice!) last night so I think I’m in the competition!
mclaren
@redshirt:
One need not wage a war in order to qualify as a warmonger. One need only constantly urge that war be waged.
Hillary has a long and invidious record of urging that America bomb and invade a long long long long long list of third-world countries, none of which have any capacity to meaningfully harm the United States.
Hillary called for America to bomb Iran (Obama wisely chose instead to negotiate an anti-nuke treaty with Iran).
Hillary called for Obama to bomb Syria (he unwisely agreed, and now America is stuck in that quagmire).
Hillary has called for America to have “a more assertive foreign policy,” when America is already involved in four different wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan) and we’ve got special ops assassination teams beavering away at murdering and torturing and kidnapping people in 134 different foreign countries.
But I’ll outsource my main criticism of permahawk Hillary to Kelley Vlahos:
Source: “The Military-Industrial Candidate: Hillary Clinton prepares to launch the most formidable hawkish presidential campaign in a generation,” The American Conservative, 20 November 2014.
Boy, Hillary was sure smart to advocate bombing Iran instead of negotiating with them, wasn’t she? Look what a disastrous war we’ve gotten ourselves into with Iran because we didn’t follow her advice — oh, wait.
Never mind.
Or we can go to the article “Hillary Clinton: The International Neocon Warmonger,” from 2015:
Any way you slice it, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy comes straight out of the Project For A New American Century — all war, all lthe time. There’s just no foreign policy issue Hillary doesn’t seem to want to solve with cruise missiles and boots on the ground and JDAMs and cluster bombs.
A Ghost To Most
@chopper:
Ted&Hellen
chopper
@redshirt:
to be fair you have been an asshole some times. you’re not king asshole or anything but you’re making your way up the minor leagues.
dogwood
@Fred B.:
I’m old enough to remember when the democrats supported unions and the working class too. It was a time when the party dominated Congress and even republican presidents had to compromise with them. A good share of these democrats were Dixiecrats. Once the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed these working class union types decided there were things more important than economic security and they switched party affiliation. They are also a group who have have displayed intense party loyalty before and after the realignment. I’ve got a down and out cousin who would pass on free college, free healthcare and 20 bucks an hour if it meant voting for a democrat. I don’t think this is going to play out this way forever, because the world changes, but that’s the world we live in now.
mclaren
@redshirt:
I use accurate descriptions. “Slope-browed pithecanthrepoid” offers an apodictically correct description of chopper. If he doesn’t like the way I describe him, let him change his behavior. The guy offers no facts and no logic to back up his assertions. That’s behavior you’d expect from someone who is distinctly slope-browed, with a sharply receding cranial vault and a distinctly protohuman habit of knuckle-dragging as he walks.
What I do not do is hurl vacuous curse-words at others. That’s the standard mode of discourse among the lower tier of Balloon-Juice commenters like chopper.
Can’t handle the heat?
Get out of the debating arena. Otherwise, I’ll strap on my sword and cut you to pieces with logic and facts, rhetorically speaking. Responding with curse-words is such weak sauce that I feel entirely confident and wholly justified in calling people out for such infantile behavior.
chopper
@A Ghost To Most:
that was half asshole/half “WHAT THE FUCK?”. i mean after a while that dude was such a hot mess i just had to step back.
different-church-lady
@chopper: What am I, chopped liver?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@A Ghost To Most: T&H was also known as Tim and Spatula right? and still shows up from time-to-time?
chopper
@redshirt:
well, you have to realize that when mclaren tells commenters to ‘go back to gargling your girlfriend’s piss’ he’s doing it like hell of gore vidal style from the day. shit doesn’t count.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
no, chopped asshole. obviously.
(the best part of the hog, by the way)
A Ghost To Most
@chopper:
Yea, I took a couple months off the comments when that nymrod was still here.
redshirt
@mclaren: I don’t care about foreign policy. America is THE global superpower and that comes with a lot of baggage. I’d rather have someone sane manage it.
It’s domestic policy that makes all the difference these days.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
Do you have even a glimmer of what door you just opened, and how wide you’ve opened it?
redshirt
@chopper: I’ll keep practicing Skip!
inventor
@AkaDad:
I was wondering if you had difficulty typing with such tiny, tiny hands?
different-church-lady
@chopper: Ugh, please, I’m still dealing with today’s double-ended “involuntary cleansing.”
A Ghost To Most
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I am apparently not aware of all BJ traditions.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
hey now, he’s deep in phrenology at this point. you know, the ‘science’ of how black people are inferior because of their ‘forehead shape’. let’s just let him keep going and see where it goes. this may be good.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
As opposed to factually speaking.
patroclus
@mclaren: I don’t really agree with this. Hillary has definitely taken hawkish positions on a lot of issues from time to time, but not like PNAC. She supported the complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq as SoS; she’s been for engagement with China, she was against military action when Georgia erupted, she’s been for diplomacy in Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Myanmar, between Pakistan and India and a lot of other times in many places. She’s not like you – a non-interventionist purist – but she’s not like PNAC either. Her time as SoS taught her that diplomacy can work, and that’s her first option more often than not.
Unfortunately, she often feels like she has to take the hawkish position to demonstrate her “toughness.” Often, this has just been political posturing, but if given the reins of power, I’m not sure when she’ll be hawkish and when not. But you’re definitely over-simplifying and over-generalizing if you seriously believe what you just wrote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@A Ghost To Most: I could be wrong on that
Is anyone watching the Hayes show? I had to mute Susan Sarandon, of whose acting I am a huge fan. Could somebody tell m gif Hayes asks her about the last time she told us the Democrat didn’t care enough about working people or the environment?
redshirt
@mclaren:
That’s just a fancy way of saying idiot or asshole or pick your more common epithet.
Do you see yourself as above common swear words?
Emma
@mclaren: Lordamercy. You must be the loneliest human being on Earth, and I include lepers.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
hey now, that’s “sloping criminal forehead” talk.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: You ain’t even close.
Applejinx
Alternately, I will be fine with Hillary toning down contentiousness in the primaries if she also vows to start no wars, fights for $15 minimum wage and promises to name Elizabeth Warren chief wall street re-regulator, and fires DWS.
I am more than happy to embrace the Corinthians of it all, if it’s not a bare-assed lie. I don’t think she gets to put a muzzle on the tone of the debate after she went and threw raw (kosher) meat at AIPAC.
This is a desperation move and suggests Sanders prevailing is not impossible, merely unlikely.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: I think I might say “pithecanthropoid”, but I, for one, like the creative element, which mclaren can bring when s/he wants to.
Cacti
@Applejinx:
No he didn’t.
WV hasn’t had their primary yet.
chopper
@redshirt:
i guess you could go through all of my posts in this thread and find/replace “asshole” with “anus” or “cloaca” and be just fine if you wanted to avoid the gauche, simplistic vulgar tongue of the proletariat. makes the same point.
patroclus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, I’ve got that on – I like Sarandon a lot; she’s had some good movies. I don’t really pay much attention to her politics though. On one of the MSNBC programs, they had Gary Johnson on and highlighted a poll which showed him getting 11% of the vote in a Hillary-Fascist match-up. I think that’s a little high, but he could well be a spoiler if the Fascist does get the nomination.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: I love mclaren’s posts and think she is a BJ treasure.
mclaren
@dogwood:
Yes, everything you said is entirely true. But it’s more complex than that.
So am I — but I’m also old enough to remember when unions actually had 28% of the American workforce because the vast majority of the U.S. workforce was employed in manufacturing. Today, with automation, only 13% of the U.S. workforce is employed in manufacturing — most of American workers today have service jobs. This isn’t because of sinister or feckless Democratic pols betraying their base…it’s because automation has wiped our factory jobs in America. With the end of high-paid factory jobs in America for lots of people, we’ve also seen the middle class in America take a tremendous hit. By and large, the service jobs that replaced high-paid factory work offer shitty low pay.
Take a look at this one single graph of total U.S. manufacturing jobs since 1960. It explains a lot of what you’re complaining about. It’s due to automation — robots + databases + algorithms, not betrayal by Democratic pols.
Or just read the fivethirtyeight article “The Manufacturing jobs are never coming back.” This is the reality. It may prove convenient to blame Democrats for all this, but the reality is a lot more complicated.
The problem with this thesis of yours is that the Democrats had 60 seats in the senate and a majority in the House in 2009. But Democrats still couldn’t revive unions and definancialize the economy and put the Wall Street crime lords in prison and kick-start the middle class. You know why? Because now that the U.S. economy is mostly a service economy rather than a factory-based economy, with all the crappy low wages and no benefits that shitty service jobs imply, the monetary power of the middle class has melted away and been replaced by the monetary power of the financial sector.
Bino! Welcome to what Bernie Sanders has been talking about.
That’s your candidate, right there. Vote for him. Maybe he’ll be able to change things. Hillary certainly won’t. She isn’t even talking about this stuff.
But let’s face it…even Bernie Sanders isn’t thinking radically enough to really solve these problems. At the rate robotics is advancing, we’re facing a massive employment crisis in this country within the next 20 years. Self-driving cars, robotic surgery, you name it…the list of white-collar jobs slated to get replaced with robots or databases + algorithms over the next 20 years is staggering.
We need some truly revolutionary thinking here. Maybe Brad deLong’s social credit. Or possibly a guaranteed minimum income. Either way, what Bernie Sanders is talking about won’t begin to address the economic shrecklicheit that’s heading for us like a tidal wave courtesy of robots + algorithms + the internet eating the economy.
different-church-lady
@patroclus: It says a lot that even Tim Robbins got sick of her shit.*
(*It’s entirely possible I’m just making that up.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@patroclus: I’d bet half those 11% just think “Gary Johnson” sounds like a guy they’d like to have a beer with. I think that time is running out for people to get on actual ballots, no? I think the only person who actually could bring on some kind of consequential write-in campaign is Drumpft.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: But even noted asshole Corner Stone has me pied! I’ve got to be top ten.
mclaren
@Applejinx:
My problem with Hillary and the Clintons in general is that they have a long habit of saying anything, then pivoting to the right. I don’t trust Hillary no matter what she says, like the scorpion on the back of the frog it’s her nature to make a hard right turn after she gets elected in order to curry favor with the far right.
Doesn’t anyone else remember Bill Clinton’s detour to witness the execution of the mentally retarded Ricky ray rector during the 1992 primary? Doesn’t anyone else remember the enthusiasm with which Bill & Hillary proferred their viciously sadistic crackdown crime bills that exponentially increased prison time for crack as opposed to powder cocaine?
Even Bill Clinton now admits that hideous crime bill and the horrible welfare deform bill of 1996 was a huge mistake. But the Clintons keep doing this shit, because they have no real principles they’re not willing to compromise for an extra temporary polling point or two.
And goddammit, nothing raises a politician’s polling in this fucking country like advocating war. Absolutely nothing.
Plus, Hillary is glued to Debbie Wasserman Shultz at the hip. Far from disowning DWS, look for Hillary to give that DINO neocon-lite a goddamn cabinet position. That’s the way Hillary rolls. Like the scorpion, it’s in her nature.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: Asshole recognize asshole.
patroclus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: They put a map up showing where the Libertarians were already on the ballot, but it was about 15-20 states short as of now. They were really pressed for time though and only showed it for about 3 seconds, so I didn’t really have a chance to focus on it. Johnson is merely one of the 17 candidates or so for the (L) nomination, but he’s the favorite.
AkaDad
@inventor:
What I lack in that area I’m huge in other areas. I’ve never had any complaints from women. They swear they like me, not my bank account and I believe them.
C.V. Danes
@chopper:
No, running up the score is what you do when you want to strengthen your position before you sue for peace. You know, Bargaining 101.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: You’re a long way from top-10 material.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Dang!
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
The five stages grief:
5. Denial
4. Anger
3. Bargaining
2. Depression
1. Acceptance
The Sandernistas are at the Anger stage. Sanders himself has already moved to the Bargaining stage.
So I guess that’s progress. Baby steps.
superfly
@dedc79:
This.
different-church-lady
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: The five stages Sandernista grief:
5. Denial
4. Anger
3.
BargainingAnger2.
DepressionAnger1.
AcceptanceAngerAnotherBruce
@Fred B.: I suspect I’m at least as old as you are. But from what you said you should be old enough to remember the Clinton witch trials, and I see you’ve bought a lot of the Republican decades old propaganda about the Clintons. But you never did answer my question. Do you think that Hillary is a greater monster than Trump is? Because it really comes down to that whether you like it or not if she gets nominated. Your purity will suffer one way or another. Your non vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee makes President Trump more possible.
different-church-lady
@AnotherBruce: HE’S DOING IT FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!
Technocrat
@mclaren:
Why “viciously sadistic”? It’s not just hyperbolic (as in true but exaggerated), it’s an objectively inaccurate way of describing the bill. The ’94 crime bill was a reasonable response to conditions at the time.
Anyway, I thought the 100-to-1 rule came from Reagan’s crime bill?
@different-church-lady:
I am so stealing that.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: Dang!
Tim C.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I used to read and post at myDD long ago. I still remember Jerome’s epic meltdown over Obama. It was amazing to behold. And also, it really was much much worse on the dem side eight years ago. THe webotariot is the most passionate part of the party and its a petty small fraction that seven saying “No Difference” Enough people remember 2000 to know that’s obvious crap.
kc
Over the course of this campaign, I’ve gone from being neutral/mildly defensive of Clinton to disliking her (& many of her supporters) intensely.
It’s depressing that she is going to the nominee. She represents a huge step backwards from Obama.
Tim C.
@AnotherBruce: I still think of the Dem primary as the council of Elrond. Dwarves, Elves, and Men are still fighting over old scores but the flaming eye of Drumph is raising his army of orcs…
ALternately , when Obama comes out to give a speech at the convention, should we all start chanting, “THE KING IN THE NORTH!!!!” Over and over again?
Ben Cisco
@mclaren:
Inventive, creative, and on target. I like it.
Redshift
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Apparently she shut it down last summer, and then turned it over to some guys running a site called Shadowproof, which it now redirects to.
Christy is doing well; I’m friends with her on Facebook. She had some health problems a year or two ago, but she got through them.
redshirt
@Tim C.: Cool, but racist. Who are you calling dwarves?
Raven Onthill
I think it’s hippie-punching; I suspect that Clinton’s financial backers want to be reassured that she’s not going to suddenly turn into a socialist. I suspect also that conservative Dems want to deny Sanders an audience for his effective oratory; New York State is a big audience. In this election, a lot, ironically, is going to depend on what Sanders tells his supporters if Clinton wins the nomination. I hope he brings in some good deals, enough so that he can go to his supporters and say something like, “We fought the good right, and now it’s time for Democrats to close ranks.”
Damn, but I worry about Clinton debating Trump. Trump is so much the more effective speaker.
Cacti
@Raven Onthill:
The kids supporting Bernie aren’t hippies.
Just because somebody wants to punch you, doesn’t make you a hippie.
Princess
@chopper: Good catch. I didn’t spot until i read your comment but this part:
pretty much clinches the DougJ identification.
redshirt
@Princess: I know this is an in-joke on BJ but it’s definitely not DougJ for the record. He’s got better things to do now a days.
That goes for the next new poster with outrageous claims too. And the one after that.
Raven Onthill
@Cacti: “The kids supporting Bernie aren’t hippies.”
‘course not. But older people don’t know it and the very rich are also mostly the very out of touch. I haven’t seen an responses on Sanders from the very rich, but I am sure he is not loved by them. I’ll bet the banksters hate the man; they seem unable to abide even the mildest criticism, and Sanders is not a mild critic.
Tim C.
@redshirt: I think the more important question is who am I calling Orcs.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: Are you sure about #235?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Raven Onthill: I’m sure they’re terrified, that’s why the Kochs and the Ricketts and that NYC hedge fund guy who bribed the NY state lege to legalize gay marriage for his son are pumping all that money into oppo research, to stop the Revolution!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tim C.: I should like to be an Ent.
Ben Cisco
@PsiFighter37:
A lot of lifelong Democrats would still be in office if they hadn’t run like their asses were on fire AWAY from the president in the 2010 midterms. Right here in NC, Hagan took the ONLY shot she had at re-election and threw it away chasing the bigot vote.
redshirt
@Tim C.: Well, Republicans obviously. It works.
Bobby Thomson
As maddening as the Clinton crap in 2008 was, at least she had a semi-plausible path to victory at this point in the calendar if Michigan and Florida were seated in their entirety and if the superdelegates from states she won flipped. Yeah, it was bullshit hypocrisy, kind of like decrying superdelegates in January and then plotting to get their votes in April when you realize the gap is too big to bridge, which is why I gave her hell for it then and give Sanders hell for it now.
The debate thing was poorly done. A simple “No” would have sufficed.
Technocrat
@Cacti:
True that. I grew up around actual hippies. They’re wonderful people, no one sane wants to punch one. But I suspect “smug, sanctimonious asshole punching” doesn’t inspire the same martyred indignation.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: Yes. Sadly, DougJ has for the most part moved on. We await the next incarnation.
Bobby Thomson
@Fred B.: As a lifelong Democrat, I can tell you that purity trolls who start out with “as a lifelong Democrat,” before launching into arguments why people shouldn’t vote for Democrats, are never Democrats.
Tim C.
@redshirt: Oh good, and frankly given that I like roaring fires, malt beer and red meat on the bone….
kped
My god, can you imagine Cole’s reaction if Clinton was losing and she said:
“All of the super delegates in states I won should vote for me, and all of the super delegates in states I lost should vote for me too because I’m more electable”.
That’s the dumbest argument, and it didn’t come from a surrogate. It didn’t come from a 17 year old writing in slate (which infuriated Cole not long ago). It didn’t come from a random mystery person on Twitter (and i still find it hilarious that John Cole is seemingly the only one who sees the most vitriol from Clintons side…), it came from Sanders and his campaign manager themselves! On TV no less! But here, it’s treated as “eh, nothing” while Hilary’s campaign saying she’ll debate him if he changes his tone is treated as more Clinton crap.
Seriously Cole, get a grip.
Bobby Thomson
@Fred B.: Fuck off, Doug.
Keith G
@mclaren:
That is a reasonable context for thinking about the next few decades. Think of the joy caused by the irony many will feel as the FIRE sector of our economy shrinks it’s workforce by well over 50%.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kped: and it didn’t come from a surrogate. It didn’t come from a 17 year old writing in slate (which infuriated Cole not long ago)
I don’t remember that.
Cole’s head is with Clinton, his heart is with Bernie, and all the other parts of him hate his head for being so mean to his heart. I suggest more fiber, long walks and a no-twitter diet.
redshirt
@Tim C.: You’re a republican Hillary voter?
chopper
@different-church-lady:
5. Angnial
4. Anger
3. Angaining
2. Angpression
1. Angcceptance
different-church-lady
@redshirt: Well duh — anyone who votes for Hillary is automatically a republican.
Kropadope
@redshirt:
Well, Omnes should be in the competition too. I could probably make a decent run myself.
@different-church-lady:
You’re more than welcome in the competition. I’ve often wondered if your “different” church is the church of “Jesus Christ, they’re latter day assholes.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Citations?
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: No, they just want the Democratic party to more closely resemble the Republicans as far as its relationship with facts and toleration for intra-party dissent.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope: I think this year proves it takes an outsider to do intra-party dissent right!
different-church-lady
@Kropadope:
Who you kidding? We’re PRESENT day assholes!
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ll go ahead and count every time someone here dismisses Bernie’s chances of getting legislation passed while failing to acknowledge it will likewise be difficult for Clinton. You can probably find at least one example per thread on balloo juice going back several months.
As far as her intolerance of co-partisans questioning the details of her plans, just look to her last two presidential campaigns. “This is THE Democratic plan….shame on you Barack Obama.”
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Corner Stone doesn’t have you pied. Corner Stone has you tied up in knots by ignoring you. It’s fucking hilarious.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus:
lol. That you find that so funny says a lot. But also not surprising.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus:
The correct term is “crawlspaced“.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bobby Thomson: This.
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: Just out of curiosity, what is it actually?
different-church-lady
So it’s agreed: everyone here thinks everyone else here is an asshole.
kped
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It something he freaked out about on his twitter feed. A 17 year old girl wrote about annoying Bernie Bros in her high school, and Mr Cole about lost his mind with the Clinton campaign…for…reasons? Who knows, it’s pathological with him. At least he will support her when the time comes, but i have a feeling his support will come with 9 “OMG SHE IS BLOWING IT AGAIN WHY CAN’T SHE JUST RUN A GOOD CAMPAIGN CAN WE GETSOMEONELESEURGLEBURGLE” for every good thing he writes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Neither you nor I have a shot at the prize. We have our moments, but some of these fuckers are artists.
AnotherBruce
@Bobby Thomson: Dammit, I hate to think that I wasted all of that logic on that pecker Doug.
Gin & Tonic
@different-church-lady: Bingo!
redshirt
@different-church-lady: I actually don’t think many people are, including Omnes. And you! But I’m a hippy like that.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
It’s impolitic to mention it, but being a corporate shill does give you certain connections that a firebrand reformer doesn’t have. It’s probably true that neither Sanders and Clinton can bring the corrupt oligarchs to their knees, but for any initiative that requires industry cooperation (ie the ACA), Clinton has a leg up.
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: I have learned something new today. Thank you.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope: It’s Monday.
Oh, you mean the “different” part? My first ever BJ comment regarded Sarah Palin, who I thought of as the “church lady” at the time. I tried throwing ‘chuch lady’ into the name field without thinking, because I thought it was going to be a one-comment kinda deal. But then I saw there was already a “church lady” here, so I put “different” in front of it and hit post.
Then the field autofilled with “different-church-lady” every time I came back so I just stuck with it, and eight utterly wasted years later here we are.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: So many swear words!
different-church-lady
@redshirt:
Don’t make me punch you.
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: Iowa Old Lady is nice and Betty Cracker, of course.
Fortunately, the affable asshole is my favorite personality type. That describes at least a few of you assholes.
@different-church-lady: Hmm, good story, thank you.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: Go ahead. I can take it.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: The fox doesn’t get many small things passed, but the hedgehog doesn’t get one important thing passed.
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: Utterly wasted? I mean, I learned something from you tonight. You should take some satis…. (Dear god, I can’t…) faction from it (Victory!)
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: Utterly wasted… UNTIL TONIGHT!
Kropadope
@Technocrat:
Their relative success of actually getting policy passed in the Senate notwithstanding (Hillary really wasn’t very good at that).
redshirt
@different-church-lady: VICTORY! I think….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@different-church-lady: @different-church-lady: You cracked my shit up twice in three minutes. You weren’t kidding when you said your best was yet to come. I’m glad I didn’t quit on this thread.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope: I think it’s also agreed that neither Sanders nor Clinton are going to get anything through a republican congress.
So, I guess it’s back to Jill Stein for us.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not representing well for my state, then. The Masshole moniker is clearly not getting its adequate due from me.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Some people can paint.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Different offices. One can reasonably say that person x’s skill set will make x better than y in a particular position, Even if y is better on the margins in a different job.
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: I haven’t voted for Jill Stein since she ran against Mitt Romney and Shannon O’Brien. She was my first vote ever.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: One could say that, however I don’t really see any reason to believe that will be the case here. But I will agree that the principle you outline is theoretically possible.
AnotherBruce
@Tim C.: I wish we could “like” comments around here. But here ya go “like”
Frankensteinbeck
@Kropadope:
Your ‘Clinton can’t get things passed either’ argument isn’t a bad one, but there are important differences. I have heard four addressed in discussions of this issue. First, the scale of what Sanders wants to accomplish is so great that it would be unrealistic even under friendly circumstances. Second, Sanders is doing little to nothing to add Democrats to congress, suggesting his strategy to accomplish his goals is flawed or nonexistent. Third, Clinton is popular with the Democratic legislature. They would have her back, while Sanders would have to struggle to have even that support. This aspect can be big, because the stimulus and ACA process showed how the negotiations that limit legislation are often with conservative Democrats, not Republicans. Fourth, the math on Sanders’ major proposals are iffy, and practical problems with such drastic changes are not addressed. All together, the argument of ability to get things done is that Hillary (like Obama since 2010) will get some progress made, while Sanders’ proposals are so impossible they are not even useful as referents he’ll aim for.
TheMightyTrowel
@different-church-lady: And the Great Balloon Juice Consensus of 2016 was reached!
mclaren
@Bobby Thomson:
As a lifelong Democrat, I can attest that anyone who doesn’t vote for the Democratic candidate in this election is either a thawed-out member of the Third Reich or on so many hard drugs it would make Charlie Sheen’s head explode.
This election is a no-brainer. If you’re undecided whether to vote for Sanders or Trump, then you’ve made the mistake of concluding: “If I can’t have democratic socialism, at least I’ll get national socialism.”
EPIC FAIL.
Omnes Omnibus
@TheMightyTrowel: You seem nice. Consensus ruined.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Actually, you seem to be agreeing with BT.
Nerull
@opiejeanne: So when Amanda Marcotte implied that only childless women support Bernie (with the apparent implication that women only become real women if they have kids), that was an imaginary post?
I mean, it must be. Only berniebros are insulting and condescending. The internet tells me so.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: That never stopped mclaren before.
Omnes Omnibus
@Nerull: Marcotte is an asshole. Always has been, always will be. What again is her role in HRC’s campaign?
different-church-lady
@Nerull:
That was less ironic than you think.
Kropadope
@Frankensteinbeck:
So, he may not get free public university for everyone. If he reach some of the scaled down proposals; if he can make the loans non-profit, allow refinancing, help bring down other costs like books, etc; I’ll consider it a job well done.
He participates in the DSCC’s annual fundraising event and is building a massive list of potential donors that Democratic candidates may benefit from. He has his own race to run right now, so I can forgive his lack of immediate focus on actually putting money in candidates’ pockets for the time being. Before this year, his profile was basically non-existent, so what little he did with the DSCC was probably the limits of his capability. Still, I wonder what he could have accomplished within the last decade or more if he had put forth a Presidential campaign-level effort earlier. That’s probably my biggest problem with Bernie, that it took him so long to stand up and take a leadership role sooner.
Well, Congressional Democrats are just gonna sit there with their thumbs up their asses if Bernie gets elected. They all have their own goals, which mostly align with Bernie’s. Even if they don’t take up much of his agenda, they will probably send him plenty of nice things worthy of his signature. And I don’t really expect them to write him off anyway, he will be the top elected official representing their party. Petty refusal to engage in basic governing due to Sanders’s hypothetical election would damage the party immensely and they have to know that.
See also, one of the candidates has a history of putting forth policy proposals and trying to sideline Congress’s role in policy making. Hint, that candidate is not Bernie.
He fell into a trap putting out a single payer proposal before it was ready. Reacting to the Clinton campaigns pants-on-fire accusations about Bernie’s intentions WRT Obamacare and Medicare could have fallen well short of rushing out a sloppy, flawed proposal. That was, in fact, an overreaction. Personally, though, I think Hillary’s dishonest perfect-for-TV claims were a worse problem, though.
And, aside from all that, I honestly don’t see the need for Presidential candidates to put out these plans with such exhaustive detail. Outlines and a general sense of where the money will come from should suffice, given that no policy a President puts forward will (or at leas should) be adopted wholesale by Congress. What does HRC think she is? ALEC?
Technocrat
@Nerull:
Those pesky apparent implications. But the data do seem to support what she actually claimed:
mclaren
@Frankensteinbeck:
That’s dubious for two important reasons. First, the Republican House obstructionism on the Supreme Court nomination has energized the electorate in a whole new way. We’re likely to get a Democratic senate because of that base energization, and we may even get a Democratic House (I rate the chances of a democratic majority in the House as unliklely, like Nate Silver…but then, let’s recall that Nate Silver rated the chances of Trump getting the Republican nomination as “effectively impossible.”).
Second, we are overdue for a recession. This next recession is likely not to be as bad as the 2009 global economic meltdown…but since the Republicans in the House almost certainly won’t pass any stimulus bill to help a Democratic president, and since we’re already at the zero lower interest bound the Fed can’t boost the economy by reducing rates, we’re really going to be screwed hard in the next recession. Massive unemployment. Because nobody will be able to do anything to stop it. So it’s going to cause economic pain like you’ve never seen in your lifetime. The unemployment rate will just go up and up and up and nobody will be able to do anything (because Republican House blocking everything, and Fed up against the wall unable to reduce interest rates). After a couple of years of that, the economic anguish will cause such a huge backlash against the Republican House that Democrats will retake the House with a veto-proof majority. Then you’ll be talking a different tune.
Let’s deep-six this canard once and for all. Ever since 1968, no Democratic president has ever been “the leader of hi/r party” and no Democratic president has ever been able to do anything to help the chances of downticket Democrats running in congressional races. Why? Because ever since 1968, the rules have been such that they completely disconnected the President from the rest of the party in terms of funding, electoral base, etc. Presidents for the last 70 years have run campaigns completely disonnected from and totally different from congressional or state races. This is due to the disconnect in 1968 twixt the party and the president. The rules got changed in 1968 so that instead of the party deciding who got the nomination (as in 1968, disastrously, and 1964, disastrously), a series of primaries chose the president. But this means that with the disonnect, the President is now completely cut off from the rest of the party financially (Democratic presidents have wisely chosen not to accept federal funding because that subjects them to spending limits) and politically (superPACs operate independent of the party infrastructure).
So the false assertion that “President X has not done anything to help the party downticket!” is a complete fabulation because Presidents no longer can do anything to help the party downticket. State and congressional races depend largely on party financing and the candidates get determined by the party apparatus at the state level. This is just not true of the presidential election, and because of this, presidents no longer are wired into the state or local party apparatus as they once were.
So everyhing you’re saying about Bernie not helping build a Democratic coalition in congress downticket is equally true for Hillary. And guess what? Hillary can’t do much to build a Democratic coalition downticket. Hillary has a whole array of backers inside the Beltway and in the superPACs, but those backers mean nothing for selecting and funding a candidate in a state or congressional race. Let’s be clear here, folks — Hillary is getting money from NOW. And NOW isn’t invested in getting Democrats elected in all 50 states, NOW only really cares about getting a president who will veto efforts to repeal Roe v. Wade. Hillary is getting money from the Sierra Club, but the Sierra Club doesn’t give a shit about getting a Democratic supermarjority in the House, the Sierra Club cares about electing a president who will veto the Keystone pipeline.
You mean: Clinton is popular with the Democratic minority who are currently seated in congress. Since there is not likely to be a Democratic majority in the House, why should anyone give a shit how popular Sanders is with a minority in the congress that can’t get legislation passed?
The math on Hillary’s major proposals is even more iffy. The Iraq war cost three trillion dollars and counting. The U.S. economy is slowing, and Hillary has long suggested getting us into more endless unwinnable wars overseas. She wanted to bomb Iran instead of negotiate that treaty. How many trillions of dollars will Hillary’s endless unwinnable foreign wars cost us? We don’t have the money. We don’t anything close to that kind of money to piss away right now, with the economy slowing, China slowing down, the Eurozone possibly heading back into a major recession, and automation + the internet eating everyone’s jobs.
Assumes facts not in evidence. This is the “underpants gnome argument” for Hillary’s candidacy:
1. Elect Hillary
2. Massive Republic hatred and obstructionism
3. ???
4. Hillary will get things done!
Sorry, doesn’t parse.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: You are voting for Sanders. Got it. Please consider going for pithy. I mean, I have argued with you enough that I make a point of reading what you say. Please don’t make work for me.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
good god
to whom he’s spent the last few months insisting the all-but-certain nominee of the party is corrupt, because speeches
Yeah, Claire McCaskill, Chuck Schemer, Joe Minchin, Bernie Sanders… I can hardly tell them apart!
I believe I’ve seen you offer this defense before. It’s not…. good.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
TRANSLATION: “My brain is too tiny to absorb more than 144 characters of information! Please have mercy on an underpaid astroturfer in the basement of the Pentagon E-Ring!”
eemom
Regretfully late to the asshole-measuring contest.
On a completely different note: what ever happened to Tommy?
different-church-lady
@Kropadope:
Well, that way it certainly makes it easier for us to claim he/she has sold us out once she/he takes office.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Here I have to disagree with you. After Paul Ryan’s magic asterisk bullshit. Democrats need to nails down all the specifics. That’s how we distinguish ourselves from airheads like Trump and Randite mythomanes like Ryan. Those guys are all smoke and mirrors and “I would…uh, reduce…uh…waste-fraud-and-abuse…uh…and…uh…err…um…that’s how we save the five trillion dollars needed to make my plan work!”
Okay…no.
Just: NO.
I want details. Give me specifics. Lay out the numbers. Let me see them. If a candidate isn’t doing that, nowadays with all the magic asterisk bullshit wafting around courtesy of the Heritage Foundations creative accounting and Paul Ryan’s ERNON-esque proposals that violate the laws of arithmetic, then I assume the candidate is feeding me a pack of goddamn lies.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: And you complain about insults. Jesus wept.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: Or it could just be that single women tend to be (wait for it…) younger.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
You might consider it a job well done. But I’m not convinced Bernie can get away with small-ball given his base. His entire raison d’etre is that incrementalism is bad. He’d be labeled a sellout in the first 50 days.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: Jesus
weptstood there with his mouth kind of agape, blinked a couple of times, and then said, “Fuck this shit, it’s not worth it,” and went to his neighborhood hipster dive bar to get a beer..Technocrat
@different-church-lady:
Or that, certainly. But I think either rationale is a long way from “only Real Wimmenz make teh babbys”.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat:
Yeah, but to be fair, that’s gonna happen no matter what he does.
redshirt
@eemom: Sorry, you’re like 3 years behind the times.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Frankensteinbeck required a point-by-point analysis and much of it I couldn’t do justice without a full paragraph per point.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: I’d almost like to see Bernie get elected President so he can get burned by the “Where’s my Unicorn?” crowd.
Almost.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
It’s the old Balloon-Juice Catch-22. “Give us links! Give us references! Give us logical arguments to support your claims! Give us facts to back up your assertions!”
Then when you do…
“Too long, didn’t read.”
Kropadope
@Technocrat: His entire raison d’etre is that incrementalism is bad.
That’s my favorite response I get when I point out Bernie’s efficacy and pragmatism. “Bernie’s supporters don’t care about that.” There is a Bernie supporter right here right now telling you he cares about that. This also is an effort to link Sanders supporters with the emo-progs who bitched throughout the whole ACA debate, albeit without mentioning them by name. Sorry, I’m not buying into your caricature of Sanders supporters.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
Nah.
Humble proposals
From the Party head, offset
rushed Single Payer
;=)
redshirt
@mclaren: To be fair, sometimes your responses are very long. You need to consider audience and hour in response. Maybe only give a few lines of a response instead of the whole story. Maybe be nicer with your insults.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
Only for legislation that gets written by corporate lobbyists. And, sad to say, that kind of legislation is worse than nothing at all.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Omnes Omnibus: “Links?”
Omnes Omnibus: “Consider being more pithy.”
Mclaren: “Classic corporate astroturfing troll.”
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom:
Who really cares? I know I am opening bad, bad things by saying this. Racist, anti-Semitic bros are racist and anti-Semitic no matter how nice they seem otherwise. If you want examples, I would love to provide them, but the “upgrade” of the website seems to have lost the ability to provide those examples. Hmmm….
mclaren
@Kropadope:
The caricature of Sanders supporters is necessary because the mudslinging and caricatures of Sanders himself aren’t working.
redshirt
@mclaren: That’s Omnes. He’s a special case. Don’t respond to him if you think your style is better for it, as he’s only trolling.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: Ah, lol, that’s “your enemy”. LOL.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
“Sanders supporters” are an aggregate, not a point. It’s entirely fair to characterize his campaign as being about big ideas and large-scale change. That doesn’t invalidate your personal perspective.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s like the question: “What happened to Brick Oven Bill?” Who gives a shit?
“What happened to [R!ght To R!ise]?” Who gives a fuck?
“What happened to General Stuck?” I don’t give a piss.
These turds have swirled down the great porcelain bowl in the sky and the suction has sent them into the nether regions where they belong. Good riddance.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Proof, bitch? Come on, prove your claim. Or stand revealed as liar. Prove it.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
It can be worse. Outside of the Manichean progressive blogosphere, it can also have positive benefits. i.e. the ACA.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I hit mute when she used the word “Monsanto”. If this is accurate, I’m glad I did
In fairness, we can all retreat to our villas in Tuscany while the unpleasantness sorts itself out.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@different-church-lady: I don’t think so. For example he gets a free pass for supporting droooooonez, keeping GITMO open, and giving the NRA blanket corporate immunity against widows filing wrongful death suits.
What the “he/she sold out” people want, more than anything else, is validation. They want someone to tell them their views are correct and righteous.
The biggest example of that was Edwards. There was a guy who voted to repeal Glass-Steagle, to deregulate commodities and derivatives, who voted for the China trade deal which was 17 times bigger than NAFTA, and for the corporatist bankster bankruptcy bill. Not to mention personally co-writing the Iraq war resolution. But as long as he validated the views of the “he/she sold us out” caucus they gave a free pass for all of his atrocities and declared him the “only True Progressive”. (photo)
It doesn’t matter if it’s Sanders or Edwards, it can be anyone. As long as they feed their voters a steady string of red meat and validation they can get away with anything, including murdering 600,000 Iraqis.
dogwood
@mclaren:
I want to see candidates lay out specific plans and crunch the numbers as well. The problem arises when people then believe that the plan as described in the campaign will be the exact plan that will be adopted as if Congress doesn’t exist. I remember the month and months of debate and Internet food fights over Clinton and Obama’s health care plans. It was ludicrous. They each had detailed plans that were rooted in reality. That was good enough for me since I was well-aware neither plan would be adopted as they were.
Kropadope
@Technocrat:
Right, but wanting large scale change doesn’t exclude the possibility of pragmatism and curtailed proposals.
Also, if you think Sanders’s supporters aren’t interested in achieving incremental change where that’s all that is possible, I’d like to point out to you that the “king of the amendments” factoid is not one of the ones I can claim credit for discovering myself. In fact, that was pointed out to me by, gasp, other Bernie supporters.
eemom
@redshirt:
Iz not! He worked on the upgrade thingie not so long ago. There was some kind of foofaraw about him having the keys, and then Cole took them away, but he was still around after that.
Tripod
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
According to Jessie Ventura, he is going to endorse Clinton.
redshirt
@eemom: I meant in terms of being hated. You’ve lost your edge of late.
eemom
@mclaren:
That’ll be YOU someday, asshole. It was never General Stuck, who was loved by many here. You, not so much.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
Really?
What’s so “big” about the idea of returning progressive taxation to where it was in the Eisenhower administration?
This was a “big” idea back in 1932, when it was first proposed, but a long long line of Nobel laureate economists have signed off on high progressive taxation over the last 85 years. So this is not a “big” idea in any way, shape, or form.
You want an example of a big idea? Okay, building a nationwide hyperloop system for mass transit. That’s a BIG idea. Bernie isn’t proposing anything like that. You want another BIG idea? Okay, how about social credit, where the government nationalizes most businesses and distributes excess profits as a giant Earned Income Credit to every citizen so they can increase aggregate demand by spending it. They’ve tried it in Ecuador and in the Basque region of Spain and it works spectacularly. Social credit was a big deal back in 1932, during the Great Depression. That’s a big idea. But once again, Bernie isn’t suggesting anything that radical. Or how about a really big idea: knock down and rebuild our cities to be people-centric and light-rail- and solar-power-centric instead of car-centric. Create tens of millions of jobs, eliminate our oil and car dependency in one fell swoop, make our cities orders of magnitude more energy-efficient and space-efficient. That’s a BIG idea. But Bernie isn’t suggesting anything that huge.
Bernie is proposing modest incremental nudges. Eisenhower-era levels of taxation on the rich. More infrastructure spending. Reinstating the 1930-era Glass-Steagall Act to regulate banks. Basically, Bernie is proposing policies from the Eisenhower administration. Those are not “big” ideas, they’re minor incrementalist tweaks to get America’s house back in order, to where it used to be before Reagan rammed a Cadillac through the living room and set the drapes on fire and shat all over the living room carpet and took a fire axe to the walls and windows.
As for “large-scale change,” not so much. Bernie’s proposing change. Period.
All the other candidates are just offering “more of the same.” Tinkering around the edges. Barack Obama shit. The time for tinkering around the edges has passed. America is broken, capitalism is collapsing. The global warming is on track to breaking agriculture, which means a Malthusian dieback of the entire human race. We need change, period. Not fucking tinkering around the goddamn edges.
different-church-lady
Whatever happened to mclaren?
eemom
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’re a lot ornerier than you used to be.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Au contraire.
redshirt
@mclaren: This is a persuasive post and makes me think.
redshirt
@eemom: Right? He’s dropping swear words every other word and he’s entirely antagonistic.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
First off, if a little civil war is what it takes to put our political sphere in a better place one we’ve come out the other side, it might not be the worst thing in the world. I mean it will suck, a lot, for everyone. But things can’t always be sunshine and rainbows.
Also, sadly, given the US’s global hegemony, I doubt even Tuscany could escape such an event unscathed.
eemom
Anyway…..so Tommy just vanished? No glorious GBCW or ban hammer fireworks finale? Seems odd.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
But he’s not running on a “More Amendments” platform, is he?
But here’s my problem. I can find a dozen or more pro-Sanders articles decrying incrementalism (in fact just Google “incrementalism”). Of course, that might seem like cherry-picking to you.
So I’ll ask, what is the essential difference between the scope of what he expects to do, and the scope of what Clinton expects to do?
Kropadope
@eemom:
I disagree, I think he has calmed down quite a bit lately. I remember a time not too long ago he would attack me out of the blue for generally things I didn’t even say. He’s actually interested in communicating now, I say it’s a step in the right direction.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Fuck you.
mclaren
@eemom:
General Stuck was a piece of human garbage who deserves the obloquy and oblivion to which he has been rightly consigned. It stands to reason that sociopaths like you adored sociopaths like him, because birds of a feather, kiddo. Sociopaths praise and adore other sociopaths.
Rest assured your grave will be a urinal used by a vast public that loathes the kind of cruelty and viciousness you and the late unlamented General Stuck represent.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@eemom: he still shows up from time to time. He surfaces and compliments me on the photos I post. but he largely lurks.
Kropadope
@Technocrat: I expect their legislative accomplishments to be very similar, seeing as how they are pretty much entirely dependent on Congress in that regard, anyway.
I think the big difference will be in appointments and regulatory policy. As president, Bernie could use his executive orders (within the bounds of the law, of course) and his appointments in ways that will help make clearer the need for his more ambitious policies and providing a strong foundation to build those policies on once those ideas become more politically tenable, even if that’s after he’s out of office.
There are studies that can be done, tweaks to enforcement priorities, cultural signaling that can help push states to make changes and probably lots more I’m not thinking of that a president can do to improve society without Congress.
Also, speaking of culture, one of the top reasons I’m not to keen on HRC getting elected is that it sends a signal that you can engage in alternate reality mythmaking to a degree that would make Mitt Romney proud and still be elected as a Democrat. That’s bad. That’s especially bad if her presidency isn’t viewed as being successful going into 2020, a census year. You can be a liar, you can be ineffective, don’t be both.
redshirt
@mclaren: :
So, just to summarize, you feel responses like this are fair and balanced, and not at all vicious and insulting and something that other people might take great offense to?
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Bring condoms. I’d also like to meet in a public place first, spend some time, make sure you’re stable.
Jean
@Redshift: Glad to hear that Christy from FDL is doing well. I used to like her Saturday morning posts. While the the heated arguments against Sanders and Hillary haven’t risen to the level of vitriol in 2008, I’m still reminded of those days lately. Never went back to FDL, MYDD, etc.
Lately, I can no longer read the commentary at the few blogs I used to enjoy reading. I read the main posts, skip the comments thread, and move on. The most dismaying example is the frog pond at Booman’s place. I was only regularly reading about 3 blogs anyway. Now I’m down to Balloon Juice where I do read commentary, and the main posts at TPM.
What’s amazing to me are the people who profess deep historical as well as current knowledge on issues, presidents, candidates, and campaigns without so much as a glimmer of self-doubt.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
So you’re saying that Bernie’s campaign is not about “big” ideas, but incremental change (as you define incremental)..
That’s bullshit, mclaren. I’m not in the habit of pretending to read people’s minds, but I have a hard time believing you believe that. Single Payer and Free College are BIG ideas – in our current political climate. Taxing wall street speculation is a BIG idea.
It’s one thing to claim that big ideas are possible. I think that’s Bernie’s claim. But even he doesn’t pretend they aren’t big:
ETA: You say the time for tinkering around the edges has passed. Kropadope says that Bernie could do some studies and tweaks around the edges. It’s like you guys are supporting a Rorschach test.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: You misinterpreted. How odd.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
To be perfectly frank, I am not at all sure of what Hillary Clinton proposes to do, what with all the hedging and doubletalk and bafflegab in her proposals.
Case in point: Hillary claims “I support raising the minimum wage.” But when you examine, Hillary says she doesn’t want to pass a federal law requiring a raise in the minimum wage, she says she wants the states to take care of it. But without a federal law, the states by and large won’t do it, so what she’s really proposing is…nothing. Doing nothing at all.
Another specific example of Hillary’s waffling bafflegab: she says she agrees with Bernie that we need to reform the banking system but she says breaking up the Too Big To Fail banks isn’t adequate because the shadow banking sector is bigger today than the regular banks. So Hillary says “we need to do something to regulate the shadowing banking sector.” But what? She never says. How do we pass this legislation? She offers no specifics. What would this proposed legislation say? She never tells us. How the hell do we even do the accounting to figure out what risks the shadow banking sector is taking with derivatives, when current accounting laws don’t require them to divulge this info? Hillary has nothing to say on the subject.
So once again, Hillary is saying something that sounds good, but that boils down to nothing at all.
Bernie proposes breaking up the big banks. That’s a specific policy. It’s a fact we can point to. What does Hillary stand for in the way of financial reform? Bafflegab. Nebulous waffling. Where are the specifics? What are her actual policies?
Hillary “stands for” stuff in the same way that Bill Clinton “stood for” stuff and the same way that Richard Nixon “stood for” stuff. Basically, these pols told us “I like the general idea of [x]” and then once elected they blew off any policies related to [x] because they had done a bait-and-switch on the voting public by claiming “I like the general idea of [x].”
It’s the old old scam. “I stand for freedom and prosperity for everyone. I stand for liberty for every America.” Yeah, everyone stands for that. GIVE US YOUR SPECIFIC POLICIES.
I’m not getting them from Hillary. Bernie, yes, but Hillary’s website is just a miasma of “Hillary Clinton stands for [x].” That’s empty rhetoric.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Gilbert is a giant compared to dilettantes like Sarandon.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
And to be clear, this is not a “big” policy to you?
mclaren
@Technocrat:
You have just contradicted your entire argument with your quote from Sanders.
Read it.
He says “People want real change.” Not big change. No huge tectonic upheavals.
Just actual change.
The rest of the pols running in the 2016 presidential election are promising smoke and mirrors, empty rhetoric, tinkering around the edges. “Hope and changey” B.S. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” “Make America Great Again.” “Soy Hillary Clinton y estamos todos juntos.”
No real change.
We have reached the degraded and pathetic nadir in America where modest actual change is now regarded as running-around-with-our-hair-on-fire transformative tectonic upheaval.
Nope. Bernie’s just putting us back to the Eisenhower administration in terms of policies. Ask presidential historians. See if you can find one who claims that the Eisenhower administration was a transformative presidency. It wasn’t.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, that wasn’t offer? Sorry, I went with that interpretation since it was more fair to you personally than suggesting you were resorting to insults since you had no honest way of rebutting my claim.
Kropadope
@mclaren:
Most real change is incremental. Also, something a few people here (not you, that I’ve seen) fail to grok is that Revolution does not mean instantaneous.
dogwood
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
That’s the crux of it isn’t it? I don’t take pundits who are always wrong seriously, and I never trust the judgment of the John Edwards crowd. There was no way you could look at his thin record in public life and conclude he was a champion of anyone other than John Edwards. But he said the right things and validated their feelings.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Do you really lack that much of a sense of humor?
mclaren
@Technocrat:
Nosir, it is not.
Back before the 1990s, there were many thousands of small banks in America. Then after the Reaganoids got finished and the Drunk-Driving C Student ran amok, America turned into the Land of the Giant Banking monopoly, with a couple of huge banks gobbling up all the others.
Breaking ’em up is just putting things back to where they used to be.
That’s “big”?
Not likely. It’s obeying the anti trust laws on the books. Maybe obeying the law is a “big” policy change to you. To the rest of us, not so much.
eemom
@mclaren:
General Stuck had more kindness and decency in his little finger than you’ve ever been able to muster in a single one of the God knows how many gazillions of words you’ve spewed on this blog.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Now who can argue with that.
NR
@PsiFighter37: Gonna stay out of the Hillary v. Bernie pie fights. It’s pretty pointless by now anyway.
But I just want to say it’s very surprising to see someone finally say this here, of all places. And it’s true. Obama has been absolutely horrible for the Democratic party, and arguably for the country, since his few accomplishments have to be weighed against the political power the Republicans now hold as a result of his first two years in office.
It comes back to one issue: From day one in office, Obama cared more about making Republicans happy than he did about making his base happy, or doing what was best for the country. He ran, and got elected, on a platform of change, which in 2008 was an explicit repudiation by the electorate of Republican policies. The voters did not want more Republican policies enacted. They very specifically and explicitly voted against that, and by a significant margin.
Yet Obama refused to fight them. Exhibit A on this was the stimulus. Obama had 70% approval ratings in his first few months in office, and with public anxiety about the economy, he could have passed anything he wanted to fix it. And he still went with a stimulus that even his own advisers admitted was half the size of what was really needed, and then gave away a third of what was left in the form of stimulus-useless tax cuts. And he did it all to appease Republicans. Who never had any intention of voting for it anyway.
The stimulus was inadequate to the task at hand and produced a sluggish recovery, which planted the seeds for an electoral disaster in 2010. But Obama still persisted in his strategy. The country was hungry for strong leadership in a new direction, and yet Obama made the rehabilitation of the GOP his mission in life, co-opting and endorsing their policies, and bragging about how many of their ideas he’d included in his legislation. People didn’t want Republican ideas. They voted against them in 2008. But Obama gave them nothing to vote for in their place.
To be fair, not all the blame rests with Obama. The weak Democratic leadership in Congress is also at fault for a lot of what happened. But if Obama had actually delivered, or at least tried to deliver, the change he promised and was elected on, we would be in a much better position today. I can only hope that if she wins, Hillary won’t make the same mistakes.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Provably false.
Most real change is dramatic and requires massive convulsions. That’s why Bernie’s proposals, as modest as they are, almost certainly are not sufficient to fix America’s problems.
When the robotic revolution hits hard and we get an unemployment rate north of 60%, you’ll find out exactly what real change requires.
Hint: it ain’t incremental. Raising the minimum wage to $18/hr for the 20% of the population that’s still working at that point won’t cut it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
My god you’re an idiot
Kropadope
@mclaren:
He did oversee a transformation in out transportation infrastructure that, sadly, hasn’t been improved upon nearly enough since.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Technocrat
@mclaren:
“just”.
Bernie’s “just” reversing 54 years of American politics – and there it is. The idea of unwinding a half century of relentless inertia isn’t even a biggie to you, it’s a “just”. It’s not HOLY SHIT WHAT, it’s “just putting us back”. So simple.
And this is why I think his supporters won’t be satisfied with a mild reduction in, say, federal loan interest rates. Because that’s not his value proposition. His value proposition is that he’s going to transform shit. When the juices start flowing you make that obvious.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: My god you’re predictable.
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
Earlier, when I said I’d have a hard time finding a supporter who didn’t seem like a strawman? Well, here’s one. I doubt he will be happy with tweaks.
mclaren
@eemom:
Since this is coming from the toxic sociopathic rage-holic who wrote, back in 2012, about me:
your words are as empty as air.
Like the late unlamented piece of human garbage General Stuck, you are a contorted hate puppet who lives only to shriek envenomed verbal abuse.
Keep screaming your hate. Everyone recognizes you for what you are, shudders, and turns away to put their head between their knees in order to avoid puking.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Avoiding profanity does not mean not being an asshole.
Kropadope
@NR:
If you were one of the people who actually paid attention to Obama in 08, you would realize that the major point of the change he was proposing was the tenor of the debate between the parties. Furthermore, he explicitly ran on recognizing (the decidedly rare) good proposals from the other side and embracing them. What you are complaining about is literally the entire reason I chose him in 08.
Of course, we all know that the Republicans then decided to do the opposite of what Obama wanted, updated daily. Still, though, he had to be seen as trying to make good on his promises. Despite “wasting his time” trying to work with Republicans, however, he has still been a massively successful president. And he is not to blame for midterm election dropoff. That has been the way things have happened for a long time. plus, the media was pushing for the Rs big time during the mid-terms. Some things are just beyond the President’s control.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
Well, you know, if you claim that undoing the Reaganoid/Bush policies of endless tax cuts for billionaires and limitless expansion of the national security is a major undertaking, you’d better be aware that we’re already well underway in that process. Obama, as minor as his tinkering around the edges has been, has at least broken with the previous Reagan/Bush policies of continually getting us involved in more and more endless unwinnable wars overseas. (Hillary would represent a step backward from that policy.)
Obama signed off on the initial Bush-era tax cuts for billionaires in the 2012 debt ceiling showdown, then more recently he’s refused and has presided over an increase in the marginal tax rate on capital gains.
Once again, that’s a move away from the Reagan/Bush policies of basically turning America into the Confederacy.
The change is already underway. If for no other reason, simply because we can’t afford more 3-trillion-dollar-plus unwinnable foreign wars and more multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts for the billionaires, even if the American people wanted them…which they clearly don’t.
So casting Bernie as ‘the guy who is going to turn back 54 years of policy’ isn’t accurate. The tide has already turned. Bernie is merely making it explicit. Hillary pretty much wants to reverse course and go back to the Reagan/Bush policies, but with a smiley face and kinder gentler rhetoric. Plus, women’s issues! We can make sure under Hillary that the public bathrooms we erect from the vast armies of the homeless middle class are unisex-safe and LBGT-friendly!
Kropadope
@Technocrat: His supporters, by and large, will be paying attention to what the government is doing. If Congress is a stumbling block for perfect policies, I’m sure 98+% of Bernie’s supporters would be fully on board for successfully implementing pared-down policies. The only situation I see them truly getting mad at a leader for “only” providing incremental change is in a scenario where they didn’t even try for the stretch goal (or even the barely sufficient goal).
ETA: As far as mclaren (s)he says she plans on voting for Hillary. If that isn’t a demonstration of acceptance of ugly political realities, I don’t know what is.
redshirt
@mclaren:
See, even if you disagree with the person vociferously, this kind of language seems beyond the pale, and by stating it as such you’ve created a half dozen or more enemies, people who might otherwise agree with your actual point but now will go out of their way to tell you to screw yourself. Do you get why?
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, eemom’s appalling and disgraceful vowel movements offer a continual reminder of that.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
I often find your arguments to be immensely well-structured, if not completely persuasive. But you are just bullshitting me at this point. I will point out that neither of us think it is remotely possible that he can break up the banks, and let that fact stand as proxy for the definition of “big”.
Kropadope
@Technocrat:
Again, no one said any of this would be instantaneous. If Bernie can lay a solid foundation for change and put changes to entrenched problematic policy on the radar or even get some positive momentum, that’s a BFD.
NR
@Kropadope:
The major point? Not hardly. He made his campaign about making big changes from the Bush/Cheney years. He hit those points over and over again throughout the campaign. His selling point was “We’re going to do things differently than the Republicans,” not “We’re going to keep implementing their policies.”
His campaign was all about change, from top to bottom.
There were two reasons for the 2010 midterm disaster: The sluggish economic recovery, and depressed enthusiasm from the Democratic base. Both of those things have the same cause: Obama’s constant desire to appease Republicans.
As I said, he is not 100% to blame, but if he had delivered the change he promised, instead of prioritizing making Republicans happy over doing so, we would be much better off today.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Whereas describing someone eemom disgrees with by saying “There is a crazy person in the room. Everyone back away slowly” is not “beyond the pale.”
Sure. I get it. Bullies must be worshiped, and their victims must be savagely chided if they dare to defend themselves.
That’s standard operating procedure for America, the land of the bully worshiper. Proof once again that “the American people, taking them by and large, are the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the fall of the Eastern empire.”
Technocrat
@Kropadope:
If we go with “by and large”, then fair enough. The reason I took it this far is to defend against the idea that I was caricaturing you. I came by my impressions honestly, and I think some of why is evident in this thread.
ETA: I really see two separate arguments being made. Yours, and mclaren’s.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Jesus, you’re a stupid little fuck.
I’m sorry Obama didn’t make your rightwing stepdad cry.
I hope someday you can forgive your mom for choosing him over you.
redshirt
@mclaren: I do agree that many posters on this blog bully you, use extreme language with you. But do you admit any cause for that? Have you insulted others first?
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What the fuck?
Seek professional help, dude. You clearly have some major issues.
Kropadope
@NR:
So, I was just imagining all that he was saying about the discourse in Washington being broken? What he wanted to do different from the Republicans had nothing to do with refusing to replicate the way they leveraged their questionably-obtained political power to push through dramatic policy changes?
If the “change” Obama was pushing were as simplistic as you suggest, pursuing D policies over R policies, every voter would rightly have said “No shit, Sherlock, What you are saying now is basically meaningless, I’m voting for Hillary.” Just because you didn’t truly pay attention to Obama and made him a cipher for your own lefty wishes, doesn’t change the actual facts of what happened, sorry.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
Honesty I’m not.
The Sherman anti-trust act is a very big hammer. The problem with our economic system is not so much that presidents lack the legal or administrative engines to effect genuine change, as that our presidents lack the will to use those legal and administrative engines.
I wold contend that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act can smash CitiCorp and Chase and Goldman Sachs and Google and Apple and Microsoft and Uber and Wal*Mart and Amazon.com and Comcast and Adelphia and dozens of other brutal sadistic and quite illegal monopolies, monopsonies, and duopolies and triopolies and tetraopolies.
I would remind you that American monopolism is so extreme today that only six companies are today responsible for almost all books printed in America, almost all music sold on CD in America, almost all movies made in Hollywood, almost all DVDs manufactured and sold in America, and almost all video games made and sold in America.
Six. Frickin’. Companies.
See the article “These 6 companies own 90% of the media in America,” Business Insider, 2012, and tell me the Sherman Anti-Trust Act cannot and should not be used to smash these giant monopolies. And if the Sherman Anti-Trust Act can do that for media monopolies, it can sure as hell do it for banking monopolies and duopolies and triopolies.
If you want your mind really blown, take a look at the article “The Four Companies That Control the 147 Companies That Own Everything,” Forbes magazine, 2011.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: Hit a nerve, did I? Maybe by the time you’re thirty you can afford your own place, then you won’t have to call him “Sir” and ask to borrow the car.
Good luck.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m not the one posting my insane and frankly more than a little creepy Oedipal fantasies on a public forum, dude.
I mean it. Seek help. You clearly need it.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
I agree, in principle. But you also have to account for the fact that nearly half of our 300 millions are vehemently opposed the the actions of a Democratic President. The “consent of the governed” is an underlying covenant of democracy, and it stands – regrettably – apart from policy.
Kropadope
@NR:
If I were to take you as representative of voters disappointed in Obama, that drop off had more to do with their own unrealistic expectations and complete lack of understanding of what Obama actually was proposing during his campaign.
Of course I don’t really think this is the case. There is always a drop-off during the mid-terms, because too many people don’t care about anything other than the presidency.
redshirt
@mclaren: See, this stuff freaks me out and makes me wish I could vote for Bernie.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @NR:
Kropadope <- rooting for injuries.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m not the one posting my insane and frankly more than a little creepy O*dipal fantasies on a public forum, dude.
I mean it. Seek help. You clearly need it.
mclaren
@redshirt:
They try to bully me.
What happens is that when these verbal bullies reach out a hand to slap me, they draw back a stump. And that makes them hysterical.
Tough tit, folks. I respond with civility and finely crafted logic to people who engage me in reasoned debate. But if you want to get into the Roman arena with me and start hacking away with name-calling and verbal assaults, you better strap on your sword, motherfucker. Because, rhetorically speaking, otherwise, you had better prepare to get ripped apart and have your head torn off and your guts unspool from that gaping hole where your stomach used to be, exactly like that first scene in the arena from the movie Gladiator.
NR
@Kropadope:
Obama was proposing to do things differently from the Republicans. He made this quite clear.
That he promised this, and then turned around and tried to appease them right off the bat with the stimulus, and continued to brag over and over about how many of their ideas he was embracing, turned a lot of voters off. Which really should come as no surprise.
redshirt
@NR: Or Obama got exactly the maximum that was possible even in that hallowed year of 2008.
While also preparing for future fights.
Kropadope
@NR: So, you’re not going to engage with the content of what I write and just keep repeating yourself? Fine, I’m done with you.
NR
@Kropadope: Well if you’re going to deny the basic premise of Obama’s 2008 campaign (that he would do things differently from the Republicans) when it was all over the place for months, there really isn’t much I can say to you.
NR
@redshirt:
And here we are, back to the standard BJ argument about Obama. God is good, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds, therefore any evil that happens is both absolutely necessary and the least that it could possibly be.
I’m glad to know that the policies that led to the Republicans seizing more power in Congress and at the state level than they’ve had since the 1940s were the best that could possibly have been done. I shudder to think about what could have happened if Obama had screwed up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@redshirt: a strong daddy I mean president would’ve just beat up the bullies who were mean to little NR instead of passing legislation through Congress
Technocrat
nite folks, I’m off to bed.
redshirt
@NR: Racist ass Americans?
Kropadope
@NR:
You’re being irrationally reductionist about his campaign. What did you expect him to do different from the Republicans that he didn’t do? Close every military base across the globe? Govern without a banana up his ass?
He governed way differently from the Republicans, both in concrete policies and in disposition. You’re full of shit. Time to wake up your third brain cell and/or put down the meth.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
The idea that an economy that was in recession for a year before it went into near collapse would have anything other than slow and steady recovery is magical thinking. A bigger stimulus would have been better if there were votes for it, but it wouldn’t have been enough to save the midterms especially after the passage of the ACA. And putting a public option in the ACA wouldn’t have saved the midterms either. There were plenty of people like me during that time making around 50K a year who didn’t lose their jobs or their homes, but saw their modest investments disappear. These are the people who feared more change. The ones who still had something to lose. I don’t think there would be a single democratic president who could have changed the course of things at that time. I see different faults in Clinton than you do. I don’t think of her as a warmongering, deceitful, corporate shill who will sell us out. I think she is too fearful at times to to take risk. If she would have been elected in 08, given the circumstances at the time, I don’t think she would have attempted health care reform. Obama may be too non confrontational, and measured for some people, but he is pretty fearless when he makes a decision. NR is wrong when he calls Obama the worst president for democrats. Bill Clinton lost control of congress in ’94 without any policy changes to show for it. And in that case I blame Congress more than Bill. They were too chicken shit to even bring a bill to the floor for a vote.
NR
@redshirt:
Who voted for a black man two years earlier?
Obviously racism was at the heart of a lot of the opposition to Obama (just look at the birther movement for proof of this), but if racists were an all-powerful, unstoppable force in American politics, Obama would never have been elected in the first place. You have to go at least a little deeper than that.
redshirt
@NR: Obama lost a good deal of white vote from 2008 to 2012, for sure. But he got enough to win, again, and that’s all that matters.
mclaren
@Technocrat:
One of the big advantages of a representative Democracy is that the people get their chance to weigh in about policies — every four years. This means that a president or a congress with fire in their belly can grab the reins and make some real changes, and even if the public recoils, it’s a fait accompli.
Did you know that Social Security was at first not tremendously popular with the general public? And you know why? Because originally Social Security was supposed to be for white people only. Unbelievable, yet true.
The general public was very resentful in the early 1930s that “those people” were going to get social security benefits along with the rest of us lily-white peeps. But the general public eventually got over it.
See, there are two ways to lead — one way is the quip by the famous French prime minister, who said “The people are on the move! I must discover where they are going so that I may lead them there!” The other way to lead is to make a gutsy first move that the public may question at first, but comes to respect and agree with.
You can’t always lead by doing that first trick, following the crowd. Sometimes you must lead by doing an initially unpopular thing which people come to recognize as the right thing to do. Hillary seems to use the first example as the her model of leadership, Bernie the second example.
One basic truth about public policy is that the public as a group is usually resistant to any kind of change, just on first principles. All change is bad…at first. Republicans recognize this and have often made gutsy moves as president that the public comes to accept over time — Nixon’s opening with China, Reagan’s ginormous tax cuts for the rich, Bush’s insane Iraq debacle. I really seriously wish that Democrats would use that strategy more often: move first, move fast, let the pundits and the public natter and bitch and whine but the thing is done and it’s now institutionalized.
FDR did that. Truman did. LBJ did. But not so many Democratic presidents since then.
redshirt
@mclaren: Yeah, we’re too polite.
Obama should just seat a Supreme Court judge after a certain amount of time, claiming Congress has consulted.
Also, 420 y’all.
NR
@Kropadope: Propose a stimulus that actually would have gotten the job done, for starters.
Again, I will point to the fact that even Obama’s own advisers admitted that the stimulus the proposed was only half the size of what was really needed, and that was before they knocked off another third of it in tax cuts with little to no stimulative value. They watered down the stimulus to the point where it was much less effective than it otherwise would have been because they were chasing Republican votes.
It would have been better for Obama to propose a stimulus that would have been big enough to fix the economy right off the bat and fight as hard as he could for it. Maybe he could have passed it. But even if, in the end, he’d been forced to reduce the size of the stimulus in order to get it passed, he could have pointed to the reductions that the Republicans demanded and said “See? This is why the stimulus isn’t working as well as it should. I told the Republicans this would happen but they didn’t listen.”
Instead, the Republicans were the ones who got to point to the stimulus and say “Look! Obama got what he wanted and it didn’t work. He’s a failure. Blah blah blah.” We all saw how that turned out.
NR
@redshirt: I would argue that the current state of Congress and state governments matters a hell of a lot.
But the point is, racists don’t make up a majority in the United States. We can’t just blame all our problems on them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No, you arrested adolescent fuckwit, they were trying to keep Democrats from bolting. The fact that people soured on the Iraq War and were spooked by Sarah Palin didn’t mean they understood, much less embraced, Keynesian economics.
redshirt
@NR: I feel confident we can blame most of our problems as a country on racists.
Kropadope
@NR: So, asking for a less-than-sufficient stimulus, which itself narrowly passed Congress, is doing that same thing as the Republicans, who wanted no stimulus, would’ve done. Riiiiiiigggghhhhtttttt.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Fuck’s sake. Obama went on record saying he wanted the stimulus to get 80 votes in the Senate.
Just stop. You’re only embarrassing yourself at this point.
NR
@Kropadope: It showed that Obama cared more about appeasing Republicans than doing what was best for the country, despite the fact that the country had just decisively voted against the Republicans.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: And I’d like to win the lottery, and you’d like your mom to kick her husband out. Your childish obsession with “fighting” and inability to understand that Democrats aren’t a monolith still doesn’t change history, or the Constitution.
You screechy little halfwit.
Kropadope
@NR: I’m sure he would’ve loved every piece of legislation to get 80 votes in the Senate. Obviously that was nowhere close to happening, so he had to compromise. That’s what adults do.
Kropadope
@NR: You’re fucking deluded. I really don’t know why I’m still trying to talk sense to you.
NR
@redshirt: If that’s true–if it was just racism that caused the massive, historic Democratic losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms–then we might as well just pack it in and go home. Because we’re never going to convince racists to not be racists anymore, and if we accept that they have enough power to give the Republicans over 240 House seats and full control over the governments of more than 30 states, there’s no point in even trying to accomplish anything politically in the United States anymore.
Is that really the argument you want to make?
ruemara
I hate to say this, but you have a raging blindspot problem. Sanders isn’t having a little delegate math problem, he is enabling pretty incredibl revisionist fantasies. From carving out a place in civil rights history for Bernie Sanders as a leader, mover & shaker, right up to superdelegates being people the masses can lobby to flip their vote. And your ability to turn a blind eye to the stupidity you see on Elon, Imani, Al Giordiano and quite a few more’s timeline – that’s amazing. This isn’t so hard. There is a very strong aura of white privilege around a campaign that boldly announces they’re here for the white voter and their path is in whiter states. You don’t have to be out burning crosses on lawns or tossing slurs all over to be bigoted. You also don’t have to be Andrew Dice Clay to sound like a misogynist. The fact that Bern the Witch was ever something that needed to be pulled from an event listing for Sanders should tell you he has a problem with at least distancing himself from that stupidity. That doesn’t even cover the optics of his style of constant interruptions, the finger wagging and that last appearance with his wife, not pretty. They don’t have to horrible, awful people like republicans, to have problems with race & gender. You may not want to believe it, but it does exist. If only you could direct your rant to the candidate you favor.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What is it with you and your mommy issues? I’m serious when I say this is really creepy. Please get help.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: I was snarking on the notion that the cult of the presidency is related to daddy issues, but I’m almost sorry to have started now that I see how the hook is in. Sorry about your life.
NR
@Kropadope: The problem was, he “compromised” before the fight even began.
He could have proposed a stimulus that would have been adequate to fix the nation’s economic problems. If the Republicans had blocked it, he could have gotten out there and fought for it. Maybe he would have had to compromise in the end. But at that point, the public would have seen that he had pushed for something and settled for something much less than what he wanted. At that point, he could have made a plausible argument that the weak recovery was the Republicans’ fault, not his.
Instead, the public saw him propose something, and get something that was pretty close to what he proposed. And then the Republicans got to say to the public “See! We told you it wouldn’t work!”
That’s not being an adult, that’s being a fool.
eemom
@mclaren:
You were in 2012, and are now, a sick, hateful individual who more often than not are the FIRST to hurl insane abuse at those who disagree with you. I don’t care what you say about me, but exactly what grounds do you have for your gratuitous, venomous filth above about General Stuck, who’s no longer with us?
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You don’t know anything about my life, but it’s amusing that you think you do.
I still recommend professional help, by the way. All that stuff about your mother didn’t come out of nowhere.
Kropadope
@ruemara:
He has to win 56% of the remaining pledged delegates to have a majority of the pledged. Not likely, but not wildly outlandish either.
Fun fact, saying that Democrats should try to do better among white voters, a Demographic they generally lose, is not the same thing as prioritizing white voters above all else. What about Muslim voters? He has won among them where I’ve seen polling. Do they not count? Should everyone just defer to their black Southron betters, including the third of northern black people that Bernie is pulling?
dogwood
@Kropadope:
You have to admit that Bernie needs to start winning some primaries to show that he can consolidate the democratic electorate. I don’t discount caucus participants as not counting, or their delegates as less than legitimate. But with few exceptions it is pretty common that on both sides of the aisle caucuses are won by whoever is perceived to be the most liberal or the most conservative candidate because participants who are more liberal or more conservative are the ones most likely to attend. Obama cleaned up the caucus vote. Those delegates counted for a lot, but he’d probably be governor of Illinois, or running some non- profit right now, if he hadn’t edged her out in primary states as well.
agorabum
@Scarcelight: It’s not about ‘birthright’ – it’s about the Democratic nominee getting the votes of everyone on the left because a Republican president is a disaster since the Republican party is insane. It’s why Obama was entitled to Hillary’s supporters in 2008, and its why Hillary should be entitled in 2016 – if the voter asks “how should I cast my vote in a way that’s best for the country” they should do everything they can to prevent a president trump or cruz. Same goes if Bernie ends up pulling out the nomination.
Kropadope
@dogwood: Obviously I know he needs to start winning primaries (though he has). Why do you think I think it’s so “unlikely” that he makes the 56% he needs to pull this off?
As far as Obama; not, say, Senator?
dogwood
@Kropadope:
I’m not sure he would have stayed in the Senate. Harry Reid called him in and told him to run for president because he would never be happy in the Senate. I love the story about his first foreign relations committee meeting. Joe Biden gave one of those long-winded opening remarks speeches before questioning whoever was appearing, and Obama passed a note to one of his staff saying JUST. SHOOT. ME. NOW.
Kropadope
@dogwood: Maybe you’re right. Still, though, this would only be the end of second term if he did stay. He’s still decently young for politics, he may have decided to wait. Though Lord knows the Governor’s seat in IL has made itself available. Then again, the trigger for that was Obama’s election and vacation of the Senate seat, around which Blagojevich’s scandal arose.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
Nothing is impossible. But I listened to a podcast with Jon Favereau an another Obama guy talking about how glad they were they weren’t involved this year. Six months before voting started in’08 they had gamed out every state. After winning Wisconsin in March, I believe, they were pretty sure the path was clear. They were talking about how exhausting and depressing it was to slog through Ohio, Penn. W. Va. Etc, spending tons of money, knowing they were going to lose and having to keep up the optimism for the public. After the North Carolina blowout when it was obvious she couldn’t catch him, they were really depressed when she wouldn’t quit and they had to head to Puerto Rico and spend a bunch of money. I don’t think these primary contests are as fluid as we ardent supporters think they are. I wanted to believe that Obama had a chance to win in Penn. and Ohio, but his team was much more realistic and clearheaded about it. I may very well be wrong, but I think it will play out the way it did last time.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
Maybe he would have stayed in the Senate. But the Senate is more suited to pols who enjoy the gamesmanship, and the prestige. If you want to really make a difference the US Senate isn’t an ideal place to achieve your goals. I don’t really project on people my desires for what they should do or be. I believe them when they say who they are. Obama has repeatedly said he would have no desire to be on the Supreme Court because he is too restless for that kind of work. Yet people still bring it up. Given that statement alone, I imagine a long career in the Senate would not have suited him either.
NR
@agorabum: The Democratic party is not entitled to anyone’s vote. If they act like they are, they deserve the loss they will get.
Applejinx
@Technocrat: Well, if you’ve been studying Eurozone banking with the help of Mark Blyth, and you don’t think the United States can break up monopolized banks, then they can’t be broken up at all ever. I’ve seen an infographic showing banking changing from a whole scattering of bigger and smaller banks, to four. Four banks.
I saw screw breaking them up, let ’em boil down to one and then nationalize that one. Clearly it’s politically impossible to break up banks or to have anything resembling a ‘market’ in banking, but send in soldiers or even heavily riot-geared cops and the bankers will accept their new masters.
Failing that, I love the idea of letting the post office be a national bank. I would switch over immediately, especially if checking accounts paid some tiny amount in interest. This would not be a profit center any more than roads are. It’s infrastructure.
Applejinx
@NR: Obama’s black. I’m sorry, what you’re asking wasn’t possible. He did the best he could and he did a lot (not everything, a finite amount of stuff but he did amazingly considering what he was up against).
I’ll grant that the rest of what you’re saying is true, but Obama is faultless as far as not being able to aggressively ram policy through. He’s black. The government basically shut itself down rather than work with him, in spite of public backlash, and they continue to do it. Practice for Trump or Clinton, I guess? They’ve learned they can just refuse to work and still be paid enough to be mid-investor-class and so they do.
brilliantatbreakfast
They sure are pearl-clutching and fanning themselves with outrage for a campaign that’s going to have to run against Trunp.
jeannedalbret
href=”#comment-5730039″ rel=”nofollow”>redshirt:
At the very least, Sanders has succeeded in leading a new generation of Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to believe they can turn to the Democratic party to build their futures…a party which has exploited or neglected them for many years.
In terms of party-building, team S has generated a tremendous amount of interest in the Dems in a very short time, and Team H will be guilty of gross solipsism and leading our political system into further irrelevance if they do not engage seriously and in good faith with this phenomenon.
John D.
@Kropadope:
Oh, well, you don’t see the need. Guess we can all go home now.
This is the single dumbest thing I have read on Balloon Juice, and I used to respond to Darrell.
An outline isn’t a plan. it’s a wish. A hope. Magical unicorn-pegasus rainbow sparkle shit.
If you tell me that you have a plan, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation says “Yeah, that’s at least in the right ballpark”, then fine. I’ll still want the details — and ask for them — but I won’t be up in arms about it. You start throwing around significant fractions of the national GDP being in flux? I’m going to demand it be a bit more concrete than wishes. You start claiming savings greater than current expenditures? I’m going to call you a fool or a liar, depending upon my judgment of intent.
Choosing this particular hill to die on is really odd, because this is not open to interpretation. Sanders offered a goal without a plan, a whole lot of people effectively said “give us data because that seems unworkable”, he released a plan, and it was bullshit. Saying that the people asking for a plan and releasing it was the problem is entirely the wrong point to focus on. Offering such an ambitious goal without a plan with rigorous math behind it is such a fucking unforced error on Sanders’ part. Everyone on the GOP side was going to be baying for his blood over it, and the wonks on the Democratic side were not going to be able to defend him.
So, I don’t particularly care if you see the need or not. If you want to upend the economy, you damn well better have the math nailed down.
John D.
@Kropadope:
That percentage does not exist in a vacuum.
Over half (52.15%) of the remaining 1747 delegates are in THREE states — NY, PA, CA. Clinton is up 35, 25, and 10 in those respectively in current polling. Let’s shift ALL of those 20 for Sanders. NY goes 57.5% Clinton, PA goes 52.5% Clinton, and CA goes 55% Sanders. Sanders gains a whopping single delegate across those 3 states. And now he’s down 229 with 836 to go (which means he needs 63.58%). Shall we add NJ and MD? Clinton is +30 in both. So, shift 20, Clinton wins 55% in both, adds 24 delegates, and now there are only 615 to go which he needs to win 70.37% of.
Winning 56% of the particular states that are upcoming is wildly outlandish. It’s an order of magnitude more of an upset than MI was. It is more of an upset than Dewey-Truman. Any state that doesn’t shift 20 points towards Sanders makes the above math worse, and nobody expects a 20 point shift across the board.
He is not mathematically eliminated. He can still win. But it has become astronomically unlikely barring an external event like the death or indisposition of a candidate.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope:
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
So does projectile vomiting. But you were saying…
J R in WV
@AkaDad:
If AkaDad is dumb enough to support Trump, I fear for his life when trying to pop corn. Do read and follow the label directions, if you can read.
J R in WV
@eemom:
Tommy busted his ass for weeks doing volunteer work to improve the code base for Balloon-Juice, and then got his ass handed to himself by ungrateful know-nothing-about-coding people who don’t understand how code is tested and improved to work better.
So he went away, unfortunately, after the mis-treatment he received from a few assholes about the work he did.
I hoped he would come back, bot so far, no good.
No one even said thanks for what he tried to do. Except me and probably John Cole. Well, it was months ago, there may have been more people saying thanks, but the majority of people being asses about being asked to pass suggestions and bugs along to Tommy overwhelmed the thank-yous by 10 or 15 to one.
J Thomas
@Applejinx:
“Nationalize” is such an ugly word. Instead let’s invoke eminent domain. Figure out what the bank is worth according to the government, and pay its owners that, and call it even.
Sanders calls for just that, and nobody objected too much, but he hasn’t been talking about it much recently. Maybe it just didn’t seem that important, or for all I know maybe somebody found a valid objection and he just dropped it.
I say, give every citizen one smartcard and an account, and the smartcards can be voting ID too. Any time the government pays or gives money to a citizen, deposit it into their account. Possibly also have accounts for small businesses, and when the government pays them, deposit the money into their accounts too.
J Thomas
@NR:
The last poll I saw, 54% of voters said they would never vote for Trump, while only 43% of voters said they would never vote for Clinton. I’m not sure just what to make of that, but it sounds promising. If Trump’s number goes up to 67% after he gets the nomination….
I just imagine Clinton and Sanders and Trump all running. Sanders could get some of Trump’s voters, some of the people who want an outsider but don’t insist it has to be Trump.
If Trump came in third, regardless the order of Clinton and Sanders, the GOP would be a third party. That would be so perfect….
It could work that way if the GOP managed to switch in Kasich too. In polls, Sanders and Clinton both take part of Kasich’s votes, but not the same part. Sanders would take most of the Trump votes that bother to vote. Clinton would take a lot of the moderate-republican votes. We could easily get the GOP as the third party again.
Of course the polling is still not very predictive, it only shows how people feel now and not how they’d feel in November. But against a GOP that was divided enough, it would be great to have Sanders and Clinton both winning.
Of course it would be too risky. There would be the risk that it would go to the lame-duck GOP House, where the congressmen who hate Trump and hate Clinton and hate Sanders would have to choose which one to select….
I can’t help giggling when I think about it, though.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@mclaren:
I have no illusions that Clinton won’t do much better than hold the line and keep us from backsliding until at least 2018, if not 2020. Personally, I’m okay with that; you govern with the Congressweasels you have, not the Congressweasels you wish you had.
I’d like to see some changes in the DOJ, DHS, and a few other agencies wrt domestic surveillance (paranoia will destroy ya), and I’m not confident she’s the person to do that. But I still believe she’s the better choice to actually execute the office than Sanders.
Hell, if we just get to a point where Congress just starts functioning again, I’d count that as a huge win.
chopper
@eemom:
but you have to understand, calling mclaren ‘crazy’ is a zillion times worse than him calling stuck a piece of human excrement and it’s good that he’s dead.
it’s science.
J Thomas
It sounds like you have very low expectations. So you are less likely to get a bad surprise.
Myself, I like to look for hope. After all, it looks like we’re heading for a secession event. At some point probably pretty soon, a bunch of red states will secede from the Union. We could in theory send in the military to kill them until they surrender and their congressmen take their rightful place in the House. But would we? How many Texans are we willing to kill to force Texas to rejoin the Congress and do whatever they possibly can to block the US government from doing anything? But then I remember something LBJ said, “Would you rather have him inside the tent, pissing out, or outside the tent pissing in?”. I’m not sure there’s any solution to Texas. Anyway, secession event. The USA stops being the USA. Maybe we wind up with 3 or 4 nations with different Constitutions. Not that long from now.
And I think, maybe it’s time to try for possibilities that might work out even if the odds aren’t very good.
I don’t have much more hope than you do for Clinton. And if she’s president in 2020, she’ll run again. We won’t have a chance to run a decent Democrat for president until 2024 at the earliest. If we still elect presidents then.
So how about Sanders? If there’s 1 chance in 4 that he could get a good outcome, isn’t it worth taking that chance?
Like playing bridge. You’re vulnerable, doubled and redoubled, and it looks like you’re going down. There’s one way the cards could be arranged that would let you make it, and the chances are 1 in 4 that the cards are arranged that way. Do you try for it, or do you accept certain failure? Well, why not try?
And what about Trump? Trump is a liar, he says whatever his base wants to hear. He says a lot they don’t want to hear too, and then he backs away from it. If you go by what he says, he comes off on average to the left of Clinton — but he’s a liar and you can’t trust what he says.
I wouldn’t want to vote for a liar, when I can’t depend on what he says he’ll do — but if I let that stop me I wouldn’t vote for Clinton either. If there’s 1 chance in 8, or even one chance in 10 that he’d actually make some of the changes that we vitally need, would that be worth voting for him? A chance, as opposed to no chance….
When you have a garden you have to spend some time weeding it etc, or else plants you don’t want will grab the minerals in the soil and shade out the plants you do want. If you don’t do that, then come harvest time you’ll be saying “You harvest the weeds you have, not the garden you wish you had.”
It isn’t a perfect analogy, particularly when Congress is a garden that lots of people try to weed, and some of them are trying to pull up the crops because they like the weeds. But we have to make the effort, right?