Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

In my day, never was longer.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Everybody saw this coming.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

No one could have predicted…

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Monday Evening Open Thread: Both Sides! (Vanity Candidates *and* Media Village Idiots)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Both Sides! (Vanity Candidates *and* Media Village Idiots)

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Lo, there is a great disturbance in the shallow reflecting pool of Conventional Wisdom, when those who serve the mantra that All Is for the Best in This Best of All Possible Worlds sense that they are not being taken seriously! I’m a subscriber, but I thought yesterday’s Boston Globe anti-Trump parody front page — which actually appeared on the inside weekly ‘Ideas’ section — was a moderately funny idea, but overthought in its implementation. So, it would seem, did Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… The Republican Party is in the process of ritual public suicide. There are too many chickens for the party to handle and nowhere near enough roosts. Forty years of batshit economics and dangerous demagoguery, god-bothering and otherwise, have made a liar out of the Globe‘s contention that the party’s “standard” deserves to be hoisted by anyone who is anything but a demagogue. Everybody with eyes can see this.

However, there seems to be an abject terror within the elite political media at the prospect of the Republican party’s destroying itself through the extremism that the party has tolerated for far too long. If the Republican Party goes away, whatever will we do? All of our Both Sides tropes will be instantly inoperative. Thinking once again will be required around the Fournier manse. This existential pundit panic manifests itself in a few ways: first, Both Sides can still be invoked if we can point to a rockfight on the Democratic side, too; second, we can go along with the Globe and pretend that an utterly unprincipled retread like Willard Romney, or a complete public charlatan like Paul Ryan, are “honorable and decent men,” or third, we can talk to the real crazoids and pretend that they are sensible actors in the political life of the country, and by doing that, we can pretend that the Republican Party as it currently exists is, well, sane…

***********
Apart from keeping our waders at hand, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Reader Interactions

115Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    If the Republican Party goes away, whatever will we do? All of our Both Sides tropes will be instantly inoperative.

    Meh. It’ll be like 2009-10 again. “Both sides” is a sop to Republicans. There is no need for it if Dems control everything.

  3. 3.

    debbie

    I thought the Globe should have had that page as their editorial page. Opinionated objectivity is overtaking newspapers enough as it is.

  5. 5.

    Baud

    @jl:

    I’m a better example than Sanders if Trump is going to highlight the corruption inherent in the system.

  6. 6.

    jl

    And of course, Trump is wrong as usual. Sanders has just as much chance as Trump. But so far, Sanders isn’t getting the landslides he needs to catch up with HRC. Trump is just piling up excuses to throw tantrums and blow up the convention if he does not get the nomination, no matter what the merits of the case.

  7. 7.

    bystander

    I did catch Obama’s “both sides do it” cop out on Fox interview. Pretty disappointing.

    I’m reading a poster for the NYC AIDS Walk and I see its sponsors include two pharma companies, Gilead and Pfizer, who are gouging HIV positive people for their lifesaving meds. Do these people ever think about what they’re doing when they get in bed with these thieves?

  9. 9.

    FlipYrWhig

    Isn’t Trump’s foolishness about Sanders sort of like being all worked up that the basketball team that scores more in the 3rd quarter doesn’t necessarily start the 4th quarter ahead? Or, like, win, later?

  10. 10.

    jl

    @Baud: Did Baud! 2016! just admit he was corrupt!? I think he did. Uh-oh.
    Too late, it’s ‘out there’ now and irresponsible not to speculate. About squads of hookers and mountains of blow floating away in the seas of booze in the Baud! 2016! campaign.

  11. 11.

    Aqualad08

    If a high school holds a senior class president election, and the two people running for senior class president are a) a kid who has been in the high school since day one of freshman year and b) a transfer student who’s only been there a month, hearing the transfer student whine that he or she has is being treated unfairly because he or she is new is unsurprising but ultimately pointless.

    Yes, the party nomination process favors the established members of the party, because NO SHIT, SHERLOCK… portraying yourself as an outsider HAS ITS LIMITS when you’re trying to unseat the insiders.

  13. 13.

    Baud

    @jl:

    I don’t know what’s worse. That people call me corrupt or that they think I’m bad at it.

  15. 15.

    Patricia Kayden

    The Republican Party is destroying itself on a national level but not on a local level. Look at all the states which have Republican Governors (alas, including my own state of Maryland).

    I have a feeling that if Republicans completely self-destructed, we would end up with quite a few conservative/blue dog Democrats, which in my opinion would be quite problematic to achieving a progressive agenda.

  16. 16.

    MattF

    @debbie: And Jen Rubin– the other WaPo harridan– is now gritting her teeth and admitting that Cruz is the only remotely plausible choice for your average never-Hillary voter. And as for the WaPo himmidans– Will and Krauthammer– the less said the better.

  18. 18.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @FlipYrWhig: or to switch sports, that field goals (cauci) should count as much as touchdowns.
    (and this won’t be the last time you hear Trump and others concern-trolling about Bernie)

  24. 24.

    starscream

    OT, but I saw this video over at DKos (yeah, I know…). I got literal chills. Hillary went above and beyond to support Obama in 2008. No way will Bernie be this gracious.

  27. 27.

    starscream

    @Baud: I believe it was about playing politics with Supreme Court nominations. (See: his filibuster of Alito in 2006.)

  28. 28.

    jl

    @Baud: Too highlight the inference that Baud! 2016! is a gin soaked hobo, since it is irresponsible not to speculate about all the corruption that Baud! is lousy at.

  29. 29.

    Gimlet

    It’s a good thing this doesn’t affect anyone here… Baud?!

    http://www.thewrap.com/porn-site-bans-north-carolina-users-over-anti-lgbt-law/

    XHamster users in the Tar Heel state will just have to find porn somewhere else on the Internet

    XHamster just delivered a serious money shot on the North Carolina legislature.

    Users from the Tar Hell State began complaining on Monday that when they tried to access the popular porn site on Monday, they were met with a blank screen.

  32. 32.

    Baud

    @starscream: I suppose that makes strategic sense, since he doesn’t want to get into a debate about his 2006 filibuster at this point. As long as he didn’t compare what the GOP is doing now to the Bork vote.

  33. 33.

    cokane

    i dunno if there’s all that much “both sides” ism going on this year. Sure, any idiot can point to some. But actually this is the first year where much of the media has been pretty damned outwardly hostile to the GOP frontrunner.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    So Richard’s comment has a light blue background, and all the other comments are alternating shades of grey. Anyone else seeing this?

  36. 36.

    jl

    @starscream: No, it won’t happen that way. Sanders has already said he will use his delegates to influence the Democratic platform. So, there will be drama. I don’t know whether Sanders could deliver gesture similar to HRC’s in 2008 and keep his supporters roused for the general election anyway. We have to hope the Democratic convention will end up unified.

  42. 42.

    Baud

    @jl:

    Sanders has already said he will use his delegates to influence the Democratic platform.

    Depends how he goes about it.

  44. 44.

    Baud

    @NotMax:
    @debbie:

    So the BJ comment section is now a class-based society with aristocrats and everything. Figures. They should have just gone with Royal Purple while they’re at it.

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    A Canadian FB friend, who hates Hillary and loves Bernie, decided to trash our nominating system earlier today. Well, dammit, it may be a terrible system, but it’s ours. Without giving it a lot of thought, I responded with the following comment, only slightly edited here:

    It is indeed a complicated, Byzantine system. The two parties have different rules, and each state/territory sets its own regulations, calendars, and registration requirements. Some jurisdictions have primaries, some have caucuses, some have both. Some have winner-take-all, some have proportional delegate allocation. Some reflect the popular vote, in others it depends on the congressional district in which the voting occurred. Some are open primaries, in which one can vote for a candidate in either party; others are closed, and in order to vote one must declare and be registered to a party. In some places you can register, or change your registration, on Election Day; in others you must file the necessary paperwork months in advance. Some states require several forms of identification; in others, a signature testifying to your address will suffice.

    Horribly complex, I admit, and it would be a blessing across the country to simplify a lot of these rules. I hope that will, in fact, happen.

    That being said, every serious candidate and his/her ground staff ought to know this stuff cold before they start revving up the crowds and predicting victory. Hillary Clinton didn’t in 2008; Barack Obama did. Hillary learned an important lesson eight years ago, and this time around she understands how it works; Bernie Sanders doesn’t.

    If the rules are unfair and overly confusing, by all means work to change them. That’s why there are party structures and conventions, and state legislatures, and boards of elections. Go in, get involved, organize for change. But don’t spend a political lifetime sneering at the party and refusing to align with it because doing so might corrupt your purity, and then complain when you want it to fall in line for you.

    TL;DR — Don’t complain. Fix it.

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    @jl: You know, if there’s some kind of chaos at the R convention and then the D one presents a unified party one week later, that’d look terrific going into the general election campaign. But if Sanders actually makes any kind of trouble… it’ll be both sides do it!!! right down the line.

  52. 52.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    This is something I wonder about: Will Trump be smart enough to pick a Very Serious Running Mate who will give the Village and the Chamber of Commerce an excuse to vote/campaign for him

    POLITICOVerified account ‏@ politico
    Trump would consider Walker, Rubio, Kasich as VP

    Katich would be as good a choice as any from that regard, I wonder if he’d do it. Christie thinks he would be a great choice, and I suspect Trump knows it.

  55. 55.

    jl

    @Baud:

    ” They should have just gone with Royal Purple while they’re at it. ”

    Glowing rainbow font on black velvet is more the BJ blog version of ‘Royal’. I guess they’ll fix it up right and proper soon enough.

  56. 56.

    Hal

    Is the current system radically different from the one Obama competed in and won in 2008? The one Hillary had in the bag before the first vote was cast?

    If yes, I could potentially see the complaints from the Sanders side. If not then stfu about how unfair the system is, and do your best to make it work. It’s clearly doable.

  59. 59.

    Calouste

    And as the OP shows, Trump is the candidate for the illiterate, Sanders is the candidate for the innumerate.

  60. 60.

    Baud

    @Hal: I think the schedule is different. I’m not sure what else is. As long as the rules were known well in advance of the first contest this year, no one has a right to complain about the process.

  61. 61.

    Calouste

    @Hal: The system is pretty much the same. Of course Obama put in the hard work to sort it all out and maximize his resources to win it, where Sanders’ campaign is a cargo cult that just expected that things would go the same way for them because, just as Obama, they are running against Hillary Clinton, and so, just as Obama, they should win.

  63. 63.

    lamh36

    Oooh, Im intrigued, I’ve never actually been much into Thor comic, Ive only ever really been interested in the movies.

    What say you comic book fans?

    @WeAreWakanda
    ‘Creed’ Star Tessa Thompson Joins Cast of ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ http://bit.ly/1StIa07 #Thor3 #Marvel #movies #comics

  64. 64.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    It slightly pisses me off that she is always so ready to weigh in on everything that’s wrong with American politics. Not that I disagree all that much, but as a non-U.S. citizen she has the luxury of being as critical as she wants to be without having to take any responsibility for making changes.

    But she’s a good, if opinionated, friend, and she lives in Vancouver and will put me up when I visit, so I try not to lock horns TOO energetically!

  65. 65.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Calouste: I also think Sanders started out, in his own mind, as a message candidate, and it wasn’t until some point in December, as I recall, that he convinced himself, or let himself be convinced, that he could win, a couple of months after the registration deadline in NY

  66. 66.

    jl

    @Matt McIrvin: Depends on whether Sanders is interested in substance during platform negotiations, or just wants to make a fuss. I hopefully assume the former, not the latter.

    Serious negotiations over the platform might not even make the corporate media news, since it would involve discussing details of issues and stuff. And I think that happens before the big TV stage productions. How long are the celeb news actors going to stand in front of meeting room doors breathlessly reporting that Sanders will trade a concession on 15 buck an hour federal minimum wage for HRC promise to develop and use special elderly and disabled price indices for social insurance inflation adjustment? Not all that long is my guess.

  67. 67.

    Baud

    @Baud: By the same token, I expect if Hillary’s team had know Sanders would do this well, they might have modified their campaign strategy also.

    That’s the problem with alternative reality theories — all the people involved would have behaved differently so you can’t simply translate current results into a different reality.

  69. 69.

    JaneE

    Isn’t the delegate business very similar to the electoral college, before the popular election of senators amendment? Part popular choice, and part back room deals, and who gets the most popular votes doesn’t mean anything in the process of electing a president.

  70. 70.

    smith

    If we’re lucky Hillary will have sewed it up far enough in advance of the convention that she and Sanders can start ,and hopefully complete, negotiations over the platform, and any other goodies he’ll be asking for, before the convention even starts. Sanders might still want some theater for his supporters but if all goes well we could have a very pleasant convention indeed.

  72. 72.

    geg6

    @lamh36:

    Already set the VCR. Looking forward to watching it in one fell swoop this weekend. Looks really good and I’m a sucker for a Ken Burns doc.

  73. 73.

    Baud

    @JaneE: I don’t think the popular election of Senators had much impact on presidential elections. As far as I remember, winning the votes in the states became the key to electoral college victory pretty early on.

  74. 74.

    NotMax

    Not a recommendation; it barely achieves B status. More of a curiosity as the premise is essentially the same as used in The Producers.

    Tuesday, April 12, 7:30 a.m., TCM – New Faces of 1937

  75. 75.

    redshirt

    That Trump quote looks kinda like the opening text scrawl of Star Wars, and now I can’t help but think of Trump in the Star Wars universe.

    YUUUGE!

  78. 78.

    jl

    @JaneE: I think a big difference is that both parties can do what they damn please at pretty much any time in nominating process with no sanction. I don’t think there is any Constitutional or statute law controlling how parties do their nominating.

    With electoral college, seems like something definitely wrong and illegal can happen, but not much experience in how to remedy irregular procedure. So, for example, a state has a law against faithless electors, but an elector goes faithless anyway and it changes the result of the election. What is the remedy for elector disobeying state election law? Can the state intercede before the electoral votes are formally counted by Congress? Andy BJ lawyers or election law mavens know? I guess the Florida lawsuit is a taste of how badly things can go wrong.

  79. 79.

    Roger Moore

    @Patricia Kayden:

    I have a feeling that if Republicans completely self-destructed, we would end up with quite a few conservative/blue dog Democrats, which in my opinion would be quite problematic to achieving a progressive agenda.

    This. The biggest obstacle to progress is that not enough voters are in favor of it. If a big slice of voters didn’t approve of what the Republicans have been doing, they wouldn’t have the power to do it. Until those voters change their tune, some political party is going to go after their votes.

  81. 81.

    jl

    @Baud:

    ” I am sadly too ignorant of other countries’ problems to be able to respond in kind. ”

    Another advantage of a Trump presidency. We could just yell, or ;type in all caps that Trudeau is sissy pretty boy with very small fingers, And, of course, a loser. And it would be principled discussion of high policy, US-style.

  82. 82.

    Hal

    @Baud: I forgot about Florida and Michigan not counting because they had their primaries too early and were warned that the results wouldn’t count, but IIRC, all involved candidates were fine with that, until they weren’t. As in Hillary Clinton.

    Part of me can’t help but wonder if the *some* Sanders supporters see Obama as an inferior candidate and Sanders as the one true progressive who should therefore be running away with this election. Once again it’s against HRC so why shouldn’t Bernie be winning in a landslide? Sort of the same attitude Hillary’s camp had in 2008 against Obama. Oh the irony.

  86. 86.

    billcoop4

    I suspect that Bernie did not expect to get this far, back when he announced. I think he wanted to run, and run hard, to move HRC as far left as he could, and if he had a block of delegates, he would have some influence over the platform. That he has made it this far is to his credit, especially since the media rather largely ignored him over the spring and summer months, as a wild-haired old-guy pulled in lots of people in a lot of places.

    So cool.

    That said, ground game is the game. Ground game is why we got trounced in 2010 and 2014, because we on our side don’t get folks out to vote when the Alpha isn’t on the ballot. Ground game sucked here in Kentucky, as a very lazy AG lost to the cretinous Matt Bevin for Gov. Conway wasn’t perfect, but for God’s sake, Matt Bevin? The slasher? The entitled brat? The embracer of the Davis person?

    Howard Dean was right with a 50-state strategy. We cannot give up anywhere just because it’s a long shot. Even with the very pro-GOP redistricting, we need to put the skeer in them in sufficient places to make them expend resources more thinly.

    And we need to abandon purity tests. No candidate will be perfect, and that’s ok. I think Bernie is OK for focusing more on economic inequality rather than racial inequality. While they’re related, no one can be all for all. I think Hillary has done better adapting her message to include racial and sexual disparities, but that does not make Bernie wrong–and, indeed, I think that solving economic disparities is needed in the long term to solve racial disparities.

    But that doesn’t respond to the needs evinced over the last two years since Ferguson. Stuff’s gotta happen now.

    I’ve been blessed to avoid the worst of life even as a gay man, because I grew up white, middle-class, old-family, entitled and privileged. I try to catch myself when I forget to think beyond where I’m from (as I’m sure I’ve done in this post).

    But politics is the art of the possible, and the possible requires hard work. We can’t just sit around assuming people will vote “in their interest” when it’s clear that folks can get ginned up to support anything: Matt Bevin, Bathroom Bills, and Donald Trump forming three recent exhibits.

    And campaigns and parties need also to reach out to folks.

  88. 88.

    NR

    The reports of the GOP’s demise are greatly exaggerated. They wield more power in Congress and at the state level than they have at least since the 1940s, possibly the 1920s. If they win the presidential election–and Hillary Clinton is a very weak candidate, so they can definitely win–they will have an amount of political power that is nearly unprecedented in this country. And if they lose, they will still hold a great deal of influence over public policy.

    2010 and the decisions that led to it were an absolute disaster for the country.

  89. 89.

    Calouste

    @smith: The problem with negotiating with Sanders could be that, as shown by the now infamous New York Daily News interview, that Sanders doesn’t have much of a clue of how to achieve the things he says he wants, besides a few slogans.

  91. 91.

    geg6

    @Hal:

    Oh, I can say that, anecdotally speaking, the ones I know definitely aren’t Obots. They bad mouth him all the time as a coward, a corporate whore, a war criminal…pretty much anything a right winger would say about him but with less birtherism. One of the many reasons I am avoiding these people these days. I really don’t need an assault charge right now.

  93. 93.

    lamh36

    This idiot…why da fuq would you want to run for Prez, when you already 3 spots from the top…

    Damn, dude ain’t even been in the speakership a darn year.

    Ugh, I can’t stand the damn GOP. Dems lets get this primary shit done, so we can let the GOP fuqfest continue…

    ‎@thedailybeast
    Report: Paul Ryan is set to attend a secretive meeting with “twenty or so” GOP donors http://thebea.st/1TNjftS

  94. 94.

    sinnedbackwards

    On many threads (not this one yet) too many folks forget that trolls subsist on responses.

    Do not feed the trolls. Ignore them. Do not respond. When they get hungry enough, they will find another bridge.

  95. 95.

    jl

    @geg6: May all be over by April 27. If polls now mean anything, Sanders will have lost NY, PA, MD. Even if he squeezes out some narrow wins, I don’t think he will have anything near the 60 percent of delegates he needs to beat HRC on pledged delegates.

    At some point, unless Sanders can pull off the political miracle of all time, he will have to shift from campaign to win, to a campaign for his political revolution, and to affect Democratic platform and HRC policy proposals.

  96. 96.

    Francis

    @billcoop4: A competitive Democratic Party in Alabama would look very different from the one in California. Many people here would be very unhappy with the politics of the most liberal electable Alabama Democrats.

    But you gotta start somewhere.

  97. 97.

    smith

    @Calouste: Could be, but there definitely will be negotiations, as Bernie will not go quietly without at least something to show for his run. I’m sure Hillary understands this, since she was in his position 8 years ago, and I’m sure she’s putting together a list of what she’d be prepared to offer.

  102. 102.

    Bobby Thomson

    @geg6: except that Sanders said the same thing. There’s more than one person over there who’s lost HIS [no gender neutrality required for accuracy!] mind.

  103. 103.

    sinnedbackwards

    @JaneE: Uh, no. The electoral college has been subject to games but usually has reflected the popular will, even early on.

    After the chaoses in 1796 and 1800 (which resulted in the twelth amendment) probably the worst miscarriages have been when the Republicans stole the election in 1876, and when the Republicans stole the election in 2000 (via Congress and the Supreme Court, respectively), and 1824 when the House decided.

    Otherwise, the smoke-filled back rooms mostly involve nominations.
    Go read about the Dems in 1952 for the last time someone NOT RUNNING AT ALL was nominated.

    Otherwise,

  105. 105.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    As long as the rules were known well in advance of the first contest this year, no one has a right to complain about the process.

    I’m not sure I’d go that far. The rules can be well known and still unfair; I’d even say that the whole superdelegate business falls into that category. Of course, Bernie is losing even without considering the superdelegates, so his biggest problem is that he can’t get enough people to vote for him.

  108. 108.

    Tom Q

    @Roger Moore: I’d say the biggest problem, in this race in particular, is the odd optics created by the Democrats’ proportional representation. It seems to me that, short of 75-25 splits in every state, it’s impossible under this system for any candidate to amass a delegate lead that looks as insurmountable as the same sort of dominance would look under a winner-take-all system — or even one that had cutoffs for delegates at, say, 40%, rather than 15%.

    Sanders folk scream that he won WY by 12% but tied in pledged delegates — but this is more than offset by the number of delegates he picked up just for showing up in some of those Southern states where he got shellacked. The flip side of that is, that same disparity between vote dominance and delegate dominance will work against Sanders catching up in the next two months, even were he to do better than expected in the states that significantly favor Hillary. And 538 has tried, over and over, to explain that to people, but it’s arcane math to most — all Sanders people can see is, Hillary is only ahead by something like 220, so we just need to win CA. They don’t get that they’d need to win CA BY SHUTOUT, which isn’t happening in this universe. But they don’t get that, and I’d argue the proportional delegate split makes it harder for them to get. And that it, more than anything else, will engender feelings of “The game was rigged against us”.

  109. 109.

    Aqualad08

    @Tom Q:

    And 538 has tried, over and over, to explain that to people, but it’s arcane math to most

    Bernie supporters spent a good chuck of last week accusing David Wasserman of being in the tank for Hillary because he a) wrote a piece saying Sanders’ “the voice of the people” cannot be supported by popular vote totals and b) he’s OBVIOUSLY related to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. It was a sight to behold, that comment section. I’ve haven’t seen that many people believing in magical thinking since I was eight years old watching a production of Peter Pan…

  110. 110.

    J R in WV

    @lamh36:

    Mrs J informs me that Jackie Robinson’s number is the only one that’s retired in every MLB park. And once each season, all the players wear his number in honor of his career.

    That guy had courage and self control above and beyond the normal hero.

  111. 111.

    mclaren

    @debbie:

    And the best worst situation would be for the Republican Party to lose this election with dignity.

    I’m betting the Republican party goes out like Al Pacino in the final scene of Scarface.

    “Say hello to my leeeeeetle friend!”

  112. 112.

    mclaren

    @Tom Q:

    A lot of us feel that the game was rigged against Sanders — but not by Hillary or the Democratic party. it was rigged by the mainstream press.

    Until a few months ago, Bernie Sanders had gotten a grand total of 20 seconds of coverage on the major news networks. Donald Trump, meanwhile, had gotten 80 minutes of coverage.

    it was only until Sanders started winning states in major upsets that the mainstream press even deigned to mention him. And since news coverage = polling boost for the early primaries, that was it for Sanders.

    The mainstream media decided Bernie Sanders was “too extreme” in his policies to cover in the news, so Sanders remained invisible and didn’t do as well as he could have in the early primaries. And by creating the impression that Sanders was a marginal candidate, the mainstream media confirmed it and made it a reality.

  113. 113.

    sherparick

    @Baud: Yes, the Village Media is desperate to keep this favorite trope of the last 40 years. Scott Lemiuex at Lawyers, Guns, and Money sums it up:

    “…The fact that Republicans can claim to have an ACA replacement and anti-poverty plan forthcoming and be taken at face value by credulous journalists is about as pure a distillation of the felt necessity to present a “shape of the world, views differ” perspective as you can find. “I fully intend to put forward a replacement for Obamacare, really” is not even a complicated scam. It’s the most obvious and pathetic one: “my check’s on the mail” and “my Audi’s in the shop” from a man who has never made a payment on his loan and has been driving a ’93 Geo Metro since you met him six months ago. But it’s an iron law among a certain kind of journalist that there must be a Serious, Moderate Major Republican, and when the competition is the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Paul Ryan gets the gig purely by default.”
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/04/yah-okay-ill-have-my-girl-send-you-over-a-copy-then

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