My therapist said I have to stop reading and writing about Putin’s useful idiots on “the left”. It’s hard to top this from LG&M and anyway:
Watching Glenn Greenwald desperately fling his hands and talk VERY LOUD to dissemble from his role in electing Donald Trump through funneling everything about Hillary Clinton the Russian propaganda arm known as Wikileaks gave him throughout the election is pathetic. Only Greenwald and Katrina vanden Heuvel know the real truth–that by focusing on Russian interference in American elections, that we are engaging in a NEW COLD WAR that makes any criticism of Glenn NEO-MCCARTHYISM! If you don’t believe this YOU ARE A DESPICABLE LIAR!!!! AND A REDBAITER YOU JOE MCCARTHY YOU!!
Kylroy
The thing about McCarthy is that A) he *was* actually right about the U.S.S.R. having places moles in many U.S. agencies, *but* B) his famed crusade failed to out even a single genuine Russian spy. Totally wiped out a bunch of his political rivals, though.
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, for access to drones to send just one to Brazil.
amorphous
What did I do, Lord, to deserve Glenn Greenwald?
dmsilev
Needed to be about three times longer than it was, plus XXVIII updates.
ruemara
I fucking despise the people who manipulated the left with the same level of vitriol I reserve for people who use faith for their own twisted evil. KdH, GG, Stein, Sanders, TYT network, Sarandon et al, deserve to be shunned and as financially bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt. They’ve done a lot of harm and simply will not stop doing harm while fellating their own egos.
Brachiator
Glenn Greenwald and Milo Yaniwhatsis need to be locked in a room together, and the key thrown away.
sharl
Welp, Doug, the last time you posted something here critical of GG, you got a mini-barrage of tweets from the Man himself complaining of your “dishonesty”. Keep this up and you’ll make it into a post at The Intercept; then you’ll know you’ve made it.
Snowden deleted a tweet on this general topic that didn’t age well (screencap here for anyone curious). Looks like Glenn is doubling down.
Shana
Yeah for an REM reference! Thanks for that.
Downpuppy
@ruemara: Blame Sanders? Hey! He conceded, got behind the candidate & has fought the good fight all along.
& oh, yes, there are plenty of people I used to enjoy reading who I now want to slap upside the head until they get over it.
tobie
@ruemara: Why, oh why is Chris Hayes giving so many of these people airtime on his show? Doesn’t he recognize some of the damage they did?
P.S. If you listened to “On Point” this morning, you’ll have heard a caller from Alabama say she voted for Stein, not Clinton, because she (the caller) is a true progressive who cares about the working class. I was tempted to call in to say that the choice in the Democratic primary was not between progressivism and neoliberalism but demagogery and competence but I realized it wouldn’t make a difference to those already so convinced.
P.P.S. Yes, she identified herself as a BS supporter.
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator: I think you’re being unfairly harsh to Milo.
Mister Forkbeard
@ruemara: I’d cut Sanders out of there. Unlike some of the others I don’t think he intended to cause harm, and I don’t think he realized the divisions he exacerbated until the convention.
@Downpuppy: I think you just started/continued a flamewar. But I think that while we can agree that Sanders was post-convention a great asset, his run caused some divisions that he didn’t anticipate and he accidentally reinforced a lot of right-wing propaganda about Hillary, or allowed some of his more fervent followers to do so.
Nina Turner, for example, was with Bernie and absolutely not a team player.
bystander
I used to like GG but somewhere along the way, he went over to the dark side. But KdvH? I missed that.
ruemara
@Downpuppy: I’m glad you view him as blameless. I, however, having listened to his rhetoric of extreme disappointment in anything that wasn’t exactly what he wanted yet couldn’t actually do and he knows that, yet still spouts pony crap, blame him for giving too much credence to “we coulda had [extremely progressive policy only possible with a monolithic population] but those evil Dems colluded to not do it]”. Sick. Of. Him. You want to love him? Go ahead. 10 years of Breakfast with Bernie soured me on him and Hartmann.
@Mister Forkbeard: See above.
randy khan
@sharl:
Just tweets? GG didn’t deign to actually visit a nearly top-10,000 blog to explain the error of Doug’s ways? Gee, I’m disappointed.
Patricia Kayden
@sharl: Doug should simply do what Glenn does when he gets criticism — block the critic. Glenn loves to block critics but then go around criticizing other people. Funny that.
patroclus
Well, GG is right that I.F. Stone was a good writer in the 50’s but to compare then to now is wrong. I’d trust Gary Kasparov, Johnny Weir and John Oliver more on Russia these days than Dear Leader Greenwald. I wonder if Greenwald is aware of the anti-gay pogrom going on in Russia; the elimination of all political and business opponents to the existing regime, the blatant harassment, the killings, the elimination of most free media organs, the persecution of musicians and artists, the undermining of NATO and the blatant interference in democracies all over the world, not just the U.S. (not to mention the support and arming of Syria’s repressive regime). The list just goes on and on and on and you don’t even have to mention Putin. It’s not a Cold War to point all this out. Greenwald ignores all of this or, in Greenwald style, ALL OF THIS!!!!
Roger Moore
@bystander:
I don’t think he ever really left. He fought against some other dark siders, but that never put him on the light side.
Mister Forkbeard
@ruemara: Right. I think he largely stopped doing that after the primary through the election, but I don’t think he realized how harmful that rhetoric actually was until the convention started and he just couldn’t calm his supporters down at all.
Honestly, he’d have done a lot better to stop attacking around May or earlier, and to start letting his people down easy. The “I’m going to take it to the convention” was strategically a horrible decision. My own guess is that he knew he’d lost, but he was trying to establish a power base for himself in the left and didn’t believe he’d damage Hillary enough for the Republicans to win, and once he saw how angry and hoodwinked his supporters were (such as booing Elizabeth Warren, of all people) he stopped encouraging it. But that’s just me, YMMV.
geg6
@ruemara:
I’m sitting down with you. And giving the Berniebros the stink eye. I have no use for the man.
Betty Cracker
Two things:
1) Greenwald isn’t fit to shine I.F. Stone’s shoes.
2) I am confused by this bit from another writer, Keith Gessen, whom Greenwald quotes approvingly:
What the actual fuck?
randy khan
@Roger Moore:
In gaming parlance, I kind of think GG started out neutral neutral and slid to neutral evil.
I’ve said this before, but I liked him in his Salon days, at least for a while, but I started getting annoyed not so much with his positions but with his endless combativeness – the inability to acknowledge any weaknesses in his arguments, the tendentious (a fav word of his) and endless updates, and the presumption that anyone who didn’t agree with him was acting In bad faith – and decided he wasn’t worth my time. What’s happened since always has seemed to me to be a devolution.
patroclus
@Roger Moore: Dear Leader GG was really must-read from 2005-09, but he went way off the rails once Obama got in. I think he’ll come around eventually because, under Trump, the surveillance state goes on, the attack in Yemen was conducted, the drones are becoming more ubiquitous and I can’t believe he would really favor the travel ban. But he hasn’t noticed much of that because of his Trump-love and his defense of Russia’s horrific policies. He doesn’t seem to care about deaths in Syria because they’re being caused by Assad and his Russian backers – the massive amount of refugees seems to have escaped his attention as well. Nothing from Dear Leader GG as yet on the crackdown on transsexuals; on Muslims, on women’s rights or on immigrants from Latin America – it’s like none of that is even occurring to him.
randy khan
@Betty Cracker:
Okay, the Gessen bit is just bizarre. I don’t blame the country’s problems on Putin or Russia; I blame them for making it harder to address those problems, and airing out the dirty laundry and purging the people who were beneficiaries of the intervention is just one step in that process.
zhena gogolia
Has anyone noticed that since the election, we get the garden-variety trolls we got before, but the random comments that seemed to come from an apartment on ulitsa 26 Bakinskikh komissarov have disappeared? Strange.
different-church-lady
@sharl: Goldman Sachs has never looked better.
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: Well, they’re kinda preoccupied with writing the language of executive orders at the moment…
MattF
It’s notable that actual left-wing ideology plays no role in GG’s arguments– in his world you choose the set of oligarchs you line up with and everything follows from that. Not that I miss the days of being solemnly informed that my arguments are meaningless because I have no understanding of the Dialectic, but at least in those days you made contact with the Zeitgeist by reading and thinking, rather than by putting your fingers into an electrical socket.
Roger Moore
@Mister Forkbeard:
Much earlier. It was mostly hopeless for him after Super Tuesday, and it was practically, though not mathematically, impossible for him to win pretty soon after that. He should have gracefully accepted that he wasn’t going to win by the middle of March. When it’s clear you’ve lost, accept it, congratulate the winner (or the remaining candidates if you get bumped early), and get to work helping the team. Instead of doing that, he continued to fight, getting more and more vicious the more obvious it was that his campaign was hopeless. That scorched earth campaigning was very destructive, and all the stumping for Hillary after the convention couldn’t undo it.
sharl
@bystander: Regarding KdvH, this 2014 Slate piece might be relevant; an excerpt:
Her husband Stephen Cohen of Princeton is the career USSR/Russia scholar, though KvdH did her undergraduate senior thesis on McCarthyism (per her Wikipedia entry), so there is some historical overlap of scholarly interests there I suppose.
Note that the author of that Slate piece – conservative/libertarian Cathy Young – emigrated from Russia as a teen with her family. Her politics notwithstanding, I like a lot of her writing (including this piece), but I tend to be on the lookout for incidents of emigres letting their personal (and understandable) passions overwhelm their intellect in their writings. Family history, and the deep knowledge and passions that often come with it, can pose a real challenge for those writing for a general audience.
randy khan
@patroclus:
GG seems to be in that interesting (and happily pretty small) group of gay men who care a lot about civil rights of gay men, but not really that much about the civil rights of other people.
SatanicPanic
@Mister Forkbeard: That’s a fair defense, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Patricia Kayden
@bystander: I used to love his articles on Salon way back in the day. After he left, he appears to have gone off the deep end. The fact that he’s shilling for Trump and Putin says it all.
different-church-lady
@patroclus:
I remember reading him during that period and thinking, “Okay, his enemy is my enemy, but something still doesn’t smell right at all here.” The only reason he gained any credibility with the left is because in their version they put a period where my second comma is.
Chris
And like I said over there: what the fuck IS it with the far far left and Russia? There isn’t even a USSR anymore. They don’t even pretend to be a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement trying to liberate the oppressed masses anymore. Even the shitty transparent excuses available to the Baader-Meinhoff/Red Brigade types of the seventies and eighties aren’t there anymore. They’re carrying water for an out-of-the-closet white nationalist regime with strong imperialist and fundamentalist tendencies. Might as well be shilling for apartheid South Africa.
tobie
@Mister Forkbeard: Nah, he ran against the party. That’s why the damage he did cannot so easily be undone. NPR’s “On Point” was interesting this morning. I heard a lot of vague crap about neoliberalism. It made me wonder how much the people who spout this line know what neoliberalism is.
Patricia Kayden
@zhena gogolia: Are you referring to Bob of Portland (or Bob from somewhere or the other)?
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
There’s a tiny hint of an argument there. Yes, it’s true that Russia worked with Trump in the election, and he should hang for that. But it’s also true that Trump shouldn’t have been close enough that Russia could steal the election from him. There are real pathologies in American politics that Trump (and Putin) took advantage of. We shouldn’t focus on Russian interference so much that we ignore the deeper problems the election revealed.
Chris
@Kylroy:
That, and being “right” about Russian moles in the U.S. government is like being “right” that the Sun will rise in the east. It’s called espionage.
different-church-lady
@randy khan:
That one took a lot of Spackle.
Patricia Kayden
@Betty Cracker: It’s not meant to make sense to people like us, Betty. I assume Rightwingers will read that paragraph and go “AHA!” since basically Glenn is a huge fan of Putin and will write nonsense to express that support. When you know that Putin has gone after gays and minorities in Russia, Glenn’s support for him becomes grotesque and inexplicable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ruemara: John Fuglesang, who was pretty willfully silly about the possibilities of Wilmer*, actually said something kinda harsh the other day about Sarandon being seemingly unaware of the damage she did to other women and other senior citizens who aren’t multimillionaire Oscar-winning celebrities
* the example that stands out in my mind: “Wilmer will govern by executive order, and it will be a one term presidency, but a one-term revolution!”
tobie
@Roger Moore:
I agree with you on this and would only add that they are old pathologies that get inflamed at certain points. I mentioned the other day that a friend of mine recently learned from an American historian studying exit poll data that in 1968 George Wallace got 44% of the self-identified white working class vote in Wisconsin. That’s shocking. White working class voters were moved then as in 2016 by racial animus.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
QFT
Been waiting for the right moment to say this: our problem is not Trump. Our problem is that 60+ million people looked at Trump in all his insane, ranting, sexist, racist, incompetent asshole glory, and said to themselves, “Yeah, presidential!” Someday Trump will be gone. But those voters will still be here.
randy khan
@Roger Moore:
I don’t have a huge issue with him continuing to campaign, but I found it troubling at the time that Sanders adopted narratives that fit in with what Republicans were saying about her, particularly the idea that she was part of a corrupt system. (In contrast, Clinton held back on most of the really nasty things she could have said about Sanders.) I don’t believe in Reagan’s 11th commandment, but when you’re in a position where only something improbable will let you win, you need to think hard about what kinds of appeals you want to use.
Sanders hitting her on “corruption” just reinforced the messages that we heard in the general, and I have plenty of anecdata from Facebook and elsewhere (including here) that BoBs used that claim to justify not voting for her in the end. I don’t know how many votes it was worth, but it certainly was worth some, and it’s not hard to imagine there were 80,000 of them in three key states, so to speak.
Captain C
@Chris: There’s a certain species of Far Leftist (also Far Rightist, once you get out to the extreme Libertarian fringe) to whom anyone who opposes America must be good, righteous, and worth supporting, even if they have a few flaws. And by few flaws, I mean even if they’re empirically worse. Of course, you don’t see these people moving out of America for whatever anti-American paradise they’re loudly supporting.
To quote the Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries:
“29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less”
And my own corollary: “Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is worse than your enemy.”
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh
Chet Murthy
@Roger Moore: Roger, I think you’re 100% right in -all- your points, -except-:
I would put to you that until we recover from this horrible own-goal of having installed a fascist, nothing else matters. Once it’s Preznit Fat Termite or ZEGS, yeah, we need to address all those other things. But right now, there is only one thing that matters: getting Dampnut out.
Captain C
@Patricia Kayden: I believe Bob In Putinland got banned at some point.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@patroclus:
Hell, I don’t think GG is going to give a shit about the anti-gay pogrom that is getting ready to get under way here in the US.
Chris
@different-church-lady:
That was basically my opinion even when I still thought he was going to lose.
randy khan
@different-church-lady:
LOL. I think that’s a much larger group than the one I was highlighting, but he’s *definitely* in that one, too.
Captain C
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So…President Cruz, or Rubio, or whoever gets to undo all those orders in 2020? How does that help any revolution in the long run?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Betty Cracker:
Gessen isn’t wrong – WASF due to the deep and abiding problem of white nationalist christian conservatism that is deeply ingrained in our political system.
trollhattan
Oh waiter, popcorn please.
Aleta
No, it’s an attempt to point out that the Russians helped elect a man who is turning our country over to racists, who intend to increase our deep abiding problems.
Mister Forkbeard
@Roger Moore: I agree with this largely, but I don’t really fault him holding on for awhile after Super Tuesday. But May, I think, was the latest time I would have said calming down was a good idea. And I remember the ludicrous conspiracy theories from some Bernie supporters after it was announced in before the CA primary June that Hillary had the required number of delegates and thought “Uh oh.”. >_<
Mnemosyne
I just realized what this argument is — it’s GG’s version of, Democrats opposed civil rights until the 1960s, so Democrats are the real racists.
IOW, it’s ignoring the history of the past 50 years or so and pretending that McCarthy’s red-baiting = people being pissed that Russia interfered in our election.
Baud
Are all of these pro-Putin leftists white? Maybe we needn’t get too sophisticated in our thinking about their motivation.
trollhattan
Am a tiny bit conflicted here. What would GG think? (Not actually asking, thanks anyway.)
Minorities? Screw-em but save the Free Markets!
trollhattan
@Baud: White leftists with daddy issues.
Roger Moore
@different-church-lady:
Thank you for saying what I meant better than I could say it.
les
@trollhattan:
No mean trick, that.
SatanicPanic
@Chet Murthy: This. Whatever we want to say about Trump voters, the fact that the FBI threw the election and that Trump might be in cahoots with Russia are the biggest political scandals of any of our lifetimes. And Trump is certainly a bigger deal than his voters- he got the same votes more or less as Mitt Romney, and while I wouldn’t be happy with Romney, I wouldn’t be having trouble sleeping either.
Davis X. Machina
@Aleta: Immigration is a federal issue…. what branch of the federal executive can you foresee having a surge in demand for detention capacity?
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I’m not. Go Injuries!
tobie
@Mister Forkbeard: You’re really bending yourself into the shape of a pretzel to defend the guy. It was clear the race was over by Super Tuesday. BS should have bowed out the moment Trump reached the magic number to become the GOP nominee in April. Continuing after that and campaigning against the party and the party’s nominee served no purpose except to enlarge BS’s already oversized ego or to split the party (or some combination of both). Neither he nor his surrogates should be rewarded for his and their truly damaging behavior by giving them leadership of the party. That is why I’m steadfast in my opposition to Keith Ellison as party chair and will now write my state reps at the party convention to encourage them to vote for Perez.
Baud
@trollhattan:
@Roger Moore:
Agreed.
Chris
@trollhattan:
“They [who] seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers…call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.”
Baud
@tobie: FWIW, I agree about the harm done by the way the primary went down, but I’m against bringing it into the DNC Chair race unless Ellison himself did something specific that I should oppose.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Show me a non-White one.
Mister Forkbeard
@different-church-lady: Honestly, I think a lot of those people looked at Trump and thought “Not a democrat/Hillary!”. The republican machine did a simply fantastic job of demonizing Hillary specifically and Democrats in general, but a fair bit of Trump supporters didn’t proactively support him so much as decide to hate on Hillary.
They’re conservatives in the sense of Cleek’s Law, not in terms of actually liking Trump or his personality. I know several people who voted for him despite hating him because they were disgusted with Hillary… though for mostly imaginary reasons.
Roger Moore
@les:
Remember who has been most effective at blocking Trump’s agenda so far.
rikyrah
@SatanicPanic:
Is there anything that the Spooks knew that the FBI didn’t? The Spooks expected the FBI to do their phucking job.
Aleta
@Davis X. Machina: Very good point. (I pick H. Security.) Also (the Hill)
SatanicPanic
@rikyrah: I dunno
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
The biggest issue for me isn’t even the extent of Trump’s ties with Russia. It’s the fact that we have a president who not only seems to want to be closer to Russia than to his own longstanding democratic allies, but wants to be so close to them that he openly called on them to hack into his political competitors for him and be a force in the U.S. presidential election. It doesn’t fucking matter if he’s completely squeaky clean on the Russian front, it still wouldn’t clear him of that.
ruemara
@Baud: Sssshhhhh. Let’s not bring up the albino elephant in the liberal tent.
I’ve been doing yeoman’s work whittling down my 2017 Christmas if it happens list, just by that one weird trick.
tobie
@Baud: Well, Ellison continued campaigning for BS after Trump became the GOP nominee. He could have retreated from the campaign or, like Merkley, all but publicly asked BS to concede. He didn’t. I bear no bitterness toward Merkely because when push came to shove he saw the writing on the wall, knew how singularly horrific a Trump Presidency would be, and did the right thing. Ellison didn’t. That’s why I’m opposed to him.
FWIW: I am also kind of keen to have a DNC chair who worked in the civil rights division of the Justice Department and as Secretary of Labor. Who better to address the Dem’s two most important challenges: fighting voter suppression and reaching out to labor?
Baud
@rikyrah: Not to toot my own horn, but I stopped following that crowd long before many others did, so I couldn’t tell you the races of a lot of these folks other than GG.
Ksmiami
@Brachiator: with cameras on filming …
Baud
@Aleta: I feel bad for the victims, but am grinning from ear to ear at the impact on the weed-smoking libertarians who supported Trump for the tax cuts.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: This too.
Baud
@tobie: As far as I remember, Ellison never said anything offensive, but I don’t recall the exact timing of his actions during the primary.
I like Perez too, and while I’ve mostly been neutral on the race, I oppose anyone who would vilify him simply because he is not in their camp.
zhena gogolia
@Patricia Kayden:
Not really, because I never got the impression he’d ever set foot in the motherland.
Baud
@ruemara:
Haven’t you heard? The War on Christmas is over. Christmas won!
zhena gogolia
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, yeah, yeah — first things first. (directed at Gessen, not you)
Mister Forkbeard
@tobie: I am? I thought we basically agreed on this – with the exception that I understood why he might want to continue the race despite not having much/any chance of winning, and that he should absolutely have left the earlier than he did? Note: Understanding his motivation is not agreeing with him that it was the right thing to do. I completely agree he caused a lot of damage.
I say this as someone who voted for Hillary in the primary. Sanders had some good ideas, but was unrealistic and didn’t have a good handle on how government actually worked. That probably played into his decision to continue the campaign so long, too.
And I don’t think Bernie has gotten leadership of the party. I am completely happy with letting many of his supporters decide they want to run for office and work with the party, though. In terms of DNC Chair, I don’t think Perez would be much different than Ellison in terms of actual value or decisionmaking and I’d rather not vote against someone purely because they voted for Bernie. As a practical matter, that’s a really bad idea for party unity and it invites a fight we don’t need. I think Perez is currently favored to win anyway, isn’t he? And whatever else he is, I wouldn’t call Ellison a BernieBro.
The Moar You Know
@Baud: The guys who won’t go to jail? Shit, I got news for you. Weed has been de facto legal since at least the 1990s if you happen to be at least middle-class white and don’t dress like a Deadhead.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@different-church-lady:
I tried reading him back in the day, I really tried. But the man is verbosity given flesh.
Brachiator
@patroclus:
Greenwald is one of those people for whom only the sins of the United States matter. This is an old issue for a certain type of purity pony rider.
NR
@tobie:
You’re right. We should keep the same party leadership that lost the entire country outside of the Northeast and the West Coast to the Republicans over the last eight years. That’s a much better idea. I don’t see anything that could possibly go wrong with that plan.
different-church-lady
@Mister Forkbeard:
They’re lying. If that really were true they’d have voted third party. They liked what Trump put down but were too ashamed to admit it — pretty much exactly what Conway was saying during the campaign.
No sane person could have voted for him. We have to face the fact that a much much larger percentage of the country is insane than we ever imagined.
jl
@Mister Forkbeard: Well, you didn’t basically agree in exactly the precisely right way did you? The holdouts fighting the good fight in the HRC/Bernie ware that must never die are very particular.
Perez is going to win DNC chair. Perez and Ellison are friends, and Ellison has indicated that he is not going to make a stink about how the election comes out. Either one will be a good DNC chair, and I think are basically agreed on the direction the Democrats need to go. I don’t see much to argue about, unless a person is obsessed with keeping the HRC/Wilmer feud going.
Baud
@The Moar You Know: Oh, I understand where the brunt of this will fall and am opposed to it. But even though the white libertarians won’t be the ones going to jail, I do think they were sincere about wanting legalization.
BTW, I was curious and did a quick google search, and here were Trump’s and Clinton’s stances on the issue.
Chip Daniels
@Chris:
Yep. When you find yourself in bed with Stormfront and Breitbart, you might ask yourself just what was in that free drink someone gave you.
Mister Forkbeard
@jl: In all seriousness, I do see a lot of people that are really vindictive about support for Hillary/Bernie. It bugs me. Mistermix was a bad messenger for it a few weeks back, but he’s essentially right that we’re almost all of the same team and we need to stop attacking each other.
EDIT: There ARE some Bernie supporters that weren’t and aren’t interested in being Democrats, but I refuse to believe that was anywhere near most of them. I know (and am related to) a lot of Bernie dead-enders that were kind of pathological in how strident they were against Hillary, but even most of them wised up around late September. Most of them. :P
Baud
@jl: From what I can tell, there are basically only two groups that think the DNC race is do or die. (1) Michael Moore and his ilk and (2) Alan Dershowitz and his ilk. 99% of us will move forward, but there will be noise.
les
@Mister Forkbeard:
Distinction without a difference. Actions matter, don’t really give a shit what was in their “hearts.”
Cacti
@Captain C:
Too many non-topical posts about Victoria Nuland cookies no matter what the subject.
les
@Roger Moore:
Agreed–can’t totally hate on lawyers, I are one. But for Ms. Kelly Anne to top John Yoo and the Liberty U assholes who still infest the DoJ takes some doing.
tobie
@Mister Forkbeard: Where we differ is in your assumption that BS didn’t know what he was doing. His campaign became too negative for me to accept that. The melodrama surrounding the suspension of his campaign where he wouldn’t do it until he had a personal meeting with the President was one of countless signs of his astonishing self-importance. We also shouldn’t forget that he put Cornell West on the platform committee, a man who certainly is no friend to the party. No, what BS understood was how to take hostages, and the party foolishly believed that if they placated him, he and his supporters would come around. It didn’t work out that way.
What I think we can all agree on is that we have bigger fish to fry now.
gbbalto
@NR: Run for office, win, and show us up!
Aleta
@Baud: If jail time for pot increases, I suspect that as before whites will be treated more leniently, shorter if any jail time.
But leftists and libertarians will be sad if Homeland Security and the courts are able to define speech in the US as having the potential to support terrorism. And to legalize even more surveillance, entrapment and coercion.
Cacti
@Baud:
I’m almost hoping that Pete Buttigieg gets chosen as a compromise candidate for DNC chair.
That way, the contingent who’d like to make us officially into the Kiss Bernie’s ass Party have no rational basis to complain that he’s not in touch with the youngs, or part of the nefarious DC establishment.
liberal
@patroclus:
LOL. The “new chronology” guy. Yeah, I think we should all listen to him.
NR
@gbbalto: “Um, Mr. Engineer? That bridge you designed? It just collapsed.”
“Yeah, well, can YOU do any better?”
Baud
@Mister Forkbeard:
Clearly right. The dilemma is, when our people are attacked from the left, who will respond? And how can we respond without exacerbating divisions? Clinton mostly tried to play nice, and it didn’t work.
Baud
@Cacti: I don’t know if that’s right. I don’t know to what extent they are now “Ellison or bust.”
Brachiator
@different-church-lady:
Strangely enough, Sarah Palin was the Hope, Trump the fulfillment of the Promise.
A certain type of citizen yearned for someone just like them. Someone ignorant, nationalist, selfish.
Yesterday I listened to some talk radio hosts who talked about how Trump loves the Oscars and would probably watch and post Twitter comments — just like they would. And I was thinking, shouldn’t the president of the United States have more important stuff to do than pay rapt attention to the Oscar telecast??? Why in hell would I want the president to be as much of a slacker as I might be?
But no, to these clowns knowing about Trump’s Oscar love just makes him someone they can relate to, a man of the people. The same is true of his shambolic press conferences.
liberal
@patroclus:
Yeah. The fact that our friends in Turkey, S.A., and Qatar helped salafist nutjobs become major players in Syria had nothing to do with it.
Aleta
I’m disappointed in Lewis Black, who still preaches his animosity to HRC. I pictured him as smarter.
Baud
@Aleta: That is disappointing.
liberal
@MattF: He’s never been left-wing. At one point he was claiming that there was a deep contradiction between campaign limits from corporations and first amendment rights. A bunch of people had to point out to him in the comment section that corporations aren’t people, and the State has every right to regulate them—in fact, they’re creatures of the State.
No leftist would ever think like that.
Aleta
@Brachiator: Or said: “all his insane, ranting, sexist, racist, incompetent asshole glory” is not a big deal.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: Back in 2008 I never imagined that the reason Palin got rejected was because she wasn’t crazy enough.
trollhattan
O/T Florida Man, still a damn jerk.
liberal
@tobie:
Yawn. BS was nowhere near as damaging as the genius who appointed Comey to head the FBI.
Cacti
@different-church-lady:
That wasn’t the reason she got rejected.
She got rejected because she had girl parts. Trump is boy-Palin. All of the crazy with the proper genitalia to boot.
liberal
@Brachiator:
Depends on the context.
In an important sense, the sins of the US should matter the most to Americans. They’re sins we can do something about, and which in some sense we’re responsible for.
different-church-lady
@Aleta: No, I’m telling you in my insistent, half-baked theory way, that there’s some kind of weird tipping point or uncanny valley effect involved — one notch of crazy below Trump means revulsion, but put enough crazy on the table and people sign on. Nobody went “meh”.
liberal
@NR: Heh. Wonder how quickly someone will make an ad hominem attack on you based on other posts you’ve made, despite this point being pretty obvious.
different-church-lady
@Cacti: Probably right to the extent that men can play the asshole much more convincingly than women, at least among those for whom asshole is a positive quality.
liberal
@different-church-lady: I don’t think that’s really true; you’re underrating the possibility that they were stupid enough not to see the far, far greater threat Trump posed (assuming their viewpoint that Hillary constituted a threat herself).
Mnemosyne
@Mister Forkbeard:
Don’t forget, those impatient “incriminating” emails from the DNC were written in May, after he was mathematically eliminated. And yet you still have morons quoting them as PROOF! that the DNC was conspiring against their hero from day 1.
liberal
@jl:
Yeah, I think someone posted some photos on Twitter of them eating together in some restaurant in DC late at night, recently, or something.
different-church-lady
@liberal: That stupidity was a choice.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
FWIW, it’s the “pro-life” crowd. The ones in my family have totally lost the thread, to the point where they think Trump is A-OK because he’s going to outlaw abortion, and literally NOTHING else matters to them. Nothing.
Mister Forkbeard
@Mnemosyne: Yep. And the “incriminating” emails don’t even say what morons want them to say. It’s infuriating, because I can’t intelligently argue with people who believe this. It’s like someone telling me that Obama is actually white: Show them a picture and they say “That doesn’t matter. Dude’s still white, why can’t you see how you’re a tool of the elites?”
I just don’t know how to respond to that.
@different-church-lady: I think people can convince themselves of A LOT when they hate someone so much. It’s not that they liked what Trump represented, but that they hated Hillary so much they refused to actually evaluate Trump at all.
liberal
@gbbalto: Heh. The usually fucking idiot trope that “if you don’t make massive contribution X, you can’t ever criticize the idiots who have been running the Democratic Party.”
The stupid, it burns.
Cacti
@different-church-lady:
Much worse. Men are rewarded for it.
Trump’s bon mots about his fondness for random sexual assault were taken by the deplorables as proof of how jocular and relatable he was.
Meanwhile, Hillary was a heartless bitch because Bill had affairs.
Brachiator
@liberal:
But I’m talking about a blindness among some lefty types (conservatives have their own version) that the US is the sole force of evil in the world.
There is also some arrogant stupidity at work here that says “if the US didn’t do [whatever] then the situation would not have been as bad as it turned out.”
Mister Forkbeard
@liberal: I’m not sure I’d take anything NR says on good faith though. S/He has always been more about attacking that doing anything productive, and the criticism frequently wasn’t helpful and was extremely trollish.
Even now, NR seems angrier at Hillary/Dem Leadership that’s ostensibly a misguided ally than at Trump/Republicans who are actually perpetrating atrocities.
NR
@Mister Forkbeard:
I’m angry at both the Republican leadership that’s fucking up the country and the Democratic leadership whose gross incompetence made it possible.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Actually, I have pointed out repeatedly — with links from places that include the Brennan Center — that NR’s magical map of states the Democrats lost matches up exactly with the states that implemented voter suppression programs against Democratic voters.
But you guys seem to think that links and facts are an “ad hominem attack,” so …
Mister Forkbeard
@NR: Okay. That’s a good, fine place to be. But I could be wrong, but I see a huge imbalance in your “awful democrats” comments against your “awful republicans” comments. So maybe you need to focus a bit more on the 2nd one.
ruemara
Voter suppression. Voter suppression. Voter suppression. I don’t know how to phrase it so the disappointed will understand it, but when you win the popular vote, but lose by in some cases, less than 100k votes, EC votes due to a coordinated campaign of voters suppression of the key groups who saw through the bullshit and understood what was at stake – it doesn’t count as lacking appeal. You can have your reality, just stop trying to get actual reality to accept you.
NR
@Mister Forkbeard: I have criticized Republicans around here before.
That said, only bad Democrats get defended around here, so I can see how it might seem imbalanced.
AxelFoley
@liberal:
Yeah, no. Fuck you and Bernie.
NR
@Mnemosyne: And I’ve pointed out repeatedly that no, your voter suppression map doesn’t match up exactly with states the Democrats lost, and that many of the states in question were lost in 2010, before the voter suppression schemes were in place, and that there is no hard data about the effect that voter suppression had. So don’t preach about facts when you consistently ignore facts that go against what you want to believe.
Brachiator
@Aleta:
Trump promised to give them everything they wanted. They believe that he listened to them, and that neither the Democrats nor the Republican mainstream cared about what they wanted.
They do not care about his “insane, ranting,sexist, incompetent asshole glory,’ as a potential danger.
They want someone who will give them what they want. That’s the appeal of the authoritarian demagogue.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: Those folks, if they’re white, aren’t going to have much – if anything – bad happen to them. Because, as Reid Fleming so famously put it, “The RIGHT people NEVER get hurt.”
Miss Bianca
@Mister Forkbeard:
That’s a pretty damning indictment, considering that the guy has spent, what – 30 years in federal government?
NR
@ruemara: You want to talk about “actual reality?” Look at Minnesota. That state was controlled by Democrats; no gerrymandering, no voter suppression. And yet Hillary only won the state by 1.4%, down massively from Obama’s 7% margin in 2012. Minnesota is one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country (it’s the only state that voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972), and Hillary won by a mere 1.4%, and the Republicans took control of the state legislature.
So no, the Democratic party has problems that go far beyond voter suppression (which I agree is awful and should be fought against).
Miss Bianca
@NR: So you’re basically admitting you don’t have what it takes to actually run for office. Now if you’d only take that extra step and admit you don’t have any fucking idea what it actually takes to put someone ELSE in office.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@trollhattan:
I read that woeful story earlier. Ugh. Maybe he doesn’t have a daughter.
NR
@Miss Bianca: What, exactly, does it take to run for office? Anybody can run for office.
And I don’t think anyone who still supports the current leadership of the Democratic party has any room to be criticizing other people for not knowing how to get people in office, I’m afraid.
gbbalto
@liberal: If you endlessly insist that only you have the Truth and Knowledge that could have won the election, keep expecting to be challenged to demonstrate that it works. Maybe start with state lege in a red constituency?
patroclus
@liberal: The “New Chronology” guy is/was Anatoly Fumenko – not Kasparov (who merely wrote about it in Russian media). Kasparov is the former chess champ, who founded the “Other Russia” and was one of Putin’s principal political opponents until he was warned by the former KGB head that his life was in danger and he then emigrated to the U.S. And his expertise on Russia is far more extensive than an American living in Brazil, who has little (if any) direct knowledge of what’s going on in Russia. I think most observers would trust Kasparov on Russia far more than Dear Leader GG. Please explain in detail Dear Leader GG’s experience in Russia.
gbbalto
@NR: But you won’t. So much easier to stink up a comments section!
patroclus
@liberal: I don’t think our friends in Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Qatar have much, if anything, to do with Dear Leader GG’s failure to even notice what is going on in Syria, or Russia’s involvement. I await with earnest Dear Leader GG’s first foray into the issue, because he surely hasn’t cared about Syria at all up til now.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
And yet in 2008, Al Franken only won by about 300 votes.
Yep, that says “reliably Democratic” right there.
ETA: The current Democratic governor also won in a contested election by a very, very small margin. “Reliably Democratic” is what Jerry Brown’s margin of victory is, not Mark Dayton’s.
NR
@Mnemosyne: Name another state that’s voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972.
And anyway, you’re ducking the main point, which was that Hillary’s margin dropped hugely from Obama’s, and the Republicans took control of the state legislature in a state without voter suppression.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
And they voted Democratic for president again this year. You somehow keep acting like Hillary lost Minnesota.
Yes, her margin was lower. Perhaps that had something to do with the way Minnesota keeps manically cycling between parties on the state level.
But it’s pretty odd to keep citing a state that Hillary won as your proof that the problem is the Democrats, not the Republicans.
patroclus
Since 1972, Minnesota has sent 4 Republicans to the Senate – Durenberger, Grams, Boschwitz and Coleman. Since statehood, Minnesota has sent 26 Republicans to the Senate and only 13 Democrats (and 3 FL’s). It seems like you should be doing a better job than you’re doing. Maybe you should listen to voters from other states that have a better record.
NR
@Mnemosyne: You do understand that margin of victory is a thing, right? And you do understand that 1.4 is quite a lot lower than 7.7, right?
I mean, these are simple concepts that shouldn’t have to be explained.
patroclus
Why did you let Republicans take control of your state legislature? What did Hillary do right in carrying the state and you do wrong in allowing control to be taken away? Winning is better than losing, right? Isn’t it a simple concept that doesn’t need explaining?
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Please explain why the margin of victory is more important to your point than the actual victory.
Minnesota has gone to the Democrat every year since 1972, including this year. What is significant about this specific margin of victory, other than your undying hatred of Hillary Clinton?
MisterForkbeard
@NR: Do you feel that the cyclical nature of politics might be having an effect wrt this argument? It’s typically much harder for a party to do well if they just had 8 years of the presidency, since they’re an obvious and easy target for discontent.
It’s the same reason opposition parties do well during the midterms. Arguing that the entire 6% difference between Obama and Hillary is entirely due to a problem with current democratic leadership feels like a reductive and overly simplistic answer that rests more on feelings and less on in-depth qualitative analysis.
Mnemosyne
@MisterForkbeard:
IOW, just like all of NR’s comments here to date.
NR
@Mnemosyne:
Because it represents a ton of votes that were lost without voter suppression.
In other words, it completely contradicts your assertion that voter suppression is the cause of all the Democratic party’s problems.
NR
@MisterForkbeard: Oh, I’m sure there were cyclical factors at play in this election. The point I was making was simply that it’s idiotic to blame voter suppression for all of the Democratic party’s problems when Hillary very nearly lost a solidly Democratic state that didn’t have voter suppression (and the Democrats did lose control of the legislature).
Was it 100% the Democratic party’s fault? I doubt it. But at some point the party leadership has got to stand up and take responsibility for the nearly unprecedented electoral losses that happened on their watch. They have to accept their share of the blame. And the people who support them have to acknowledge their role in this disaster and the need for change. Or we’ll have eight years of Trump and someone even worse after him.
tybee
@liberal:
then you should be on fire.
patroclus
@NR: The Democrats (nationally) actually picked up seats in both the House and the Senate last year. But, on the other hand, the voters in Minnesota turned the state legislature over to the Republicans. I’m sure there are various factors at play, but it seems to me that the voters in Minnesota should accept the blame for that – they don’t seem to be putting out the right message, nor do the Minnesota voters seem to be doing things correct tactically. Especially in such a swing state, given the history of sending so many Republicans to the Senate throughout history. It’s about time that the Minnesota voters took some responsibility rather than trying to blame others for their mistakes.
gwangung
@NR: Actually, no, it doesn’t; there are multiple other factors that conceivably could explain the results that you haven’t devoted much space to consider. You’re rhetorically favoring and using space to showcase one explanation that may or may not be the cause, though it IS one conceivable explanation.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
So one (1) outlier state out of 50 proves that voter suppression in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina didn’t matter this year?
Talk about deciding on a conclusion and only looking at evidence that supports it …
ETA: Also, you may want to look at various Democratic margins of victory prior to 2012. Just for shits and giggles.
NR
@gwangung: I’m not writing a doctoral dissertation here. Of course there are always multiple factors at play in any election. But the simple, inescapable fact is that under the current leadership’s watch, the Democratic party lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost over 900 state legislative seats to the Republicans. What they’re doing is not working. Change is needed.
patroclus
@NR: I’m not writing a masters thesis here. Of course there are other factors at play in any election. But the simple inescapable fact is that the Minnesota Democratic voters lost control of their legislature while, nationally, the Democrats were picking up seats in the House and Senate. What they’re doing in Minnesota is plainly not working. Change is needed. Tactically, strategically and on their message. It is long past time for Minnesota voters to accept blame and responsibility for their own mistakes. Blaming others is unacceptable – when will Minnesota voters own up to being wrong?
NR
@Mnemosyne: Do you even know what “outlier” means? Minnesota wasn’t an outlier. Hillary did worse than Obama in 38 states, many of which did not have voter suppression.
See here for the data. (He uses red for Democrats and blue for Republicans). Minnesota wasn’t an outlier, it was part of a nationwide trend.
patroclus
@NR: Do you even know what “outlier” means? While the Democrats were picking up House and Senate seats nationwide, the Minnesota voters turned their legislature over to the Republicans, without the voter suppression efforts elsewhere. Minnesota was clearly an outlier, especially given that Hillary carried the state while the voters turned the legislature over. Why were Minnesotans so off message? They should try appealing to the voters by indicating that they are on the voters’ side! What did they do wrong while other states were getting it right? When will Minnesota Democrats admit the obvious – that their message, tactics and strategy should change?? It’s long past time.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker:
Translated: We deserve Putin fucking with us, because of Hillary Clinton and Goldman Sach.
J R in WV
@sharl:
I knew a Kathy Young very well. Knew her mom well, who died of cancer way back.
Kathy was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease, too late for real curative treatment. She was mostly wheel chair bound after being an outdoor person. She died of a smack overdose, trying to deal with pain her prescriptions were unable to handle.
Not the same person, of course. But those medical patients with severe chronic uncurable pain are dealing with a big problem… related to the “opioid epidemic” but not the same problem. I think all drugs should be available to everyone at a drug store for a flat rate, no limits. And no advertising for any substance with a medical/addicitive effect, from alcohol to gambling and all the pharma drugs in between.
Most countries that try that find their addiction problems diminish quickly. The Netherlands and Portugal and one of the Andean countries in S America have all found that to be true.
And states with legal marijuana have lower opioid abuse rates… what a surprise. Wonder why Sessions is against that? Money from drug cartels with billions of dollars income? We’ll never know!
NR
@patroclus: You’re nowhere near as clever as you think you are, bud.
J R in WV
@NR:
Fuck you! And if the Democratic Party was about you, I would say fuck that too, but, thank dog, it ain’t.
We cal all tell when you’re spouting bullshit because you’re posting it here. Fuck you and your republican ideas! If you ever worked to elect a Democratic candidate in the history of the nation, I will eat my fur hat!
You are a troll, full of hate with no where else to spill it out over people you hate. Fuck you!
patroclus
@NR: You’re nowhere near as politically aware as you think bro. Try talking issues and try varying your shtick occasionally.
No One You Know
@Roger Moore: And now that I’m aware, I notice them more and more. I really don’t think they were commenting publicly before it became safe to be openly bigoted. I see and hear them on the bus, in the supermarket, and at the coffeeshop, muttering about how protesters “should’ve voted if they didn’t like him” and how “It’s about time we cleaned things up.”
Especially scary to hear transit police agree, while standing next to a sign that says public transit authority “guarantees your civil liberties.”
This was today.