No, this is not about health care.
This is about the recent dudebro outbreak of PELOSI GOTTA GO that has been driving me crazy since Ossoff didn’t pull off a miracle in Georgia. I don’t think there is ANYONE out there who disagrees with the fact that our leadership needs new blood. Our bench is weak and it needs to be reinvigorated. I’d like to see younger leadership.
But what also matter is how we gain that new leadership. We don’t do it by shitting all over people like Pelosi, who has been an extraordinary leader in troubling times and I shudder to think how bad things would have been were she not in charge keeping the House Dems together. She’s spent her lifetime doing what is best for the country and the party, and when the time is right she will do the right thing.
I can not say the same thing about certain independents and their crank followers who become Democrats only when it is convenient and then jump ship the moment they don’t get their fucking way. BTW- that health care bill we are rushing to save? It wouldn’t be there if it were not for Pelosi, and the assholes slagging her didn’t like the damned bill in the first place because it didn’t make us Sweden overnight.
Trentrunner
All of them dudes, most of them Berniebroflakes.
You do the misogyny math.
Felonius Monk
AMEN! On both points.
Hunter Gathers
This is all about Brogressives telling women and non-whites to shut their mouths and know their roles.
Mediocre white men unite!
Thoroughly Pizzled
Pelosi is one of our best. We don’t get rid of our best.
And it’s worth remembering that Pelosi got a public option through the House. She delivers.
Gin & Tonic
“I can not say the same thing about certain independents and their crank followers who become Democrats only when it is convenient and then jump ship the moment they don’t get their fucking way.”
Who in the world could he be talking about?
Brachiator
Word.
Heidi Mom
Amen, John!
hitless
Yeah, saw Tim Ryan slagged Pelosi this morning saying that they were unlikely to take back the house with her in leadership and also that the Democratic brand is “toxic”. I’m not sure why he’s not a Republican.
The idea that kicking out Pelosi is going to flip a bunch of “Independents” to Dem voters is beyond fanciful. Moreover, capitulating to Republican propaganda is no way to run a political party. Fight, you twit.
In fact, one could argue that Pelosi has been targeted because she has been effective. Taking Republican advice on how to staff Dem leadership positions seems unwise.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If I were a young D MoC looking to build a national reputation and collect some chits, I wouldn’t be mouthing CNNish talking points about what Dems Need To Do to the Washington Post, I’d be poking around the country, starting in my state/region, for those Bluer than GA-6 districts, getting to know their regular activists and potential candidates, maybe focusing on people who traditionally don’t show up in midterm votes
Citizen_X
@hitless:
THAT.
And we’re supposed to launch a purge because we lost a couple of special elections in blood-red districts? GTFOOH.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, if we’re going to contest every race, now is the time to be finding people to contest those races. I don’t need to see Tom Perez on TV if he’s working hard at recruitment.
Villago Delenda Est
So, we replace the 77 year old Pelosi with the 75 year old Sanders.
It’s a youthquake!
Matt McIrvin
You know what kicking out Pelosi would do? Make the entire Republican Party celebrate at how liberals ate their own and took out another one of their favorite hate-targets, and sing “ding, dong, the witch is dead.” This isn’t how you get marginal Republican votes, it’s how you get them feeling their oats and looking for the next one to take down.
msdc
@hitless: I was informed that the Democrats need to fight harder, “grow a backbone,” etc. Clearly the only way to do that is to jettison the most effective liberal parliamentarian in a couple of generations because some guy lost Newt Gingrich’s old district.
Major Major Major Major
Right on, fuck Manbun Ken.
The folks I know who think we need to trash Pelosi are to a man straight white dudes. Half of them are the reddit set and the other half are the set who think the lawsuit against the DNC cuz Bernie wuz robbed is a good idea. They’ve completely bought into the conservative framing of Pelosi as a greedy evil corrupt backroom deal-maker who prefers the interests of (boogeyman) to your own; they’ve just swapped out the boogeyman.
slag
What you said.
And @hitless:
Indeed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hunter Gathers: Upfist. All the upfists.
Major Major Major Major
@hitless: I maintain that he should be referred to as Tim “Dago Wine” Ryan.
Corner Stone
This push to out Pelosi and the glee the R’s enjoy when they use her to demonize elections should end, finally, the idea that our message matters. It doesn’t matter what we say or the policy we support that will help people.
They simply enjoy hating more than anything else.
Corner Stone
@Hunter Gathers:
Untie!
hueyplong
Amen from here, too. I look sideways at the good faith of anyone seeking to dump Pelosi.
SiubhanDuinne
A righteous birthday rant, John. Happy day to you. Will you please do something nice for yourself today, to celebrate?
Also, I hate to toss around terms like “sexism” and “misogyny” in an irresponsible way, but in the minds of a lot of these puritybros Pelosi is, first and foremost, a scary powerful woman whose mission in life is to attack their balls with a meat-cleaver.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Christ. I”m older than Ryan and that sounds like regular guy signaling aimed at my parents’ generation– my mom’s professionally Italian best friend from high school loved to talk about “dago red”, much more than she liked to drink it. She has gone to her reward, as have most of her generation in my social circles.
So Ryan wasn’t talking about the effect of Medicaid caps on his constituents in Youngstown?, and the OH state budget? Any rural hospitals in the Sainted and Doughty Ohio River Valley?
Chris
Having seen Pelosi lead the opposition to Social Security privatization attempts in 2005, and lead the creation of the ACA (with a bill that was better than the one that eventually passed), fuck the people who want her gone.
O. Felix Culpa
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But that would be real work. Much easier to engage in misogynistic attacks on accomplished women.
ETA: Happy birthday, John! Thank you for the truly righteous rant.
cmorenc
Plus, if the Dems kicked Pelosi to the curb in order to get “new leadership” in (whomever?…why not use Ryan as our example)…in less than the brief span of a single cable news cycle, the ReThugs and RW media accomplices would already be hard at work acidly attacking the “Ryan socialist-liberal democrats”. Except they’d find a far more pejorative term than “socialist-liberal”…they couldn’t use “San Francisco ” as a symbol of Pelosi’s alleged wacky-looney left coast liberalism infecting the democratic party, but Frank Luntz would quickly be on the case of finding an sulphuric-acid equivalent to paste Ryan with.
hitchhiker
Keep everything the same except Pelosi’s gender. An elder statesman of the party who pulled off the impossible task of a real health care reform bill by sheer determination & deep knowledge of the legislative system would be HONORED forever.
8 years after that achievement, there would not be young women on the tv demanding that he resign in disgrace to make way for someone more like themselves.
This is misogyny.
O. Felix Culpa
@SiubhanDuinne:
If that’s your notion of “irresponsible,” please carry on. :)
trollhattan
Handel hit Ossoff as a Pelosi tool and it seems to have worked to some extent. So just because Frank Luntz approves of using Pelosi as a campaign target Democrats are supposed to dump Pelosi? Do they not understand Luntz et al will simply replace Pelosi with another “hated Democrat”?
Nancy SMASH is a fighter and an effective parliamentarian. We need her and more like her.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hitchhiker: as I think Goldie Taylor pointed out, Ted Kennedy used to be aGOP boogeyman. Did anyone suggest he go sit quietly next to Herb Kohl?
scoop
Dudebros like Congresswoman Kathleen Rice.
This is what the establishment does. They label ideas they don’t like as “bro”. We get it, you don’t like Bernie/the fact he has loads of female supporters.
Keith Kennedy
Let’s not support Representative Pelosi by denegrating other progressive voices. I appreciate and support both Pelosi and Sanders…and Franken and Schiff and …
A lot of people think “they are all the same”. I try to introduce them to people they can learn to trust and appreciate.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
There’s not really another way to interpret the “we need to dial back on the Identity Politics!”
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: well, there’s always ‘racism’ and ‘transphobia’.
Gretchen
Yes, I saw that stupid Tim Ryan says Pelosi ought to go and be replaced by somebody like him. The last time the House got to vote between them, they picked Pelosi, who actually knows how to keep her caucus together. The Republicans hate her because she’s effective, and female. Not necessarily in that order.
cmorenc
Instead of new Dem Congressional leadership, how about we get new congressional campaign and general messaging leadership? As totally sociopathically cynical and dishonest as the ReThugs have been on those counts, and as much a repulsive lizard as Frank Luntz is, what we need most of all is our own devastatingly effective version of Frank Luntz – someone especially gifted in creating devastatingly resonant, bumper-sticker concise messaging. Being effective with concise minimalism is a vastly more difficult art than it superficially seems.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
boy, if you could get “other progressive voices” to stop “denigrating other progressive voices”, I’d sign you up for one of them Sherri’s Berries fruit of the month clubs the podcasts are always telling me about
Trying to remember, who was the Progressive Voice who used his Progressive Voice to tell Progressives that Jon Ossoff was not a Real Progressive? I remember the Progressive Voice had a funny accent…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
trump is trolling Pelosi and the DNC now
cmorenc
@trollhattan:
As repulsive as Frank Luntz is, an equally or more talented progressive version of Frank Luntz is precisely what we need – someone who can come up with devastatingly effective, simple, concise ways of messaging. For example, though Paul Ryan has been House speaker now for going on seven years…why have the dems not come up with any equally pithy, effective ways to turn “Ryan” into a devastatingly effective synonym for lying sociopathic snake who will steal your Medicare?
O. Felix Culpa
@cmorenc:
Hear, hear! Effective mass-messaging is very difficult. Needs to be concise, motivational, and hit at a gut level. Because we’re liberals, we also prefer truth, which makes it even harder. We need a good Luntz (is there such a creature?) on our side.
Msb
Happy birthday, John!
And thanks.
ruemara
@trollhattan: well, actually, they were tying him to Sanders & the shooting.
Kathleen
@Corner Stone: How can there be any doubt that the WouldaStock Wailers are colluding with Rethugs. and Russia to destroy the Democratic Party? And democracy?
Between the DeathDon’tCare vote and Tensing jury deliberations and my fucking phone I’m about ready to lose it.
Kay
Observe how much attention is paid to this compared to how much attention is paid to abortion:
The mortality rate for mothers in childbirth is going up. It’s not supposed to go UP in advanced countries- always supposed to go DOWN. See if any of the GOP Senators mention this when they’re spending days this week working to eradicate Planned Parenthood.
Burnspbesq
@Keith Kennedy:
Let’s not conflate issues that ought to be analytically separate. There are plenty of reasons to denigrate our current crop of self-proclaimed progressive saviors that have nothing to do with Ms. Pelosi.
MomSense
@Hunter Gathers:
All I know is that when you look around the phonebanking shifts, town, county, and state democratic meetings, indivisible meetings, town halls, etc, it is mostly women doing the actual planning and work. So I’m not sure who these brogressives think will actually do the revolution if we are not involved.
Kathleen
Happy Birthday John. Thanks for BJ and. your righteous rants like this one.
Kay
I think people who are frustrated and disappointed lash out, but they also make bad, rash decisions so why not wait a month and re-visit this after the furor dies down? If she’s still the scapegoat then they can launch some campaign to replace her. I don’t think it’s a good use of time and energy but I don’t really control Democrats and either does anyone else, as far as I can tell.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Took me a minute (I was thinking stock> Wall St>> Soc Sec privatization) but.. nice
JDM
Let’s not trade our strongest players. Get rid of the weak ones. Radical idea.
chopper
goopers have been demanding pelosi’s head on a platter for a long time primarily because they know she’s capable. getting rid of one of your most effective leaders in modern history would be a huge own goal.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: also, if Ryan wants to be the leader of the new generation of DC Dems, I say ring-a-ding-ding (which is something that young people are saying, more and more frequently, I heard my daughter Tiffany, I think her name is, say it at Christmas, which is the last time I saw her, at family time, a couple years ago,) more power to him. Show me some leadership that moves the ball on issues, not how you can suck up to Tweety, Jake Tapper and Ron Fournier
Paula
Nancy Pelosi has been tremendously effective. Doing anything other than saying “thank you” to her would be both stupid and damaging. New blood comes from the bottom — that’s where the effort needs to be right now. Plus its time for Dems to stop dancing to Republican’s tune — there is never a payoff. Remove Nancy and Repubs will turn gleefully on whoever replaces her. That’s what they do. Its NEVER about merit or fact or truth, it’s just about slander, slur and denigration. They’d turn (some have already) on Mother Theresa; they’d turn (some have already) on Pope Francis.
pat
This a million times.
japa21
@cmorenc: I agree with this. The policies the Dems promote are actually approved of by most Americans. We need a messenger, not a politician, who can hone that message and, yes, go after the GOP the same way they have gone after the Dems. We need to turn the names of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell into the same type of epithet that they have done to Pelosi.
joel hanes
@scoop:
We get it, you don’t like Bernie
Close.
What we hear, endlessly, from the self-selected Bernie-or-bust commenters, is that they neither like nor respect the Democratic Party, nor, especially, its recent leadership.
It’s hard to start a friendship with people whose opening is “You suck.”
Kay
I guess I’m just confident Pelosi will be okay. She’s really pretty good at herding cats and she knows there has to be a scapegoat. It’s her turn :)
I myself don’t think anyone did anything “wrong”. He seemed like a fine candidate to me and he ran in a tough district in a special election which were always considered lower turn out “base” elections. Republicans probably have a bigger base there. It seems like they underestimated GOP base turnout but would they have done anything differently if they hadn’t? What would they have done that they didn’t do? The whole point of “analysis” is so one can do or change something. What would they have changed- done or not done?
hitchhiker
@MomSense:
They think we’ll keep doing that stuff if we know what’s good for us — if they think about it at all. I’m so goddamn old that I can remember this exact dynamic during the Vietnam protests. The women will keep us fed and sexed. The women will clean up after us. The women will type. And we will stand up heroically to the man!
Ahem.
Sorry, I know we’re not really there … but younger types reading threads like this one have got to understand that this is not all in our heads. We watched HRC get flogged on the daily by many prominent Bernie fans, and then we watched what came next. The very best thing any D could right now, from Trump’s perspective, is to give the same treatment to Nancy Pelosi.
chopper
@MomSense:
exactly. buncha couchsitters shitting on the people who actually do the work.
Goblue72
Oh look, a Republican whom it took the disaster of the Bush years to finally see the light is lecturing people who’ve been members of the Democratic Party since they were legally old enough to vote and volunteering for the Party just as long.
Interesting.
Nethead Jay
Yup. Not a whole lot else necessary to say.
chopper
@scoop:
it’s almost like oligarchy! amirite
Chris
@joel hanes:
This.
And tolerable during the primary when everyone’s saying it. Much less so after the election. And unforgivable in a context where Donald Trump is president.
Barbara
@hitchhiker: Amber Phillips in WaPo this morning sounds like a leftwing parrot of right wing soundbites. What an idiot and what a rude shock she will experience when she turns 40 and no longer fulfills the fantasy needs of the men in her professional orbit.
Corner Stone
I don’t think I have seen it noted on this thread but it should be expressed again that not only is Pelosi effective at strategy to keep the caucus together, she is also phenomenal at fundraising. I think that burns the ossoff the GOP as much as anything else.
Kathleen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thank you.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
WALL STREET CORPORATE WHORE!!!
FlipYrWhig
Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan are nakedly ambitious fucksticks. Is there any doubt that what they want is a Democratic Party that’s _less_ liberal, in the service of a bunch of creepy validation of white working-class something something? I had no interest in Manchester By The Sea and I have no interest in this sad white Casey Affleck version of the Democratic Party.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Goblue72: Oh look, a cosplay cubicle radical and advocate for political violence (committed by other people, natch, Dwight is always ready for you to take it to the streets. Man.) is telling people who actually want to get shit done how to do it.
Hiya Dwight!
Goblue72
@joel hanes: Funny. I see almost zero Bernie or bust commenters here and mostly commenters in a frothing rage tilting a Bernie or buster windmills while screaming about mythic Berniebros. Pretty much a sign you have no substance to your positions.
trollhattan
@ruemara:
Yup, that too (being current events and all) but I also heard Handel soundbites invoking Pelosi, as though she’s a known communicable virus. It’s the usual tautology: bad Nancy is bad so Ossoff is bad also, too.
Republican lizard brain: Nancy BAD, Handel GOOD. Beats talking issues.
FlipYrWhig
@Goblue72: What a shock, the board’s leading rich white pseudo radical poseur has a sad.
Goblue72
@FlipYrWhig: Politicians who are ambitious? Who woulda thunk that?
rikyrah
I love Nancy Smash.
And, if you listen to the muthaphuckas wanting to get rid of her, they have something in common:
They want Democrats to abandon ‘ identity politics’….meaning women, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Natives, shut up about the injustices that happen to their community…
so that we can get the votes of muthaphuckas who want to deny my humanity.
PHUCK.THAT.SHYT.
nominus
Mattel’s new Ken doll was the most appropriately-timed gift to Twitter for just this occasion: Man-bun Bernie Bro tells all:
@SheWhoVotes
@SteveZiss0u
a combined effort
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I know she’s a lightening rod to base Republicans but I’m not sure picking Democratic leadership pegged on what base Republicans prefer makes a whole lot of sense. She’s like a symbol of “liberal elite culture” to them but we’re actually in favor of liberal culture- that’s partly why we’re not Republicans and I don’t know what “elite” means.
I’m deliberately raising liberal elites. It’s my parenting plan. I think it’s a good plan- it’s working out quite well. Other people are raising, what? Low income adults who reject modernity? Why?
Goblue72
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: oh look, a guy who clearly does shit for the party IRL.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That part, I’m fine with. But working class whites in greater Youngstown and Milltown (or wherever Mouton’s from) are gonna take it up the ass from TrumpCare. Is Ryan outside the Youngstown and Ohio Valley Medical Center telling people Rob Portman wants to shut it down?
gvg
As a woman who votes democratic, i would be very offended if this campaign to unseat Peloisi worked. I see it as completely dumb and spiteful. this Ryan character is coming across as a treacherous snake. I really admire Peloisi, far more than Hillary actually.
the way I see it, Tim Ryan hasn’tt really proven himself yet by actually being that useful so his attacks on the establishment don’t have credibility.
FlipYrWhig
@Goblue72: “We are earthy white men and we’ve been kept down long enough!” Fuck you you pissy little shit.
nominus
Oliver Willis: maybe if we removed all the women and minorities from democratic leadership, then republicans won’t be mean to us anymore, right?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Goblue72: Is today Grass Roots Organizer and Party Insider day in the costume rotation, Dwight? I woulda thought a Malcolm-y radical like you would find that Martin-y costume tight and itchy.
But I bet everything’s a bit tighter since Liz in the next cubicle started bringing in brownies, and you just can’t say no!
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I have no idea but his calling card all along seems to have been “I’m a young dude and young dudes like me.” Remember when Heath Shuler challenged Nancy Pelosi for Democratic leadership? Remember how “progressives” felt about that? This is fucking absurd. All it does it make me resent this social-conservative white-working-class ass-kissy framework we appear to be being told is the way to get back to the future. Ridiculous. As ridiculous as campus liberalism can be, this is far, far more ridiculous.
Kay
@Goblue72:
Right, but Tim Ryan’s whole plan is to “get back” white voters who have been voting GOP since Reagan. If they’re younger they’re now 2nd generation GOP voters.
So it isn’t about who is a “real” Democrat.
The Democratic Party IS. It isn’t a theory. It is a collection of people. It’s exactly like all those Republicans who say Trump isn’t a “real” conservative. “Real conservatism” doesn’t exist unless it’s made evident in the composition of the Republican Party. That’s not a Party- it’s a theory.
Chyron HR
Look, it’s very simple:
– The senator from Vermont has decreed that Republican voters are MORE progressive than the average Democrat, and that they yearn for the socialist policies that the Democratic party’s leadership denies them.
– Republican voters HATE Nancy Pelosi.
– Therefore, Pelosi must be too conservative, and once she is purged from the party the extremely liberal white working class Republicans in the rust belt will vote for single-payer health care and free college.
*** THIS IS WHAT BERNIECRATS ACTUALLY BELIEVE. ***
The Moar You Know
Huh, pie filter works great!
Nick
Fuck off Cole with the hippie punching. It’s tired and lame, like Pelosi’s leadership right now. Look we are all tired of fucking losing, we need some one to step up and get a new direction.
Major Major Major Major
Why did goblue decide to capitalize its name?
@The Moar You Know: hooray!
FlipYrWhig
“With the Republican noise machine being so well developed, let’s pick someone to represent us with an unassailable record of decency and public service!” said Democratic strategists in 2004 who rallied around the candidacy of… John Kerry.
trollhattan
@Nick:
Your thinking Cole is engaged in “hippie punching” is a tell. It doesn’t make you a hippie, it makes you a pissy moron.
FlipYrWhig
@Chyron HR: As I said before, if they truly believe what they say they believe, the logical course of action would be for Bernie Sanders acolytes to take over the Republican Party.
Kay
@Goblue72:
This genuinely baffles me and always has. Count the people in the United States who say they are Democrats. That’s the Democratic Party. There is no other, real-er Democratic Party anymore than there is a Donald Trump GOP and a “real” GOP. There’s just the GOP- as currently constituted. There’s just the one that exists. So you have to decide. Are you advocating on behalf of an aspirational Party- the “real” one that doesn’t exist yet or are we talking about the current one?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So the wanna-be “hippies” and true blue bold progressives are rallying around… Tim Ryan?
Chris
@Chyron HR:
The hard left has a century or more of experience convincing itself that almost all Americans are just confused socialists, that the only reason it’s not reflected in their votes is that they haven’t had a True Socialist enough option, and that if only we ran the right messiah, they’d abandon the fascists, the conservatives, and the Corrupt Neoliberal Establishment Corporatist Democrats. [Cue a century or so of trying to find that messiah]
As long as we’re being repetitive, a question I keep asking when this comes up: how many Sanders-backed True Progressives have managed to win elections?
zhena gogolia
Bravo, John.
FlipYrWhig
@trollhattan: Yeah, I like the thought process there. “Ossoff isn’t progressive enough and also got tied to the hyper-liberal caricature of Nancy Pelosi, so the obvious way to validate the kinds of things ‘hippies’ believe in is to get a new leader in place of Pelosi because that way non-progressives like Ossoff have a better chance of winning, so if you support having liberal icon Nancy Pelosi continuing to lead the Congressional Democrats, you must hate hippies, the kinds of hippies who have a problem with liberals and care a lot what Republicans think. Also, by the way, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton care too much about what Republicans think.”
Juice Box
@FlipYrWhig: My belief exactly. They can go reform the GOP. From “outside”. We’re in sore need of improvement there. It would be a rich vein of “corporatist shills” for the Wilmer cult to mine.
Kay
@Goblue72:
“I didn’t leave my Party my Party left me” is another one. Well, yeah, because one person isn’t a “Party”. That’s the thing about groups of people. They’re a group. They exist and they determine the direction of the group because they compose it.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Evidently, on the basis that something something white working class. This is a truly dumb moment in the history of liberal-left political thinking.
Denali
Happy Birthday, John.
Thank you for Balloon Juice and all you do to sustain it.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: “We have to be competitive in every district no matter what!”
“No, not with them! We need candidates like, uh… hmm…”
“Purge the blue dogs!”
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s funny with Tim Ryan because he sort of embodies what he accuses Pelosi of. He very much represents the Democrats in his district. But “San Francisco Democrats” are Democrats too! Why is his group “real” and hers less real? Why are we even deciding who is “real”? They’re both real. Stipulated :)
Juice Box
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But “progressive voices” aren’t denigrating other “progressive voices” because if you aren’t 110% true to Bernie, you aren’t “progressive”. QED. /s
Peale
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Zell Miller is no longer available.
Captain C
If this abomination passes, I can’t wait for all the GoFundMes from Trump voters and Broflakes who are too good to vote Democrat when they lose their health care:
“Dear Friends, as you know I’m the most principledest principled person ever. That’s why I had to vehemently oppose Obamacare and every Demoncrat who defended it. Now, I’ve lost my health insurance, and am facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills that would have been covered had I not been so principled I voted to screw myself. But at least Hitlery and Pelosi are gone. So please, please, deplete your savings to cover my
irresponsibilityprincipledness. Sincerely, It’sAnyonesFaultButMine”Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: also, multi-millionaire vacation-vineyard owning coastal elitist Nancy Pelosi has been in the trenches fighting against her own personal, short-term economic benefit for the good of Tim Ryan’s voters for … (counts on fingers)…. her entire public life
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: I co-sign Chris‘s response above. There really is this… wistfulness, let’s call it, about how everyone is aching to be a leftist or at LEAST a social-democrat or at _least_ they WOULD IF THEY ONLY KNEW. Like Roy Edroso says about conservative culture writers, have they met any actual human beings?
scoop
@joel hanes: Like Trump, some people I guess need flattery first. Out of the two parties, the democratic party is the most glorious, amazing, righteous party in all of both parties.
Having said that, democratic leadership blew the biggest opportunity in history to shut down far-right faux populism, and then refuse to change their tune. But hey, 0-5. Great job?
Anyway, the left flank (Brown, Sanders) has been saying for years that dems need to zero in on a coherent economic agenda and message, and now the right flank (Tim Ryan and co.) is agreeing.
Its an easy message: real opportunity for all. Infrastructure, from locks and dams to schools and internet, is the key investment. Tax the rich, rebuild America.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What are you gibbering about?
Ah. A well-informed true progressive taking his cues from Donald Trump
ETA:
the almost uniform bleat of Kucinich supporters “If people just heard Dennis’s message…”
Peale
@Kay: Ryan is annoying me today. He had his leadership challenge a few months ago and lost. Does he plan on pulling this crap each and every month until the next Congress? His colleagues told him to sit down. I doubt he suddenly has more support there. No, he wants her to “resign” so he doesn’t have to run against her. He might as well be Darryl Issa, because I’m guessing that were she to do what he wants, he’d not be next in line just because he says he wants to be.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: that attitude is even directed at people like me, who are fully aware of some of these policies, like Bernie’s upper-middle-class-handout ‘free college’ plan, and prefer something else.
NR
@Corner Stone:
Too bad all those six-figure checks don’t get to vote.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: How is Tim Ryan regarded in Ohio? I don’t get a sense that there’s a lot of there there. He kinda seems like a meathead TBH.
Chris
@scoop:
Hi.
Repeated from above: how many Sanders-backed True Progressives have won elections?
Omnes Omnibus
For the people who want to replace Pelosi: what exactly is she doing wrong, how should it be fixed, and who is the person to do it?
If you can’t answer those questions with some specificity, you have no business advocating her ouster.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Maybe they haven’t but THATS BECAUSE OF NEOLIBERALS RUINING THINGS IN ADVANCE is I think the reasoning lately.
Major Major Major Major
@scoop:
I’ve been informed by my progressive betters that opportunity is evil and we need to be the party of equal outcomes.
Also, don’t make me dig up Hillary campaign speeches where she said exactly that, you nincompoop.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I like her. I even like her stilted, weird speech patterns. I like how tough she is and how she cranks shit out. It may blow over. It was very disappointing and people are mad and frustrated.
I was really upset yesterday- I hate losing and we lost on my birthday and I am 7 years old. A Democrat who was equally upset sent me this yesterday.
This is a good idea. I know he’s a conservative and a pundit (I looked him up) but this is a good idea.
Warren really is different than other liberals. Her stuff is sharper and more focused. In a way it’s much more timely. Her stuff might work. I first encountered E. Warren in a bankruptcy refresher course. There’s case law and rules and then there’s essentially essays by law “thinkers” (whatever they’re called). Hers STUCK OUT. It partly stuck out because the conservative essays were so pro-lender but they were also just boilerplate “market theory”. Theory. “This should work because blah, blah, markets” Warren’s was different. It was about lenders and borrowers- real ones.
It was one of those things where you say “wow- this is really different than all these other people”. SO sharp and well-thought out and so practical and real.
Corner Stone
@NR: I don’t see how that has anything to do with that I stated, but yeah, sure, also too.
hovercraft
AMEN!!
The reason the GOP go after her so hard is because they are afraid of her, she is very good at her job. Unlike a certain thin skinned boil on humanity, she has no problem allowing her caucus to run the way they need to run in their districts, and she and her team know how and when to hold the line.
Nancy has earned the right to stay as long as she wants, and her caucus wants her. The peanut gallery can run for the job and prove they have the chops to take it from her, or STFU.
Mateo
“and the assholes slagging her didn’t like the damned bill in the first place because it didn’t make us Sweden overnight.” Absolutely correct. I believe that the term for this group, fair or not (and it never really took hold anyways), was “firebagger.” These are the same folks that jumped ship after Obama’s first two years because he didn’t successfully transform our entire country to their liking and they conveniently ignored that the Democratic legislative majority at the time was largely an illusion with so many ‘blue dogs’ who were elected in 2006 and 2008, who never had any intention of following Obama’s lead.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
so easy it sounds real familiar. Surely Republicans will never stand in the way of infrastructure! Why hasn’t someone tried “tax the rich” as a plank in their platform?
NR
@Chris: I’m sorry, are the backers of the party establishment that’s lost 1,000 legislative seats to the Republicans since 2010 now lecturing other people about being losers? Because if that was going on, it would be pretty funny. Not funny “ha-ha,” though.
joel hanes
@Goblue72:
I see almost zero Bernie or bust commenters here
That’s a fair cop.
My comment applies less to Balloon Juice commenters than to commenters I see at Kevin Drum’s blog, at LGM, and especially at Political Animal. For some reason, the B-o-B faction is less numerous on BJ.
Also, I hope you noted my “self-selected” nod to the vast majority of Sanders supporters who just want more emphasis on economic justice, and don’t couple that with vocal hatred of various recent career Democrats, esp. Sec Clinton.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yeah, I saw that yesterday and thought it was good. Barro’s that rare beast, a fairly consistent libertarian.
And happy belated birthday
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I wish you would stop yelling about soft, spreadable cheese being to blame for things.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes:
Why would he have noticed something that made it more difficult to be persecuted and self-righteous?
NR
@Corner Stone: You’re talking about fundraising as if it does something in and of itself. But it doesn’t. Fundraising is only worth something if it translates into accomplishing tangible goals. Like, say, winning elections.
So what has all that fundraising actually done besides pay for Democrats to have nicer campaign offices? Because it sure as hell hasn’t resulted in electoral wins.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Oh, Dwight, you silly little cosplay fraud. People are laughing at you, not mad at you
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@N(R): Fuck off loser. You always seem to come here when someone you like is being criticized. You never contribute anything constructive and you avoid my questions like a coward
joel hanes
@scoop:
Its an easy message: real opportunity for all.
I agree. Comity!
See Tom Sullivan today on Digby’s Hulaballoo for someone laying it out better than I can :
A fair deal again
Chris
@NR:
No. You’re the one lecturing people about being losers, and promising that your messiah could do better. And so I ask, again: where has your messiah, in fact, done better?
Kay
Well, if Democrats need an issue Trump specifically and repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid and he’s cutting Medicaid.
You will all recall how all of media and conservatives hammered Obama with “you can keep your plan”. We know media won’t do it with Trump because they hold him to a much lower standard and he lies constantly, but Democrats should.
Donald Trump promised not to cut Medicaid. They are gutting Medicaid. Donald Trump’s voters rely on Medicaid- I know- I live in a county that went 70% Trump and I swear the majority of Trump voters in this country are on Medicaid. There are probably 5000 right here out of 30k.
low-tech cyclist
This seems to be all about Ossoff and other Dems this year getting ‘tarred’ by association with Pelosi.
Well, fuck that shit. The Republicans will always find ways to demonize Democrats. We can’t keep on running away or hiding under the bed whenever the GOP yells ‘boo!” I’m so fucking tired of the Dems being the Scared Rabbit Party.
No, we don’t throw Pelosi to the wolves. Screw that. Where the GOP pulls this shit, the Dems should run commercials reminding people that they can get insurance despite having pre-existing conditions, because Nancy Pelosi got Obamacare through the House. And they still have Social Security because Nancy Pelosi led the fight to keep Dubya from privatizing it. That’s who Nancy Pelosi is, and that’s what she’s done. Demonize that, fuckers.
FlipYrWhig
@scoop: No, good point, Democrats should really run on the “good things are good, better than the bad ones” platform. Republicans will be powerless to stop the resulting momentum!
O. Felix Culpa
@FlipYrWhig:
No. SATSQ.
Corner Stone
@NR: Unfortunately, fundraising is the glue of a lot of political operations. If you remove her from the picture, where do some other younger congresspeople, or potential candidates, backfill that flow of funds? It’s part of a team pulling in the same direction.
Major Major Major Major
I kind of lost track of this thread once everybody started having trouble locating their pie.
Peale
@Chris: Well, we’re 0-5, but since the two Bernie Candidates lost, they really are Pelosi’s problem.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Youngsters like Warren too. She was the first person I saw to really tap into student debt rage. She’s on the Senate Ed committee and she stays on DeVos about it. She’s focused. A lot of them are all over the place but she returns to student debt again and again and again. There’s real tension between the two women because DeVos is defensive about ripping off 18 year olds. It’s indefensible and she knows it. DeVos is actually a political pro. They’re an even match.
NR
@Chris: Tell you what: when we’ve lost a thousand seats like you guys have, then you get to act all smug and condescending.
Until then, glass houses and all that.
O. Felix Culpa
First time I’ve tried the pie filter. Learned that it also pies out replies to pie. Double helping!
Chris
@Kay:
Yep.
I’ve said over and over that I by and large have zero problems with the Sanders wing of the party, and Warren is one of the prime examples of that. Ditto Keith Ellison. It really is Sanders specifically who’s turned it, or at least its loudest and most visible portion, into a demented personality cult that can’t take “yes” for an answer and whose main contribution to politics is to punch Democrats.
Chris
@NR:
How many seats has your messiah won for The People, NR?
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Barro is a registered Democrat and, despite a libertarian past, actually wants a functioning Democratic party, unlike most pundits.
Kay
Let’s back Elizabeth Warren for President! Unity, you jackals. She would bring it :)
I don’t have anyone else anyway and it would bring the Party together. Sherrod Brown would also be good but he’s too rumpled and he says he doesn’t want to spend all his time “fundraising in California” – although why he prefers Ohio I do not know.
NR
@Corner Stone: But, again, why should I care how many millions of dollars Pelosi or anyone else can raise from high-dollar donors when that money obviously doesn’t translate into winning elections? Maybe the party’s priorities need to be examined.
NR
@Chris: More than negative 1,000, which is what you guys have managed.
Nelle
I’ll just leave a friend’s rant (with her permission) here – OK, here’s a shorthand for the Democrats. START HAVING THE BACK OF YOUR FEMALE POLITICIANS, ESPECIALLY THE OLD ONES, OR PEACE THE FUCK OUT.
I am so sick of this crap. I’ve been working for Democratic candidates since before I was young and cute enough to be close-uped on the newsfeeds at Bill Clinton’s first presidential victory party. I gave up my VERY lucrative job in 2006 to do Democratic party voters rights work, and I worked on Hillary’s campaign in 2008, then went on to work for Obama’s campaign, in spite of being pissed off enough at him to consider being a PUMA. See how that works? I threw my back into it for the party and the goals.
And I am so FUCKING tired of this tired “well, we gave you girls a shot and you lost, so it’s old white men for another generation. So sorry, but we have to listen to the explanation of white men WHO DIDN’T VOTE DEMOCRATIC and white REPUBLICAN women about what kind of Democrat they would have found palatable.”
Well you know what? I, *I*, I am your base. I’ve been carrying your male asses over the finish line for 30 years now. Women like me have been carrying the party since there was a party.
And if you can’t see your way clear to celebrate the elder stateswomen of your party, that’s right, CELEBRATE, them, not tolerate them, not resent them, but fucking LAUD them, you are losing me. So you go ahead chasing after those rural racists, and you might just be too busy to notice me staying home, or voting Green, or whatever the fuck it is people do when their party doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to them anymore.
FlipYrWhig
@Peale: Also, IIRC, the two candidates who lost by the most (MT and KS) were the Bernie Sanders-backed ones, and the one who lost by the least (SC) was the one that was under the radar and anathema to Sandersites because he had ties to Goldman Sachs. All of which proves that Sandersism is a winner everywhere under all conditions! But REAL BERNIEISM HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED!
feckless
I have a love-hate relationship with Nancy Pelosi.
She is the first female speaker of the house, the lack of accolades for that demonstrates the misogyny she has had to overcome, and the Jackie Robinson level of her performance at passing laws when she had the job.
That said,
The democratic party has been destroyed nationally, and in the states, and refuses to face up to that fact. We need new leadership and ideas because the old ones have failed.
“Republican-lite” democrats do not get the base to the polls, and that is all that matters.
I still hold it against her that she took impeachment off the table. By trying to play nice with Cheney & Co. she normalized their level of transgression and helped usher in the current junta who is Cheney X10 plus overt racism.
HRA
Happy Birthday, John!
Nancy Pelosi will leave when she is ready o leave. We need her now.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: You think you earned the right to be smug and condescending? I’m pretty confident it just came naturally.
Chris
@NR:
How many more, exactly?
Look, this isn’t complicated. You say the current leadership of the Democratic Party is doing horrifically. The evidence certainly doesn’t contradict you. Then you say that Bernie Sanders and his brand of populism are the solution. Okay. Based on what? What red or purple districts has he flipped back to blue? A proof-of-concept really isn’t too much to ask for.
FlipYrWhig
@feckless: Who is a Republican-lite Democrat? You think that’s what Nancy Fucking Pelosi stands for, even though she has fuck-all to do with candidate recruitment? What the fuck are you talking about? Does contact with people who like Bernie Sanders spread some kind of brain parasite?
liberal
@scoop: Kathleen Rice? I saw her in a HuffPost article talking up Dem Congressional criticism of Pelosi.
Rice is a NY Rep. Her Americans for Democratic Action score for 2015? 60%. That’s pathetic. I’ve seen lower scores for southern blue dogs, but even if she’s not from a very blue part of NY state, that’s a crap record.
My impression is that the people criticizing Pelosi aren’t Bernie people but rather Blue Dogs who don’t think the party has moved to the right enough.
Kay
@NR:
It really bothers me that Bernie Sanders bitches about the Democratic political class when he raised all that small donor money and ran such a conventional campaign. He spent it conventionally. He had back to back tv ads in Ohio. They were throwing money at media. Big wads. He also says he hates consultants but he hired conventional consultants. Sort of horrible consultants, to boot. Dishonest, hackish consultants who acted morally superior while running a circa 1990’s campaign.
I would love to see a genuinely different approach to campaigns but Bernie Sanders claiming he has one is just nonsense. It’s insufferable to slam other Democrats when he so obviously uses the same template. He lost me there.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Kathleen Rice (who is opposed to Pelosi) seems to have earned “Republican lite” as a label, at least for the purpose of this discussion.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: NR’s argument is that the opposite of what doesn’t work, works. His corollary is that seats once held by conservative Democrats and now held by conservative Republicans can be won back by the liberal-populist Democrats _who have never held them before_ because reasons. Bear in mind that NR is very opinionated and very, very stupid.
liberal
@Kay: He did have one, at least insofar as he relied on small donors and wasn’t really “preapproved” by the big donors AFAICT.
That said, what should be done shouldn’t be about blindly following various personalities, but rather principles and empiricism. Empirically, I’ll make the claim that the consultants are largely (if not entirely) a bunch of leeches.
Corner Stone
@NR: I don’t guess you have to care at all about it.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: I’m old enough to remember when someone like Tim Ryan, somewhere near the Bart Stupak end of the spectrum, would have been considered “Republican lite” and the kind of Democrat who tries too hard to please Republicans. And I think if I were, like, 8, I’d still be old enough to remember that, because it just. fucking. happened. The time is out of joint.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
I know, but what the hell. I usually don’t engage the trolls, but I figure as long as the blog continues to reject the concept of troll control, I might as well every once in a blue moon.
hovercraft
@Nelle:
Righteous rant, I’m tired of all this bullshit about white men not having a voice in the party. How heir fee fees are hurt because of all of the focus on minorities and women, grow the fuck up, you’ve been in charge for over two centuries and you can’t take the fact that a black man and a kickass woman were the face of the party for the last 10 years? Give me a fucking break, there are more white male elected officials in the party than any other group, are yo still dominating the way you used to? No, but that’s the progress we’ve been fighting for. What the hell did you think would happen when you championed the need for more diverse representation? Did you think somehow you’d still be in charge, that the rest of us would settle for the little positions while you held onto all the real power, or were you just paying lip service to get us to support you?
You don’t get to “give us a chance”, we ALL get to pick our leadership and right now we choose Nancy Smash, if you want her job, go on and take it, challenge her for it, if you dare, see what happens, Nancy don’t play.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: But Obama ’08 and Dean ’04 were already powered by small-dollar donations. That doesn’t seem like some innovation on Sanders’s part.
liberal
@Nelle: Sorry, but this is silly. If a woman politician is doing a great job, great. If not, not.
Pelosi might not be perfect in the sense of some Platonic ideal, but she seems very good. Never liked Hillary. Kathleen Rice, in her role as detractor of Pelosi, is also a woman and frankly can go fuck herself.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: He has some troll markers, like showing up only under certain circumstances chiefly to gloat and repeat himself, but unlike a lot of trolls, he actually believes what he’s saying is quite brilliant. More’s the pity.
Amir Khalid
@Major Major Major Major:
Saya suka makan pai.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal:
This is creating interesting overlaps on the big Venn diagram of Democrats, though. Because of the Sanders crowd’s emphasis on class and impatience with “identity politics,” we’re getting these convergences between pro-life heavy-industry-legacy politicians and very young “woke” types who want an intersectional social-justice left that takes on Wall Street AND mass incarceration AND trans rights AND student loan debt and thinks Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are “corporate” or something. It’s causing definitional problems with mapping the right-left axis.
Kay
Speaking of old ladies, which I am now and I’m pretty excited about it, I took my 14 year old and two of his female friends with me to get my hair cut because they needed a ride where they were going. His female friends are a little older than him and they treat him like a little brother, which I can tell bothers him- he wants to be considered a possible romantic interest. I picked them up post haircut and they have this hysterical thing they do, where they refer to older people using names they consider “old”. So the women’s names they use are “Debbie” and “Barbara”.This is girls doing this to me. They’re like “Debbie got a haircut”. It’s horrible and obnoxious but also really funny. You can’t say “it’s rude to call me Debbie” because it’s such complex dismissivness :)
NR
@Nelle: Nice rant. However, it doesn’t have any connection to reality. No one is demanding that Pelosi be replaced with a man. The people who want her replaced, want her replaced with someone who won’t lose to the Republicans over and over again. Whether that person is a man, a woman, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, or any other race matters not at all to me.
Just find someone who can win and implement a progressive agenda that helps all Americans, and you have my full support.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@NR: You have to prove yourselves first, coward. But you don’t have the answers either
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: The generational name thing is interesting. I just recently realized the passe-ness of two women’s names that pretty much defined my Gen X cohort: “Jennifer” and “Lisa.”
liberal
@NR: Problem is that AFAICT Pelosi’s detractors, at least in Congress, are Blue Dogs, who are attacking her not because of tactical ability but rather because she’s too liberal for them.
NR
@Chris: How is pointing out facts trolling? The Democratic establishment has an abysmal electoral record of late. Their approach is not working. That is a fact.
As for the proof of concept you’re looking for, Democrats dominated the political landscape for a generation when they embraced solidly progressive economic ideals. More recently, Barack Obama won a wave election by promising voters that he would change the way things worked in Washington. People are tired of policy passed for the benefit of the parties’ big corporate donors. There’s a huge opportunity for Democrats there if they would only take it and then deliver on what they promised.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: So a Debbie is the opposite of a Betty?
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Nah. The main people pushing “woke-ness” are the supporters of Hillary, as a form of virtue signalling and an excuse to not get behind pushing progressive economic reforms.
BTW, “industry” isn’t legacy. What’s apparently “legacy” is the notion that there are jobs for people other than writing JavaScript for Web 2.0 startups.
liberal
@NR: IMHO that’s all true. It’s not why people are attacking Pelosi, though. They’re attacking her because she’s “too liberal,” be they Rethuglicans or Democratic Blue Dogs.
NR
@Kay: This is a legitimate criticism for sure. Ironically, I think Sanders would have been better served by running a campaign similar to Obama’s, focused far more on grassroots mobilization efforts than traditional advertising and such. It would have suited his message better.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Not saying Sanders originated it. But AFAICT he had much less from large donors, compared to Obama. (Haven’t thought much about Dean, especially since he became an MEK whore.)
NR
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?: Of course I don’t have the answers. But I can at least see when something isn’t working, which puts me a step ahead of a lot of people here.
NR
@liberal: There’s some of that for sure. But other people are concerned with the poor electoral track record of House Democrats under her leadership.
Chris
@NR:
I’ve been asking you this entire thread to point out facts, specifically, the ones that show that your messiah’s message would work where other Democrats’ messages wouldn’t. I can’t help it if you continuously refuse to do so.
FlipYrWhig
@NR:
Like segregation! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Your daily reminder of why Democrats keep losing seats.
Hint: it’s not because of their Wall Street ties, or because they’re just so old and tired and not giving progressive ideas a try. It’s because Republicans are deliberately preventing non-whites from voting, an issue you clearly couldn’t care less about since your whining is all based around getting racist white people to vote for Democrats.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Well, Rice, with an ADA score of 60%, is probably more liberal than any House Republican. And when he left the Senate, Ben Nelson (NE) was more liberal than all the R’s, including the princesses from ME.
I think having a more conservative Dem from a more conservative district is a fine idea. (Don’t have time to research Rice’s district.) But their attempt to replace Pelosi by a Blue Dog or whatever they’re trying to do should be rebuffed.
Nancy P. is 77, but I don’t have any info that she’s getting too old for her role, and it’s not like a USSC position where if she suddenly dies in office, we could be fucked.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@NR: They dominated before they explicitly tied themselves to social justice and have been gradually losing ever since. Those white voters are brainwashed and never coming back. We have to register and win new voters. Downplaying the side of our coalition (non-white and women) and their issues is always something that comes up to “solve” our electoral problems.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: The “woke” I’m referring to are the young people of color and largely-well-meaning white allies, and they thoroughly despise Hillary Clinton.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
You mean other than all of the men who insist that she needs to be replaced by someone just like them?
ETA: Tim Ryan and Heath Schuler aren’t men? I guess you’re one of those people who doesn’t see gender, so the fact that the people you support just happen to all be white men is a strange co-inkydink, amirite?
liberal
@Mnemosyne: That definitely hurts on the margins, but it can’t explain everything.
The only apologetics I’ve seen that might convince me that leadership incompetence isn’t mostly to blame is the fact that the national R takeover at all levels is coincident with Citizens United, etc. Having to fight an enemy with essentially limitless cash is difficult.
joel hanes
Democrats dominated the political landscape for a generation when they embraced solidly progressive economic ideals.
And then, while the Democrats still embraced solidly progressive economic ideals, St. Ronald of California led a political revolution that demolished the political and financial support for those ideals (destroyed unionized manufacturing), and emphasized cultural wedge issues, courted racist voters, and promoted a laissez-faire brand of economics that strokes the egos of those who are already affluent and greatly reduces their taxes, while repudiating the idea that Americans have any duty or moral obligation to the unfortunate and downtrodden. Those ideas were wildly popular, and the Rs returned from the Goldwater/Nixon wilderness re-energized.
So, because their solidly progressive economic ideals were no longer winning elections, and because the stream of union money dried up, the Dems were motivated to look around for other approaches, and tried some of them, with mixed results.
It’s funny how your narrative omits to mention any of this.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Fair enough. I usually see it as a derogatory term used by anti-HRC progressives, on twitter.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Chris: They’re a coward and won’t answer that. They won’t answer me when I ask them what they’re personally doing to change things positively. Pissing on blogs is all they seem to be good for
Major Major Major Major
@liberal:
This is stupid and whoever would write it is, I suspect, stupid.
NR
@Mnemosyne: Your daily reminder of the fact that Democrats have lost seats even in states without voter suppression.
But you’ve never acknowledged that fact before, so I don’t expect you to start now. I’m sure you’ll just continue to dishonestly claim that people who disagree with you want to pander to racists. You are nothing if not predictable.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@joel hanes:
This. All of this. Including the part I didn’t quote. N(R), if not a troll, is just a Keyboard Kommando
FlipYrWhig
@joel hanes: I know you know this, but even giving the Golden Age of Democratic politics an _enormous_ benefit of the doubt, they embraced “solidly progressive economic ideals” for able-bodied white men, preferably Protestants. Trying to go beyond that led to the crack-up that started in 1964 and ended in, oh, *looks at calendar* *looks at watch*, not quite yet.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@NR: You’re one to talk about being dishonest and not acknowledging inconvient facts
NR
@Mnemosyne: Funny, I didn’t realize Elizabeth Warren was a man.
But again, it’s not surprising to see bullshit accusations of sexism from you to try to shut down any criticism of the failures you support. As I said: predictable.
Kay
That’s the paper of record, folks.
Here’s the truth:
Sorry. I know the NYTimes is supposedly a national institution but this is crap. It’s bad work. Allowing him to get away with this bullshit is just poor, sloppy work. Time to take a critical look at entities who ride on reputation and not just in government.
They haven’t produced a single revelation on Trump and he is the LEAST transparent person we;ve ever elected and he came up in their fucking back yard. Think back to Obama. The Chicago media were the source on Obama- people really didn’t know much about him. Lynne Sweet was the expert and she was relentless.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: Because they’re accusing Clintonites of using people of color as human shields. But full-on hardcore “social justice warrior” types think Hillary Clinton is an icon of “corporate” or “white feminism” and have no time for her. And that was some proportion of the Sanders supporter crowd as well. Thus you get a momentary convergence between people who think the contemporary Democratic Party does _too much_ with identity politics and people who think it does _too little_, or not intersectionally enough.
NR
@Chris: And I can’t help it if you refuse to acknowledge the fact that Democrats have a long history of winning with an economicallly progressive message.
Yoda Dog
@NR: Warren’s in the Senate, she can’t replace Pelosi.
Also, you are an idiot.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@NR:
From commenter joel hanes above(bolded):
Can you refute This? Curious that you ignored this and all of my comments challenging you
Amir Khalid
@NR:
But it wouldn’t have improved his merits as a candidate. My beef with him (and that of many here) would still remain: he wasn’t preparing for the actual job of President, was ignorant of things not related to his pet issues, and he hadn’t put together a realistic plan for action even on those pet issues. Whereas Hillary was preparing, exhaustively; she never got caught not knowing about any area of policy; and she had a more detailed action plan than anyone else running last year. I believe that that difference between them, not his candidating (he did outperform expectations, after all) and not the DNC being in cahoots with her, is why she won the primary.
NR
@Yoda Dog: I know Warren is in the Senate. Mnem was talking about people I support. Elizabeth Warren is such a person.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Please, dude, if you are going to continue with this, AT LEAST specify that what you’re talking about is the Democratic Party OUTSIDE THE SOUTH. People in the Solid South weren’t voting for Democrats because of an “economically progressive message,” they were doing it to uphold a one-party white-supremacist patronage system for a hundred years.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@FlipYrWhig: Don’t confuse N(R) with the facts.
Yoda Dog
@NR: Whatever, you are a fucking moron and I could give a shit what you think.
Good day.
Amir Khalid
@Kay:
That excursion to Rome on the donors’ dime, all just to say hello to the Pope, was maybe not so conventional.
Chris
@NR:
History’s a wonderful thing. For instance, the history that, as has already been pointed out to you, Democrats began to lose decisively long before they backed away from those progressive messages. It does very little to show that it would still work now – and more to the point, it does very little to show that Sanders’ own particular brand of progressive messaging, which is what we’re discussing now, can bring the Democratic Party back from the abyss. You know what might? A clear record of Sanders and the candidates he endorses succeeding where other Democrats failed.
How many red or purple districts have Bernie Sanders and the True Progressives he supports flipped back to blue?
NR
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?: I ignored your comments because you were hectoring me.
But in any case, the destruction of manufacturing unions certainly hurt the Democrats and cost them at the presidential level. But we didn’t see true electoral disaster at the Congressional level until 1994, after the Democrats had embraced NAFTA and smiliar free trade deals that would decimate that industry even further.
Clinton tacked the party to the right, and they paid the price.
Tazj
Late to this thread but Tim Ryan is an idiot. Why the hell isn’t he actually doing his job advocating for the best interests of his constituents(which would be speaking out against the ACHA and Trump)instead of causing unnecessary chaos in his party?
He’s a pure opportunist who hasn’t accomplished anything for the country yet accept constantly criticizing his own party. You know who agrees with him that he should have been in leadership?Kelly Anne Conway who talked about it yesterday.
Handel winning a Republican district where she ran ads about Kathy Griffin, Hollywood and how the looney people of San Francisco would somehow ruin your life, made him think that he was the Democrat’s savior, when he’s just a bad politician.
A good politician would contrast the ACA and the ACHA and propose his policies for job creation. What ideas does he have?
NR
@Yoda Dog: You seem to be under the misguided impression that I give a shit what you think.
Free clue: I don’t.
NR
@Chris:
Actually, as I said, the big Congressional losses started in 1994, which was not coincidentally when the Democrats began embracing policies that were antithetical to the working class.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: I’ve acknowledged before that it was mostly racism that flipped the South.
FlipYrWhig
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?: What’s even goofier is that the message that held some of those Southern states longer than others was… new-economy managerial competence, as practiced by people like Jim Hunt, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. And it was when their successors — like Mike Beebe, Phil Bredesen, Bev Perdue, and Steve Beshear — either retired or lost that the statistics he likes to cite about lost seats really kick in. Those seats _weren’t held in the first place_ on the basis of an “economically progressive message” as NR would define it, but by something far more “neoliberal.” So as applied to the South it’s an entirely specious argument. It’s basically a Wisconsin-Michigan-Ohio argument padded with grandiose claims.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
I didn’t realize that Elizabeth Warren was a member of the House of Representatives and thus was eligible to replace Nancy Pelosi in her House leadership position.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@NR: So, asking questions is “hectoring”? God, you have about as much fortitude as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. You just didn’t want to answer tough questions.
My prior points still stand, in regards to proving yourselves and your message first electorally. I’m open to candidates for the House having more latitude in their messaging for their districts. But you have win first before anyone is going to follow you
lethargytartare
@scoop:
Barack and Hillary called. They want their campaign platform back.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
You mean policies that were antithetical to the working class like universal health care, the Clinton initiative that led directly to the big midterm defeat in 1994?
Bill Clinton only started triangulating after that defeat. Look at the dates of the welfare “reform” bill and Dodd-Frank, you fucking addled moron.
Captain C
@scoop:
I’ve finally figured it out!
Establishment = Neoliberal = Anyone* I don’t like
*But especially those whom an impartial assessment would see as at least potential allies.
Chris
@NR:
Uhhh…
But since 1) economics are the reason we’ve done so much worse in the last couple decades (according to your first statement at least) and 2) Bernie Sanders is finally bringing back the kind of economic message we haven’t had in the last couple of decades and will allow us to win again… it shouldn’t be difficult to point to a string of victories by vigorously Sanders-backed candidates that succeeded where other Democrats had failed.
Should it?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You’ve probably gone to troll other threads but: I’ve never run for the state lege in Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama or Kentucky.
Can’t speak for anyone else here.
You dimwitted fuck
Captain C
@Kay: A nontrivial percentage don’t seem to be able to control themselves. In this, they have a lot in common with too many Republicans.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: That’s putting a hell of a lot of stock in NAFTA as the Democratic Party’s original sin. I think it’s question-begging. The 1990s are also the decade of the culture wars and right-wing talk radio. My theory would be that that was the beginning of the Republican Party’s (still successful) attempt to use grievance politics to demonize liberals, link all Democrats to liberal outrages, and nationalize local elections. Or, to put it a different way, Democrats started losing elections they used to win _because they were seen to be TOO liberal_. Your theory is that they ceased being seen as liberal ENOUGH. That doesn’t ring true.
Captain C
@joel hanes:
FTFY
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?: Can’t edit, so continuing here:
Special election districts are incredibly difficult to flip anyway. Ossoff could have run as a Sanders populist. Do you think he would have won those Republican educated voters? I don’t. I don’t think he could have won without them either. Not enough Dem voters. The fact that he came as close as he did is incredible and I think is a forshadowing of next fall in closet districts
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Chris: That’s because the evil SJeW establishment is keeping them down
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What would a different “leader” do differently. And yes, it’s up to you to answer that.
@feckless: I still hold it against her that she took impeachment off the table. By trying to play nice with Cheney & Co.
Impeachment was never on the table. She was trying to calm down the Blue Dogs and ConservaDems and Iraq War voters who were part of her (our) majority. She shouldn’t have said it in public, I agree, but if you think there was ever any kind of chance of impeaching Bush, you don’t know the country you live in.
Captain C
@Chris: None, but it’s obviously somebody else’s fault.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: That’s also the first election after the “gays in the military!” kerfuffle. I think it’s far more likely that backlash against Democrats intensifies when they get perceived as “too” culturally liberal, which Republicans are quite expert at whipping up. There’s some overlap in a concept like “liberal elite,” which to lefties means “rich white people with cushy jobs who care about their kids going to an Ivy,” but to right-wingers means “people who think they’re better than me.” As usual, the left critique of the Democratic Party and class gives the right critique of the Democratic Party and class WAAAAAY too much credit for forethought and sophistication. No one thinks “The Democrats voted for NAFTA and now I don’t have a job, so I’m voting for Republicans from now on!” They think “I don’t have a job and Democrats would rather give free goodies to Those People and make me push 1 for English and care about where a man in a dress takes a piss, and at least Republicans will cut that shit out,” then fit whatever else they know about politics and history around that sentiment.
Juice Box
@NR: Except that Pelosi doesn’t lose to Republicans. She’s very, very good at not losing to Republicans. Her job is to run the Democratic caucus in the House. Her job is not to run Democratic campaigns, provide election strategy or anything else. Why is it so hard to understand that different people have different jobs?
Recall
@Major Major Major Major:
Reddit doesn’t give a half a shit about Pelosi.
Captain C
@feckless: Your handle is perfect for you.
Citizen Alan
@Goblue72: @NR:
Don’t they? The GOP outspent Ossoff 2.5 to 1 in order to get, what, a 4% advantage? Who says money doesn’t vote?
Captain C
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, but if we combat voter suppression, more of those Identity Politics people might vote, and they vote wrong, so…
Captain C
@NR: If you can’t figure out that a Senator is not going to be named House Minority Leader and highly unlikely to be voted in as Speaker of the House, you need to shut up and go take a Civics class before you comment here again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@feckless: Draw us the connection from Nancy Pelosi to Scott Walker, Bruce Rauner, Paul LePage, Rick Scott, Cory Gardner, whichever knob knocked out Kay Hagan in NC (Burr?)? Did Nancy Pelosi trick Bruce Braley into saying something stupid about farmers IN A FUCKING STATEWIDE RACE IN FUCKING IOWA (sorry for shouting but I still can’t believe that). How ’bout Charlie Baker? Did Pelosi and Obama convince Martha Coakley to be so fucking useless? How about the Ohio Teamsters Union? Did those stout-hearted blue collar stalwarts endorse Rob Portman because Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table? How did Nancy Pelosi help Ron Johnson defeat Russ Feingold, the lefty-fetish candidate when nobody had heard of Bernie Sanders outside of Vermont and the 8 dozen people who listen to Tom Hartmann?
Raven Onthill
Misogyny rules. Seriously, WtF?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Amen.
lethargytartare
@Mnemosyne:
Not to mention NAFTA had already passed by the time Clinton became president – what he signed was a liberalized version of G.H.W. Bush’s bill that attempted to somewhat level the playing field within the treaty’s territory.
and the fact that manufacturing was always going to seek the lowest wages it could, the only question was whether the US would have any say in the form and pace of that move.
kindness
I got so slammed yesterday for a similar post at RawStory in my support of Nancy and another at HuffPo. For the life of me I wish it was Russian Trolls posing as BernieBros who are the ones supporting purges like this but I’m afraid that isn’t completely true.
And these assholes have the gall to call themselves Democrats.
Rugosa
@Matt McIrvin: Yes! Tim Ryan needs a time out and a nap.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
This. Again, the “bathroom bills” of this year weren’t written and pushed by Democrats to allow transgender people to use the bathroom of their preference, and yet the Democrats got tarred with that brush.
AnonPhenom
Re: Kathleen Rice (NY-4); per her hometown paper, an early supporter of Hillary Clinton. FWIW.
This. x100.
Paula
@hovercraft: Seconded!
Paula
@low-tech cyclist:
Amen!
feckless
@FlipYrWhig:
Why all the ad hominems/cursing? Are you 12?
Regardless of your age, Mr. Whig, I’d like to see you talk that way to my face.
to rebut:
Ossof ran on “cutting wasteful spending” is that progressive? Did it work? He lost the district by more than Hillary did.
feckless
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wow 2 replies.
okay.
1) Didn’t have to successfully impeach Bush, but like occupying Germany after WWII, it would have physically demonstrated that the Bush junta was illegal and all they touched was tainted. So glad she screwed the republic to save the seats of the Blue dogs so they could be completely wiped out in 2010. I wonder why. The Dems let Nixon off, and that led directly to Iran Contra, they let Reagan off, and that led directly to the Invasion of Iraq, I shudder to think what Trumpf will be forgiven for. Why directly? Because it was the same people each time (Cheney Wolfowitz, Rove etc).
2) Touche’ on Russ Feingold.
3) What is our narrative? I don’t expect Nancy Pelosi to have god like control over every political race in America. But we don’t have a story, and whether it comes from the top or the bottom we need one badly. Obviously the “Trump is a bad man” story does nothing.
4) Democrats have been breaking promises to organized labor for 25 years. Its not surprising that they lost the shop floor, what’s terrifying is why the leadership of labor is so divorced from members.
You can lob all the foul language and ad hominems at me that you want, but it won’t change the fact that the democratic party is on an existential losing streak and there has been no changes in the organization. Still the same bunch of consultants taking paychecks to lose races.
feckless
@Captain C:
Thanks!
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@feckless: Oh, implicit threats of violence, real mature.??
nominus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s funny how Republican they keep thinking, down to their projection: They can’t grasp that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t pick candidates, doesn’t endorse them, no one asks what she thinks about Candidate X, and wouldn’t give a flying fuck if she said she didn’t like them. Meanwhile, they rush to the feet of Sanders trying to get an endorsement, waiting for him to bless Candidate X as “progressive enough”. They try to perforate anyone who doesn’t perform the play exactly how they think Sanders wrote the script, but can’t figure out how they would get anyone else to play along other than to resort to name-calling. They wouldn’t have any idea of how to control a caucus, unlike She-Who-Must-Go.
In short, they hate Nancy because she doesn’t act the way they think Sanders acts, and doesn’t do exactly what they do. The GOP aren’t the only ones that project their faults onto others, I guess.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@feckless: Impeaching Bush would have been utterly pointless as we didn’t have the votes in the Senate at the time.
The narrative is that Trump and the GOP are authoritarian oligarchs who want to kill you
?BillinGlendaleCA
@feckless:
Guess you don’t remember the Teamsters endorsing Tricky Dick in 1972.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
amidst that incoherent gibberish I can make out the central problem with purity lefties: You can’t accept the fact that people who voteactually matters in politics
it wasn’t to “save their seats”, it was to keep them from bolting the party.
Labor started leaving the Dems with Nixon, right around the time I was born, which I’m very sorry to say was lot more than 25 years ago. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, precisely for the message it would send to organized labor, more than 35 years ago. How’d he do with rank and file hard hats in ’84?
did I lob foul language and ad hominems at you? I called Bruce Braley fucking stupid, and I’ll stand by that. Though this does move my finger toward the fucking ad hominem button
chopper
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
you don’t understand, you can run someone and lose, but it’s way better to not run anyone at all and lose. you get to keep your precious purity that way and argue that you totes woulda won if you would have gotten your ass off the couch and actually tried. it’s a win-win.
ruckus
@hitchhiker:
It is mysoginy, but it is also much more.
They know exactly who and what Pelosi is. They are attacking us as well as Nancy. This is a normal process for conservatives, attack the strong with bullshit and figure that the far left will pick up the ball and run with it, doing half the work for them.
Art
Wow. I’m amazed at the number of reactions that posit any criticism of a female = misogyny. I voted Hillary and support Pelosi…but come on folks, use your higher brain functions!
Bunch of you folks are god damned slaves to your amygdala.I love reading that internet tough guy MajorMajorMajorMajor bitch about this when just a few days ago admitted “tbh” he would physically assault a specific woman to which he vehemently disagrees.
Happy Birthday, John. And fuck you for tolerating and promoting some of these assholes to the front page.
NotoriousJRT
Right(eous) on!