Comments

1
I thought the Bern or Busters were a cult. They have such a hard time following their leader over the cliff.
2
@1: Yes, yes, we get it, you're the cuntiest of the cultiest. Let us know if you want us to send you some deprogrammers or whatever.
(Also, big talk about leading people over a cliff from the guy who wants to give Donald Trump the nuclear codes.)
3
The few Bernie or busters left out there were too busy putting bitchy comments on Sarah Silverman's Facebook page to have paid much heed to anything Senator Sanders said. But I'm sure they'll find a home with Dr. Stein and her cozy little group.
4
I hate to credit that harpy with anything, but Ann Coulter's mic drop worthy tweet was great.
5
I didn't hear a great speech, and 2/3 of the folks I watched with nearly fell asleep ... a letdown after several outstanding performances.

Throughout the day, I DID hear a handful of pasty whites neophytes heckle and boo a long line of life-long black life-long laborers in the vineyards of progress in their rare moments in the spotlight.

That did not sit well with me, not at all.
6
The absolutely funniest part about you guys? You all spent the past couple of months deriding Bernie for not stepping down soon enough. And you spent that same time chiding Progressives for following and supporting Bernie to the end of the Earth.

Now that the left has finally decided that you're right and that Bernie wasn't so perfect after all, now we're chided for not following his every step.

Bunch of fucking hypocrites you guys are. Its like you're never satisfied.
7
Poor old guy's completely berned-out.
8
It was a great speech, it made me feel good about having supported Bernie and pretty good about being an adult about it and voting for Clinton on Election Day. Sure, I'd prefer if it had been Clinton giving that speech, but hey. Sometimes you just don't get to have every single thing you want. Sometimes you gotta settle for some of what you want, smile and call it a day.
9
@6

Do you even read your own comments?

Go on, go back just six weeks and read through your own words, if you can stand it.

Or, if you really want to avoid surprising anyone: don't.
10
Here's why Bernie-or-Busters me. Please consider the following four scenarios.

Consider Amal, a bright 10 year-old boy who loves school and learning. Or I should say he did, until the other kids started bullying him and calling him a terrorist due to his brown skin, his unusual last name, and his mother's hijab. His parents don't dare raise the issue with the school principle, though. They know from painful experience that President Trump has set a new example for what is tolerated in America, and making too much noise only attracts unwanted attention from the authorities.

Consider 12-year-old Ana. She was born in Los Angeles and helps to take care of her younger brother Diego while her undocumented parents work four jobs between them. Her family has always struggled, but they've managed to eke out a life in America. Now, however, with the massive immigration sweeps that started 6 months ago, she's frightened and can't sleep. Two of her friends, along with their entire families, disappeared last week. She wonders if her family will be next.

Consider Cynthia, a 52-year old woman with rheumatoid arthritis who works at a local fabric shop. Her employer is small enough that it doesn't have to provide her with health insurance, but fortunately she can afford insurance through her state's health exchange. Or at least she could until Trump, with the Republican congress, repealed the Affordable Care Act. Now she fears she won't be able to obtain insurance due to her pre-existing condition, and she worries that she'll have to endure daily, agonizing pain.

Consider Madeleine, a 19-year old college student who just discovered she's pregnant but isn't ready to be a mother. Had it happened a year earlier she might have been able to obtain an abortion, but not now. That's no longer an option due to a recent Supreme Court decision. Trump's appointment of three justices shifted the court's balance, allowing it to outlaw nearly all abortions by a 6-3 decision.

All of these nightmare scenarios are shockingly easy to envision under a Trump presidency. Indeed, he's explicitly promised to realize them. They're equally impossible to imagine under a Clinton presidency.

Imagine what it's like to have a debilitating medical condition and no health insurance. Imagine what it's like to be a person of color in a country where casual bigotry now has the President's stamp of approval. Imagine what it's like to be an immigrant living in constant fear that your family could be torn apart at any moment. Imagine what it's like to have your reproductive rights torn from you. The consequences of a Trump presidency are going to be painfully real for millions of people in this country, and your inability to put yourself in their shoes reflects your selfish privilege.
11
Beautifully said Timmy Tokyo.
14
The people who won't vote for Hillary, because principle, have no empathy for those Trump will punish.
Even though they may be amongst those he punishes.
So what gives with this. Do the ideas of equality Sanders was talking about, mean nothing to them? If they did, if the ideas really mattered.. they would recognize that a trump Presidency would take them a million more miles away from equality than a Clinton one would.
If it's not the ideas. Then what is it? A particularly American turn of ego. Maybe they are really trump supporters. Are secretly racist and anti- Muslim.

Whatever is the reason for this blindness, it makes it more understandable how Hitler took over Germany. People, like this never-vote-for-Hillary mob, just ignored the danger signs.
15
I didn't think it's a great speech, Dan.
It took forever for him to congratulate himself and I lost interest.
Seriously, why weren't the Republicans emails hacked, just before their convention? That would have been juicy.
Johnny come lately Sanders
thinks the Team, are going to not question his motives? I question his motives. He has no excuse, he isn't one of the kids. He hung on and hung on.
After it was obvious a maniac was loose and he was rounding up his other crazies, there's Sanders.. droning on with his same old same old.. A fucking tidal wave is brewing and he ignores it.
16
@15 Hillary is going to lose because a fascist is garnering the working class votes you have so much disdain for.
17
Do I, how do you arrive at that? In Australia our unions are still strong. I'm not a middle class person.
Both trump and Bernie stirred up the blame game. Blame this group. Blame Wall Street.
easy way out of any situation that involves complex issues. Blame someone.
If there is any chance of fighting this demon, this Hillary bashing has got to stop. Unite means that. Let it go. Defeat this lunatic seething with rage.

Sorry Agrippa; didn't mean to ignore your comment. Maybe Hillary does have to find a way to talk with trump supporters. Because you are right. he has mesmerised many. I read where Muchael Moore thinks he could win.
If people stopped attacking Hillary, so she could relax and present her best self, she could front trump's territory. She has the political skills, let her use them.
This vile hatred should be directed at trump, not Hillary.
18
@17 "if people stopped attacking Hillary"

That will not happen in the next three months. The RNC was just a preview, and the GOP's hate dial goes to 11.
19
@ 17, It's really simple: Clinton is the problem, and it's the Democrats who've decided to play Russian roulette with the election by nominating her. They can't comprehend the rage that voters feel toward the political class of both parties, and those voters are going to lash out at the ballot box by rejecting establishment candidates. This is why nothing Trump says or does matters. He's the missile that the angry and disenfranchised are using to destroy the DC/Wall Street power complex.

It doesn't matter what Clinton says because she has no credibility, and her own disastrous record belies her campaign trail conversion to a progressive platform. People expect that she'll betray us for her corporate paymasters the instant the election is over. Sanders at least offered the hope that things could get better for the 80% of the country that's economically imploded, but that hope now has been supplanted by dread and despair.

The Establishment Dems have committed a fatal error, and we're all going to pay the price.
20
@16 It's a bit of a stretch to claim Bernie/Jill-or-bust as the working class vote. We are used to not getting everything we want, and making compromises that reduce threats to our stability. For most working class progressives, that's Hillary. Also, keep in mind that, at least in most of the country, working class white men without college degrees fall hard for reactionary nationalism and are basically Trump's target demographic.
21
@19 Hits it on the head for me. Just like her husband, she holds the unwashed masses in complete contempt. Unlike her husband, she doesn't contain it very well.

What do you do to counter a fash piece of shit like Trump talks revitalizing the industrial jobs that have been decimated. His talk is cheap but he's good. She and Frank and Emmanuel and their ilk are just more finance capital telling tool and die workers, the people that make shit that make shit, they need to become Uber drivers and make apps. They've got nothing to stop him.
22
@6 (and other folks that feel the same way) -- So what exactly is the strategy of the Bernie or Bust folks? I honestly want to know. I can think of several ideas, but I don't want to build straw men (e. g. you are hoping that by sitting out this election, you move the Democratic Party to the left in the following election). None of the strategies I can think of are likely to work, but again, I would like to hear your ideas.

The strategy for many of on the left is simple: Vote for the candidate that is farther to the left. In almost all races, this means voting for a Democrat. In most of them, voting for a Democrat in the general will make a bigger difference than voting for this Democrat versus that Democrat. This state is no different. There are several candidates (but three with a solid chance) in the 7th. But I would be thrilled If the worst one (or the one farthest to the right) gets in, but at the same time, Reichart or Buelter (or both) get kicked out. That is a trade I would take every time.
23
@20 plenty of people with degrees are for Trump. That elitism is a bunch of rubbish and totally unhelpful. People with degrees are very able of making calculated decisions. Hell, as far as a crumbling infrastructure goes, I think Trump is actually the better bet!
25
Lifelong GOP may vote Trump or not. Lifelong Dems might have to re-think their ideas on sportmanship and vote for the one that has a better chance of winning, that is, if they want to win.
26
@ 19, sorry, but the problem is pie-in-the-sky idealists such as yourself, who just don't understand that the two party system is what we got and there's no instant alternative because no third party candidate can appeal to anyone but a hardcore base. This is because of the reasons Dan listed in his TV rant.

Remember 2000.
27
The naïve "I'm going green" Sandernistas are having a poutrage. They'll come around before November, as Trump's malignant narcissism goes on full display. Particularly at the debates, when I expect Clinton to dismember him as a shouting fool without a fact in his head. She's dealt with actual, nation-ruling strongmen face-to-face. Trump's a clown in comparison.

America is going to tire of his act, of what Sanders labeled, accurately, his "bombast".
28
A word of encouragement for those who are discouraged by the number and the volume of the Bernie or Bust people at the convention last night; these people are wingnuts, and wingnuts are almost always disproportionately represented at political events. Aside from professional, paid political operatives, the majority of Bernie supporters (and pretty much every other normal, reasonable person) has shit to do. We're just not going to take a week off from work, send the kids to Grandma's, and otherwise put life on hold for a week to attend a fucking pep rally for a primary that's already been decided. That's a week in which we could be getting paid, or vacationing, or otherwise not disrupting our lives to attend an event we have no say in and can just as easily watch on TV. The Busters are there because of magical thinking. Most of us don't indulge in that asinine luxury.
29
@ 28, These activists are also the people who do the actual work of canvassing, doorbelling, phonebanking, engaging and otherwise dragging people to the polls. It's interesting how much outright hostility and contempt Democrats have for them.
30
@27- You have a very misguided trust in the American voting public. A brash showman is exactly what about half of them are looking for.
31
@26- I remember 2000. The Democrats ran an uninspiring centerist candidate and the number of voters who stayed home was way, way, way bigger than the number of voters who went Green.
32
@ 26, Yes, let's blame the idealists, that miniscule number of voters that'll somehow throw the election. In reality, Establishment Dems have a much bigger marketing problem.

It's baffling to me that Team Clinton doesn't seem to have made any serious effort to understand voters other than her own supporters. Let's say an ad comes on teevee for a product that you don't want. The announcer says "Hey, you stupid asshole, buy my product or else." Well, are you gonna run out and buy product X? Of course not. But that's exactly the ad that's running day in and day out on social media and comment threads like this one. It actively repels disaffected conservatives, independents, and liberals alike, making them more likely to just stay home in November.

Given that the public's perceptions of Clinton are fairly well set, I don't see how this attitude helps.
33
Good point @28. The "Bernie or Busters" have a disproportionate presence in Philly. While I don't agree with Bernie on some things, I caucused for Bernie. I donated to Bernie. I'm wearing a Bernie T-shirt as I type this. And I'll be voting for Hillary in November.

I was enormously encouraged by Bernie Sanders's speech Monday, by the full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton and by the case he made that his endorsement is very much about achieving his agenda. The line that gave me a laugh was how Bernie said in his typical Bernie way, "There was a significant coming together of the two campaigns," while rounding up his hands and slowly bringing them together to demonstrate.

I caught Chuck Todd on MSNBC afterwards observing that the speech was Bernie declaring victory. "He lost the nomination but he won the issues."
34
And if I may contradict myself a bit, I think dwightmoodyforgetsthings makes a great point @31 about voters staying home in 2000 when the Dems ran an uninspiring centrist candidate. And I kind of agree with Original Andrew @32 when he writes: "It's baffling to me that Team Clinton doesn't seem to have made any serious effort to understand voters other than her own supporters."

The question to me is whether centrist, elitist, globalist, Wall Street-backed insider Hillary can change her stripes and really meet the progressive wing of her party in the middle, and fundamentally whether she can realize there's good reason millions of frustrated Americans are gravitating toward Trump.
35
@32, "It's baffling to me that Team Clinton doesn't seem to have made any serious effort to understand voters other than her own supporters."

And yet, thanks to Bernie supporters, they have proposed the most progressive platform in decades. Like John Oliver said, just because you feel something strongly doesn't make it fact.
36
@29 "These activists are also the people who do the actual work of canvassing, doorbelling, phonebanking, engaging and otherwise dragging people to the polls."

I'll just leave this here for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hi…
37
@36- Why did you leave that thing there? It doesn't seem like a reply to the quote.
38
@ 35, Perhaps you don't realize it, but I'm trying to have an honest dialogue here, and you're coming across as smug and condescending; are you really going to persuade someone to your side with that?

As far as the platform goes, it goes back to the credibility problem, which is that people don't think she'll make any good faith effort to deliver and will say anything to get elected.

What would persuade me is knowing more about who she would appoint to cabinet positions, and her making firm, public commitments there, for example: absolutely no Goldman Sachs or Citibank cronies and sycophants.
40
#38 Actually if you paid attention to Hillary Clinton's record (instead of random fringe-left conspiracy nonsense about Wall Street and such) you might be able to put together a more cogent argument. The first two years of the Clinton I administration were actually rather progressive and she had a lot to do with that (mostly through her push for health care reform). What is legitimately troubling about both Clintons is their tendency to triangulate (usually shifting far more to the right that is warranted for political expediency). Vote for the Iraq war falls under that. Welfare reform. The notorious crime bill. Any progressive not consumed by wild conspiracy theories and fantasies about what a president can achieve should be a lot more worried about 2018 than who she is going to appoint to her cabinet. After the inevitable right-wing backlash that will occur that year I'll be rather worried about what malignant Republican initiatives she decides she needs to co-opt. One fantastic thing about Obama: he doubled down after both mid-term drubbings (although almost triangulated his legacy down the drain with the failed 'grand bargain').
42
@38, Oh, I know I'll never persuade an internet commenter to change their point of view. For what it's worth, a lot of people feel that "she's not trustworthy" is a gendered attack that is routinely used against women in high level positions, in the same way that "he's too inexperienced" was seen as a racially-based attack against Obama. Look it up and you'll see that there have been multiple articles written about this.

Politifact has her listed as the most trustworthy of all the candidates (including Sanders) running for office based on all the facts they've checked, and there was this: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

Yet the allegations persist.

Regardless of whether you choose to trust her, you cannot claim that her campaign hasn't taken Sanders' supporters into account, based both on the platform AND the fact that she has specifically called them out during all of her speeches since the debates ended, stating explicitly that she hears them and feels the same frustrations that they do and what her plans are to address their concerns.

@37, I left it there because it's a long list of activists and labor party leaders who have endorsed Clinton. It was a response to Andrew inferring that the true activists and people getting shit done were those behind Sanders.

43
@ 40, So if I were to flip what you just wrote to me, it would go something like "you're just ignorant of her actual record because you repeat campaign propaganda, meanwhile here's a list of all the major issues over the last 20 years about which she's been disastrously wrong."

Can you really not see how insulting that is?

Oh and bonus from 41 "you don't know what the president does."
44
@43 Ah well, I would say there is considerably more to her record than the items you are obsessively fixated on. Like the fact that her voting record was rated as one of the most liberal over her career in the Senate. Not entirely clear if you are ignorant of that or if it just serves your purposes to repeat campaign propaganda.

In any case, highly likely that at least the first two years of a Clinton II administration would be quite progressive. Ample evidence for that. No I don't expect that means a unilateral military withdrawal from the mideast and elsewhere, or the breaking up if big banks, or the parting of the Red Sea. I think you fringey fantasists would be a little disappointed in the foreign policy area even if Jill Stein miraculously became president. Anyone who is not entirely insane is going to listen to people with foreign policy expertise and I think they would be hard-pressed to find a foreign policy expert who believes that ISIS's 'Caliphate' would turn into an Arabic Denmark overnight if we just packed up our drones and went home, or say, it would be just dandy (and of course, none of our business) if Iran and Saudi Arabia went to war.
46
@15 - Why weren't the RNC's servers and emails hacked?

Because the Russians chose not to.

Because the hackers have now been traced not only to Russia, but specifically to an arm of the Russian government. Vladimir Putin has a personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton after she expressed concerns over the integrity of the last elections in Russia. Meanwhile, he and Trump have lavished praise upon one another, Trump owes at least $300 million to Russian oligarchs (which is why noted conservative columnist George Will believes he won't release his taxes), Trump's top campaign adviser Paul Manafort has been a political consultant for pro-Russian Ukranian politicians for more than a decade, and the ONLY battle over the GOP platform that the Trump camp fought -- the ONLY ONE -- was to gut the platform's original anti-Russia stance on Ukraine. The ONLY battle over the platform was to back Vladimir Putin.

That's why the RNC's servers weren't hacked and the DNC's were, and why the DNC files were posted on Wikileaks (which have long been weaponized by the Russian government with the knowledge and consent of Putin-sympathizer Julian Assange, who is being guarded by Russian FSB guards in the Ecuadoran embassy in London) at a time when they were hoped to do maximum harm.
47
@ 45, That is the point. At least on this blog, and others that I read, Clinton supporters can't make the case without being hateful and insulting. That's going to win over the public how, exactly?
49
It's pretty amazing just how soft on Russia you can be and people will generally give you a pass, if you're a shouty man wearing a Republican mask.
50
@29: Hey, you made a connection between political activists and wingnuts. I offered no comment on political activists, only on crazy people who don't understand how to behave like adults.

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