Bernie Sanders

[vt]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

Yup, "socialists" don't get how the 1/100 of 1% require most of the money. People on the right with maths skills keep voting against themselves. Must be the smart ones.

What we have now doesn't work either. We need new solutions.

[Woodsman]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

What we have now doesn't work either. We need new solutions.

Then why do you keep running the same old tropes?

[vt]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign...rns-on-sanders

[Woodsman]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign...rns-on-sanders

Ya think?

[vt]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

Sorry dude but I don't think it was obvious that progressive publications would be so critical of Bernie:

"As the fallout from last weekend’s Nevada Democratic convention spreads, sharply critical pieces about the White House hopeful and his campaign have appeared in progressive outlets such as Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos within the past 48 hours.
The Sanders campaign has also taken hits from progressive CNN contributor Sally Kohn, who endorsed the Vermont senator from the stage at a massive rally in New York City just before the Empire State’s April primary."

Did you actually read the article or just react to the headline?

[Woodsman]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

Sorry dude but I don't think it was obvious that progressive publications would be so critical of Bernie:

"As the fallout from last weekend’s Nevada Democratic convention spreads, sharply critical pieces about the White House hopeful and his campaign have appeared in progressive outlets such as Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos within the past 48 hours.
The Sanders campaign has also taken hits from progressive CNN contributor Sally Kohn, who endorsed the Vermont senator from the stage at a massive rally in New York City just before the Empire State’s April primary."

Did you actually read the article or just react to the headline?

No big deal, just politics. I've been paying way more attention to this than I had first intended, but the universe coughed up Bernie and Trump and I've been a hopeless case ever since.

I don't care what one thinks about the man and his political ideology, but to see a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn bring Mrs. Bill Clinton - the old Goldwater Gal herself - Hillary to a draw in Kentucky of all places is just remarkable to me. It's turning out to be a replay of '68 and Hillary is Hubert Humphrey, Sanders is Gene McCarthy, and Trump is Nixon. I wish I had called it, but all credit goes to Dick Morris. Of course, he knows the Clintons better than most:

"What may happen here is that if Sanders wins the first two primaries and then does well in the white primary states — not South Carolina, but the largely white ones — Sanders could beat her in all of those primaries," Morris said. "You could have a situation where she tries to win the nomination, steal it by getting the super delegates — all of whom believe that Sanders would be a disaster for the party."

He then told "The Steve Malzberg Show" that the scenario "could cause a backlash in the Democratic Party, very much like the Hubert Humphrey backlash that took place in 1968, when he didn't even enter a single primary and he was nominated anyway."

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/hi.../30/id/707664/

It wasn't obvious to anyone but Dick but it's played out rather close to his outline. And what's been obvious to me since last fall maybe you just took a while to key in. Given the insane terror fugue of the media following Hillary's most recent drubbing in Kentucky and Oregon, it looks like they're late to the party as well. But really it's been this way since before Iowa. There Clinton - the candidate the NYT decreed in October 2015 as “the unrivaled leader in the Democratic contest” was taken down to a draw by a grey, otherwise invisible man the entire political world knew had no chance at all to win. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Hillary was reported as the winner, of course, but at 49.9% to 49.6% it was a dead even tie. Had Martin O'Malley's phone tree broken down, the eight people who voted for him might had overslept and thrown the day to Sanders.

Anyway, that set the tone of the race and with a huge win in New Hampshire, Sanders upset the long planned and well scripted narrative of the Clinton Coronation. And while everybody was watching the Trump circus, Sanders showed the world how he would work around Clinton's many advantages and win. And it happened again in this last round. I think that's when the people you characterize as "leftists" and "progressives" were mobilized to put the skids on Bernie. But in the same way the media has experienced a psychotic embolism in the run up to the Trump ascendancy and obliterated their last shred of credibility in mobilizing to stop it, the so-called progressive caucuses are being similarly exposed. Pay close attention and you might see things that will make you re-calibrate your political and economic shorthand.

This week in the Paper of Record, for instance:

Senator Bernie Sanders is opening a two-month phase of his presidential campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton in California….

Now I came up in politics and elections. If you've got pretensions of rising to some degree of political influence higher than say "Tracy Flick", then a political campaign is about advancing your candidate and giving people reasons - not necessarily rational ones - to vote for your guy.

Nobody who is serious about winning starts a campaign for office with the goal of damaging or derailing an opponent. Campaigns like that exist, but they are spoilers and it's not unheard to later learn of collusion and similar corrupt practices were employed to torpedo an upstart or deliver payback for lapses in discipline. I suppose the next step is for the media to try and convince folks Bernie was a spoiler all along (that will be the balm HRC/DNC applies when she loses), but I think their powers of doublespeak and crimestop have run their course going with Trump.

So how to account for this claim by the paragon of Journalistic Ethics 101, the New York Times? Sure this sensational claim is supported with hard evidence of a "campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton in California", right? Well, no, but that's the narrative you want people to accept; Bernie Sanders is a spoiler who wants to throw the race to Trump. Now you can't yet just make up quotes and events to support your thesis (unless you work in the Black Propaganda section), so what you do is go to the Sanders campaign and say to them something like "you guys are only in it to stick it to Hillary" where then the Sanders campaign says, no we believe the people want our candidate and we're in it all the way to win, or some similar bromide.

Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator’s team was “not thinking about” the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president.

Then you go back to the newsroom and work with your editors to make the denial into the proof that your thesis is what has been happening all along.



On top of that, you get the front-page above the fold to advance a false story of violence on the part of Senator Sanders, bolstering your other false narrative —aided by phantom chair-throwing incidents—that the Sanders campaign is a dangerous menace intent on inflicting a “heavy blow” on Clinton in California to “wrest the nomination from her,” despite the plain reality that she has not clinched the nomination under any calculus and that the race is far from over. That's the narrative, from the top to bottom:

CLINTON: I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done, in effect. There is no way that I won’t be.

CUOMO: There’s a Senator from Vermont who has a different take on that —

CLINTON: Well —

CUOMO: He says he’s going to fight to the end —

CLINTON: Yeah, it’s strange.

But what's genuinely strange is that Hillary and the New York Times seem flummoxed that Sanders, with his insistence on “amassing enough leverage to advance his agenda at the convention in July—or even wrest the nomination from her" is actually working the democratic process towards the goal of winning the election. They just don't understand why he won't accept her inevitability and quit all his winning.

What's stranger still is that by that statement, Hillary seems to be telling California Democrats not to bother voting because in her mind nothing California could possibly do in its primary could change the outcome of the Democratic race.

"That is already done...There is no way that I won’t be."

Bernie, on the other hand, is all about California. And it looks like that's been the case all along. Sanders is on pace to win as many as 18 of the final 24 state primaries and caucuses. While Clinton is fond of saying she won “nine of the last 12 contests” in 2008, she tied with Obama in the final ten state primaries and caucuses during the 2008 primaries, winning 8 and losing 15 of of the last 23 states. She's whistling past a graveyard she's walked by before and it scares her.

I wish I could say I had it figured out after Iowa, but it's clear now that was the guerrilla/asymmetric strategy on how Sanders gets to the nomination. Create an independent crowd-sourced small-donor base managed by technology and using social media and social networking as a force multiplier to fight for every goddamn vote, nurture victories into breakthroughs and starve failures all the way to California and the convention. It's deep, man.

In this way, Sanders diminishes Clinton's primary advantage - her lock on the so-called pledged delegates - and by a winning popular vote strategy highlights the contradictions (as a good Marxist or Neocon might say) between his grass-roots popular democracy and the lack of it in the commanding heights (as a good Leninist or Conservative might say) of the Democratic Party Nomenklatura. His electoral success has made it impossible for Clinton to win the primary with pledged delegates alone.

This means that to win the Democratic nomination, Hillary will have to rely on the loyalty of super-delegates who won’t vote for more than two months in Philadelphia on July 25th. As the DNC has repeatedly advised us all, super-delegates can and often do change their minds and are free to do so up until they actually vote this summer. And a win California will cause many of these super-delegates to switch their votes to Sanders in late July on the argument that he’s more electable than Clinton in the fall (what if the Feebs sense weakness and indict her).

Enough defections and Clinton will not, in fact, be the Democratic nominee. And should she enforce her discipline with too naked a power grab, who could blame the Sanders kids for staying home and cultivating their own gardens once they are shown to have no place in Hillary's party. As they focus building on their independent base and applying their future efforts at electing Sanders Democrats, HRC is denied the White House.

We'll see. Let's just say we're all Captain Obvious by now on account for the fact that there's there's no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.

[jk]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

[lektrode]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

best critical analysis eye've seen to date: woody's POV (and writing on this topic) + jk's vid as the kicker..

[vt]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

Excellent points Woody.

Hillary has a recurring nightmare from "Night Of The Living Bern"

[jk]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

the 1968 analogy sounds about right. humphrey got the nomination, and i think hrc will do the same. i have less faith than you do, woody, in the flexibility of the super delegates. i think either dem will lose to trump, but i wonder if it makes any difference to the undercard. the dems didn't do badly in '68 - they lost 5 seats in the senate but maintained their majority, and they lost only 5 seats in the house.

[vt]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

The elites can be socialists as well as capitalists:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-starving.html

The people want to be rid of elites of all political facets.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

The elites can be socialists as well as capitalists:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-starving.html

The people wants to be rid of elites of all political facets.

What is an "elite"?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

What is an "elite"?

A person who is wealthy and respected with whom I disagree.

[Woodsman]

Re: From Sanders to Trump - What a Long Strange Trip it'll Be

A person who is wealthy and respected with whom I disagree.

Funny one, yet not too far from the mark. Thing is, when people speak of elites they usually forget the prefix "power." Otherwise, we could be talking about figure skaters or competitive bull wranglers.

But who reads C. Wright Mills these days.

The Power Elite are the key people in the three major institutions of modern society: 1) Economy; 2) Government; and 3) Military. The bureaucracies of state, corporations, and military have become enlarged and centralized and are a means of power never before equaled in human history. These hierarchies of power are the key to understanding modern industrial societies.

[Polish_Silver]

Mills

Funny one, yet not too far from the mark. Thing is, when people speak of elites they usually forget the prefix "power." Otherwise, we could be talking about figure skaters or competitive bull wranglers.

But who reads C. Wright Mills these days.

WM, have your read the Mills book and did you think it was good?

I have to agree with the idea that bureaucracies are one of the biggest (if not the biggest) power centers in the modern
world, and they certainly inhabit larger corporations. Does Mills believe, as Kissinger and I do, that bureaucracies, whatever their stated purpose, tend to
serve the purposes of their own members?

Mills did not mention health care or finance, but they are covered by government and corporations.


There is some thinking that the Military has been becoming more bureaucratic in the last 50 years, or that the bureaucracy is more self serving than before.