text:
Tag Archives: sexism
There is not, and there should not be, affirmative action for elections
Your race and your biological sex aren't qualifications for elected office, whether you were born a white male or a non-white female (or non-white male).
The identity politicians are apoplectic that white men are the front-runners for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Indeed, most nationwide polls of Democratic presidential preference taken over the past two weeks or so show Joe Biden at No. 1, Bernie Sanders at No. 2 and Pete Buttigieg at No. 3.
Kamala Harris, a two-fer for the identity politicians, had been in third place for a long time before she was bumped (perhaps only temporarily — who knows?) by Buttigieg.
Politico reported a few days ago:
Houston — The women of color who packed into a university auditorium here Wednesday for a first-of-its-kind presidential forum delighted in the rhetoric of candidates who vowed to make Donald Trump a one-term president.
But their frustration was just as palpable — over the heavy media attention being paid to white male candidates in the early days of the Democratic primary, and over polling they contended is feeding a misleading narrative that only a white man can defeat Trump.
"With all due respect to the vice president, he hasn't even announced yet but he's the front-runner?" Leah Daughtry, a political operative and former Democratic National Committee official who helped organize the "She the People" event, said of Joe Biden [who would go on to officially announce the next day].
"Racism and sexism are part of the fabric and the fiber and the founding of our country," she added, "and the way that the [Democratic] candidates are being treated, it just reminds you of that. We're not past it." …
Thing is, it seems that the identity politicians' belief is that we, the people (on the Democratic side, anyway), must support, preferably, a non-white female candidate for president (if it must be a male, he must be non-white).
But electoral politics don't work that way. The people support and vote for whomever they support and vote for (even when they support and vote for appallingly awful candidates such as George W. Bush and Pussygrabber).
There isn't, and there cannot be, affirmative action in democratic politics, because democratic politics is all about choice — not about having candidates of certain demographics rammed down the throats of the populace.
I understand the frustration and disappointment over the fact that female and non-white candidates are campaigning but aren't gaining traction. Kamala Harris as of late can't make it to even 10 percent in most nationwide polls, and Elizabeth Warren can't do as well as even Harris, and Cory Booker is behind both Harris and Warren.
Beto O'Rourke is polling right around where Warren is — proof, methinks, that merely being a white man isn't enough.
Harris, Warren, Booker and O'Rourke all, in my book, lack substance and/or charisma. Harris doesn't have much of either, Warren has a lot of substance but not a lot of charisma, Booker has neither and ditto for O'Rourke, whose laughably contrived "charisma" isn't charisma at all, because you can't fake charisma; you have it or you don't.
Obviously, because every U.S. president except for Barack Obama has been a white male (and Obama is half-white), within the collective American psyche, apparently, is the belief, if even subconscious, that the president should be a white man. Many, many women even hold this belief, even consciously (most of them are Repugnicans, but still…).
Obama overcame this challenge because of his charisma — and also because, as he acknowledged himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." (Indeed, upon that blank screen I projected — because of his campaign's relentless, ubiquitous promises of "hope" and "change" — that Obama would be a progressive president. Boy, was I punk'd!)
Obama, an astute political opportunist, struck while the iron was hot; his window of political opportunity was rare and unique and it was brief. For Harris or Booker to believe that she or he easily could replicate Obama's success simply because of his or her race not only is cynical and shallow and superficial, but quite obviously dead wrong.
I support Bernie Sanders not because he's an old white guy — I loathe "President" Pussygrabber, but not because he's an old white guy, but because he's a fascist, treasonous criminal who wasn't even actually elected — but I support Bernie because of those candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in the top three tiers (which I define as consistently polling at 3 percent or more in nationwide polls), he has the most experience in D.C. and is the most progressive, entirely unlike Creepy Uncle Joe, who is an obsolete Clintonian sellout.
I easily could argue that Bernie is the only true Democrat in the race, which is ironic, given how often he is criticized for not actually being a Democrat.
My second choice probably would be Warren, even though her campaigning has been tone deaf and even though it does bother me at least a bit that as recently as the 1990s she was a Repugnican.
The reason I'm not giving Warren money or otherwise actively supporting her is because the polls of those within her own party clearly show that she isn't exciting them, and I don't and won't squander my money, time, energy and emotional investment on a candidate who can't excite even his or her own base.
My third choice probably would be Buttigieg, but I'm still gun shy from Obama. Even though Obama was an unknown, I put my support behind him, hoping for that change, and I was bitterly disappointed to see that we didn't get change, but for the most part got only more of the same. Obama was a caretaker president at best.
So I can't dive in and blindly support Buttigieg, as I did Obama.
Plus, Buttigieg isn't ready to be president. He's precocious and ambitious, to be sure, but I don't think that it's time to turn over the Oval Office to him. I'd love him to run for governor or for the U.S. Senate — and win (and then do a good job in the office) — first.
And, unlike how the craven identity politicians would support (probably exclusively) only someone who shares their own demographics, I'm not going to support Buttigieg primarily or even solely because he's a gay white man like I am. It's not enough that he and I both happen to white, male, and not heterosexual. This isn't junior fucking high school.
Again, if it's indeed the case that most American voters believe that the president should or even must be a white man, that's sad, but, in a democracy, in which the voters are free to elect whomever they wish to elect, whether you or I agree with their choices or not, what, exactly, can be done about that?
That was a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway: qualified candidates who aren't male and who aren't white should continue to run for office, from local office to the presidency. Over time, their candidacies, successful or not, will change the national psyche. I know of no other democratic way.
Finally, it also should be pointed out that Biden and Bernie have run for president before, which is a huge reason that they are at No 1 and No. 2. On the national political stage they are fairly known quantities, unlike the likes of Harris and O'Rourke and Buttigieg. (Sadly, the problem with candidates such as Booker and Warren apparently is that they are known quantities…)
Ironically, at least for now, anyway, it seems to be Buttigieg who is filling the "hope" and "change" spot — that is, he is the bright and shiny newcomer on whom many voters seem willing to take the chance. (It had looked like that spot would be filled be O'Rourke, but he has turned out to be the flash in the pan that it was pretty clear he was going to be.)
And I'm sure that many black Americans, who tend to be homophobic, are pretty incensed that a gay white man apparently has displaced Kamala Harris, who "deserves" the presidential nomination because she's a black woman, you see; the way that she was born are her "qualifications," which is ironic, given that we've established that merely having been born a white male aren't qualifications.
What I'm hoping is that young progressive politicians now, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Katie Porter and Rashida Tlaib (and Buttigieg!), get more and more electoral and governance experience under their belts and give us the diverse bench of qualified presidential candidates that we don't really have now.
That, to me, seems to be the best solution — not to piss and moan ad infinitum that the American people apparently still prefer presidential candidates who are white men.
Whining incessantly about "sexism" and "misogyny" — while ignoring her glaring flaws and shortcomings as a president candidate — didn't help Billary Clinton the last go-around.
Further such whining isn't ever going to work in the future.
Tagged as affirmative action, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, charisma, Cory Booker, Democratic Party, diversity, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, identity politicians, identity politics, Ilhan Omar, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Katie Porter, Misogyny, Pete Buttigieg, Politics, Racism, Rashida Tlaib, Republican Party, sexism, tribalism
Good luck, Liz (you'll need it)
Updated below (on Wednesday, January 2, 2019)
Boston Globe photo
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts celebrates her election to a second Senate term in Boston in November (above), and yesterday she declared her intention to run for the White House. She'd make a good president, but match-up polling has her barely beating "President" Pussygrabber in November 2020, while both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, the clear front-runners for the Democratic nomination, both beat Pussygrabber in the match-up polling by double digits.
I guess that maybe Elizabeth Warren deserves a political Brownie point or two for having gone first this time around, that is, for being the first upper-tier Democratic Party presidential candidate to have formed an exploratory committee for 2020.
But I just can't forget that in 2016 we pretty much heard crickets from her, and she isn't polling well right now; she has yet to hit double digits in any nationwide poll of Democratic presidential preference taken over the past three months.
By comparison, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have hit double digits in all of those polls.
Bright and shiny new object (to lift from Claire McCaskill) Beto O'Rourke only sometimes hits double digits in those polls, as does Billary Clinton when she stupidly is included in them. (I put the chances of Billary running yet once again at maybe 1 percent or 2 percent. Oh, I'm sure that she'd still very much like to be president, but even she probably doesn't want the embarrassment of running again and failing spectacularly again.)
According to the nationwide polling, right now it's really down to Biden and Bernie, but I'm not one to say, anti-democratically, that someone shouldn't run, even if he or she doesn't have much of a chance, as is the case with Warren. If you qualify to run for president and wish to run for president, knock yourself out; the voters will sort you out.*
As I've noted, Warren as of late unfairly has been attacked, and it's been rather sad to watch her implode instead of explode, perhaps especially over her Native American DNA campaign.
I don't think that she did anything wrong by pushing back against "President" Pussygrabber's perpetually calling her "Pocahontas," but apparently the whole episode backfired on her in the court of public opinion.
I think that Warren would make a good president, but I also think that as a presidential candidate she'd be smeared as just another Massachusetts egghead, a la Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. It's not fair, but all is fair in love and war and politics.
Also unfair is the fact that while I always thought that Billary Clinton's and the Billarybots' claim that Billary faced sexism/misogyny always was bullshit — voters haven't liked Billary primarily because she is unlikable and untrustworthy and reeks of corruption, not because she is a woman — I think that as a presidential candidate, Warren would face actual sexism and misogyny.
That's not her fault, and you easily could argue that she shouldn't be punished for it, but the larger issue is whether or not she can beat Pussygrabber in November 2020.
A Morning Consult poll taken in August showed Warren beating Pussygrabber in a hypothetical match-up, but by only 4 percentage points, while that same poll showed that both Bernie and Biden beat Pussygrabber by 12 percentage points each.
Recall that months before the November 2016 election, Billary Clinton led Pussygrabber by only single digits in most polls. By the time Election Day arrived, she was ahead of Pussygrabber by only a few percentage points. We all know how that ended up.
Unless the match-up polling changes, it would be too risky to make Warren the 2020 Dem nominee, especially when both Bernie and Biden do much better in the match-up polling against Pussygrabber.
(In that August Morning Consult poll, by the way, both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris lost to Pussygrabber, by 2 points and 3 points, respectively. They are non-starters, in my book. I mean, sure, go all-out for craven identity politics, but then also ensure that Pussygrabber gets a second term! Woo hoo! Smart!)
I'm OK with Warren being the 2020 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, but with both Bernie and Biden also being from the Northeast, should one of them snag the presidential nomination, as I expect to be the case, I don't know that either of them would pick another Northeasterner as his running mate.
In the end, Elizabeth Warren might remain in the U.S. Senate for the remainder of her political career, which wouldn't be a bad thing for the people of the nation. The Senate has few progressive fighters like she.
In the meantime, I'm focused on the Democrats nominating the most progressive candidate possible who also has a very good chance of beating "President" Pussygrabber (polling against "Pussygrabber" by at least double digits is where my own comfort zone is).
That candidate right now is Bernie Sanders. He fulfills both requirements, while no one else does. Everyone else is either not progressive (enough) or probably can't beat Pussygrabber, or both.
Update (Wednesday, January 2, 2019): Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written another thoughtful-as-usual piece on the unfair treatment of Elizabeth Warren by the corporately owned and controlled media.
I agree with most of what Taibbi has to say, and I too am concerned that the corporate media aren't reporting the news so much as they are trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary contest. (As I've noted, it would be no shock that the corporate media bash a candidate who promises to rein in corporations!)
That said, when I get behind a presidential candidate, over time I give him (or her) a lot of money (in proportion to my income, anyway), my time and energy (OK, mostly that's blogging, but still…) and my emotional investment. Therefore, the candidate's viability, as best as it can be discerned, matters to me.
Fact is, Warren isn't looking great right now. (Yes, that might change, but right now… [I make no predictions as to who the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will be, but I can and I do look at and report what the current polling indicates.]) Even among those of her own party, Warren can't get double digits in the nationwide polls. If she doesn't excite her own party, how can she excite the national electorate?
That aside, Bernie Sanders (who gets double digits in the nationwide polls) generates more enthusiasm within me personally, perhaps because he remains necessarily critical of the Democratic Party where appropriate and when necessary, and also because yes, I do at least somewhat believe that it's his turn.
He did a great job in 2016, given what he was up against, winning 22 states and garnering 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates to Queen Billary's 54 percent. Had the Billarybots within the DNC and elsewhere within the establishmentarian party machine not rigged the process, who can say that Bernie wouldn't have won the nomination?
Any other candidate who had done as well against party juggernaut Billary as Bernie did would be the heir apparent right now, but because he's a democratic socialist instead of a Democratic Party hack, Bernie's accomplishments in 2016 (and before and afterward) largely are ignored.
That's some fucking bullshit, and I think it's (past) time that we reward him by making him the presidential nominee this time.
Taibbi writes about "electability," and yes, ideally that should be for the voters, not the corporate media, to decide. Yet there is a synergy between the voters and the media; both influence each other, for good and for ill, and there probably is no way around that.
Team Warren, in an e-mail it sent to Warren's supporters today (I'm on her e-mail list), spoke about "commentators [who] spend more time covering Elizabeth or any woman's 'likability' than her plans for huge, systemic change to make this country work for all of us." (The e-mail makes it pretty clear that Team Warren views claims that Warren isn't likable to be rooted in sexism.)
I never have seen Warren as anything other than likable (I gave her another donation today), but electability is, it seems to me, a valid concern, as long as it isn't rooted in something like personal sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia, but is rooted in political dynamics, such as recorded in reputable polls.
Taibbi, quoting another writer, suggests that "Democratic voters should ignore such punditry, and simply vote for whichever candidate they would most like to be president."
Well, I would most like Bernie Sanders to be president, and I am supporting him again for 2020, but, truth be told, I also want "President" Pussygrabber out of office as soon as possible — yes, I also want to win — and, as I already noted here, with Bernie, I believe, we get that two-fer.
Elizabeth Warren remains my second choice, and if she grows in popularity within the Democratic Party to the extent that she poses the largest clear and present danger to Pussygrabber's "re"-election, then she might even steal me from Team Bernie.
*Well, a corrupt Democratic National Committee aside, that is. The corrupt DNC most definitely tipped the scales for Billary in 2016, but some reforms have taken place since then, so we'll see how 2020 goes.
Tagged as "President" Pussygrabber, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, corporate media, Democratic Party, electability, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, likability, Matt Taibbi, progressives, progressivism, Pussygrabber, sexism
Mississippi is still burning
AFP/Getty Images news photo
"President" Pussygrabber appears with appointed Repugnican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith at a rally in Mississippi in October. He stands behind her not only literally but also figuratively.
Some who have read my rants against identity politics might conclude that I don't take racism and sexism (and other bad -isms) seriously. I do, which is why I have a problem with identity politics, which too often devolves into anti-white racism and misandry, but right now we're talking about white racism.
We're talking about Repugnican Cindy Hyde-Smith, who on Tuesday will vie in a run-off election in Mississippi to finish out the U.S. Senate term of Repugnican Thad Cochran, who retired on April 1, citing health issues, and whose unfinished term ends in January 2021.
Upon Cochran's resignation Hyde-Smith was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Mississippi's Repugnican governor in April, but she had to face the voters earlier this month in order to keep the seat until it comes up for election again in November 2020. Because no candidate won more than 50 percent in this month's election, the run-off is on Tuesday.
First, Hyde-Smith drew attention to herself when she said of a political supporter, on video, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row."
Mississippi had more lynchings than any other state, according to the NAACP, which puts Georgia at No. 2 and Texas at No. 3. Yet Hyde-Smith claimed that "this comment was twisted and it was turned into a weapon to be used against me." It's interesting how quickly wingnuts turn from casual victimizers to "the victimized."
Then came the revelation from the Jackson Free Press, a Mississippi newspaper, that as a high-schooler Hyde-Smith had attended an all-white "segregation academy" whose yearbook was called The Rebel.
The newspaper reports:
U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith attended and graduated from a segregation academy that was set up so that white parents could avoid having to send their children to schools with black students, a yearbook reveals.
A group photo in the 1975 edition of The Rebel — the Lawrence County Academy yearbook — illustrates the point. High-school cheerleaders smile at the camera as they lie on the ground in front of their pom-poms, fists supporting their heads. In the center, the mascot, dressed in what appears to be an outfit designed to mimic that of a Confederate general, offers a salute as she holds up a large Confederate flag.
[Here is the yearbook photo the newspaper published:
Apparently the high-schoolers called themselves "the rebels." Nice.]
Third from the right on the ground is a sophomore girl with short hair, identified in the caption as Cindy Hyde.
The photo, and the recently appointed Republican senator's attendance at one of the many private schools that was set up to bypass integration, adds historic context to comments she made in recent weeks about a "public hanging" that drew condemnations from across the political spectrum.
Lawrence County Academy opened in the small town of Monticello, Miss., about 60 miles south of Jackson, in 1970. That same year, another segregation school, Brookhaven Academy, opened in nearby Lincoln County. Years later, Hyde-Smith would send her daughter, Anna-Michael, to that academy.
Hyde-Smith graduated from Lawrence County Academy in 1977, meaning she would have already been in school elsewhere at the time the academy opened.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in 1954 and again in 1955 to do so with "all deliberate speed," Mississippi slow-walked the integration of its schools as long as possible, trying a variety of "school choice" schemes, state legislation and court cases to stop full integration, including arguing that white kids should not go to school with so-called "genetically inferior" black students. …
The [Lawrence County Academy] yearbook, provided to the Jackson Free Press by a former student who asked not to be named, is one of very few pieces of evidence still available that identify the segregation academy as the recently appointed senator's alma mater.
While Hyde-Smith regularly touts her subsequent education at Copiah-Lincoln Community College and the University of Southern Mississippi, her high school has been conspicuously absent from the senator's official statements, speeches and public biographies. Even her Facebook account suggests her education began with community college. …
Lawrence County Academy shut down in the late 1980s due to dwindling attendance — one of the now-defunct early [segregated] schools that sprang up in response to integration. Among those that survived, though, was Brookhaven Academy, where Hyde-Smith chose to send her daughter, Anna-Michael. …
As many have pointed out, Hyde-Smith might not have had a choice if her parents sent her to the segregation academy, but Hyde-Smith certainly knew what she was doing when she sent her daughter to a segregation academy.
And if there were no shame about having attended the segregation academy, then why does Hyde-Smith never divulge where she went to high school?
Tomorrow, "President" Pussygrabber, who has campaigned for Hyde-Smith before, is to headline two rallies for her in Mississippi.
Andd the Repugnicans complain that their party is so unfairly painted as racist and white supremacist.
No, it simply is that we judge you by the company that you keep.
One of the many reasons that I never vote for a Repugnican is that the party is the party of the former slave states that committed treason when they seceded after the election of Abraham Lincoln (my favorite U.S. president, I'll add).
Of course, treason wasn't the slave states' largest crime; what they did to the black slaves — awful crimes against humanity — was their largest crime.
Any political candidate who associates himself or herself with the Repugnican Party cannot credibly dissociate himself or herself from the stances that the party has taken, which include white racism and white supremacism, anti-labor unionism and pro-plutocracy, misogyny and patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-semitism, anti-environmentalism, etc., etc.
The Civil War never really ended, obviously, and we Northerners (literal and philosophical Northerners) must continue to fight it.
In the meantime, on Tuesday Hyde-Smith faces former Democrat Mike Espy, who is a black, and the Mississippi Clarion Ledger notes:
… National Democratic fundraising groups and leaders believe [that Espy] has a chance, especially after recent comments by Hyde-Smith talking about voter suppression and attending a "public hanging."
They are pumping last-minute cash into the race, as prominent names such as Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker visited to drum up excitement for the former U.S. representative and U.S. agriculture secretary.
The last time a Democrat from Mississippi was elected to the Senate was 1982; the last time a black senator represented Mississippi was shortly after the Civil War.
An Espy win won't give Democrats control in the Senate, but it could signal a larger political shift in the historically conservative South. Yet Espy often downplays the historic nature of his run.
"I'm proud of that but I'm not dwelling on it," he said in another recent interview. "I want to be a senator for everyone. I'm trying to get votes from everyone, regardless of race, or age, or gender, or sexual orientation, or disability — or even party. I'm going to Republicans and Democrats talking about the issues that concern them."
Despite a long-shot bid for any Democrat — Trump won Mississippi by 18 points in 2016 and has endorsed Hyde-Smith — Espy has generated several bursts of national attention and excitement on the campaign trail in recent weeks. Sometimes, they have been thanks to his opponent's mistakes. …
Yes, but we're still dealing with the South. In Florida, the purplest of the Southern states, Repugnican Ron DeSantis, running for governor against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is black, infamously warned the state's voters not to "monkey this up" by electing Gillum, and DeSantis still won ("won"?).
This Civil War has been a long, hard slog.
P.S. Peter Berkowitz is on the right, but I do agree with this take of his on identity politics (you knew that I couldn't resist):
… Identity politics … directs students [and everyone else, I'd argue] to think of themselves as members of a race, class, or gender first and primarily, and then to define their virtue in terms of the degree of oppression that they believe the group with which they identify has suffered.
It demotes the individual rights shared equally by all that undergird American constitutional government, while distributing group rights based on its self-proclaimed hierarchy of grievances. It imperiously pronounces collective guilt and summarily rejects appeals. It nurtures a sense of victimhood in those it purports to protect and empower.
In the guise of fighting domination, it aims to impose its will on all. In these ways and more, identity politics trains students [and, again, everyone else] to turn up the heat of the tribalism that threatens to engulf the nation. …
The sister doctrine of intersectionality adds that all crimes and sins committed by the unjustly privileged oppressors — typically white men — are indissolubly connected while righteousness inheres exclusively in the oppressed, comprising people of color and women. … [I]dentity politics affirms that victims are neatly distinguishable from, morally superior to, and entitled to greater political power than, the villains. …
None of this is to minimize what historically oppressed groups — including mine (gay men) — have suffered throughout way-too-often-ugly American history. And I agree with only some of what Berkowitz has to say in his column to which I linked (his advocacy for home-schooling and for charter schools, for instance, I disagree with); and even though I agree with some of his points, which are logical and which jibe with my own observations and experiences, I do question his overall motives, frankly.
But this is to point out that it's very, very easy, if we let them, for the victims (and the "victims" — that is, those who aren't actually victimized today but who nonetheless cravenly falsely claim victimization for personal and political gain) to become the victimizers.
When we say that human beings shouldn't be treated based upon their race or biological sex (or upon other demographics/traits), but upon the content of their character, we mean it or we don't.
If we oppose oppression only when it's our own group that's being oppressed, then we are in the grip of toxic identity politics. And that is worlds apart from the true spirits of diversity and of liberty and justice for all.
Tagged as Andrew Gillum, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Democratic Party, Democrats, Florida, Georgia, identity politics, lynchings, Mike Espy, Mississippi, Racism, Republican Party, Republicans, Ron DeSantis, segregation academies, sexism, South, Texas, the South, toxic identity politics
Super-delegate and caucus reforms making the party democratic again
The Democratic National Committee voted yesterday to strip the so-called super-delegates of their anti-democratic power. This means that in 2020, should Bernie Sanders decide to run for president again, the deck won't again be stacked against him from Day One by constant reports of how many super-delegates, the vast majority of them self-serving party hacks, already have promised to vote at the party convention for an establishmentarian, center-right, Repugnican-Lite, pro-corporate, DINO sellout candidate. (Above: Demonstrators urge the DNC to strip super-delegates of their power at the DNC's summer meeting that just wrapped up in Chicago.)
The best news for the Democratic Party in a long time came yesterday, when the Democratic National Committee overwhelmingly voted to effectively eliminate the power of the so-called super-delegates.
Against the wishes of a minority of dead-ender DNC assholes who had come to savor the fact that their votes for the presidential nominee have counted much, much more than the votes of us mere peasants, the DNC yesterday demonstrated its new-found realization that if the party wants to save itself, it actually needs to be democratic. (Who knew?)
The party is, however, taking baby steps toward reform. "Saturday's vote officially [bars] the super-delegates from voting on the first ballot to choose the party's presidential nominee unless a candidate has secured a majority of the convention using only pledged delegates, whose votes are earned during the primary process," explains CNN. The super-delegates may vote in a second round of voting if no victor emerges with a majority of delegates in the first round, so while their undue influence has been reduced sharply, the petulant, spoiled babies were thrown some pacifier. (The equivalent of super-delegates in the Repugnican Party must vote the way that the people of their respective states voted, so even the Repugnican Party doesn't have an anti-democratic, aristocratic system of super-delegates.)
And while I've written before that presidential caucuses, which are plagued with irregularities (that is, opportunities for cheating), should be dumped altogether and replaced with presidential primary elections, the DNC yesterday also voted to encourage (again, baby steps) states that still hold caucuses to switch to primary elections, and voted to require states that still hold caucuses to allow some form of absentee participation, given that it's forever been unfair that those who for whatever reason cannot get to a caucus have not been able to participate in the democratic process.
The dead-enders within the DNC (all or the vast majority of them Billarybots) probably view these positive reforms as being for the benefit of Bernie Sanders, and while he did push for these reforms, having been the victim of the corrupt, calcified, anti-democratic DNC himself, these reforms are good for the people and are good for democracy — and thus are good for the party.
On that note, McClatchy reported (in an article titled "Loyal Democratic Donors: We're Done with the DNC Until They Get Their Act Together") just a few days ago:
While Democratic donors have eagerly opened their wallets ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, helping Democratic candidates and groups largely outraise their Republican counterparts, one notable exception has stood out: The Democratic National Committee — the party's signature organization — has posted its worst midterm fund raising totals in more than a decade.
The DNC has so far taken in $116 million before the November midterm elections — $9 million less than it had taken in at this point in 2014 and more than $30 million less than it had taken in at this point in 2010, the last two midterm cycles.
By contrast, the Republican National Committee has nearly doubled the DNC's haul this cycle, bringing in a total of $227 million. And of the six major federal committees of both parties, the DNC has by far the most debt ($6.7 million) and the least amount in its bank account ($7.8 million).
After 2016's defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, many of the group's most consistent donors are putting their money elsewhere. A McClatchy analysis found that more than 200 donors who had given more than $1,000 to the DNC in each of the past two midterm elections have failed to pony up any cash to the DNC this time around, despite continuing to support other Democratic groups and candidates. …
Indeed, many if not most ordinary (that is, non-super-wealthy) Democratic donors now give through the wildly successful Democratic fundraising website ActBlue, where they — we — can decide ourselves to which Democratic candidates to give money and how much.
I have given almost $4,500 in a series of donations over the past several years through ActBlue (my average donation is $13) because, frankly, I don't at all trust the center-right, pro-corporate DNC with my money. (The No. 1 recipient of my donations via ActBlue has been Bernie Sanders, to whom I've given more than $1,000, and Elizabeth Warren is at No. 3, with almost $250. At No. 2 [$275] is Kevin de León, who I hope unseats DINO U.S. Sen. Dianne "Cryptkeeper" Feinstein in November.)
"The [DNC's] poor [fundraising] showing could limit the DNC's ability to provide support, such as direct financial contributions or get-out-the-vote assistance, to candidates and state parties in November. And it puts them at a disadvantage heading into the 2020 presidential cycle where the committee will play an even larger role," notes McClatchy, but, again, Democratic candidates are getting money via ActBlue, which is a much more democratic venue anyway. (ActBlue's home page right now reports that since it began in 2004, it has collected more than $2.5 billion in donations to Democratic candidates and groups.)
With ActBlue, we, the people, decide where to put our money. We can bypass the center-right, pro-corporate, anti-democratic Democratic Party bosses, which is wonderful. And that's how it should work: If avenues are blocked, then we, the people, must create our own, alternate but equally if not even more effective, routes around the obstacles.
For years and years, the DNC weasels took our support, including our money and our votes, for granted. Where else were we commoners going to go? While the DNC continued to rot in order to preserve the undue power of a relatively few weaselly insiders, we, the people, have been doing our own end runs.
Because the DNC and the party establishment as a whole fell asleep at the wheel years ago, we, the people, took over, such as via ActBlue and by supporting progressive (that is, actually Democratic) candidates whether the center-right, Repugnican-Lite party big-wigs wanted us to or not. (Bernie Sanders, of course, is the largest example of that, but there have been many others.)
It has been a long struggle, and it is not over, but we progressives are taking back the Democratic Party, bit by bit. And when — and if — the DNC can be trusted again, its reputation and thus also its fundraising will improve.
In the meantime, yes, it's time to look to the 2020 presidential election cycle.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll reported last week puts Bernie Sanders against Pussygrabber in a hypothetical presidential match-up at 44 percent to 32 percent, so anyone who says that Bernie Sanders can't beat Pussygrabber, as he could have and probably would have in November 2016, is, of course, full of shit; Bernie has a double-digit lead over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling already, just as he had a double-digit lead over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling leading up to the 2016 Democratic Party National Convention.
Joe Biden also beats Pussygrabber by 12 points in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, 43 percent to 31 percent, so 2020, it seems to me, could be a lot like 2016 if both Bernie and Biden run; it would be the progressive champion against the party establishmentarian.
However, as Biden already has run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and lost twice (in 1987 and in 2007), I don't see him as strong a candidate as some would assert. He would be the anti-Bernie vote, but I don't think that that would be enough. Also, Billary Clinton was the holdover from the Clinton-Obama years, and wouldn't Biden, as the holdover from the Clinton-Obama years, remind a lot of voters of Billary's colossal failure in 2016?
In the Politico/Morning Consult poll Elizabeth Warren comes in a No. 3, still beating Pussygrabber but by a much smaller margin, only 34 percent to 30 percent, with 36 percent undecided.
Billary Clinton was within only a few percentage points over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling averages for a very long time, all the way up to Election Day, and look how that turned out.
If we want Pussygrabber out, we need to select, as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, the one who polls the best against him; we (well, the Billarybots and other zombies) fucked up big-time in 2016 by passing up Bernie Sanders for the candidate who polled much worse against Pussygrabber than Bernie did.
I've noted many times that while I like Liz Warren, and would be fine with her as a vice-presidential candidate, I think that as a presidential candidate she'd be painted as a female Michael Dukakis, another clueless egghead from Massachussetts, and I think that while Billary Clinton did not face much actual sexism, Liz actually would.* (That said, if it's between Biden and Warren, I pick Warren, who is my No. 2 choice behind Bernie. I still cannot support Biden, not for the primaries.)
Also in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Pussygrabber beats U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Attorney General Eric Holder and others by 2 percentage points to 10 percentage points, so unless their polling improves drastically, these second- and third-tier candidates are non-starters for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination for me, and we can't allow craven identity politics to sink us in 2020 like they did in 2016.
("Bernie bro," "brogressive" and the like only backfired, as Billary wasn't a victim of sexism, but only suffered appropriately and deservedly due to her utter unlikeability due to her inherently corrupt nature and shitty character, which enough voters sure sensed if they couldn't articulate.)
Methinks that 2020 is going to be a bumpy ride, with identity politics vs. electability once again rearing its ugly head, but at least the road is made a bit smoother because the so-called super-delegates have been defanged and because quaint but corruptible caucuses apparently are on their way out.
*I agree with fivethirtyeight.com's Perry Bacon Jr.'s sentiment when he writes:
… How comfortable should we be, as a society, with discouraging members of traditionally marginalized groups from pursuing political office because other Americans might have a negative view of those potential candidates' gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or other personal characteristics (or some combination of these characteristics)? After all, a candidate can change her ideology if her platform isn't appealing to voters — but many of these traits are immutable. …
I agree that of course it's not fair to punish the victim for the voters' prejudices and biases and bigotry, but when push comes to shove, it does come down to whether or not you want to win the fucking election. In the 2020 presidential election, for a great example, which is more important: booting Pussygrabber from the Oval Office (presuming that he's still there, of course) or making a point?
And there are plenty of reasons to reject Kamala Harris and Cory Booker that have nothing to do with race, such as their history of coziness with corporations, their lack of leadership and accomplishment in the U.S. Senate, and their lower name recognition and popularity — and thus their lower polling — than the top-three front-runners Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
Of the two, I'm more fond of Harris than of Booker, but she has not been in the Senate for even two full years yet, for fuck's sake. It's way too early to talk about her being president. As I have noted before, I think I'd be OK with her as the vice-presidential candidate for 2020, but that's as far as I can go.
In 2016, aside from the copious intra-party rigging that was done in her favor, apparently the idea was to make Billary Clinton the nominee — even she didn't poll nearly as well against Pussygrabber as Bernie Sanders did — in order to make a point (namely, that the Democrats could nominate a woman [likability and popularity of said woman entirely aside]). How well did that turn out?
If we make that mistake again, we deserve whatever we get.
And I'm no hypocrite; I personally always have disliked DINO Billary Clinton but love Elizabeth Warren, but if it looks like Warren can't beat Pussygrabber, then we go with the stronger candidate who can. It won't be enough for me that Warren is a woman.
Tagged as "super-delegates", ActBlue, Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders 2020, Bernie Sanders for president, Billary Clinton, Billarybots, caucuses, corruption, Cory Booker, democracy, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party, DINO, DINOs, DNC, electability, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, identity politics, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kevin de León, Kirsten Gillibrand, Liz Warren, news, Politics, presidential caucuses, presidential primary elections, Racism, sexism, superdelegates
No, Pussygrabber's use of 'the "n"-word' won't actually guarantee the Dems a win
We already know that "President" Pussygrabber, among many other things, is racist, such as by saving his "low-IQ" and similar slams primarily if not only for black people, so how would proof of his ever having uttered "the 'n'-word" actually change a fucking thing?
I find it pathetic and juvenile that after all that "President" Pussygrabber has done and said — including having savaged Mexicans in his "presidential" campaign announcement and having bragged about having "grab[bed]" women "by the pussy," and then "won" the presidential election with almost 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, and then having issued unconstitutional executive orders, including a ban on Muslims from entering the country and the defunding of "sanctuary cities," before January 2017 was even over — millions of Americans apparently view as the one silver bullet that would or at least should finally take Pussygrabber down is that if a recording of him having uttered the word "nigger" ever emerges.
We're worried about a single word, which, if ever dare uttered (by a non-black person, that is), should be the end of one's life; it should be very much like death (I mean, at least social death if, hell, not even physical death as well). I live in a nation of fucking imbeciles. This is Dark-Ages-level bullshit, replete with magic no-no words.
Don't get me wrong; I oppose hate speech. No one in the workplace or in public should have to deal with a hateful epithet hurled his or her way. Such epithets are a level of terrorism; they are meant to frighten and to disempower their targets, which is why they should not be tolerated.
But let's get fucking real. I have a black co-worker now who not long ago enough used the word "cracker" in anger and in hatred (not against me, but I was offended to have had to hear the racist epithet in my workplace nonetheless), and I didn't bother to report it because I knew that with her constant pre-emptive bogus claims of racial victimhood meant to scare "management" from ever disciplining her meaningfully for anything, nothing would have been done had I reported it. (Indeed, I would have been branded as a "troublemaker," I am confident.)
This same co-worker, when I once asserted that gay rights are civil rights too, responded, "You can't compare race to sin." Lovely. (This same co-worker also, when she wasn't repeatedly equating homosexuality to pedophilia, repeatedly incredibly judgmentally and incorrectly referred to being gay as a "lifestyle choice" [that it's the "wrong" "choice" is understood, you see]. It's interesting to see which "nice" words "nice" people can use to express viciously hateful sentiments.)
In another job, a black co-worker used the word "faggot" (in hatred) in my presence, and that's another case where had I reported it, nothing would have been done, and when I was on a public bus once and simply asked two young black punks who were blocking the aisle to move so that I could get past them and exit the bus, one of them felt the need to call me a "queer."
A black client once hatefully and angrily called me "white boy" when I refused a request of hers that could have gotten me fired from my job.
A leader within the black community with whom I once corresponded years ago actually wrote in her response to me that being gay might be a "birth defect."
I've never called a black person a "nigger."
So this notion that blacks only ever are victims, that they are incapable of uttering hate speech or committing hate crimes themselves, demonstrably is bullshit, and their bogus claims of this only harms their credibility even further.
Let me point you to two recent examples of blacks blatantly committing hate crimes: the 30-year-old black woman arrested in Los Angeles for having savagely attacked a 91-year-old Mexican man with a piece of concrete block, reportedly telling him to "go back to [his] country," and the 18-year-old black man arrested in Manteca, California, for having savagely knocked down, kicked and spat on a 71-year-old Sikh man. Both elderly victims were taken to the hospital; the 91-year-old sustained fractures.
Guess what? These actually are worse crimes than merely uttering the word "nigger"! (Who knew?)
And, as I already have indicated, there are words that individually are innocent enough, but when strung together are just as ugly as is — or even uglier than is — "nigger." It's just that, individually, they're not taboo words. So in this juvenile nation of simpletons, you may express any hateful notion that you please, as long as you don't use certain magical no-no words, first and foremost among them "the 'n'-word," which is so taboo that we must call it "the 'n'-word."
Take Faux "News" "talent" Laura Ingraham's recent on-air rant:
In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.
I could argue that this racist, xenophobic rant is even worse than the word "nigger" because it apparently scoops up even more groups of already-long-oppressed people in its wide net of hatred.
(While I'm quoting she-Nazi Ingraham, I must note that demographic changes are not "foisted" upon anyone. For the very most part, they just naturally happen. [Well, of course, the Native Americans could argue persuasively that "massive demographic changes have been foisted" upon them...] And how, exactly, would we "vote" on demographic change? Would we vote certain groups of people off of the island? Would we kill brown-skinned babies, a la King Herod? And do we not get to vote for the federal and state lawmakers who make our laws, including immigration law? Do we not get our say that way?)
Again, to be clear, I oppose hate speech in the workplace or in public spaces. I believe that at work and in public, we have the right not to have bigoted, hateful, ignorant invective hurled at us for our real or perceived sex or gender expression, race (yes, even if we are — gasp! — white), sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, etc. Such invective is meant to disempower us, and we deserve an environment in which we are not disempowered, but are free to do as well as we can do and, to borrow a cheesy line from the U.S. Army, be all that we can be, as long as we do not harm others.
What is said in private, however, is a different matter. I'm still a staunch defender of privacy rights. (See my August 2014 piece on the infamous Donald Sterling case, titled "Privacy Rights Scrapped for One Old Racist's Scalp.") In their own homes and in other private settings (settings in which they have a reasonable expectation of privacy), people should be able to think and say as they please.
Often people need to work shit out in private, even if that includes language that they wouldn't use in public or at work. And there probably literally is not one American adult who would be OK with anything and everything that he or she ever said in private being revealed to the entire American public, so those who are fucking hypocrites on this point need to shut the fuck up and check themselves.
Perhaps the larger issue, however, is that there apparently is this widespread magical belief that if it's definitively revealed that "President" Pussygrabber ever uttered the single word "nigger" (in any setting, private or public), then it's all over for him. Everything else that he has done, including his having trashed the United States of America with a smirking Russian dictator Vladimir Putin standing right next to him, isn't going to remove him from the Oval Office, but his ever having uttered the single word "nigger" would.
Just: Wow. I live in a nation of fucking infants.
Slate.com even ran a lengthy piece titled "If He Said It: How the Country Would React, Day by Day, if a Trump N-word Tape Came to Light." The time-line piece, which apparently is partly serious and partly comedic, ends thusly (spoiler alert!): "November 2020: Trump wins re-election with the support of 0 percent of black voters and 60 percent of the white electorate."
That sounds about right. I mean, that's along the lines of what would happen if we make his ever having uttered "the 'n'-word" the one and only true absolutely unpardonable crime that Pussygrabber ever committed.
Most Americans, I surmise, already assume that of course Pussygrabber has uttered "the 'n'-word" at some place at some time, and that there may or may not be a recording of this.
If the Democrats think that simple-minded, playground-level identity politics can save them in 2020 like it didn't in 2016, then 2020 indeed will be a repeat of 2016.
P.S. I recommend Ted Rall's piece in which he compares Pussygrabber to Kaposi's sarcoma — that is, just as Kaposi's sarcoma is a symptom of the underlying, much worse disease of AIDS, Pussygrabber is a symptom of the underlying, much worse disease that grips the American "democracy."
Just as removing one Kaposi's sarcoma (or even all of them) wouldn't save the life of someone with AIDS, removing Pussygrabber from office — while a laudable goal — would not cure the underlying disease, for which all of us, to some degree, are responsible.
Tagged as "N word", democracy, Donald Sterling, Donald Trump, Hate speech, Homophobia, hypocrisy, identity politics, imbeciles, imbecility, Islamophobia, Laura Ingraham, magic words, magical thinking, Misogyny, President Pussygrabber, privacy rights, Racism, sexism, sexual assualt, simpletons, xenophobia
Identity politics loom over 2020; will the so-called Dems fuck it up again?
Boston Herald file photo
Politico reports that former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, pictured above in 2006 with Barack Obama, is Team Obama's favorite for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Never mind that Patrick works for Mittens Romney's Bain Capital; if we actual progressives have a problem with that, then we're "racist."
Friday was former President Barack Obama's 56th birthday, and we witnessed another national spasm of Obamamania. ("Barack Obama Day," a commemorative but not a legal state holiday, begins in Illinois next year.)
Thing is, academic historians and political scientists on average list Obama as only the 17th best of our 43 past presidents.
(No, "President" Pussygrabber is not included in the presidential rankings, since his "presidency," unfortunately, isn't over yet, and one president, Glover Cleveland, was president twice, and so usually is called the 22nd and the 24th president, but, of course, up to and including Obama, only 43 men have been U.S. president. [And yes, we need that streak of men to stop, but no, Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton wasn't the woman to break that streak.])
So, which 16 past presidents are ranked above Obama? They are, in this order: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon B. Johnson, James Madison, John Adams, James K. Polk and James Monroe.
(I agree with the top two, anyway, and no, I wouldn't have Reagan in there, and Jackson, Pussygrabber's idol, was a prick who caused harm to many, many people, too.)
And the five ranked below Obama, to round out the top half of all of the past presidents, are Bill Clinton, William McKinley, Cleveland, John Quincy Adams and George H.W. Bush. (George W. Bush, in case you were wondering, ranks at No. 36, which is too high, in my book. [And again, Pussygrabber isn't ranked because it's too early.])
So Obama ranks in the top half, which is better than ranking in the bottom half, but still, historians and political scientists overall give him a fairly middling ranking, at toward the bottom of the top half.
What has benefited Obama the most, methinks, is that he was sandwiched between two of our worst presidents ever, Gee Dubya and Pussygrabber.
By comparison to these two, yes, Obama, in retrospect, looks like he indeed was the second coming of Abraham Fucking Lincoln (indeed, when Obama first announced that he was running for president, he did so in Springfield, Illinois, and apparently tried to look Lincolnesque).
But historians and political scientists, taking a longer view and a more dispassionate view than most of us commoners do, rightfully don't rank Obama up there with Lincoln, and I surmise that as the years pass, Obama's ranking won't improve, but probably will drop, although probably not dramatically; I suspect that he's at No. 17 in large part because his presidency is still so fresh and because even academics, being human beings, can't help but to some degree compare him to Gee Dubya and to Pussygrabber.
I don't allege that Obama was a bad president, just that he wasn't a great one. He was, as I have noted before, a caretaker in chief more than he was anything else. With Obama it was refreshing to have a president actually win the popular vote — twice — and while Obama committed no huge blunder like Gee Dubya started the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War (after he apparently had just allowed 9/11 to happen), just allowed Hurricane Katrina to kill almost 2,000 Americans, and tanked the U.S. economy, Obama had had a shitload of political capital at his disposal when he first took office in 2009, and he squandered it on "Obamacare," which requires Americans to buy for-profit "health-care" insurance, which has been called "progressive."
Another FDR Barack Obama was not. Let's get that historical fact straight.
But the widespread but incorrect belief that Obama was a great president apparently has given rise to the widespread — if (mostly) publicly unspoken — belief that the next Democratic president must be black, too.
(And, I further surmise, Gee Dubya and Pussygrabber have given the widespread impression among many of those who call themselves Democrats that all white presidents are bad, and therefore, we never should have another one. This is incorrect thinking that is blinded by recent history [as well as by anti-white sentiment], and it lacks historical perspective.)
Indeed, Politico depressingly reports that Team Obama, including Big Bad Obama himself, is pushing for former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to run for president in 2020 — never fucking mind that Patrick works for Mittens Romney's Bain Capital.
(Wikipedia notes of Bain Capital: "Bain Capital is a global alternative investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. It specializes in private equity, venture capital and credit products." Orwellian terms like "alternative investment" and "credit products" should send shivers up and down your spine, like they do mine.)
If Politico's report is true, it's proof that the Democratic Party establishment has learned nothing — no thing: It's A-OK to front a total corporate whore as the next Democratic Party presidential candidate, as long as this corporate whore isn't a white man, because the Democratic Party establishment still wants to play identity politics as cover for the fact that it still wants to lick corporate and plutocratic ass while still calling itself "populist."
Here is my deal: I won't support another corporate whore. I refused to support corporate whore Billary Clinton. I refused to vote for Obama a second time after it was clear from his first term that, whether we fairly can call him a corporate whore or not (we probably can), he had had no intention of enacting a boldly progressive agenda. (Yes, I'm old-fashioned; I believe in actually holding an elected official to his or her fucking campaign promises.)
I don't give a flying fuck that, very predictably, the selfish, narrow-minded, black-supremacist Only Black Lives Matter crowd will call those of us who won't support a black corporate whore like Cory Booker or Deval Patrick "racist."
I don't give a flying fuck about that any more than I did about the sellout Billarybots calling us men who have supported Bernie Sanders because he was the only real Democrat in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination "sexist" and "misogynist."
Such lame identity-politics terrorism doesn't work on me; instead, it makes me support my chosen actually progressive candidate only even more so; it only strengthens my resolve to work against the sellouts and craven identity politicians who call themselves "Democrats."
That and, unlike the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Pussygrabber supporters, I know how to vote in my own best fucking interests, and supporting just another corporate whore who calls himself or herself a "Democrat" while furiously sucking corporate cock is not in my own best fucking interests.
Of the top three potential black Democratic/"Democratic" presidential candidates widely spoken about thus far for 2020, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of my state of California is the one I can support the most, but she just became a U.S. senator in January, for fuck's sake.
I'm not at all yet sold on Harris being presidential material. It was a big mistake to put Obama in the White House after he had been in the U.S. Senate for only four years, not even a full Senate term — Obama pretty much ran only on his gauzy and ubiquitous (and, ultimately, bullshit) campaign promises of "hope" and "change" — and it would be a mistake to do the same with Harris.
For 2020 I'm still supporting either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, should one of the two of them run. Why? No, not because they are white and I am white, but because they are the least beholden to corporate interests and are the most progressive.
If both of them were to run, it would be a shitty choice to have to make since I respect and admire both of them, but, as I have noted, Bernie's nationwide approval ratings long have been significantly higher than have Warren's, and I still surmise that while Billary did not face actual sexism and misogyny — Americans just fucking hate her because she's a despicable "human being," regardless of her sex (indeed, in general she still polls no better than does Pussygrabber) — Warren would face actual sexism and misogyny, I surmise.
No, I don't want to give in to the sexists and misogynists, but I also want to deny Pussygrabber a second term, and overall, Bernie Sanders to me appears to be better able to do that than does Warren, who would, I think, be depicted (probably successfully) as another Michael Dukakis (and thus probably would go the way of Dukakis).
Bernie Sanders already went before the American electorate and he won 46 percent of the pledged (democratically earned) delegates to Billary's 54 percent, and he won 22 states — a remarkable achievement by a largely previously unknown underdog against Billary "Crown Me Already" Clinton, who was in her second run for the White House.
Although the craven, sellout members of the Democratic Party establishment still act like he doesn't even exist and didn't come in at a fairly close second in 2016 despite the Billarybots of the Democratic National Committee brazenly having cheated to help Billary, Bernie Sanders remains the most popular politician in the United States of America.
And that's because although the "Democratic" sellouts say that Bernie isn't even a Democrat, ironically, he is so popular because he is a real Democrat — one of only a few real Democrats in D.C.
Really, I need say no more.
P.S. You know that I can't shut up, though.
One (probably) final thought: Yes, undoubtedly, Obama had the style of being U.S. president down pat, but he woefully lacked substance. His was a rather hollow presidency. And he wasn't playing the U.S. president on TV; he was the actual president, and we sorely needed more than style from him, especially after what Gee Dubya ("w" for "wrecking ball") had done to the nation.
True, Pussygrabber woefully lacks both style and substance, but is a chaotic, incoherent colossal mess, and even Gee Dubya, compared to Pussygrabber, had the style thing down a lot better.
But for me, substance is going to win out over style every time, and I'd love a president with some fucking substance for once.
That wouldn't be a President Patrick, a President Booker or, probably, a President Harris, who as California's attorney general was competent enough but who safely went along the established Democratic Party lines and never did anything especially courageous that I can think of.
P.P.S. I'm not the only one who does not want to see a Deval Patrick candidacy. Slate.com's Ben Mathis-Lilley writes:
The world of finance! There's nothing inherently wrong with it. People need banks so they can buy houses and cars, and need to invest their money for retirement and whatnot. Some of my closest friends work in finance, and I enjoy being invited to their beautiful country homes, where I drink their pink lemonade and lounge on their fine divans.
And yet … do I think that any of these friends of mine should run for president in 2020 on the ticket of America's liberal party during an era of unprecedented wealth inequality and consolidated corporate power?
No! And neither should Deval Patrick, the ex–Massachusetts governor who now works for Bain Capital and is for some reason the subject of a Tuesday Politico story with this headline: "Obama's Inner Circle Is Urging Deval Patrick to Run."
You may remember Bain Capital as the private-equity company co-founded by Mitt Romney — as in, the Mitt Romney who Barack Obama (a Democrat) effectively attacked for enriching himself through mass layoffs during a 2012 election that many "Obama insiders" should have at least a passing familiarity with.
As it happens, many Obama voters — including those in, to name three states at random, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — would go on to vote four years later not for the Democratic candidate whose insider connections and high-priced speeches to Goldman Sachs became a major campaign issue, but for the Republican candidate who made repeated and energetic (albeit totally dishonest) promises to stick it to the rich and powerful.
Apparently Obama insiders do not have a passing familiarity with that election, but it was bad. It was a problem.
This is not merely a matter of "optics" or electoral strategy, though. It's also a matter of principle. Individuals whose main day-in, day-out concern is the well-being of financial service executives and corporate shareholders naturally tend to advocate policy goals friendly to the interests of financial services executives and corporate shareholders.
Those interests sometimes, but do not always, overlap with the interests of potential Democratic voters, as this comparison of corporate profits to inflation-adjusted household income during the 21st century indicates:
Federal Reserve via Jordan Weissmann
Corporate profits: way up! Income for normal people: eh.
One group that believes that Democrats shouldn't overtly represent the interests of the wealthy, in fact, is the current Democratic Party. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New Yorker who counts Wall Street executives among his most prominent constituents (and top donors), is on board with a 2018 Democratic platform that frames the party's agenda as a matter of increasing wages while diminishing corporate power.
Is a finance executive who conducted his Politico interview at "Bain headquarters in Boston" really the ideal messenger for this sales pitch?
The Politico article acknowledges this practical reality, sort of, writing that "Bernie Sanderized Democrats … are suspicious of finance types to begin with, and were taught by Obama's 2012 brutal campaign attacks on Mitt Romney to think of Bain as a curse word." (Again, though, the group that swung the 2016 election was not "Bernie-addled coastal leftist elites," it was former Obama voters in the Midwest.)
The piece then suggests that Democratic voters in 2020 might rally around the idea of "taking on Trump's management shortcomings" and "calling for a different way of merging government and business experience."
And, well, I suppose anything can happen in three years, but if the 2020 Democratic primary turns on an angry base's passionate demand for "a different way of merging government and business experience," I will eat a hard copy of the Mitt Romney "47 percent" video. …
Indeed, Billary's ties to the weasels of Wall Street hurt her more than the Billarybots ever will admit. I just ordered OR Books' copy of this* —
— but never would buy Billary's own forthcoming predictably bullshit account of how she lost the 2016 election, whose No. 54 placement on Amazon.com's top-100 book list right now gives you an idea as to how much Americans still care about her.
And hey, how great it is to be a baby boomer! You can blow a presidential election spectacularly and still get another lucrative book deal!
*OR Books describes How I Lost By Hillary Clinton like this:
Judging by the stance of the leadership of the Democratic Party and much of the media, Hillary Clinton's devastating loss in the presidential election of November 2016 was all the fault of pernicious Russian leaks, unwarranted FBI investigations and a skewed electoral college.
Rarely blamed was the party's decision to run a deeply unpopular candidate on an uninspiring platform.
At a time of widespread dissatisfaction with business-as-usual politics, the Democrats chose to field a quintessential insider. Her campaign dwelt little on policies, focusing overwhelmingly on the personality of her opponent.
That this strategy was a failure is an understatement. Losing an election to someone with as little competence or support from his own party as Donald Trump marked an extraordinary fiasco.
The refusal of the Democratic leadership to identify the real reasons for their defeat is not just a problem of history. If Democrats persevere with a politics that prioritizes well-off professionals rather than ordinary Americans, they will leave the field open to right-wing populism for many years to come. [Emphasis mine.]
Drawing on the WikiLeaks releases of Clinton's talks at Goldman Sachs and the e-mails of her campaign chief John Podesta, as well as key passages from her public speeches, How I Lost By Hillary Clinton also includes extensive commentary by award-winning journalist Joe Lauria, and a foreword by Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
It provides, in the words of the Democratic candidate and her close associates, a riveting, unsparing picture of the disastrous campaign that delivered America to President Trump, and a stark warning of a mistake that must not be repeated.
Fully expect the Democratic Party establishment to try to repeat that mistake, however. It's up to us to stop them.
Tagged as "Barack Obama Day", "President" Trump, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Bain Capital, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders 2020, Bill Clinton, Billary Clinton, corporate whore, corporate whoredom, corporate whores, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, George Washington, Grover Cleveland, Hillary Clinton, identity politicians, identity politics, Illinois, Kamala Harris, Massachusetts, Misogyny, Mitt Romney, Obama, Obamamania, President Pussygrabber, presidential rankings, presidents ranked, progressives, progressivism, race baiting, race hustling, sexism, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson
2020 is going to look a lot like 2016
Progressives U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared together in Boston last week, as pictured above. Far from having gone away quietly, Sanders is fighting for such progressive goals as single-payer health care and free tuition at public colleges and universities. Unfortunately, there's no reason to think that the 2020 presidential election won't devolve into another fight between real Democrats (that is, actual progressives) and corporate, sellout Democrats who think that craven identity politics is a political cover for the establishmentarian, pro-corporate, anti-populist, ultimately treasonous Democratic Party to continue to ignore income inequality and to continue to support the socioeconomic status quo.
Bernie will introduce legislation for single-payer health care, totally bypassing the bogus argument of corporate-friendly Obamacare vs. corporate-friendly Trumpcare (and necessarily so), and he and Warren have introduced legislation for free in-state community college and public four-year college tuition.
Oh, that shit can't pass, I hear even so-called Democrats mutter.
Um, leadership is about leading — not following. Leadership is about convincing people to go in a new, better direction. Leadership isn't about watching and waiting for your inept political opponents to hang themselves, and then to continue to stick with the status quo. Nor is leadership about jumping on board something that is progressive only after it's clearly politically safe to do so, since the majority of the electorate already has gone in that direction (Billary Clinton, for instance, didn't jump on board the same-sex-marriage bandwagon until after it was safe to do so, after the majority of Americans had already gotten there first [to be fair, ditto for Barack Obama]).
Actual leadership is selfless, it's hard, and it can be risky — which is why the worthless, sellout, do-nothing establishment "Democrats" don't lead, but follow.
Unfortunately, Bernie 2020 probably would run into what Bernie 2016 ran into: anti-white racism.*
Yup. I said it.
Bernie was rejected by many, many so-called Democrats primarily if not solely because of his demographics — they wrote him off as just another old white man. He was, yes, racially profiled.
How else to explain that Billary Clinton won the support of 76 percent of black Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers, while Bernie won the support of only 23 percent of them?
Bernie was less well known than Billary, that's why, you might argue, but then there is this contrasting (and inconvenient) fact: among white Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers, it was much more evenly split — 48.9 percent supported Billary, while 49.1 percent supported Bernie, a difference of only 0.2 percent.
Clearly, there was something racial going on.
And it's interesting that black Americans supported Billary Clinton to the degree that they did; the Clintons brought us "welfare reform," a crime bill that filled our prisons disproportionately with non-whites, the job-killing NAFTA, etc.
Maybe blacks still struggle at least in part because they tend to vote against their own best interests. Just sayin'. (And I'm not picking on blacks — many, many Americans routinely vote against their own best interests, such as the poor and working-class white people who voted for Pussygrabber for president.)
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, wrote this of Billary Clinton in February 2016:
Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary — or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded.
Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with "courting the black vote," a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously.
Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.
Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we — black people — are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.
And it seems we're eager to get played. Again.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show.
It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand," Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It's true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it's a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries.
Now Hillary is running again. This time she's facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison state — many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life.
Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.
What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?
No. Quite the opposite. …
Read Alexander's article, and fuck, just Google "What did the Clintons do for black Americans?" (While you're at it, Google "What did Obama do for black Americans?")
Clearly, black Americans had no logical reason to vote for Billary over Bernie, certainly not at the rate of 76 percent to 23 percent.
Still, myths die hard. Blacks understood that they were "supposed" to vote for Billary, and so they did.
And the race-based Bernie bashing continues. There were those black-supremacist idiots who called a crowd gathered for Bernie Sanders "white supremacist liberals" while they shut down Bernie's planned speech in Seattle in August 2015. They had no coherent anti-Bernie argument; indeed, I'm sure that they were mostly if not wholly unaware of his record (including the NAACP's having given him a score of 100 percent on their agenda [and former NAACP head Ben Jealous went on to endorse Bernie]). Bernie's record didn't matter to these black supremacists, you see, because Bernie's sin was that of having been born while white.
Similarly, in a recent piece for Salon.com, Chauncey DeVega takes two sentences from recent remarks by Bernie (at the rally in Boston pictured above) and then runs with it.
Bernie said, as DeVega reported: "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don't agree, because I've been there." ("Been there" as in he has met and spoken with these people, I presume he meant.)
Bernie immediately followed that up with, "Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with: It wasn't that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election."
That apparently wasn't convenient to DeVega's argument, though, so he left it out of his article, which he had begun with:
In the United States, white liberals and progressives have historically shown a serious inability to grapple with the realities of the color line and the enduring power of white supremacy. Many of them are either unable or unwilling to understand that fighting against class inequality does not necessarily remedy the specific harms done to African-Americans and other people of color by white racism.
That's just a more academic, "nicer" way of calling Bernie Sanders and his supporters "white supremacist liberals," methinks.
Bernie also had said: "We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country; we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people, not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and the powerful."
DeVega didn't quote that, either. Better to simply paint Bernie as a denier of racism, because it appears that the same black Americans who stupidly supported corporate whore Billary Clinton primarily out of black identity than even for their own best fucking interests are going to try to shove corporate whore U.S. Sen. Cory Booker down our throats as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate.
Booker is black, you see, and for years he cravenly has promoted himself as the next Barack Obama, and it's supposed to be enough that he's black.
Booker, whose most recent big act was to vote in the U.S. Senate to deny Americans access to cheaper pharmaceuticals because he takes a lot of money from Big Pharma — I don't call someone a "corporate whore" for nothing — very much appears to me to be the next one to take the mantle of being Best for Blacks (this mantle was passed from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Billary Clinton and, I surmise, now goes to Booker; the mantle keeps getting passed, even though no one who wears it actually does anything significant for black Americans).
If I'm "racist" for being a while male who has called Cory Booker a corporate whore, know that the managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, a Bruce A. Dixon, earlier this year called Booker a "corporate hooker" and a "corporate whore." He wrote (the links are his):
After losing the White House to the most unpopular president in history, Democrats have lots to say, but even more to avoid saying, lest they expose themselves as every bit as much corporate tools as their Republican foes.
New Jersey [U.S.] Senator Cory Booker is their ideal spokesperson, a cynical, photogenic and utterly dependable corporate whore who can be counted on to keep the anti-Trump rabble safely inside the Democrats' big stinky tent. …
The Democrats leading the charge against Trump must meet exacting qualifications. They have to be loyal servants of the one percenters, of banksters, hedge funds, charter-school sugar daddies and privatizers of all kinds. They must be dependable supporters of apartheid Israel, of military contractors, drone warfare and U.S. military interventions of all kinds around the world.
To boost their party's fortunes in this new era, Democratic Party spokespeople need to be gifted hypocrites willing to pose as advocates of immigrants and champions of civil liberties going forward, even though they unflinchingly supported the biggest deportation and mass-surveillance regimes in history implemented by the Democrat who just left the White House.
They must focus narrowly on the handful of issues on which corporate Dems actually disagree with Republicans, like abortion rights [and, I'll add, LGBT rights — and other identity politics], and not stray to areas which might indict their own party along with Republicans.
And they must absolve their party of responsibility for running an incompetent campaign by blaming the Russians. Hillary is history, but her big stinking tent is still there, and Democrats are crying for a "united front" against Trump, led by spokespeople who can stick to the corporate script.
Cory Booker is a great fit. As Glen Ford, who has followed his career in Black Agenda Report and Black Commentator since 2002, notes, charter-school sugar daddies from the Olin, Bradley and Walton Family Foundations and the Manhattan Institute funded his early career. Cory's wealthy friends bankrolled and promoted a slick Hollywood documentary, "Street Fight," to ensure his 2006 election to Newark's City Hall. …
In 2010 on the Oprah show, Booker announced a $100 million "gift" from Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg to Newark's public schools, whose budget was still controlled by statehouse Republicans, to implement the latest "run-the-school-like-a-business" nostrums of Cory's old friends. Three years later, when Booker left Newark for the U.S. Senate, there was little to show for the money.
The one percenters take good care of their guy Cory, giving him three times the cash raised for all his opponents together in the 2013 Democratic primary, and he takes good care of them.
When the anti-Romney rhetoric in 2012 strayed to touch on how the hedge fund Republican actually made those millions, it was Obama surrogate Cory Booker who stepped up on "Meet The Press" to defend the predatory economics of hedge funds, calling outrage against disaster capitalism "useless rhetoric."
After all, Goldman Sachs was and still is one of Booker's major contributors. Cory hit the Senate just in time to vote for a major school voucher bill in 2014. …
Cory's a whore, but a loyal one. If he did for passing motorists what he does for charter-school sugar daddies, hedge funds, Israeli apartheid and Big Pharma, he could be arrested for prostitution.
But Cory's in the big time, and he's a leading Democratic spokeshead against Trump. If you're a Democrat, he's one of your leaders.
He's Cory Booker, corporate hooker.
The battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party continues. Ain't nothin' changed but the date.
To be clear, I wholly agree with Chauncey DeVega's assertion that "fighting against class inequality does not necessarily remedy the specific harms done to African-Americans and other people of color by white racism." It is a mistake to ignore racism (and other forms of discrimination) and to focus only on class and income inequality.
However, nor should identity politics supplant the battle against income inequality, and that's what we saw happen with Billary Clinton's awful presidential campaign, and that's what has happened with the establishmentarian Democratic Party, because the establishmentarian Democratic Party's corporate sugar daddies are OK with identity politics, since for the most part identity politics doesn't threaten their obscene profiteering (indeed, they even have found that in many instances, they can profit from identity politics).
Significantly addressing income inequality, however, does threaten the establishmentarian Democratic Party's corporate sugar daddies' profiteering, and that's why the establishmentarian Democratic Party has refused to significantly address income inequality for decades.
And further to be clear, a huge chunk of those who voted for Pussygrabber indeed were motivated, at least unconsciously if not always consciously, by racism. I believe that and so I wouldn't have gone as far as Bernie Sanders did in his remarks (specifically I refer to his remark that "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don't agree, because I've been there").
Or I at least would have said it differently; I surmise that Bernie's meaning, which he did not express well, was that not all of the people who voted for Pussygrabber are racists and sexists and homophobes and otherwise deplorables.
I think that that's most likely what Bernie meant and I think that that's probably the truth; I think that there are some incredibly stupid white people who voted for Pussygrabber against their own best interests, incredibly stupidly truly believing that (billionaire!) Pussygrabber magically was going to "make America great again," that he'd bring all of the jobs back, and with those jobs, the 1950s-era national prosperity. For those people, it seems to me, identity politics wasn't their No. 1 concern; the economy and their own dismal personal experience of it was.
What Bernie is trying to do, I surmise, is get back some of those white voters in the Rust-Belt states who voted for Pussygrabber instead of for Billary and who thus threw the Electoral College to Pussygrabber. No, I don't think that Bernie wants the racists and the sexists and the homophobes, but that he wants those whose No. 1 concern is the economy. But they probably won't vote for a Democrat as long as the Democratic Party keeps calling them "deplorables," as deplorable as many (if not even most) of them actually are.
White Americans still make up more than 60 percent of the nation's population (per the U.S. Census Bureau), and calling them deplorable probably isn't a great strategy to win a presidential election. Just sayin'. It's the numbers, folks; whites remain the racial majority in the United States of America.
And as deplorable as many if not even most Pussygrabber voters are, I still put the onus for Pussygrabber's "win" of the White House on Billary Clinton. She took the Rust-Belt states for granted because they'd gone to the Democratic presidential candidates since the 1980s, and so she'd thought that she already had them sewn up. She and her team of Billarybots in their bubble fucked up big time, Russia or no Russia.
I agree wholeheartedly with Bernie's assertion that "It wasn't that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election."
If the Democratic Party fronts yet another corporate whore in 2020 — like Cory Booker — then the result will be the same. (Don't even make me get into the cliche of the definition of "insanity.")
The fight for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination will be much like the 2016 fight, I think, except that while the 2016 racial battle (Bernie was the "white" candidate and Billary the "black" candidate) for the most part wasn't very openly, frequently nationally discussed, the racial battle will be quite openly and frequently nationally discussed in 2020 (well, starting no later than in 2019).
It really comes down to this: Which candidate is the most progressive? Which candidate is most likely to carry out policies that would benefit the highest number of Americans possible?
Would that candidate be yet another corporate whore, who has a long record of doing only what's best for his or her corporate sponsors (and thus his or her corporate overlords)? Would that candidate be a corporate whore who only cravenly can run only on identity politics, since his or her actual record only shows what a corporate whore he or she actually is?
Or would the candidate most likely to carry out policies that would benefit the highest number of Americans possible (which is my non-negotiable litmus test) be an actual progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who has a long actual record of opposing corporate malfeasance and standing up for the average American?
For those of us who oppose the illegitimate Pussygrabber regime, that's our choice in 2020, as it was in 2016.
I'm sure that if the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment fronts corporate hooker Cory Booker, it and the Bookerbots (Hookerbots?) will call those of us actual Democrats (that is, we true progressives) who oppose Booker "racist," just as the Billarybots called those of us who rejected her for the very same reasons "sexist" and "misogynist."
Calling those of us who rejected corporate whore Billary Clinton (because she is a corporate whore) "Bernie bros" didn't win her the White House, did it?
Craven identity politics (including slandering one's actually progressive political opponents as "racist" or "sexist" or whatever) won't put Cory Booker or any other corporate whore who uses the label of "Democrat" into the White House in 2020, either.
We progressives can — and we will — keep on playing this game.
I and millions of other progressives simply won't budge. We won't rest until the Democratic Party is progressive again (or until it has been replaced by another actually progressive party).
Call us "sexist," "racist," "crazy," "Communist," "radical," "extreme," "hippie," whatever slanderous bullshit you want to call us to lamely try to get us to acquiesce to your center-right, sellout, self-serving, pro-corporate, treasonous bullshit. Our days of supporting the sellout Democratic Party, which is just a hollow husk of what it once was, are long gone.
P.S. To be clear, I don't want to understate the importance of the Democratic Party (or a new, truly progressive party) standing up for the civil rights of racial and other minorities. It's that we must walk and chew gum at the same time. Engaging in identity politics (in the good, non-toxic way) or battling income inequality is a false choice. We must do both.
And of course Bernie Sanders can't know what it's like to be black. (Or Latino. Or a woman. Or gay. Or…) He can know only what it's like to be Bernie Sanders. And the state that he has represented in Congress since the early 1990s, Vermont, is overwhelmingly white, which is what it is.
I believe that Bernie's heart is in the right place, and that as president he'd do the right thing for the highest number of people possible, and that with continued dialogue, he would get even better in terms of understanding and representing minority groups' concerns.
Sadly and pathetically, though, I sense that blacks' biggest problem with Bernie hasn't actually been that he has been deficient on black issues, but that he isn't black. Under these black supremacists' "logic," a U.S. president (at least a Democratic U.S. president) from here on out must always be black, then, even though blacks are only 13 percent of Americans. (Gee, that's fair! And so democratic!)
I'm gay, but I'm not going to demand that a presidential candidate be gay, even though we have yet to have our first out non-heterosexual president.
I'm going to demand only that a presidential candidate be progressive, and I'm always going to support the most progressive (yet still viable) presidential candidate, regardless of that candidate's sex, race, sexual orientation or age (as long as he or she can still do the job, I'm not worried about a candidate's age). Unlike it is for too many so-called Democrats, for me it's not all about me and my own identity group. It's about what's best for the highest number of people.
The Democratic Party shouldn't be the vehicle through which any minority group tries to gain political control of the majority. I will put that fact out there, because that's what identity politics, in its most toxic forms, actually aims for: the tyranny of the minority over the majority.
That's not progressive and that's not democratic.
Finally, for the record, I'm fine with Elizabeth Warren as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee if Bernie doesn't run, but I'm concerned that her nationwide favorability ratings aren't nearly as high as Bernie's.
That disparity is due, I'm sure, because he already has conducted a presidential campaign, and thus is better known to the national electorate, and I surmise that Warren has been a victim of actual misogyny (recall that Yertle McConnell infamously said of Warren, "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted") more than Billary Clinton ever has been. (People just don't like Billary, regardless of her sex. It's her personality, her character and her record, not her XX chromosomes. [Nor is it Russia.])
What I hope happens is that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren keep working together as a dynamic duo. A Sanders-Warren ticket for 2020 would be incredible.
*To be fair, plenty of faux feminists also discriminated against Bernie because he is a man, and supported Billary for no other apparent reason than that she is a woman.
To support one person over another primarily because of his or her sex is to be sexist.
Tagged as Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders for President 2020, Big Pharma, Bill Clinton, black Americans, charter schools, Chauncey De Vega, Chauncey DeVega, civil rights, corporate hooker, corporate whore, corporate whores, Cory Booker, Democratic Party, deplorables, DINO, DINOs, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warrren, free college tuition, Gay rights, Hillary Clinton, homophobes, Homophobia, identity politics, income inequality, mass incarceration, Michelle Alexander, misogynists, Misogyny, NAFTA, news, Politics, progressives, progressivism, race, race relations, Racism, Racists, Republican Party, Russia, sexism, sexists, single-payer health care, the Clintons, welfare "reform", white Americans, white people, whites


No city break to Barcelona is complete without a visit to Parc Güell – the architectural gardens designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. Bursting with colourful mosaics and offering wonderful views of the city, Parc Güell is also home to the fascinating Gaudi House Museum.
This short break is based on the 3* Holiday Inn Express, however, to see the full selection of hotels CLICK HERE and create your own perfect Catalonia break.
Prices based on 2 people sharing a double or twin room, based on 05/06/19, and correct as of 04/04/19. Availability until October 2019. Prices may vary, depending on your choice of hotel and departure dates, and are subject to availability.


text:
// Copyright 2021 Google LLC
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.

package com.google.fleetengine.auth.token;

import com.google.common.base.Strings;
import com.google.common.collect.ImmutableMap;

/** Custom authorization claims for trip endpoints. */
public class TripClaims implements FleetEngineTokenClaims {
  private static final String WILDCARD = "*";
  static final String CLAIM_TRIP_ID = "tripid";
  private final boolean isWildcard;

  private final ImmutableMap<String, String> map;

  /**
   * Creates a trip claim that works with any trip.
   *
   * @return custom auth claim
   */
  public static TripClaims create() {
    return new TripClaims(WILDCARD);
  }

  /**
   * Creates a trip claim with an id.
   *
   * @param tripId id of the trip id on the token scope
   * @return custom auth claim
   * @throws IllegalArgumentException when tripId is null or empty
   */
  public static TripClaims create(String tripId) {
    if (Strings.isNullOrEmpty(tripId)) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("tripId must have a value");
    }
    return new TripClaims(tripId);
  }

  /** Indicates whether the claim restricts access to just one trip. */
  @Override
  public boolean isWildcard() {
    return isWildcard;
  }

  private TripClaims(String tripId) {
    map = ImmutableMap.of(CLAIM_TRIP_ID, tripId);
    isWildcard = WILDCARD.equals(tripId);
  }

  /** {@inheritDoc} */
  @Override
  public ImmutableMap<String, String> toMap() {
    return map;
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub