Butterandeggs for everyone!!
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Try “Pete Spookigieg”.
I’m a fan of the mouthfeel, but I could do with more testers.
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I second that.
“It’s my opinion” was meant to emphasize that I hadn’t made an argument - hadn’t done anything to convince anyone else I was right. But I probably should have said, “It’s my opinion (and I’m right) that…”
I’m a bit squeamish about making plays on Buttigieg’s last name. Given that they are a gay man and have “Butt” in their name, I worry that any play on it might read as homophobic to people who want to read it as homophobic because they are homophobic.
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And I think the way state delegates are being portioned out this year is a response to criticism from Sanders campaign. As was the way the caucus was conducted this year and the decision to publish both vote counts and delegate equivalents.
Part of the focus on Buttigieg as “winner” has been down to the fact that traditionally they didn’t put all that info out there and delegate counts were how a winner was traditionally identified. Sanders made a stink about that last time. So it makes sense that he’s focusing on votes.
But technically speaking no one has really “won” yet. There’s basically another round of caucusing at the state convention. I’m not sure how they’re handling it this year, but in any given caucus there are delegates who are uncommitted. People from non-viable candidates who refused to back another candidate. So even if it isn’t a free for all there’s space for Sanders to take a full technical win or more National delegates.
Sanders campaign was notably bad at that stuff in 2016 and a lot of their calls for rule changes came out of blaming those fuck ups on the party.
That’s in no way true. Whether a state holds a caucus or a primary is set by state law. And while criticism of caucuses and calls to do away with them are a long standing feature of the left. There hasn’t been a serious push to do away with them, and the Democratic party could not do it unilaterally.
With or without Sanders’ momentary fondness for them, caucuses were going to happen this year. caucuses mostly hang on in Republican controlled states, and the Republican party generally prefers caucuses for various reasons (turn out suppression, party control, good for extremists). And the caucus states mostly want to hang onto them because they exaggerate their influence. Iowa holds a caucus exclusively so they can be the first contest in the nation.
So while Sanders might share some small culpability for how Iowa went down, and his demands might have contributed to where he’s sitting right now. You can’t blame him for caucuses in the first place, and the vast bulk of the fuck up is on the Iowa Democratic Party’s execution fail. Those particular details are really just evidence that noone sneakily changed things to sand bag Bernie like we keep hearing.
We might have ended up with the same result had they executed it properly but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near the spat over who actually won what.
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Which is why I generally don’t, and why the one that I do occasionally use is focussed on midwestern whiteness/blandness (ie: butter) rather than anything relating to sexuality.
But, yeah, nickname mockery is not a great form of politics, especially when there are issues of substance to attack.
Such as, for example, Pete’s enthusiasm for imperialist murder and unchecked power.
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A benevolent dictator is still a dictator.
Inequality on this scale is inherently undemocratic by its very nature.
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It’s only fairly recently that he started advising people that it was pronounced ‘boot-edge-edge’. Before that, he was edgy enough to be comfortable telling them that it was like “booty judge.” If it were my name, I wouldn’t go for anything that risqué.
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According to the polls, pretty much any Dem candidate is more electable than Trump. But lest you forget, in the Electoral College it’s not one-man-one-vote, but one-acre-one-vote, and there are more red than blue acres, and what’s more, the red acres are 81% favorable to Trump.
If Sanders is not nominated and the Bernie Bros decide to sulk as they did in the last elections (where Trump got fewer votes in battleground states than Romney did), we are in for another 4 years of absolute monarchy, the Supreme Court will get a 6-3 conservative majority for the next generation or two, and Benjamin Franklin’s prescient description of our constitution, “A Republic, if you can keep it” will come to pass.
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Funny how you didn’t mention the opposite, which seems just as or more likely.
And, are these dreaded “Bernie bros” really all that large a percentage of the voting population?
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Nope, according to the polls, Sanders’ followers are the only ones who decline to vote for the Democratic candidate whoever he or she may be.
As for the impact of abstention in battleground states (stoked by Trump’s brilliant use of social media micro targeting to discourage Democratic voters from turning out, with the eager assistance of Facebook data scientists), given how thin the margins of victory were, yes, it absolutely made a difference.
That can’t be parsed out so cleanly as the fault of pouting Bernie bros. The fact that Clinton was a corporate-funded warhawk (i.e., more Republican than Democrat) had a lot to do with people who would have voted for Bernie not voting for her.
“Shut up and eat this plate of shit instead of that bigger plate of shit!” keeps a lot of people from voting.
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As a North Carolinian, I can’t forget. I live in the fourth largest city in the state, and we go 77% blue here. But the Electoral College turns our votes 100% red. It’s insane.
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Elections have consequences, and Clinton’s arrogance and incompetent campaigning do not absolve Wisconsin, Michigan or Florida Democrats who abstained of their responsibility in getting Trump elected. Gorsuch & Kavanaugh will be with us for the next two or three decades at the very least. Religious conservatives weren’t enthused about serial womaniser Trump, but they had the discipline to hold their nose to achieve their goals. As long as progressives make the perfect the enemy of the good, they will achieve the exact opposite of what they seek.
I mail-voted in the California primaries for Warren, and if it were ranked-choice I’d probably go for Buttigieg as my second choice (because I think Sanders does a lot of hand-waving but has no clue how to effect his agenda with the powers he would actually have, specially in light of a hostile Congress), but in November I’ll vote for whoever the nominee is, even if it is Sanders, or Bloomberg if it comes to that.
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That is not how the Electoral College works
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Sure, the statement has a bit of hyperbole.
That said, it’s not far off, when you consider how disproportional the representation of ‘flyover states’ such as Montana and Wyoming is - and how deceptive it is to present voting results on a map. (The key exception I can think of is Vermont, with its tiny population. Other small states, such as the New England states and Delaware, are relatively densely populated.)
It would be better said that the Connecticut Compromise, the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Missouri Compromise all were made to preserve the disproportional voice that angry white men have in the government. But said angry white men mostly inhabit sparsely populated regions.
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