I will also note, as an indicator of how excited I am for Bernie vs. Obama.
I donated to Obama’s campaign in 2008 exactly once. I got a bumper sticker for it. I also bought a “Thereminists for Obama” pin from somebody who donated a portion of the proceeds. The total was probably somewhere around $30. That includes both primary and general election.
I have made 26 separate donations to Bernie’s campaign since last July, totalling over $500; I’ve also bought a couple of T-shirts and a magnet from his store and a Bernie doll from a Kickstarter campaign.
Butthurt ain’t bigotry. “Backwards” “Stuck in time” taken together or separately are near synonymous with the Trump campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” esp. with his emphasis on race. He’d like marks to believe he can return America to a previous era by moving backwards toward that. A goal complicated only by the fact that the rosy past targeted never existed.
Well, in fairness, it was only about twelve years of Hitler in exchange for it being impossible for Germans to elect another Hitler. Bonus (and I admit I shamelessly stole this from another Happy Mutant): Hitler did actually kill Hitler.
In all seriousness though, I’m sympathetic to accelerationism as an idea, and I’m not sure that it’s the worst way to go. I’m increasingly of the mind that elections don’t guarantee democracy or competence, only the government people deserve. It’s an evolutionary process, and like all evolutionary processes, it’s slow and punctuated with brief periods of change that rapidly stabilize. Except the mechanism at play isn’t natural selection, but rather one which favors periods of rapid changes that don’t necessarily stabilize. The idea is that if you elect Hillary today and prolong the business-as-usual trend, then tomorrow you’ll have someone worse than Trump. Is this argument bulletproof? No. Is it utterly beyond the bounds of reason? I don’t think so. I might be wrong in that this election will become a function of something more mundane, like the SCOTUS nomination, because the GOP has gotten too fucking stupid at this point to realize that this isn’t something they want in a race with Trump as the nominee. However, I do think that the time is ripe for populist candidates and that it’s not going to change in the near term.
You’re arguing two different things here. The media has repeatedly and accurately reported on how much money Sanders is raising. It is also accurately reporting that, despite all that money, he is still getting beaten pretty badly in the area that counts: delegates. And there simply aren’t enough states left where he has enough of an advantage to change that, no matter how many people give to his campaign.
You’re writing from emotion. The media (in general) is reporting facts.
Clinton campaign insiders … also worry that Sanders’ emphasis on the Clintons’ coziness with the establishment, including the finance industry criminals who destroyed the global economy in 2007/8 and then paid themselves huge bonuses with tax-payer bailout bucks, will weaken Clinton in her fight against a populist/anti-establishment GOP candidate, who’ll be able to point to the Clintons as the reason that the GOP’s base is dying off at an unprecedented rate, undereducated and addicted to heroin, committing suicide in places where unemployment has skyrocketed after local industry and stable jobs were offshored thanks to Clintonian free trade deals.
Gee, it’s almost like the Democratic party should be trying to nominate someone who doesn’t have all of this terrible baggage that the Republican nominee can use against them in the general election. Clinton is the wrong candidate, especially in this anti-establishment political climate. I swear, the DNC couldn’t find their ass with both hands, a map, and an infinite mirror.
Also, to anyone who thinks she’ll have a better chance of getting things done with Congress than Bernie… have you seen how the Republicans treat her? It’s almost enough to make their deranged racist anti-Obama insanity look staid by comparison. The best they’ve been able to muster against Bernie is “ZOMG SOCIALISMZ!!!”, which has the benefit of being a pretty crappy line of attack when an actual socialist candidate has the ability to articulate his actually-popular positions on a national stage.
As a pragmatist, I’d vote in the primaries for the candidate who, during the election campaign or in office, isn’t the target of an FBI investigation that might lead to criminal charges, the specter of the classified emails scandal looms too large to dismiss.
Also, I’d vote for the candidate with crossover appeal among the general population, instead of a polarizing figure who may not be able to garner enough popular support to win the election or get anything significant accomplished if in office.
Of course you are absolutely correct, I edited my comment a bit, to add “I’d vote in the primaries…” If it’s Clinton come November, it would be a no-brainer, even with a pinched nose.
However, being from Mexico and in Mexico, I don’t have a vote in US elections :-/
As a sidenote, in the last two Mexican presidential elections I voted for Manuel Lopez “El Peje” Obrador. When attempting to describe Bernie to friends, I describe him as the US version of “El Peje”.
This. I am much farther to the right than most people here on BB, and yet I would consider voting for Sanders if he were the nominee versus Trump.
There are not enough Lovecraftian adjectives in my vocabulary however to fully describe the noxious, putrescent slime-thing that is the soul of Hillary Clinton, so if it’s Hillary versus Trump I go third party.
There is a large difference between stereotyping individuals based upon supposed group characteristics, and describing the general political culture of a region.
If the southern US states want to stop being thought of as viciously idiotic racist hellholes, they should stop acting like viciously idiotic racist hellholes. There are a vast number of datapoints supporting this point of view.
