Let’s be honest, we could all do better… 
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Bam! I feel that I have a big limitation in that I don’t think quickly. (Or, that I’m not smart quickly.) If someone confronted me in the street about some deeply held belief I would probably end up just angrily stammering and sputtering. You wouldn’t want me in politics nor on your debate team.
I’ll go through a big argument with some customer service rep (and then their supervisor, etc. etc.) about some situation where I am clearly in the right, to absolutely no avail, other than the accomplishment that my hands are shaking with rage. (The cust. svc. rep gets paid either way.) But 20-30 minutes (or even a day or so) later, it’ll hit me: “Damn it, that’s what I should’ve said!” Like George Costanza finally coming up with the perfect zinger.
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Chop Psaki!
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Normally I’m more of a fan of the Turtles (except Mitch), but given how she’s been cutting down to size people who ask stupid questions I have to say I like Oroku Psaki, the Press Shredder!
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Just because Jen Psaki is not an insane Trumper does not mean she is your friend. Please, please, please stop celebrating her for being mean to Fox or whatever. We need substance, not symbolism.
Where the fuck is our $15 minimum wage?
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She’s the WH Press Secretary, not a policy maker. Instead of directing your ire at her, there are better targets.
Meanwhile, it is definitely worth noting that she deftly avoided giving the Faux News shitweasels any sound bites to plug at to undermine future efforts to increase the minimum wage. Why settle for $15? $25 would be much better, along with eliminating the loophole of paying service workers less than minimum wage because of tips or paying them as “contractors.”
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Right?
I agree that compared to Republican spokespeeps she’s a breath of fresh air, but let’s do keep in mind that she’s still just fronting for the latest Captain of Empire and Domestic Neoliberal Austerity.
If anyone were allowed in the room who would ask her questions about THAT, and she again fended them off most deftly, would we still be singing her praises?
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Yeah I don’t think we’re in disagreement. She’s not the object of my ire but celebration of her is. She’s not a hero; she’s the mouthpiece of a center-right neoliberal president.
And yes! $15 is already an antiquated minimum! Fully agree. Too bad we can’t even get that.
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This is well and proper!
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You may have noticed that they don’t have the votes. The USA being at least a hypothetical representative democracy, if you don’t have the votes to get a bill through the House and Senate, you can’t just snap your fingers and make it a thing (in most cases). Even the House parliamentarian found that inserting the $15 minimum wage into the latest Covid relief bill was against the rules. And on top of that… they didn’t have the votes.
I think instead of directing our ire at centrist parties and politicians like the Dems, we should be considering what we can do as voters and citizens to deliver more progressive votes and thus representatives to our houses of Congress. Politicians follow the voters, it’s the main reason why almost every Republican is bending over backwards for Trump.
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Totally disagree. We are a representative democracy in name only.
Directing ire towards centrists and getting better politicians into office is not mutually exclusive! Not at all! In fact, being mad at centrists and voting for socialists/real progressives goes hand in hand. In the meantime, we have to live with a dogshit center-right president and it’s our duty to bully him into doing things halfway decently.
tl;dr: No more yasssss queen, only fuck you pay me.
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Dude.
Chill.
What you just wrote, well, it kinda looks like the beginning of an unhinged screed.
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I would look at the house rules for you if I had time, but iirc, tone policing is somehow covered/forbidden there.
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I’m not so sure we really disagree — I was simply answering the question of “where’s our $15 minimum wage.” The answer was and remains, they didn’t have the votes.
Now, what I think we may disagree about is whether the “bullying” of moderates you describe amounts to much of anything. I’d submit it does not, and thinking it does might indicate lack of awareness of how actual power is wielded in our society. If you want that approach to be effective, you actually have to have strong, meaningful power to wield. My own feeling is that progressives in the USA in 2021 are not operating from this position, and as such, should be squarely focused on grassroots efforts to gain more support in order to have more real power, which in turn can be used to affect positive change.
I should add, I think it’s perfectly alright for progressives to disagree about such things, and attacking the problems from a variety of viewpoints may actually be more effective. I’m not sure that the left’s answer to the groupthink on the right should be yet more groupthink.
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I think we disagree about methodology and the workings of American political power but not the rest. And that’s ok. There’s not a singular approach nor should there be.
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I think we are on the same side a lot of the time, but I was getting Russian bot vibes for a while, Thus my post, as I actually care about getting too riled up.
Sometimes see what is true and what is not that we forget that many times, we are still in the minority. But hey, one of our highest held virtues, the one that people always try to use against us, is that we are open to being wrong. I am glad my initial impression was wrong.
Oh, and Peter Doocey is still a tool. My thanks to Jen Psaki for teaching us all how to handle these “people say” bad faith arguments. That is the real takeaway, that we all can use her manoeuvre.
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Yeah, the entire time, you can hear his gears grinding trying to figure out how he can extract an out-of-context 5 seconds that does not make him look foolish.
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FTFY. Foot goes in mouth, head goes in ass.
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Yeah, even in the last few seconds of the video where he’s trying to get her to compare the border guard union to teacher union…he was scrambling and she wasn’t taking it.
It was quite funny.
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