Why (or why not) to vote for Bernie Sanders

While I’ve got Photoshop open, throw up this rough 'shop…

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Weird thing is though, he wants to tax the rich and spend on welfare. I didn’t notice that until recently…

Very strange; it’s tough to know quite what to make of Trump, except that he’s a nightmare for the Republicans :smile:

Scott Adams thinks highly of him.

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I really think he’s playing it by ear, with a strategy to ride this wave he’s found himself on as long as possible. It doesn’t matter to him what that takes. Independent? If needed, sure. Becomes irrelevant if he doesn’t take a veep slot? He’ll do it.

Whatever it takes to stay on that wave.

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Another endorsement:

And this:

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Given that he’s jewish, (the child of holocaust survivors, in fact) as far as a lot of conservatives are concerned, he probably doesn’t count as “actually” white.

In the absence of somewhere else to talk about Trump

in a press conference on Thursday, Trump announced: “I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party and the conservative principles for which it stands and we will go out and fight hard and we will win.”
“I have no intention of changing my mind,” the billionaire said, adding: “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.”

Presumably he sees no circumstances because he can’t imagine not being the candidate?
(but at the same time, totally acknowledges that he couldn’t care less about that pledge)

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I made a generic thread for good discussion about bad candidates.

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An on point political cartoon:

http://adamzyglis.buffalonews.com/2015/09/03/bernie-sanders/

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We gotta distribute “Feel the Bern” badges like that.

I mean, y’all do. I’m trying to stay impartial for now. (Difficult, with how far divorced from reality so many of the candidates are.)

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Interestingly enough, those are the ones that the mass media, even fucking NPR!!! focuses on… the ones who are completely out of touch with reality.

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[quote=“Mindysan33, post:418, topic:59394, full:true”]
Interestingly enough, those are the ones that the mass media, even fucking NPR!!! focuses on… the ones who are completely out of touch with reality.
[/quote]Agreed, many are out of touch with reality and then there’s also those who do understand Bernie Sanders’ very real threat to the status quo. They are purposefully avoiding Sanders to a large extent. I mean, they’ll mention Sanders here and there, however, every other candidate gets the lion’s share of the attention and Sanders gets consistently (and intentionally) shuffled to the bottom of the deck on most mainstream “reporting”.

In some ways, I really can’t blame NPR and other corporate media. They have corporatist owners and/or advertisers and backers that fear a Sanders presidency due to the fact he will very much work with our massive grassroots organizations, supporters and activists all over this country (and the world to some extent) to rein in their era of wanton greed.

A lot of local TV news stations are getting instructions from their corporate owners to ignore Sanders. Among many others, we’ve been calling out our local station 9News in Colorado on this fact and they issued a easily debunked cop out in this snide video:

http://www.9news.com/story/news/local/politics/2015/08/25/bernie-sanders-media-coverage/32311119/

This disingenuous lackey (Kyle Clark) states that 9News simply can’t report on Bernie Sanders properly until Sanders breaks from his extremely busy schedule to meet with them or contact them personally.

This is a cop out and a lie.

9News does NOT put up those same, bogus requirements for Hillary Clinton nor the Republican candidates like Trump that they’ve repeatedly reported on while mostly ignoring Sanders.

Here’s details on the real reasons they won’t cover Sanders adequately:

Speaking of the media…

Very early endorsement of Bernie Sanders from John Cusack from several years ago:

Aside from acting, he’s an activist and on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. https://freedom.press/about/board. Other people on the board of this transparent journalism/open internet advocacy group are Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, John Perry Barlow, Trevor Timm, Xeni Jardin, Micah Lee and Rainey Reitman.

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Was listening the other day (ATC?), segment on a potential Biden run and how the DNC would welcome it for appearances so that Hilliary nom doesn’t seem like a coronation. Not even so much as lip service to Sanders, name not mentioned once in the minutes long piece. Like the dude didn’t even exist.

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[quote=“slybevel, post:417, topic:59394”]
Difficult, with how far divorced from reality so many of the candidates are.
[/quote]Frankly, I think a lot of the American public is far divorced from the reality that Bernie Sanders is about to overtake Hillary Clinton and soon. Here’s a chart a lot of the corporate media doesn’t want Americans to see:

source for polls

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I’m sorry, I just can’t make sense of the damned thing without blinking 3D arrows!

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Try this instead!

In case people don’t get the reference, I used a clip from November Rain.

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Speaking of bad candidates…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/why-is-dnc-chairwoman-afraid-of-bernie-sanders-and-martin-omalley-debating-hillary-clinton_b_8087334.html

Looks like the establishment is getting the fear of the Bern…

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We already knew this more than a week ago:

However, what’s different is that front page articles are starting to trickle out. For the first time that I was able to notice, Bernie was the top article, complete with picture, on cnn.com. I think this was Friday, maybe yesterday. I just remember that he was the lead. They change their lead article so often and I don’t check it enough to know if it has happened before or not. But it was the first time I saw it.

Also, reference @Cowicide’s graph:

Labor Day weekend is the typical “launch” to campaign season, with everything in the summer months acting as groundwork. I call it a traditional “hard start date” because it’s really already going. But it’s like day after Thanksgiving = Christmas season, even though Wal Mart puts out the fake christmas trees before Halloween now. Similarly, Labor Day is considered the traditional “day 0” to campaigning season.

Now, with Bernie polling above Hillary in New Hampshire, and almost neck-and-neck in Iowa, it is essentially an even race at the starting gate with a clear momentum going to Bernie. That’s the operative part. Momentum. Can he continue to shave support from Hillary? Calving, really, like huge chunks falling off an advancing glacier. Can he continue to get support from non-traditional sources, such as anti-Trump Republicans? Can he improve his standing with women and minorities? Can he continue to emerge as a non-fringe candidate? Time will tell. My bet is that if he continues to organize as well as he and his team have done so far, the answers will all be yes.

As to another comment on another thread that we are mistaking the Presidential race for a monarchical understanding of US politics, let me say this. All monarchies, democracies, pseudo-democracies, flawed democracies and outright despotic dictatorships are subject to one ultimate master: the collective. No government or despot in the history of the world has ever been able to stand up to the eventual desires of the plurality of the citizenry. Not for very long. They’ve been able to put people off, tip the balance to 51% of people on their side for a while, even to delude everyone for a great long while, giving meager concessions to maintain the charade, for centuries even. But when those chickens come home to roost, they come in hard and strong. That short rewrite of the process of revolution is an unbroken pattern in human history. Maybe someone more scholarly than I am could shed some light on that fact, @Mindysan33 perhaps.

What’s different about Bernie is what he represents, backing him up. He represents a sea-change of ideology about how government is conducted in a general sense. Both traditional Democrats and Republicans, as we have long debated here, have become corporatist automatons. We know from his record that Bernie represents no such cliché.

And of course so much more needs to be done. It’s not just Bernie. We need to pack the other branches of government with people who understand and support the ultimate supremacy of the middle and lower classes. There will be a ton of work to do on that front, don’t get me wrong. Bernie is not the savior. He’s not the panacea. But he’s a great first step at restoring what we all need, and I think if we managed to elect him, we could make the other stuff happen more quickly.

Fingers are tired. That’s all.

Fore!

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Nice to see that happening more often!

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Thank you for spending the time to write this @awjt. This can’t be stressed enough. The same grassroots organizations, activists and supporters that get Bernie elected will also dearly need to mobilize voters to clean House (and Senate where possible) in order for nearly any of our agendas we want to get enacted.

Of course, pundits and general naysayers will tell us until they are blue in the face that this is “impossible”. However, those same people also told us until they were blue in the face that we’d never get near as far as we have already towards getting Bernie elected. In other words, the naysayers have lost a lot of credibility and have shown that they truly haven’t researched our 2015 grassroots dynamic. We can get Bernie elected to the White House and we can unseat obstructionist Republicans and bluedog, establishment Democrats who would block our efforts after he’s elected.

https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/7/9/79b17b579b7e5711c4c8374c9c490f7f94403ccb_1_690x276.jpg

Where there’s a will… there’s a way.

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America Feels The Bern:

Bernie Sanders Now Front-Runner

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