AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Tlaib Endorse Sanders

“Bernie Bros” is a Republican-Lite slur, originating with the Clinton-deranged.

Class subsumes identity. Full stop.

As an example, Shaun King hit Jane Eisner so hard with a reply tweet, drawing out this difference, she deleted her post.

It’s a thing of beauty:
https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1184510743108079618

Ultimately, I wouldn’t bet on either Warren or Sanders being the Democratic nominee, but that aside, it seems perfectly logical to me that those three members of The Squad would endorse Sanders and Pressley would (eventually) back Warren, if she does.

They all seem to know how politics works, and they know how the game is played to accomplish particular objectives. I think they realize that Dems have a poor record on behalf of the People since Nixon, and that politicians like Warren are one of the reasons why.

The Ex-Republicans (like Warren) are still at bottom Republicans, and their proliferation among the Dems, both on the elected side and the consultant side, has all but exterminated the Democratic Party’s former focus on the needs and interests of the masses. Bernie saw the vacuum of leadership and took it on, followed by a handful of other Democratic Socialist politicians and a lot of frustrated ordinary people who were fed up with politics as usual.

In other words, Bernie demonstrated there’s a strong core of support for Democratic Socialist policies among the People, but there is very little support — essentially none — within the current political system. Given the way our politics works, it would take a hundred years or more for even a few of the social justice policies of the “Left” to be adopted.

The political trend-line is always to the right, and by the time something vaguely “leftist” is enacted, it is so attenuated, it may as well be “rightist.” Viz: Obamacare.

Even if the Democratic Socialists were eventually to obtain victory at the polls and power within the political system, it’s hard for me to see a policy pathway in opposition to the rightist and reactionary system they sought power over. Institutional inertia is often more powerful than the politicians.

I think Bernie understands as well as anyone that the only way this situation changes is with a ground up revolution, but getting to that point almost impossible. So you play the game as best you can, and hope to transform the system from within.



So, I take it that you guys are not serious anymore, having fallen into a deep, abiding depression, having realized that your party consists now of foreign scab labor, and men in dresses masturbating into each others anuses. However, for the sake of argument: how do you square providing a nice middle-class lifestyle to every American, including however many billion 65-IQ Africans might want to move here for that, with drastically scaling back industry to reverse climate change? Granted, as a Forqkkking White Male I’m not up on the latest Wakandan science, so maybe I’m missing something.

But centrists thought because she was a woman, AOC, Tlaib and Omar would endorse her.

It’s much more likely that they thought they would endorse her because she might actually win and Bernie can’t no matter how many times he complains about how they “stole his nomination.
Does anyone who has been exposed to the USA over the last 20 years actually believe that someone who calls himself a “democratic socialist” would win a national election. Bernie was being cute when he tried to make sure no one called him a member of the Democratic Party. The only problem is that he destroyed his brand and elections are nothing more than branding contests.

Waiting for Americans to vote for an 80-year-old socialist with a bad ticker to start a revolution has got to be the most serious case of self-delusion ever.

Placing all your hopes on believing that America is going to vote for a Revolution led by an 80-year-old socialist with a bad ticker seems rather imprudent. But good luck.

@ponderer,

Bernie will be branded as the crazy commie candidate no matter what so he might as well own it. Getting endorsed by AOC, Omar and Tlaib might hurt Sanders in the general election because it might turn off moderates but if that happens it will be a good indicator of how genuine many anti-Trump people are.

Personally, I know some Democrats who dislike Trump but also dislike Sanders and might sit out the election if it is Bernie vs Trump or might hold their nose and choose one of them. Interestingly, they are all white guys, including young white guys, the kind of people who are supposed to be the fabled Bernie Bros. I know it is just an anecdote but it is interesting to think about.

In a Trump vs. Bernie contest it will be interesting to see how white men vote. I have criticized left-wing identity politics but identity politics exists on the right too so it will be interesting to see how many white men vote for an economically populist old white guy because theoretically Bernie should be the perfect antidote to Trump if the class-first theorists are correct, and I hope they are correct!

Bernie being a commie isn’t a problem. He’s never been one unless you are comparing him to Biden. The problem is the message he is trying to sell. Independent voters aren’t going to buy that he wants to help them and cater to ‘the three Amigas’. The pictures of AOC and co with crocodile tears and wailing at a gate with no actual immigrants or refugee’s will make the rounds again. They will wonder if once again the working class will be dropped by the Democrats in favor of identity politics. They will think he is part of the Resistance, the same one that considers them deplorable. That won’t be much of a factor until the criminal referrals. In 2020 that is going to be huge for independents. The democrats are handing him leg irons and he is putting them on. In the off chance he gets the nomination he will have to carry all that weight through the general. He is going to claim he will help the working class get ahead with huge amounts of debt and an open door immigration policy and foreign wars and on and on. He will be the poster child of the hypocrisy of the Democrats because they set him up to be that way and he has fallen for it.

Wow. You folks are giving voters waaaaaaay too much credit for being able to think.
Just take Blizzard’s comment. Quite Trumpian, right? So, there’s about 30% of America that would think it wisdom. The rest? So sick of the orange idiot they’d vote for Stalin.

We’re looking at the typical backlash landslide no matter who the democrat nominee is.

Then, we’ll see how they handle their first 6 mo.

And by the way Bliz, you’ve taken abhorrence to a new level.

Forced to agree wholeheartedly with Chey when he says:

“I think they realize that Dems have a poor record on behalf of the People since Nixon, and that politicians like Warren are one of the reasons why.”

Mr. Welsh, you should up your game and start demanding insightful commentary that matches the level of your essays, or just turn comments off. More than half of this could be yanked from my dad’s facebook wall.

Y’all boomer guys here with your obsessions about what white men think, open borders, and overpopulation? The kids are coming for your throats, teeth bared.

they realize that Dems have a poor record on behalf of the People since Nixon, and that politicians like Warren are one of the reasons why.

Politicians like Biden, Clinton, Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, Pete Buttigieg . . . .

Elizabeth Warren is one of the politicians I would be least likely to blame.

I am not saying that I do not see that she is reaching for power by means of calculated betrayals of the interests of the working classes: I do see it clearly. I would prefer Bernie. I also would prefer Bernie to be a charismatic 40-year-old.

Ultimately, my preferred politics requires mass movement. Warren is careful to say words respectful of the need for political mass movements, but at the center of her “calculated betrayal” is the possibly quite reasonable assessment that no mass movement of sufficient size and conviction will happen, perhaps both because too few of the self-disenfranchised will stir themselves and because of the reaction from the professional-classes electoral base of the Democratic Party. The latter, to which Mandos likes to draw attention as the very real electoral constituency of the Democratic establishment, are the people Warren is targeting with her own candidacy’s appeal.

There is a split in the Democratic Party. AOC and Sanders represent the radical rebels against the virtue-signaling, deep-state loving, economic complacency that voted a numerical plurality for Hillary Clinton. The Dem establishment actively cultivates (formerly since alienated by Trump?) Republican suburban women of a certain age as the key to swinging the Presidential election because their sensibilities are no obstacle to the establishment’s servicing of their donor class. While the 3 amigas were getting elected by radical rebellion, the Dems were taking the House with young conservative Congressional candidates with resumes studded with military, police and intelligence agency service — at least 10 of them, all of the Buttigieg-like.

Warren, give her credit, is doing her best to appeal to the better angels nature of the professional classes, the side that sees the need for reform even if inclined to favor wonky, self-defeating “smart” policy reform. Even given her reputation, well-earned, for being tough on the banks, she is getting support from the Dem donor base in the finance sector. She is getting favorable coverage from the now thoroughly corrupt mainstream Media. She may pull it off: stitching the rump of Sanders’ disappointed support to the great Lump of The Resistance. (And, i take some comfort in the fact that Kamala Harris did not succeed in her purer fraud marrying her authoritarianism and pretty “black” face to money from the Hamptons.)

I have my doubts. And hopes, I suppose. I look at Biden’s poll numbers and I cannot help but wonder where those people go when they wake up and start paying attention to politics for 3 weeks before the primary vote. People who look at Biden’s policy record, corruption and senility and think, “he is my guy!” Or, more likely don’t look yet, just go with a vague association from their last brief moment of participation in electoral politics.

There is a kind of statistical-stupid that has a really hard time understanding that Trump’s core electoral appeal is class-based. The “racist! and that is all anyone needs to know” refrain is meant to avoid confronting the reality of the politics and the economics.

And that computer model, four, also predicted we would be in the onset of an ige age.

bruce wilder:

I want you to read Trump supporter BlizzardOfOzzz’s comment in this very post (it’s the ninth one from the top) and then try to tell me with a straight face that Trump’s core electoral appeal is class-based. Do you really think class interests are what drive Trump supporters to believe and say things like that?

@Herman

You seem to think that its important if Bernie has some label like commie attached to him. I think the labels don’t matter, it only matters if he can get other people to trust him. Right now more Democrats trust Biden so its kind of a moot issue. I’ve heard the same promises from Democrats my entire life and the only conclusion I’ve been able to come up with is that what they say they want (platform) is not what they actually want. Clinton, Clinton, and Obama have proved this, Congress and the bobble-heads on tv have as well. Even when I preferred Conservatives (never Republicans), I noticed that the R’s delivered more than the D’s to their voters. The people that put Trump into the white house don’t trust either party because of the decades of deception and corruption. When you are in the losing class and you have no chance to get out of it you’ll take any option to get revenge on the establishment.

It appears that Bernie is trying to build a multiracial, class-based coalition which is what class-first people claim they want so will whites vote for Bernie if he is in the general election against Trump? It will be a good test of the class-first thesis.

There is no logical tie between voting for Bernie and racism. Half of Democrats won’t vote for Bernie now does that mean they are racists? These old, tired propagandistic arguments are used by people who want to fail. They like the tribal identity politics system and their place in it. They don’t want any of Bernie’s policies, they would prefer to lose decade after decade and come up with the most outrageous excuses for why they will never accomplish 1% of what they say they will. So are Bernies low poll ratings because the Democrats don’t want poor people to have healthcare or decent lifestyles, or because they don’t believe that HE wants those things. Right now it seems to be a toss up and if he has this much trouble with Democrats the rest of the country is no sure thing. As long as he and the party holds on to contradictory policies its not going to get better.

I don’t grok how Joe Biden gets any votes. Off the top of my head, he’s a race-baiter, a warmonger, a corporatist stooge for the credit card and prison industries, a senile old bozo, a misogynist, and a public prevert. And that’s on a good day.

Bruce Springsteen’s new Western Stars album has a song which may or may not be a comment on Mr. Biden:

Pssttt…Agent Mike, that’s not a threat, it’s a movie quote.

@ponderer,

Well, I was talking about a Trump vs. Bernie race in the general election. The Democratic primary is a different story. My guess is that if Sanders wins the primary most Democrats will come home and vote for Sanders just like most Republicans voted for Trump in 2016 even though many didn’t like him and would have preferred a different candidate.

In a Trump vs. Bernie race it will be pretty clear that one side is more pro-worker than the other unlike in 2016 and I think it will be interesting to see how the white vote goes, especially working-class whites. I can’t predict how it will go so I am not saying that Trump will win working-class whites.

However, I find it odd that so many people here refuse to admit that white identity politics exists and that sometimes whites vote based on identity just like other groups do. That doesn’t necessarily make white Republicans racists (although some are, just like many non-white Democrats have reactionary social views) it just means that they vote based on identity and not class. Some of the Trump vote in 2016 was tied to economic issues but a lot of it was also tied to identity politics. I am not a big fan of identity politics but it is a reality that we have to deal with on both the right and the left.

This is one of those rare occasions I’m happy to see our Blizzard “Sandy Hook was a false flag and those dead teachers and children were crisis actors and are not dead” of Ooozzz, indeed even rarer occasion I deign its existence, stop by to illuminate the issue.

Pretty sure there are no historic parallels, Mr. rational.

@Eric Anderson,

It is rational to sit around and do nothing because most people understand that they have zero influence over the major issues of the day and so they don’t bother to get involved in politics or even follow current events because it is useless to them and will likely bring unnecessary stress. In this the Baby Boomers are no different from any other generation.

By the way, this is exactly why people use things like identity as a shortcut for voting. Most people are not going to spend the large amounts of time necessary to understand policy and then spend even more time becoming activists and those that do are often even more irrational and biased than the relatively apolitical. A person could plausibly argue that we are wasting our time arguing about these things on the Internet since most of us likely have no power to influence politics and we might be better off watching sports or sitcoms instead. Perhaps politics is just our version of sports fandom.

I don’t want to go too far and argue for being apolitical, but blaming Baby Boomers or Millennials or whites or non-whites or whatever group of ordinary people makes little sense. Blaming elites makes more sense since they do have power but even they are constrained by imperfect information and the dictates of the system.

For those of you who think that Nirvana is classic rock, you might want to look into the 1940s. This will require reading but you might find the break from pr0n hub helpful. It was one of the few times in 200 years the working class got something out of the 1%. You’ll find it a distinct departure from the Democratic party of the last 60 years who’s greatest accomplishment is pissing away the New Deal slower some decades than others. Clinton really cashed out on that pissing away and its why you are living in your parents basement and financially stressed about having pets much less children. To the point it is so bad that D and R have to work together to get young illegal immigrants coming into the country so they will have someone to empty their diapers and scrub their mansions. If you feel aggrieved that 1/5 of your children will be on food stamps in their lives you might ask yourself while the housing and feeding of illegal immigrants is more important to the Democrats than providing enough nutrition and education to get your children into wage slave jobs. Better yet to wonder why you’ve been waiting on results your entire lives from a party leadership making Billions, yet you still fall for the same lies about poor white people being the problem.

If your ‘woke’ness doesn’t include realizing the Democratic party is nothing but a Honey Pot and has been since at least FDRs time you are going to doom yourselves and your dwindling children to a state in which being slaves would be an improvement. For those POC, you might come to the realization that white vs. non-white is not the end goal or the focus of identity politics. Its to have the Asians vs Mexicans vs Blacks (already quite prevalent), then the Philippines vs Chinese vs Vietnamese and Mexicans vs Equadorians vs Cubans vs… and on and on. It’s no different than the Irish vs Scots vs Scandinavians in the late 1800s. The ‘goal’ in the simplest terms is to divide the largest group of people with common interests into the largest number of smallest groups possible to provide the whole with the least amount of political power. There are always traitors willing to walk herd on their group members for a piece of the pie.

It’s time to wake up to the fact that the tactics and ideas that don’t and haven’t worked for 60 years that some of you cling to like an abusive parent were never meant to work in the first place. Just because you are dumb enough to believe something doesn’t make it true. The Democrats get money from Big Tech, Wall Street, and the occasional Fascist Dictator because they are useful tools and they are busy getting the gullible to hate each other.

If by some miracle the younger generations come to their senses and organize outside the establishment with a plan to upend the status quo they will find themselves staring down the muzzles of hard eyed foreigners made desperate by our foreign policy and eager to fight for immigration concessions. That’s when you’ll regret your biggest challenge in life was a 52 hour Fortnite marathon, your deepest thought was “why don’t I have a rainbow pony my parents said I could have everything”, and every group you alienated along the way that didn’t trust the establishment to begin with won’t be around to save your entitled butts.

I always assumed he was a sock-puppet for tribal ideologues that like to show up and further divide the populace and left. It would make sense if these were Democrat herders because that is exactly what they do so well. It should give one pause that he so very accurately matches the Clintonesk stereotype of a Trump supporter. The actual people I meet tend to be full of contradictions so when I see ones online that aren’t I tend to wonder what astroturf factory they were made in. Maybe its my time at DKos that made me so cynical.
He has allowed some commenters to ignore the relevant issues, actual facts, and try to dominate the discussion with moral ‘wokeness’. If your observations are all recycled from comments at CNN and DKos I don’t really see the point of participating in a discussion. They’ve decided to double down on the deplorables because that worked so well last time? No, they are here to divide the left and degenerate a legitimate intellectual discussion into name calling. You might think it has to do with the “other” political party but it doesn’t. The herders don’t care about that, all they care about is that the 60 years of divisions they have sown don’t get undone when people find out they have more in common that not.

NR wrote: “as for him (Trump) representing half the country? Well, sorry, but that’s just facts. Not half, of course, but the 20% or so who voted for Trump. Study after study after study has come out since the election revealing that racism and racial resentment was the primary motivating factor for Trump voters, not economic issues.”

It’s easier for you to think that, of course. But suppose that’s not true. See forex —

‘UAW workers on strike in Michigan wonder: Where’s Trump?’
https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2019/10/uaw-workers-on-strike-in-michigan-wonder-wheres-trump.html

‘Support for President Donald Trump can be found on the picket line, but members of the United Auto Workers union are wondering whether the champion of Michigan’s blue-collar workers supports their strike against General Motors as demonstrations finish their third week.

‘Michigan’s autoworkers are at the center of an ongoing labor dispute that could have implications for Trump’s reelection prospects in Midwest battleground states. Trump touts his appeal among blue-collar autoworkers as one of the chief reasons he became the first Republican to win Michigan in nearly three decades but he’s avoided weighing in on the conflict, giving Democrats an opportunity to court a key part of his base.

‘“He wins the presidency and all sudden he’s nowhere to be found,” said Stephanie Carpenter, a 44-year-old employee at GM’s Romulus Propulsion Plant. “Everyone’s like, ‘where are you at?’ I don’t see him with American workers out on this picket line, showing his support.” ….

The whole thing is worth a glance. Again, one can be contemptuous of these autoworkers as simply delusional fools or, maybe, have the grace and wits to recognize that a lot of Americans were — and are — so desperate that they took a chance on Trump because from their POV the alternative offered by Clintonite neoliberalism was — and is — inarguably worse.

Personally, I suspect the chances of the Democrats going the way of the US Whig party within the decade might be higher than conventional wisdom presupposes

isn’t all of this just a diversion away from actually doing anything, and having a scapegoat to project blame upon when nothing gets done?

Yes, it is diversion, but something gets done — the scapegoat is there to hide who did what for whom.

Mark Pontin:

I read that article and it offers zero acutal data, just a couple of anecdotes from striking workers. Meanwhile, as I’ve cited here, there is a lot of actual data indicating that support for Trump was and is primarily driven by racism, sexism, and other prejudices and not by economic concerns.

Do you honestly think that Blizzard of Ozzz and the people like him who make up the vast majority of the Trump base care about class issues at all? Can you really make that argument with a straight face after what you saw him write toward the beginning of this comment thread?

@NR

Here is an idea: try to explain why people voted for Hillary Clinton. Seriously.

The explanation i hear most often is “better than Trump” though ” how better ” is often pure fantasy: as one example, a lot of people claimed to me against available evidence that Hillary was a peacenik.

It is hard to see how more neoliberal free trade and financial free-for-all would help working people in Michigan or Wisconsin or rural Pennsylvania.

I am happy to see that you virtuously support a higher minimum wage. So did Obama to very little effect — a signature of his political style. But Obama understood the electoral value of making populist noises; i think he tried to help Clinton make those arguments with late-hour Labor Department rule changes (timed so Republicans could overturn them, naturally; Obama style, again). I do not think Clinton could take the hint. She worried outloud about how to limit the increase in the minimum wage — revealing her instincts, i think.

Politics is not mostly about someone’s made-up identity as an “Asian-American” or “Hispanic” or gender-neutral bathrooms. It is about who gets what when. And basically no one in America who is not already rich is getting much of anything. That is sinking in slowly, but maybe too slowly to matter.

Here for NR and his ilk, some realities —

Here’s the real Hillary Clinton interviewed in Dec. 2011, boasting “We saw, we saw, he died” after Gaddafi’s sodomization with a bayonet —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmIRYvJQeHM

For this regime change in Libya instigated at her behest while she was US Secretary of State — along with the attempted regime change in Libya — Clinton would be rewarded during her presidential candidacy in 2016 by more ‘donations’ from the US military-industrial complex than any other presidential candidate in American history.

At a minimum, 30,000 are dead in Libya and in Syria over 400,000 as a result of this incompetent pyschopathic grifter’s attempt to get to the White House.

Here’s the real Donald Trump a couple of days ago in Italy —
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/10/16/trump_im_embarrassed_to_say_how_many_countries_the_us_military_is_in_it_is_so_foolish.html

The video comes with a full text transcription. The usual Trump narcissistic boasts are there, but also Trump’s claims that: “I want to bring our soldiers back home. We’re not a police force … you know, we’re in many countries, many, many countries. I–I’m embarrassed to tell you how many. I know the exact number, but I’m embarrassed to say it because it’s so foolish…we got to get out of the endless wars, we have to bring our troops back home.

“I go to Walter Reed and I gave our purple hearts, just did it on Friday. I see the–the incredible soldiers coming home to Dover, coming home in a coffin on areas that we have nothing to do with, we have nothing to do with. And it’s heartbreaking. I sign letters all the time to parents whose son was shot in different places in the Middle East, mostly. It’s very heartbreaking to see. Very heartbreaking.”

And so on. Now, both of these videos are politicians talking, so possibly worthless as a guide to future conduct. That said, if the choice is between:

(a) an obvious psychopath responsible for approaching 500,000 deaths, who is too incompetent to even hide their monstrousness (watch that video).;

(b) a narcissist possibly responsible for no deaths so far, who at least has enough sense to occasionally make the right moral noises about the Evil Empire (which is what the US now has become);

Then, very clearly, in 2016 the American people were given a choice of poisons and picked the lesser of the two evils.

This doesn’t even get into the vast economic and human damage that the Clintons and the neoliberal Democrat party inflicted on the US people during the 1990s, for which they were richly rewarded, nor the Obama administration’s bailout and criminal complicity with Wall Street after the 2008 GFC, nor the ongoing corruption we live with today.

Well, I can see–unsurprisingly–that instead of addressing the actual data provided about the racism and general hatefulness of Trump supporters–including the disgusting example provided by one of them in this very comment thread–people are, instead, desperately trying to change the subject to Hillary Clinton. Well, whatever Hillary Clinton’s faults may be–and they are many–that does not change the fact that support for Trump was based on racism and racial resentment, and not on class issues. Hillary Clinton is completely irrelevant to that point.

Now if people want to continue to advance the false narrative that Trump supporters are good-hearted, kind, salt-of-the-earth working-class folks who don’t have a hateful bone in their bodies, and who only sadly and reluctantly voted for Trump after the Democrats’ neoliberal turn, they concluded that they can do that. But I’m not going to let that false characterization of Trump supporters pass without challenge anymore, especially when they themselves are regularly showing it to be false, as we have an example of right here.

I know a couple of Trump true believers, and whatever the origins of their support, it has become purely tribal. It doesn’t matter what Trump does or says or how damning the information is that comes out about him. They immediately adopt whatever talking point comes out without missing a beat. For example, they were already repeating Mulvaney’s everybody does it line and calling Democrats hypocrites for criticizing Trump. It never would occur to them, or see the humor in, that their defense of Trump is that he is as big a piece of shit as the piece of shit Democrats (Hillary, Obama, Biden) they keep complaining about. When I try to understand their fixation with Trump, all I come up with is that it is a kind of know-nothingism. What most of us see as Trump’s defects, his crookedness, grifting, lying, stupidity, ignorance, racism, they see as a kind of manifestation of themselves and more specifically their anger with their lives, the world, anyone and anything that is not them. Trump is their guy. Bizarre as it is for the rest of us, they see themselves in him. Logic, facts, crimes, incontrovertible evidence, even admission of those crimes by Trump and his underlings, the US Code, the Constitution, disaster piled on disaster, none of these things matter. An attack on Trump they feel as an attack on themselves. It reconnects them to their rage, their own sense of being under attack. At the same time, their defenses of Trump are empowering. It makes them feel as if, for once, they are the ones in the know, keepers of some secret truth the rest of us don’t get and can’t know. If all this sounds incoherent, it is, but also beside the point for the Trump true believer.

Herman:
Carrying over to the open thread. I think this is an important debate that needs to be had.

@Hugh

That was quite a rant, but I have to tell you that it seemed pretty tribal in its politics.

The country was not so well-governed under Obama or the younger Bush that anyone dissatisfied with the consequences of policy failures for themselves, their families or their communities should be labeled “losers” by you for their anger, when you yourself so enjoy expressing anger about the state of politics.

Many of the charges commonly made against Trump are themselves just narrative talking points put into the news media by professional propagandists with questionable agendas. When you use abstract language to concur with them you join the circus.

bruce, you are repeating my point. Trump becoming harder to defend? Pivot to everybody does it, they’re all the same. Still hard pressed? Pivot again to Obama or Hillary or Biden or Pelosi. Ian just had a thread up about false equivalencies, that there are not two sides to every argument, or even when there are, one side may be far stronger than the other. For the Trump true believers I know, facts are incidental. They are bent, discarded, or just plain ignored as needed. They thrive exactly on the false equivalencies you are promoting. Criticize Trump supporters? You must be as tribal as they are. No.

There is no such thing as “Bernie Bros”. The “Bernie Bro” trope is a Clintonite fabrication.

@Hugh

In politics, there are always at least two sides. It isn’t a matter of false equivalencies or some other category of fallacy; it is about partisan rivalry and the potential of rotation in office to solve problems of governance.

And, just so we are clear: I take no brief for Trump. I think I have said as much before, but you continue to interpret my remarks as a defense of Trump, and consequently miss the point of those remarks.

It is certainly true that Trump’s election initiated a more intense phase in a legitimacy crisis, but that crisis has been building for more than 20 years and envelops “all sides” of the continued partisan rivalry.

I abandoned my identification with the Democrats during Obama’s first term and that helped me to see the dynamics of the legitimacy crisis unfolding with some critical distance. Still, not sharing in TDS, I notice how weak, careless and just dumb and dishonest some of the lines of attack against Trump are. Trump presents what one might call a target-rich environment, given his apparent affinity for cynical frauds, so one has to wonder why his opponents choose to attack him on and with the charges they do. The Russia,Russia,Russia narrative pushed by the Clintonistas with help from the Intelligence establishment was both ridiculous and vaguely frightening for the level of irresponsibility in both mainstream Media and the foreign policy / intelligence establishment it presumed.

The use of otherwise moribund campaign finance law restrictions — and rather tendentitious interpretations as to what constitutes a “contribution” — is remarkable as well.

Your chanting “false equivalency” where it has no application anyway, since political competition has no analogue to logical fallacy, is leading you to miss the full flowering of this legitimacy crisis, enveloping as it does not just Trump but the whole political system that threw him up like a dog’s breakfast as that system failed to respond as egregious failures to govern have manifested over the last 20 years.

The altogether not-false-at-all equivalencies are among the most interesting features of the attacks Democrats make on Trump. And, vice-versa. Whataboutism is having a field day.

That the Clinton campaign used a foreign agent to try to get dirt on Trump from the Russians is more than richly ironic. That Clinton’s epic violation of campaign finance laws was the scandal revealed by the DNC email leak is part of the fun. That the current Ukraine-gate brouhaha turns on Biden’s corruption should not be avoided, it should be savored.

The furor over Trump actually moving to end one of America’s pointless wars has been remarkably revealing for the spectacle of false posturing, particularly by the soi disant critics of perpetual war who apparently do not want to end even one after all.

@Willy,

I agree with you in spirit. I, too, would rather be a Bernie Bro than be a Jonestown Clintie or a StormTrumper.

If there were such a thing, which there isn’t. Because ” Bernie Bro” is a deceit-based epithet of abuse invented by the Clinton Noise Machine.

The Clinton Mafia was out in force in 2016, and Warren was right to knuckle under and stay away from Bernie. Today the Clinton Mafia is beaten and bedraggled- it’s not a comparison.