#three fuck donald trump and fuck joe biden but it’s better we kicked out trump and have him in office

[maswartz]

IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave. 

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

#bernie sanders

[thisdaynews]

Democratic governors sound alarm on Trump reelection

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/democratic-governors-sound-alarm-on-trump-reelection/

Democratic governors sound alarm on Trump reelection

California Gov. Gavin Newsom noted that Democrats in Washington, D.C., have been gripped with national attention-grabbing recent events, from the Mueller testimony to the House Squad. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

politics

Outside the Beltway there are worries the party is losing control of its message and forgetting the lessons of 2018.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Washington Democrats keep talking about the “Squad” and impeachment.

Democrats outside the Beltway wish they’d remember how the party retook the House and gained ground in state capitals last year with a rigorous focus on health care and the economy.

Story Continued Below

With all the infighting and intraparty intrigue in recent weeks — most recently over the prospect of impeaching the president — many Democrats in the states are beginning to worry the party is losing its grip on its message, potentially paving the way to Donald Trump’s reelection.

The anxiety reverberated far from Washington this week, as the nation’s governors gathered here for their annual summer meeting.

“Nationally, the focus has been on last week’s hearings and quote-unquote oversight, the question of impeachment, the effectiveness of Trump to make it about … the four [congresswomen who constitute the “squad”],” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday. “That’s been the zeitgeist, and so Trump being the master of deflection and distraction … it’s been hard for the Democrats to sort of hold that message.”

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak — the governor of an early primary state and a potential battleground in the general election — said that going into 2020, his constituents “want to look forward, and how are we going to make their lives better.”

And Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, when asked if impeachment talks are beneficial for Democrats politically, said, “We should be focused on what Americans care about and what Oregonians, for me, care about, right? Making sure we have good quality jobs, that we have an education system we can be proud of and that everyone in the state has access to health care. … We saw in 2018 that when we talked about health care, we won, and we won handily. I mean, we kicked their butts.”

For Democrats attempting to focus the electorate’s attention on health care and economic positions popular with general election voters,a second round of presidential primary debates next week is likely to add to their frustration. The party’s sprawling field of presidential candidates are outbidding each other with increasingly liberal positions on impeachment, criminal justice and immigration that are being demanded by the party’s base.

In the run-up to the debates in her state, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cautioned that Democrats’ “strength is on the dinner-table issues.” The party’s presidential candidates, she said, “should stay focused, I think, on solutions that really improve people’s lives.”

She said, “In this environment, with all the social media and all the stuff coming out of Washington, D.C., it’s so easy to get distracted by the tweet of the day.”

For several days at the National Governors Association meeting, Democratic and Republican governors touted bipartisan work in the states on the economy and other issues, while Democrats labored to keep a heavy focus on health care. But the fallout from special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony on Russian interference in the 2016 election hung heavily over the proceedings.

Looking at Washington, a top adviser to one Democratic governor said, “The feeling here is that everybody just needs to get on the same fucking page.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who first called two years ago for Trump’s impeachment, said in an interview that, for tactical reasons, he is no longer certain if Democrats should pursue impeachment.

“I think that we’re now a year and a quarter away from the general election, and so I think there is a question, could you actually accomplish the goal of removing the president by impeachment before he would be removed by virtue of the election,” Pritzker said. “It’s a question of timing: How long would that take, how effective would that be?”

Trump’s public approval rating remains relatively low, and most Democratic governors remain confident that once the primary consolidates around a handful of candidates, it will present a more unified vision.

Democratic governors are not in lockstep — ideologically or on impeachment. Their degrees of concern about the state of the party’s messaging vary.Maine Gov. Janet Mills said the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is so serious that it is “an issue that cannot be dropped,” while Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said Democrats “can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Newsom said Democrats are “well positioned to pivot,” and Pritzker said the 2020 Democratic primary field, though “a cacophony at the moment” will re-focus once the field narrows.

“Then I think we should be asking the question are we articulating the message properly,” he said. “And, I believe that we will.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said that in confronting Trump, whom he called a “master messenger,” Democrats “have to have that capacity, as we do in Minnesota, to multi-task, to not normalize that behavior.”

With Trump attacking the four high-profile progressive congresswomen who make up the “Squad” — tweeting that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts should “go back�� to the “crime infested places” they came from — Walz said, “It’s a fine line. Because if you all of a sudden say, ‘You know, I don’t have time for this. I need to focus on roads.’ Really, you don’t have time to address racism? You don’t have time to address interference in our elections?”

The first primary debates last month laid bare how fractured the Democratic Party remains, with significant ideological disagreements not only about health care, but also immigration and criminal justice reform — issues Trump is already signaling he’ll leverage inhis re-election effort. A Fox News poll this week found Democratic primary voters’ support for health care for undocumented immigrants and decriminalizing crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are opposed by a majority of the electorate.

Trump is pushing to revive the federal death penalty the same week former Vice President Joe Biden reversed his decades-old position and came out against capital punishment. The entire field, minus Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, opposes the death penalty, which some Democrats fear the president could exploit in the general election. He is also ramping up his rhetoric on immigration.

In the midterms, Democrats were able to blunt Trump’s immigration assault with House candidates who knew the attack was coming and responded with strongly-worded statements centered on protecting American security. Now, the national immigration debate around the Democratic primary is being waged in a way some in the party worry will heavily favor Trump, as candidates debate decriminalizing border crossings.

A recent poll by a leading centrist think tank found that less than three in 10 Democratic primary voters support Abolishing ICE. But 64% of those who tweet at least once a day do. The alarm for Democrats is that the gulf between those presidential primary voters and the general public is also quite deep, said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at the Third Way.

“If it sounds like Donald Trump is the only one who cares about keeping our country safe, that’s bad politics by Democrats,” Erickson said. “What voters want to know is that Democrats also care about knowing who is coming into our country and following the laws and making sure it’s a not a free for all. But that part is much more difficult in a Democratic primary.”

Between private dinners, shows and a rodeo in Salt Lake, the Democratic governors’ concerns about the party’s discipline ahead of 2020 echoed among moderates and progressives alike. In part, this is because Democrats have seen the damage that Republicans can still wreak on their agenda — either federally or by Republican legislative minorities in states that Democrats carried last year.

Democratic governors this week were discussing contingency plans in case a court ruling challenging former President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul is upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In Nevada, where Democrats won the governorship and large majorities in the legislature in 2018, Republicans this month filed litigation challenging a tax extension worth about $100 million. And in Oregon, Brown remained furious about the dramatic episode this year in which Republican lawmakers fled the state to block a vote on major climate legislation.

“With the current occupant in the White House, it’s really clear that all types of misbehavior are being tolerated,” Brown said, calling her state’s Republican walkout a “subversion of democracy.”

She said Republicans’ “actions will haunt them over the next decade.” When asked if she planned to veto bills in retribution, Brown said, “I will just say … revenge is a dish best served cold and slowly.”

With Trump waging war on America’s legal and intelligence communities to help undermine public opinion of the Mueller probe and his dialing up the rhetoric around illegal immigration, the deeply divisive and often personal partisan rancor that has marked his tenure in Washington is bleeding into the states. Along with a stalemate on an immigration solution, spiraling federal debt and a lack of progress on fixing America’s infrastructure has added to the dysfunction.

“At the state and local level, usually some votes are easy to get through — those of a nonpartisan nature, or more community focused,” said Tom McMahon, a political consultant in Washington who served as executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “The nature of the political environment today is every vote has a political slant to it that makes everything more complicated. Everything is viewed though a political lens. That’s alarming. How do you start bringing that rhetoric down?”

For Democrats, it’s easy to fall into a false choice between mobilization and persuasion, said David Heifetz of New Politics, a bipartisan group focused on training and messaging among candidates with military and intelligence backgrounds.

“It’s important to remind people that Twitter isn’t real life,” he said as political fallout from Mueller’s testimony ricocheted across the Capitol. “And to remember that you still need to meet people where they are and where their lives are and not get caught up in all the day to day.”

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#Foreign #Politics #reelection #Trump