9 thoughts on “The Bernie Insurgency”

  2. Bernie Sanders says that team is a failure, even a fraud. It’s not truly “progressive.” It’s a bunch of sellouts. It hasn’t taken us to the promised land of Denmark.

    LOL. The USA as Denmark.

    These people are so self-absorbed and self-congratulatory that they do not even conceive of themselves as an establishment. When Sanders raised the issue during the Democratic debate, Clinton responded by saying she can’t be establishment because she’s a woman.

    Pure comedy gold. If anyone hasn’t yet seen this all-caps wander through la-la land, it’s recommended. A small taste:

    YOU DON’T LIKE THAT SHE PLAYS THE GAME? THAT SHE HAS TIES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT? FOR ONE THING, THAT’S HOW S*** F*****G GETS DONE. FOR THE OTHER THING, THE BIGGEST THING, A WOMAN DOESN’T GET THE F*****G OPTION *NOT* TO PLAY THE GAME.

    Along with providing tools, he’s also providing heaping piles of entertainment.

  3. I can’t find it right now to either link or paste an excerpt, but was it Glenn Reynolds who posted this long list from the Sanders campaign regarding how Hillary Clinton is against “progressive” positions on everything from Iraq to Healthcare.

    After reading that list I thought to myself, “Who knew? If these are her positions on the issues of the day, I am thinking I should vote for her. . .”

  5. Sanders is IMHO not the favorite to win the D nomination, but, there’s a risk of it happening, especially given Clinton’s e-mail problem.

    Sure, in some ways this would be a gift to the Republicans. However, let’s not forget the Republicans’ unrivaled ability to snatch defeat from the looming jaws of victory. The Republicans are very, very capable of losing in November, even to Sanders. How? A sure-fire way is to nominate an establishment hack in this anti-establishment year and thus depress R turnout in November. Nominating Bush or Rubio would be exactly this kind of blunder.

    So, while I’m delighted to see the mess on the left, I’m also seeing it on the other side of the aisle – a looming train wreck. Even if we all decide to ignore the immigration/amnesty issue, just how well do you think November would go if the Republican candidate is a guy who backs crony capitalist sugar subsidies, who backed Hillary and Obama’s disastrous Arab spring, war on Libya, and ouster of Mubarak, and is proposing a massive new entitlement program? Remember Obama saying often in the 2012 race how Obamacare was modeled on Romneycare, and how that hurt Romney regarding R turnout? Well, just imagine what a D, especially Sanders, could do with the above list against Rubio. To give just one example, Sanders was against Hilary’s disastrous war on Libya, a war most Republicans condemn her for due to the outcome that any idiot could see coming, but Rubio, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, publicly supported and also pressed for as a senator.

    Rubio, as a member of the foreign relations committee, sent a letter to Reid and McConnell, as well as a CC to his then-senator friend John Kerry, on March 30th, 2011. I’ll quote a bit of it below, verbatim, and anyone interested can follow the link at the bottom to the rest. (it’s too long to past in in full here).

    “Dear Senators Reid and McConnell:

    I am writing to seek your support for bringing a bi-partisan resolution to the Senate floor authorizing the President’s decision to participate in allied military action in Libya.

    Furthermore, this resolution should also state that removing Muammar Qaddafi from power is in our national interest and therefore should authorize the President to accomplish this goal. To that end, the resolution should urge the President to immediately recognize the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government in Libya.”
    http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=6e2704bf-b318-4ea4-a74d-3added704679

    As an aside, if the Transitional National Council Rubio refers to rings a bell, it’s because of its acknowledged links, known at the time of Rubio’s letter (though evidently not to Rubio), to Al Queda. It was over their headquarters in Benghazi that the black flag of Al Queda was flown that November.

  6. What if it’s Bernie and the Democratic establishment. There are plenty of Free Stuff, Free from Brains drones out there, particularly among the millennials.

  7. Actually, according to the former co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, the late Michael Harrington, the U.S. is already the most socialist country in the world. To wit:

    Robert MacNeil: Finally, tonight, we remember political activist Michael Harrington, who died yesterday — he was 61 years old. Harrington began his career as a leftist political organizer, author, lecturer, and teacher in the early 50’s. He became co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1983. Among his books was The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962 — it was widely viewed as helping set the scene for the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. I spoke with Harrington a year ago, when he was already suffering from the cancer that led to his death. I asked why he thought socialism had never caught on in the United States.

    Michael Harrington: I think that’s very complicated, but to just tick off a number of the reasons:

    Number one, we’re a presidential country, not a parliamentary country. In Canada, so much like us, there’s a socialist party which in the polls right now is at about 28-29 percent, which has been 20 percent or better for years. In part that’s because in Canada you can vote for your socialist candidate for Parliament, and he or she can then affect the Executive IN the Parliament.

    Number two. Because the United States in the period when most European workers were becoming socialist, which was the period roughly from 1880 to 1914 — in the United States that was the period in which it was more important that you were Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, white or black, Italian, Irish, etc. That is to say, our race, our ethnicity, all of those complexities made it difficult to develop a class consciousness when people were much more ethnically and religiously and racially conscious.

    Finally, the most complex of all, in my opinion. There’s a sense in which I think America is the most socialist country on the face of the earth RIGHT NOW — which is one of the reasons we don’t have a socialist movement. By that I mean that the United States I think has always been one of the most egalitarian, open, non-deferential societies. We’ve never had any real Tories — any real conservatives — in America. One of the reasons that Canada has a socialist movement is that our Tories went to Canada after the Revolution, and sat around and told the workers that they were human refuse — that they were no good! And one of the things that generates socialist consciousness is having a bunch of upper-class snobs trying to push people down — we’ve never had it. And, I think, in a crazy way — socially — I’ve always thought that America is really much more socialist than Sweden!

    (PBS MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, Robert MacNeil’s interview with Michael Harrington, broadcast August 2, 1989; transcribed by me)

  8. Getting serious about Bernie Sanders, my biggest knock on him is the exclusionary nature of his universe and his scolding tone, even towards people he might want to include in his coalition.

    Consider immigration. He could say something to the effect that “what Trump’s got right” is that non-enforcement of immigration law is not only undermining the wages of people already here, inclusive of black, white, and Hispanic, but it creates license to exploit workers coming here in violation of immigration law. He could go on to “signal” his continued membership in the Progressive tribe by saying that where his agreement with Mr. Trump stops is an “utterly unworkable not only to say heart-less plan to deport everybody.” I guess Bernie Sanders would at that point get booed off the stage at that point for channeling John Kasich?.

    Senator Sanders is in full “what’s the matter with Kansas” mode that many working-class voters are not with him and his Progressive allies because they are clinging to not not-having children, gas guzzling light-duty trucks, guns, religion, protecting America by fighting its overseas enemies, and so on.

    His “free stuff” and “tax the Wall Street fat cats” gospel could attract, is attracting many people aligned with the above-mentioned concerns, but the granola-crunching Ben-and-Jerry-loving Whole-Foods shopping supporters at his rallies might chase that element of his coalition away.

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