The mud from Sanders' most juvenile supporters has been all over the media, the internet. Salon - which its former writer, Joan Walsh calls a "Sanders fanzine" - has been full of examples for the entire election season. It isn't alone, AlterNet, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, In These Times, etc. have all heaped garbage on Hillary Clinton. When you add in their comment sections, you can add the most outrageous of outright lies and Republican talking points. Since his bad performance in the Daily News interview and the obvious conclusion that he has no plan for doing what he proposes, of making it law, he has taken the low road, himself, I would imagine out of anger at having that pointed out. He apparently is too thin skinned to be able to take that level of mild criticism
Sanders was never a member of the party until last November. At first I thought his campaign was what it was sold as being, an attempt to force the discussion to the left. Until about March I thought that was what it was. I learned at the caucus in my state, Maine, which went heavily for Sanders that that isn't what his "movement" is about. As soon as I smelled the potential of yet another disastrous Nader style spoiler effort I opted to not be a part of it and supported Hillary Clinton.
I started out being mildly supportive of what Sanders signaled he was doing by his symbolic run to being increasingly unsupportive of it. One thing that has come out in watching Sanders and his chosen team is that he doesn't have the temperament, the judgement, the maturity or the character to lead a movement. Believe me, I've seen supposed movements of the left come and go, they all announce themselves as being a lasting change, a "revolution" in American politics, they always fizzle when the leader acts as Sanders has the past three months. With his behavior in May, Sanders has proven that he doesn't have what it takes to lead a productive and successful movement, never mind a "revolution" . That takes a Martin Luther King jr. not an early 1970s era "revolutionary" babbler and blackmailer. It was the c.70's style "revolutionaries" that enabled Republican-fascists from Nixon to Bush II and the tea-partiers, I didn't need to be part of them enabling the Trumps and Cruzes now.
I would have no problem with Sanders setting reasonable conditions for his full support of Hillary Clinton. His demand that he gets to hijack the party isn't reasonable. But it would have to be his FULL SUPPORT. I would have no problem with replacing Wasserman Schultz, she's been really bad at her job. I do have the strongest objection to the demand that people like Barney Frank and Daniel Malloy - two strong, effective and loyal DEMOCRATIC leaders be removed from their leadership roles as Tad Devine has more or less demanded. I hope one of the consequences of this campaign is that Democrats boycott Devine's PR operation. He deserves to lose business over what he's doing.
I would, actually, be in favor of Sanders insisting that she agree to not appoint anyone from the Geithner-Summers-Rubin school of finance to any position. Those idiots should be kept from any position in any Democratic administration because they are incompetent and corrupt. But any such agreement between them should be confidential, something I have no confidence in the Sanders camp to honor.
But Sanders would be in a lot better position to make demands if he hadn't been such a total jerk this past several months. And that goes ten times for his supporters, from his inner circle of men down to the total jerks on the blogs, the webazines and the magazines. I'm fed up with them even more than I'm fed up with Bernie and after this week, I wish he had never started this.
Got an excellent example in my comments, taken directly from Sanders' own website. Seems his bill to keep banks from being too big to fail is 4 pages long and consists of the legal authority to shut down such banks when a commission says so.
ReplyDeleteHow to shut them down, how to operate the bank so it's closure isn't a financial catastrophe (which is what Bush and Obama were worried about 8 years ago), how to reduce the size of the bank, etc.? Well, that's the "and then a miracle occurs" part of the legislation. Apparently long, complex legislation that would actually give a government agency not only clear authority but clear guidance on what to do (or we could wait 3 years for the rules making process to function, and that might be optimistically swift) is arcane and and non-transparent, and as we all know, "democracy" is as clear as glass and all procedures have to be written in rules as plain as a child's primer.
Or something.
Honestly, this guy has been in the legislature for 30+ years, and he doesn't know any better than that? There's a reason Barney Frank has his name on legislation and Sanders doesn't. I got enough of ideology ruling over practicality with W. Why would I want that repeated, this time from the "left"?
It's one of my take-aways from seeing Bernie Sanders on a national stage that he was OK as a Senatorial gadfly, he never really had to produce anything like a law on his own. I re-read the transcript of the Daily News interview and it really was stunning how vague he was when pressed on exactly how he would do anything he proposed.
DeleteI think the past two months have been an expression of his fury over the reaction to that interview.
I can understand how hard it is for his supporters to face that, like everyone, Sanders has his limits and as long as those weren't tested he could be a rhetorical hero. But governing is about more than rhetoric. I think this is the difference between people who make mature political decisions in line with reality and the play-left. I used to think Sanders was part of the real instead of the play-left, that's something that was wishful thinking.