Does The Left Ever Need New Journalists And Responsible Publishers

Joel Bleifuss the editor and publisher of In These Times is really big on Bernie Sanders "raising hell" at the Democratic Convention.   And he's really big on Bernie Sanders acting as vindictively against his critics as he wants to be, no matter how petty.   In one of the most outrageous of those instances, he gives an excuse for him going after Barney Frank because Frank has been a critic of Bernie Sanders.  The extent to which Bliefuss goes to make his case is quite ridiculous.

Unfortunately, relations between Sanders and the party elites again soured when Wasserman Schultz rejected Sanders’ petition to, among other things, replace Clinton partisan Barney Frank as the co-chair of the DNC’s Standing Rules Committee, the all-important body that decides how the convention will be conducted. For instance, will the names of the delegates and how they voted be tallied for the public record? 

Well, first, for Sanders who was too stuck-up to join the Democratic Party until he decided he deserved its nomination for president, at the age of 74, to call for the ousting of one of the most prominent and most liberal of our office holders - who has been an active Democrat his entire life - is pretty outrageous.  And it's outrageous raised to the fifth power for him to try to take over the Rules Committee as his surrogates and supporters are threatening it with Trumpian style disruption at the convention if he doesn't get his way.  Especially after what happened in Nevada.  Apparently such people are nostalgic for Chicago 1968, the year that gave us Nixon and the beginning of the end for the American left.   Bleifuss is an idiot or a spoiled brat if he thinks any responsible person would just cave in to that demand.  I really don't like Debbie Wasserman Schultz but I'd never give in to Sanders on that, either.

His argument gets even stupider.

Recall the 2012 convention, when it took three voice votes before the addled convention floor chair, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, decided the loudest cohort were those who endorsed the AIPAC-supported vision of an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A roll-call vote would have put the superdelegates, many of them elected office holders, on the record. 

Un, no I don't remember that and I was paying attention.  And I doubt anyone else does but the kind of incredibly petty and picayune kind of lefty who would hold a grudge over some meaningless procedure over some meaningless, sub-symbolic act at some meeting that never had a single result in real life, the kind of guy who cherishes that kind of event because they keep it ready to pull out when they've got nothin' to make an argument from.  Who in the world cares what the 2012 convention did about "an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel"?   But to use that as an argument for caving into Bernie Sanders score settling to mount a prelude to a food fight is about as stupid a thing as I've read this year.

Apparently, the great affront - or at least the excuse for one - that Sanders took is over a remark Frank made in a well-circulated interview with Slate.

Do you think she should release her Wall Street speeches?

- Yeah, but I don’t think anybody is really against her because she won’t. By the way, I think Sanders has been outrageously McCarthyite on that.

McCarthyite?

- Yes, I saw one commercial that said the big companies weren’t punished. Why? Well, maybe it’s because Hillary is getting speaking fees. So the secretary of state should have been indicting people? I mean, yes, McCarthyite in the sense that it’s guilt by association. He complains about what she did with regards to all this money stuff. Where’s the beef of that?

OK—

- What Sanders basically says is, “They’re trying to bribe you.” Well what do they get for money? He shows nothing.

Um.... a bit strong of a word to use, perhaps,  "McCarthyite"?  But, actually,  Barney Frank's point is valid.  If you're going to accuse someone of being corrupted, of having your acts in public office influenced by a payment YOU'VE GOT TO SHOW WHAT WAS GIVEN FOR THE MONEY.   Sanders hasn't done that and neither have his surrogates or anyone else.  So, yes, to make that accusation without doing that is reminiscent of the Senator from Wisconsin's MO.   It is, exactly, the kind of thing that has been part of the McCarthyite campaign of innuendo and outright and outrageous lies made against Hillary Clinton for decades.   Maybe, considering it's the former member delegate to the Socialist Workers Party (is that the only party he'd ever been a member of before last year?) who is practicing that tactic, what he did would be more appropriately called "Trotskyite" or, the equivalent, "Stalinist" because it was universally practiced among those guys, the use of innuendo instead of fact to attack an opponent.  The "far left" of which Sanders has been a part is really not much different from the far right in some basic practices.

The behavior of the lefty magazines this year is really amazingly irresponsible, as I will never stop to point out, with the memories of Bush II -Cheney regime fresh in our memory.  And not just this year, I've been reading this kind of stuff in the same magazines since before 1968.  And nothing, nothing at all has taught them to do any better than this.   As well as needing a new left, we need a rational and responsible lefty media and we are plum out of those.   Cenk Uygur ain't it.