If you want to know what's wrong with #BernieOrBust, that will come when the "bust" part of that empty slogan kicks in.
And it busts hardest on poor folks, members of minority groups, women (especially those who aren't affluent). I doubt that the Ben or Jerry class will find it seriously impacts their lifestyle.
I will support Bernie Sanders if he is the nominee of my party but I think his chance of becoming president is far smaller than the chance that Hillary Clinton will be president. I don't believe the Berniebot talking point that the polls show he's more electable than she is, look at how right the polls were this week.
If he is the nominee the hate the media unleashed on George McGovern will look like nothing. The cabloid Republican echo chamber hadn't been invented yet and there were still broadcasting standards and equal time provisions in place. That is what Bernie Sanders will be up against if he is the nominee, by November he will be as hated as Hillary Clinton has been made by the media in the wake of Reagan and the free-speech industry destroying the requirement that media serve the public instead of screwing it.
I don't think Hillary Clinton is a paragon of truth, justice, or even honesty, but the "untrustworthy" meme that is attached to her like a second skin is entirely the product of the Republican echo chamber. She still carries the taint of the anti-Clinton smear machine which targeted her husband (and her) relentlessly, bringing (as Gene Lyons so ably described) Arkansas politics to the national stage (with the complicity of a very gullible NYT).
ReplyDeletePeople who know nothing about her think her guilty of some perfidy against the public trust because of the name "Clinton." Imagine what they would do to Sanders.
I can imagine the Republicans have a collection of quotes and videos of anything Sanders has ever said that can be turned into a charge of Marxism and I'll bet that there is plenty of that in his past. He had a life before he got elected to congress. I doubt they'll be able to make hay out of his personal conduct but who knows what they'll whip up. There doesn't have to be any there there for them to make it the cabloid driven obsession that could sink him in the general election.
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