I knew it would be a mistake to look at Salon this morning, they've been mostly Hatin' on Hillary all the time and this morning is no different. If they are going to continue with a de facto endorsement of Donald Trump by attacking the nominee of the Democratic party they should be honest about it. And, today, it's certain that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, she has a huge lead in votes by The People and Bernie Sanders' supporters are the ones who are contemplating leveraging super-delegates as a path to power, something they denounced furiously as recently as two weeks ago.
Molly Ivins once said that everyone who goes to Washington, DC eventually ends up saying the same thing, I think there's a similar phenomenon among those people and institutions based in San Francisco. I have always pretty much figured it was a Lotus land of the play-left where people made a determined effort to not only refuse to face reality but to reject the real world in favor of a group delusion. I remember how many of those play-leftists love to go online and hate on Nancy Pelosi who has, to day, in fact, been the person farthest to the left of anyone who has ever held leadership of any branch of government. I remember them cheering on Cindy Sheehan's misguided, grief informed run against her from many an online venue of the play-left. If you want to see what the results of such stuff is, look who took the gavel from her after 2010.
It's time for Bernie Sanders to put on his big-boy pants and face the fact that his ONLY hope of having any influence in making law and policy in the future lies in him not only endorsing but vigorously supporting the election of Hillary Clinton and Democrats to the Congress and in state races. If he has a role in electing Democrats, he can turn that into influence. If he doesn't do that and Hillary Clinton wins without his support, he is irrelevant and has burned his bridges with other Democrats. If she wins and has to face a Republican Congress, then stalemate continues. If she loses without his vigorous support, asking his supporters to vote for her, he earns infamy instead of influence. He will join the names of Eugene McCarthy and Ralph Nader as people who enabled the worst people to gain power.
Having been fed up with the play-left for a long time, who are neither especially left if left is about doing anything in reality instead of let's pretend fantasy nor anywhere near as strong a force as they like to pretend, I'm not going to bet on anything good happening. I hope to be pleasantly surprised but I am not holding my breath.
The left, pretty much in the political wilderness for the past fifty years, should be wondering just why, if they have such great ideas, they haven't found any success in gaining real power and making real change. Why don't The People agree with their ideas? I've spent a lot of time looking at the culture of the so-called left, from the academic irrelevancy of the Left Forum to its popular venues and its cherished beliefs and can see lots to not like. I can see a lot in that which is, in fact, not supportive of democracy, equality and an effective extension and protection of rights. Look at how many of them, in the face of a century of Communist governments being some of the most horrifically and homicidally oppressive governments in the human history, hanker after some fantasy of Marxism. Look at how the rest of us are supposedly obligated to pretend they aren't what one European journalist called "red fascists". Look at how we are supposed to lionize if not deify Stalinists, Maoits, etc. who were lying about the mass killings of tens and scores of millions as those mass murders were happening.
For crying out loud, even the Communists aren't Marxists anymore, look at China.
And it's a lot more serious than the lunatic position that Marxism holds in the culture of the left, today, in 2016, a century after the disaster that was the Russian Revolution. Look at how even the commercial leftist media, such as Salon, instinctively attacks the least bad person who WILL, in fact, become president. As I write this there are a handful of articles up attacking Hillary Clinton who is the only person standing between the United States and a nightmare Republican administration on the level of Bush II if not worse. Thomas Frank has one up there, for Pete's sake.
According to Politico, a Sanders strategist says their only hope is to get the "super delegates" to vote for Sanders despite Hillary having the lead in delegates because of "momentum."
ReplyDeleteWhich is really funny, since Sanders supporters were bitching about how unfair the "super delegates" system is, when they were all pledged to Hillary.
My favorite bit is how "corrupt" Clinton is, as if Sanders was a choir boy and this was an election between Jesus and Satan. Honestly, the commenters at Salon are the worst.....
And Frank's article was an excerpt from a book which apparently re-hashes all the liberal complaints with the Clinton Administration.
ReplyDeleteHe presents them sui generis, as if he just discovered them. I remember having those discussions, on the very same points, when Clinton was in office.
Maybe I'm just that much older than Frank. More and more the "young" people I encounter on-line seem to think history began shortly after they started paying attention, and they think they've discovered fire and invented the wheel.