I remember being told in 2016 that making the argument for Hillary Rodham Clinton on the basis of keeping any Republican president away from the federal judiciary was tantamount to blackmail. Interestingly, the refutation to this nonsense will take place in real time over the next four decades.
That's the estimable Charles Pierce at the end of a piece documenting the young legal hacks and ideological thugs that the Trump regime and the Republican-fascists in the Senate are putting on federal courts, the Federalist-fascists, American Enterprise Institute doing the selection for them. It's a line I heard from Greens and their like in the past, in the last election it was Bernie Sanders' campaign and his cult I heard it from. That's the kind of idiocy the play-left cooks up as slogans, "blackmail" in response to reality.
Contained within the the piece by Pierce is this relevant passage in describing the history of the young right wing hack Kenneth Lee
After law school, the nominee advised Republicans to “appropriate the language and logic of liberals’ most sacred shibboleth: affirmative action,” in order to obtain better representation of Republicans and Christian conservatives at universities, in a 2002 article in The American Enterprise. Lee, who has been tapped for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit based in California, also wrote in favor of denying felons voting rights and critiqued U.S. immigration policy.
That would be exactly how the Republican-fascists on Republican courts from the time of Warren Burger to Rehnquist to Roberts have adopted liberals' language and logic on such things as free-speech, free press to enable the domination of our media and, so politics by billionaires domestic, and now foreign. I will give them this, Republican-fascists, through their well endowed and financed funding of fascist intellectuals have been a lot smarter at stealing such language and turning it on the heirs of the creators of that language.
The idiocy of the left is a real problem for the left, there is no greater idiocy than that which comes from the non-Democratic left which, in most cases, is the play left, the left of those who are the centers of cults of personality who don't want to share power and the focus of attention which would come with being members of a party. That, I have concluded is the explanation of why Bernie Sanders will not really join the Democratic Party where he would be one of many prominent members, or why he wouldn't start his own party where he would have to share power and attention with other people within that party.
If you want to see more evidence that Sanders, once again, has no intention of remaining in the Democratic Party, he provided that, himself, because after he filed his intention to run for the Democratic nomination as president he filed papers to run for the Senate again in 2024 as an independent.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is officially running for two different federal offices under two different party labels. On Monday, Sanders filed for re-election to the Senate in 2024, listing his party as “independent.” Team Sanders said the filing was an automatic renewal of Sanders’ candidacy, a standard move for victorious congressional candidates ahead of anticipated reelection contests. That came a couple weeks after he threw his hat in the ring for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Certainly the history of Bernie Sanders "membership" in the Democratic Party, in 1989 (when he and his cult members joined "for one night") in 2016 and now, which he ended as soon as the fiction no longer was of use to him shows something about his insincerity as well as his ego and his hypocrisy every time he appeals to Democrats for their support in him gaining a nomination as a Democrat. What Bernie Sanders should be is the last straw before Democrats reserve the possibility of the nomination for president to those who are really Democrats. As with the Republican-fascists such as Kenneth Lee, there will be others who copy what Sanders has done, there will be such cult figures from the play left in the future, they're pretty much all the play-left ever produces.
I saw a tweet (and can't find it, now! Stupid internet browsing!) linked to an article about Bernie, pointing out he is and always has been "independent." Seems Bernie started a third political party in Vermont (IIRC), which he encouraged but never joined, preferring always to label himself an "independent."
ReplyDeleteMuch as I might prefer new ideas and maverick thinkers, two parties in America are the conditions that prevail. A President can't get anything done unless he has a party in Congress agreeing with him. Trump is not standing apart from the GOP declaring a plague on both their houses; he is, by all accounts, remaking it in his image, a transformation the GOP may not survive. Bloomberg, another tweet noted, wants to be asked to be the Democratic nominee (rather than soil himself with the hurly-burly of actually campaigning through the primaries),but I think of him as an "independent," too; certainly not someone with support in any major party that could translate to legislation in the Congress.
My biggest problem with Bernie is that he's just Trump from the left. He wants to be king, too, and get everybody to straighten up and do what Bernie says; except he won't have the death grip on the Democratic party base that Trump has (or the GOP thinks he has). He's a spoiler, nothing more, and there are reports his "Bernie Bros" are still complaining about Hillary and her supporters, and looking to fight 2016 again. The Democrats really, REALLY, don't need that.
I think national unity among Democrats is stronger than the horse-race narratives of the political press, so I don't see Bernie's supporters really having the clout they imagine they have. Polls show far less support in the country for Trump than pundits imagine he has; I think the same is true of Bernie, that the volunteers and donors he has are the extent of his support, not the tip of his iceberg. Still, we'll see.
I really don't think we need him, though. Although we tell American history in terms of individuals (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ), it's the other people who make government work. LBJ didn't declare new laws and regulations; he worked Congress hard to get laws like the Civil Rights Act and the VRA and a massive amount of social and scientific (NASA especially) legislation passed. Without him, that wouldn't have happened; but without Congress, none of those laws would exist.
We would do well to remember that.