"They don’t think Sanders can win — and they may in fact be wrong about that — but they know what SPW can do if she ends up with the power to do it."

It's good, once in a while, to see that there are Bernie Sanders supporters who aren't the kind of paranoia, rumor absorbing idiots, the kind who are buying those conspiracies, created for the target audience of the conspiracy minded  play-lefty play lefty media.  In my link-following yesterday, somewhere, I can't find it in my history, I came across a piece in which a bunch of Iowa Bernie supporters of what one hopes is a more normal kind were asked if they'ed support another of the candidates and only one of them said no.  I was a little taken aback to have a few of them say their second choice is the bizarre and Putinesque conspiracy minded Tulsi Gabbard but it was nice to know that not all Bernie fans are Bernie or Busters.  Only the stupidest ones and the ones who have a financial stake in ginning up their paranoid fantasies. 

I think this cycle has made me see something I should have noticed in years past, just how much of the play-lefty media lives, maybe in some cases even thrives on pushing paranoid fantasies as much as the far-right media does.  I have certainly seen even some of the less prone to that go whole hog on the paranoid conspriacy pushing in relation to the Iowa caucus, just like they did around the disasterous Nevada caucus last time.  Caucuses were, I am fully convnced, designed by landed gentry as a way of trying to exert pressure on the common people as they started getting what was, at least, a form of voting.  Making them do so in public where the local squire or other aristocrat could find out who voted how was one of the more effective means of preventing democracy, what the aristocratic founders did through the Senate and the abomination of the Electoral College, the reason that both Bush II and Trump took the presidency.

Perhaps I'll be able to look into the primary literature around the origins and continuation of that anti-democratic abomination.  There's really no other word for it than that one.  

Caucuses are guaranteed to be an anti-democratic mess, prone to manipulation - as Bernie Sanders bragged about doing in 1988 - and, it's now clear, even that old hand at caucus rigging will use his own tool to gin up conspiracy theories in the way so common in the history of American Marxism and anarchism and play-leftism, in general.  

I have also come to see that a considerable part of the play-lefty media depends on keeping their audience coming back for more like reality-show or soap opera or supermarket tabloid producers and publishers do.  Their audience are children who like excitement caring little to nothing if what they're pushing is real or useful or damaging fiction.  

That's another reason to get rid of them.  If they were gotten rid of the play-left like Majority Report and The Young Turks or the dimwitted dolly I came across yesterday who is trying to start another of the ever metastasizing Youtube-Patreon channells that are like a cancer on the left would have a lot lest to make hay for their never-will-be-president cult figure and hero and to damage the real left's chances.   

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Who is the only one of the top four candidates whose campaign came out of that banjaxed Iowa system without complaining about it, conjuring up conspiracy theories, or giving vainglorious victory speeches?

As I mentioned before a number of those lost me as a listener and reader when the Bernie Bots among them started attacking the best candidate in the race, Elizabeth Warren.  A lot of that attack was not only for the stupidity of promoting Sanders - a man who will never be president - but it was obviously sexist.  Though it's hard to know if the sexism was felt or if it was just another tool they'd be willing to go to for their pipe dream of having a quasi-Marxist as president - where he'd face a Congress and courts and a mass media who were not even semi-demi-quasi-Marxists so he would be guaranteed to be more useful for mounting a billionaire financed attack worse than the one they used to emasculate Obama and put the Congress back into fascist hands. 

As the generally estimable Charles Pierce noted, the media is doing its best to turn Elizabeth Warren into a non-person by pretending she doesn't exist.  I agree with just about everything he said on that a couple of days back. I'm going to repost most of it.  

After talking about the infamous incident where Mitch Putin's Bitch McConnell silenced her from reading a letter of Corretta Scott King on the Senate Floor, Charles Pierce said:

On the third anniversary of that singular moment, I had to hear Donny Deutsch in Morning Joe dismiss Warren as “strident.” For the record, all the members of the MJ crew, male and female, seem to have a bug the size of a Land Rover up their collective arse about SPW — which leads me to believe that the elite political press learned sweet fck-all in 2016. Every regular at this shebeen knows by now that I hold SPW in great political and personal affection. However, that doesn’t enter into the fact that she has been virtually disappeared since Iowa ended, assuming of course that it has. She outperformed her poll numbers, beat a former vice-president like a drum, and finished a solid third in a race of which we were told relentlessly would produce “three” tickets out. Until, I guess, she won one of them.

A cable chyron said it all — “Sanders, Buttigieg tied. Biden Fourth.” What exactly was the value of that ticket? Moreover, it should bother everyone that the same pejoratives used on Hillary Rodham Clinton — schoolmarmish, strident, unlikeable — are being used now to minimize SPW as a candidate. They are radically different people, although I don’t know HRC as well as I know SPW. But I know them well enough to know that their strengths and flaws are not identical, unless you want them to be. And if Donny Deutsch is nervous about women who are smarter than he is, he at least ought to be more imaginative in how he shows it. (The same stuff also has been aimed at Amy Klobuchar, but in a less concentrated form, probably because she hasn’t cracked double digits in the polls yet. But you wait. If she gains traction, Amy The Boss From Hell will reappear.) But I believe that the disappearing of SPW has more to it than sexism. I think the money power, including those elements of it that own media conglomerates, see her as a genuine threat. Unlike Bernie Sanders, whom they feel they can pink-bait out of contention, Warren knows their tricks and traps better than they know them. How do you think Mike Bloomberg or the powers at Comcast feel about her detailed plan to crack monopolies in our current economy? They don’t think Sanders can win — and they may in fact be wrong about that — but they know what SPW can do if she ends up with the power to do it.

As for the Democratic Party, well, who is the only one of the top four candidates whose campaign came out of that banjaxed Iowa system without complaining about it, conjuring up conspiracy theories, or giving vainglorious victory speeches? Hint: it was the campaign that quietly offered it help to try and fix the mess without trying to take political advantage of it. And it persists.