The New York Times reports that the Pete Buttigieg campaign is done, and he is quitting after his poor showing in South Carolina. I can’t say that I’ll miss him.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Who cares. Andrew Yang has dropped out. I will not be voting.
Trump has not, I repeat, NOT dropped out, so you should vote for someone.
I’ll bet Andrew Yang will be voting for somebody. I won’t guess who, but I expect he still cares.
@ 1
Sorry, but you are no longer allowed to not care.
My guess is that Biden needs more votes on Tuesday; Buttigieg would be a young choice VP that would make sense for him. Otherwise, Pete could have simply waited two more days, without burning through a whole lot more cash. (Maybe a worse scenario: Bloomberg has purchased him for who knows what reason.)
So, if things go very badly, we may be dealing with up to sixteen more years of VP/President Mayor Pete. And then, in his mid 50s, he’d be a perfect fit for a Supreme Court seat, where he’ll stay for another two or three decades.
Or it could just be over. I really fucking hope it will just be over.
I couldn’t possibly vote for Trump; but it occurs to me that there might be one situation in which I’d seriously consider abstaining:
– Sanders has a majority of pledged delegates going into the convention, and
– the neolibs freak out and change the rules to allow superdelegates to vote on the first ballot thus giving the nomination to Biden.
That would leave me with no hope.
But even if Biden is the winner, and he wins fair and square, I’d hold my nose and vote against Trump.
Bye Pete, don’t call us, we’ll call you.
@1 lawdyme I’m sorry for the following expletive, but GROW THE FUCK UP. You were so invested in Yang that now that he’s gone you “don’t care anymore”. It’s that attitude that will guarantee a Trump re-election. I’m no Democrat, but the only way to win this is to keep the left united. I don’t get to vote in the Primary, but I damn well will be voting for the Democratic nominee. Not a single one of them is worse that Trump. While I prefer some over others, I won’t deny my vote.
lawdyme, if you chose to not vote you are little more than a petulant child holding your breath to get their way.
@PZ, one can dream, can’t one?
Note, I didn’t say wish, one wishes in one hand, shits in the other, we all know which hand will get filled and it ain’t the wish hand.
I may look into some green party candidates.
I can imagine Pete as Bernie’s VP: A young midwestern conservative. Good balance. Reassures the establishment, all that good stuff.
@lawdyme:
Do that!
Frankly, I consider the whole “you owe the Democratic Party your vote because they aren’t the Republican Party” stance repellent, and even if Sanders is the nominee, which is what I want, I would rather have people who don’t want Sanders or Trump vote 3rd party than stay home.
Oh, and incidentally: it’s not speculation; in his announcement to the press, Buttigieg said explicitly that he didn’t want to be the reason Sanders had enough momentum to win.
The Democratic Party is demonstrating right now that all the claims made about them are true: they really are as bad as the Republicans, just quieter. Look at all this fuss, being made basically to ensure that we won’t have a candidate who wants to give everybody healthcare and fix the environment. Biden and Bloomberg are basically on the level of cartoon villains, running explicitly to make the country’s problems impossible to solve, so that the rich can get even richer. Anybody who would vote for either one of them is outright evil, at this point.
A green party vote in the main presidential election is exactly the same as voting for Trump. Nice to know where you stand, that you are so ideologically ‘pure’ that you’d rather have have Trump rather than someone not perfect. Sounds like your ideology includes being a piece of a shit.
@10: All you’ll find there is a bunch of kooks, I’m afraid.
Gosh @1 , surely there are local candidates that you can support. No scoundrels to vote against? Abstension amounts to a vote for the villians. Voting is a duty. Its not easy! This particular election is important.
jack16
F***! would someone explain just how mayor Pete is so profoundly different from any or all of the other center-est candidates who are still or have been running this time, besides the fact that he is openly gay of course.
voting is a duty in a democratic republic not just a right won by blood sweat and tears over all these years.
not voting is a vote against the majority and the idea of a republic governed by the people in deference to who ever is in power. Self government is hard work it requires engagement and participation, paying taxes, jury duty, trying to understand the issues of the day and voting.
I am just one person I have one vote and one life which is taking place in the here and now. The political and social world is not how I would wish it. I can control myself only barely I will make my choice in the primary for who I think might strive toward a society and a government I would like to see. Whether they will be able to accomplish all of their aspirations depends on a lot of externals to the office of president.
the criminal now in office has got to go sooner then later.
uncle frogy
Apparently y’all need to adopt an idea from us Down Under:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage
dianne @11: Don’t put the closet conservative a heart attack away from being POTUS.
@16
He isn’t. All of our ‘centrist’ (or center-right in any same nation’s standards) candidates are hot garbage, and he’s no better. One less spoiled apple in the bunch.
billseymour @6: I’ve considered that scenario and if that happens, I think that I actually won’t vote. Because if the DNC is willing to do that just to keep Sanders from winning the nomination, democracy truly is dead and there’s no point in perpetuating the sham.
Look on the bright side – at least now he is no longer a going concern you can celebrate the fact that an openly gay person ran for president and that wasn’t an automatic disqualifier. It’s progress of a sort.
There seems to be a widespread assumption (not here) that Biden gets to “inherit” Buttigieg’s supporters. I doubt it’s true. Since, whatever your political beliefs, there was no rational reason at all to support Buttigieg – other, perhaps, than wanting to see an openly gay candidate do well – there’s no reason to expect his supporters to transfer preferentially to another “moderate” candidate.
I don’t know what is more ridiculous – the petulant whining or the cries about staying home/voting third party if your candidate is not nominated. All of you KNOW what is at stake – everything you claim to hold dear. If you aren’t willing to fight for what you believe in at the polls, you quite frankly deserve to get steamrolled and face the consequences of your inaction. This is your opportunity to tell the fascists ‘No more’. One candidate (R) is clearly worse then any of the others.
I get the feeling that many of you upthread have not been effected materially by this dumpster-fire of a Presidency. I could very well be wrong. But it sure would explain a lot of the posts above (and those that are certain to follow).
My worry is that this increases the odds of a contested primary. If that happens, the delegates are free to choose the president. Given that they’re chosen by the party, this may be Bloomberg’s best shot at the presidency.
unclefrogy@16–
Buttiegieg put a huge — and I mean HUGE — albatross around his neck while he was mayor of South Bend in the way he (1) pandered to racist cops and donors to sack the black police chief, (2) allowed real estate speculators to run rampant, and (3) did nothing to implement recommended homelessness reforms while homeless people were freezing to death. This is what makes him unacceptable to progressive voters, not his sexual orientation. This is not obscure knowledge.
If you’re American and leftist and anyone other than Sanders or, just possibly, Warren is the nominee, you ought to be voting for Trump.
Biden or any other centrist candidate will lock the genuine left out of power for the next 4-8 years while drastically reducing its energy to mobilise people for it, whereas another four years of Trump will harden and energise that energy while giving new leaders like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib time to establish themselves. Trump might be marginally worse in the short run, but they would be disastrous in the long run.
Down-ballot of course you need to move the needle as far left as you can. Real progress happens at the local level in any case. If as many cities and states move left as possible, they can provide a solid bulwark against the reaction at the federal level.
brikoleur@26,
Yes indeedy! Follow the successful strategy of the German Communist Party in focusing their attacks on the Social Democrats (“Social Fascists” as Stalin so rightly called them), and thus enabling Hitler to take and consolidate power, secure in the knowledge that The Revolution could not be far behind!
Unless you care for marginalized people of course. Every, and I do mean every, Democratic candidate is much, much better than Trump. All of the democratic candidates have flaws, but none of them would be anywhere remotely as bad as Trump.
Even if you don’t care about marginalized groups, you might want to think about the appointment of judges – Trump have already appointed a scary amount of judges, and if he gets 4 more years, the damage his appointees will do, will last a lifetime, if not longer.
@28 not true. Bloomberg is every bit as awful as Trump.
@27 If Trump had a tenth of Hitler’s organisational ability – hell, if he had a tenth of Mussolini’s organisational ability – then that would be a legitimate concern. As it is, the danger from the Democratic Party centre is far more pressing.
@28 I agree, in the short term the Democratic candidates would not be quite as bad as Trump if you only care about social justice as opposed to economic justice.
However, the long-term consequences would be far more dire, and moreover the political structure of the USA allows strong resistance against that kind of thing at the local level. If a city or a state declares that it’s not going to enforce ICE rules or is going to enforce anti-discrimination rules for businesses, there’s not a whole lot the federal government can do to stop them.
Brikoleur, you really are an idiot, aren’t you? Darth Cheeto doesn’t have to organize anything. He has people for that. He has the Heritage Foundation to recommend the worst people on Earth for lifetime appointments on the federal bench. He has Moscow Mitch and his fellow goons in the Senate to ram the appointments through sans question. He has Stephen Miller, wearing his human suit, to implement cruelty at the border.
And meanwhile, he provides the Realitiy-TV shitshow to distract the masses. How is it that those on the extreme left manage to be as clueless as the nazis on he right?
Oh. Bless your heart.
brikoleur:
For certain values of “Trump”, he does; he is basically a trollish figurehead for the Republican Party, happy feeding at the trough. You imagine he organises anything? :)
Heh. You pontificate, but you make no case for it, convincing or otherwise.
—
But I get you: gloom and doom!
@#23, velociraptor
Okay, let’s talk about this talking point for a moment, because there is a gaping hole in it.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is basically a neoliberal project championed by the right-of-center Democratic “Centrists” like Obama and the Clintons and Biden, specifically had terms in it which would permit corporations to nullify national laws. Since it was implemented as a treaty, such nullification would have been outside the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court — the Constitution says flat out that ratified treaties have equal weight with the Constitution or ratified Amendments. The process for nullification was laid out in the treaty, and the only body which would adjudicate whether a nullification was okay was to be made up of representatives from corporations — there would be no citizen or government involvement at all. And one of the reasons which was specifically listed as a potential justification for nullification was that a law would make it too difficult to turn a profit.
Now: Trump is evil and doing a lot of harm, but he has not, as of yet at least, managed to actually destroy the federal minimum wage, the family medical leave act, consumer product labelling laws, OSHA, the EPA, or the regulatory powers of the labor department. If the TPP were to be passed and ratified — which a Centrist Democrat pretty certainly would do if at all possible — then all of those things would be destroyed within a couple of years, and there would be no way to undo that without not just pulling out of the treaty but then getting Congress to re-pass the laws and the President to re-sign them. (And, of course, since they’d be new laws, our super-pro-corporate Supreme Court — even the supposedly liberal justices are very much corporate puppets — would be able to hear challenges.)
(It’s absolutely hilarious that the last time I pointed this out on this board, the defense from some delusional Hillary Clinton supporter was basically “oh, but surely they would never do that here”. Take a look at the last 4 years and tell me that there is anything that corporations and the right wing will not do. Amazon, just to give one example, doesn’t fear bad PR and would instantly challenge every labor law it could find.)
So: any Centrist Democrat will pretty certainly be at least as bad as Trump, just through one single policy which would destroy everything else.
@31 @32 Hey, since I’ve already got the extreme leftie badge, let me paraphrase some Chairman Mao at all y’all: “Lose land to preserve men, land can be retaken. Lose men to preserve land, men and land both lost.”
In this context, “Lose the presidency to preserve the movement, the presidency can be retaken; lose the movement to preserve the presidency, the movement and the presidency are both lost.”
~ * ~
The real danger is that when Trump eventually exits the scene one way or another, his successor will be a great deal more able. If at that point the best resistance the US can mount is what we’re seeing now, it’ll be a long, long time before the lights come back on. If the next president is a centrist Democrat, then that is a highly likely scenario: Trumpism, not the Left, will be the torch-bearer for opposing a thoroughly corrupt, elitist oligarchy, and will be poised to win a victory that will last for a generation or more. From where I’m standing, that’s the nightmare scenario you will want to avoid at all costs.
~ * ~
Ceterum censeo, if the Sanders does win the plurality of delegates and the DNC decides to appoint someone else through the superdelegate mechanism, he ought run as an independent, and his supporters in Congress ought to resign from the Democratic caucus. It will have become clear that there is no hope of reforming the Democratic Party, so it will have to be replaced.
I kind of liked Mayor Pete, though my first choice remains Bernie.
So I will vote for Bernie on March 17 (Illinois primary day) primarily because he reminds me of me :)
KG, #22:
That’s a nice thought, but he’s been a non-Sanders candidate throughout the race. Also, in his speech that victoriously conceded defeat in the campaign, he told his supporters (using his standard word salad consultant-speak) that he didn’t want Sanders to get the nomination. I suppose it’s true enough that there’s no rational reason for his supporters to listen to him, but that doesn’t actually prevent many of them from doing so anyway.
Also, consider that the votes don’t need to be mostly or entirely going to Biden, in order for this to be effective. Suppose the votes were split evenly among Sanders, Biden and Bloomberg; then, Sanders picks up only 1/3 of Buttigieg’s supporters. If we add Warren into the mix as the next most likely option, Sanders gets 1/4. If we add Klobuchar, Sanders gets 1/5. If we add Gabbard, Sanders gets 1/6.
There’s no need to assume flat/even distributions like this, but the point is that all of his supporters falling into Biden’s warm/creepy embrace isn’t necessary for having a negative impact on Sanders, which was definitely the goal. The effect is that some may reach the viability threshold in certain places (or get more delegates where they’re already viable), when they wouldn’t have if Buttigieg were still in the race. That’s likely to help Biden and Bloomberg the most.
IMO, Buttigieg didn’t drop out as part of some nefarious strategy but rather dropped out because his own polling showed he wasn’t reaching 15% anywhere and qualifying for delegates. By dropping out he’s giving his supporters the chance to vote for their second choice on Super Tuesday, which is considerate of him.
That’s a nice thought, but he’s been a non-Sanders candidate throughout the race.
I would hope not, unless he’s an actual clone of Sanders of something like that.
There’s talk that he may be backing Biden.
@ 20
“won’t vote…democracy truly is dead and there’s no point in perpetuating the sham.”
Not one issue. Two different issues:
— Democracy dead or not: Real lives are affected by your vote,
— Vote.
— If dead and you give a damn,
— Then, Step 1: Don’t get sad, get mad…
@brikoleur
I get what your saying. A centrist president will strengthen the trumpists and they will elect an even more fascist president next election. The real victory was in denying a trump presidency to begin with, which we didn’t do. My problem with your assessment is the fact that you think leftists will strengthen under another trump presidency. They wont because Americas left are incompetent idiots who do not understand how politics works at best, and at worst are people so full of shit that being anti-establishmentarian is more important than taking back congress. I have no faith in leftist after the last general election where they acted as another arm of the right wing propaganda machine with anti-Hillary bullshit, even spreading obviously false russian propaganda (Lee Camp, hillary rigged primary) despite the dnc having the most left platform its ever had.
Unlike the right wingers who actually understand how politics works and took the house and senate and their president has been more progressively right wing till the point of fascism, and when the RNC wanted to use the voting energy of a radical third party (the tea party) for their own benefit the end result was that third party taking over the RNC and kicking out anyone who didn’t conform to their beliefs and became the new establishment. We could have easily done that, but no. hell we could have retaken the senate with mostly leftist candidates, we didn’t. I’m glad we have AOC and the rest but the majority are still centrists and their appeal has more to do with identity politics than anything (which I support).
We cannot have a centrist president, because I do fear the next trump more, but I have zero faith in the lefts ability to mobilize. Also your suggestion of having Sanders run as independent with democrats who supported him resigning would essentially turn this country to a one party state with that party being trumps party.
Rowan vet-tech @13
It is more like not voting at all. It doesn’t change the difference between the 2 major contenders.
There are 3 meaningful positions one can take on the presidential election: I want R candidate to win, I want D candidate to win, and I’ll leave the decision to others. If the ones who take the latter position are unhappy with the outcome they should reassess their initial choice, because they just discovered they actually had a preference, but were unwilling to act on it.
pipefighter @29:
Not true. Bloomberg at least recognizes the reality and severity of climate change. For that alone he’d be getting my vote over Trump.
The polls have been like that since the beginning. He chose an awfully weird time to finally pay attention to his polling numbers. Anyway, you can have your opinion, but it wasn’t just my opinion that he said last night (once again) that he didn’t want to risk a Sanders nomination. That was in fact how he explained his decision.
I could’ve said “anti-Sanders.” Saying he’s a non-Sanders candidate was supposed to be a slightly more charitable way to put it. It’s like a drink for teetotalers, who prefer a non-alcoholic beverage. What I didn’t mean by it is that he’s just a different brand of whiskey.
Buttigieg said after Nevada that there needed to be an alternative to Sanders, and I think it’s clear that he had himself in mind when he said that. Biden’s performance in South Carolina then showed that Buttigieg wasn’t going to be that alternative, so he dropped out not long after Steyer did as Steyer had staked all on doing well there and didn’t.
As for the polls, Buttigieg’s whole campaign was about doing well early and benefiting from a Biden collapse. That didn’t happen. So Buttigieg, after one more round of internal polling I’m sure, decided to pull the plug rather than delay the inevitable. Now Klobuchar, who is also not going to get the nomination, has a reason to stay in because she’ll net some delegates in Minnesota, which in the event of a contested convention is at least a consolation prize.
stroppy @40: First, I don’t live in a swing state anyway so who I vote for for president really doesn’t matter. Second of all, in the event that the DNC is willing to torpedo the most popular candidate in the race by using superdelegates to give the nomination to someone else, most likely Biden, it’s a signal that there won’t be any actual changes. And I’m saying this as someone who is a member of one of the minorities who’s lives have been threatened by Trump’s election. Biden has been looking for Republican approval for years, he’s not going to stand up for me. He’s not going to nominate a progressive to replace Ginsburg. He’s not going to reverse any of Trump’s disasters. Same with Bloomberg- he’s just Trump with the ability to speak in complete sentences and better hair.
aspleen:
You should tell Mayor Pete your theory about why Mayor Pete dropped out of the race when he did, because Mayor Pete is the one who thought Mayor Pete gave the reason I had described.
@46
Sure. And FWIW, of the two, Bloomberg or Biden, I think that just the act of electing Bloomer would pretty much signal the coup de grace for democracy as we know it. That said, some pricktaters are worse than others. The free fall we’re in matters. As I said above: two issues.
Keep in mind the rightwing strategy; keep your allies fearful, irrational, and well armed, keep your enemies demoralized, and keep everyone else complacent. If you just throw up your arms and call everything the same, you’re playing into their hands.
I keep thinking of the Arab spring in Egypt. The protesters a) couldn’t get their act together and then b) consciously declined to vote, which as we saw set an unfortunate chain of events into motion.
@47
It’s not what Buttigieg said, it’s your take on it that I don’t find persuasive. Buttigieg’s campaign was premised on doing well early (which he did) and having Biden’s campaign collapse. That didn’t happen and Buttigieg dropped out, in part to avoid being the biggest loser on Super Tuesday (Klobuchar will net delegates in MN, as will Warren in MA) and in part to winnow the field and let the chips fall where they may. As I’ve said elsewhere, about the only thing I’m sure of is that few of Buttigieg’s supporters will vote for Klobuchar. Just a hunch.
@#49, aspleen:
How, exactly, do you interpret “I don’t want to be the reason Sanders has an insurmountable delegate lead” as anything other than “I don’t want Sanders to have the nomination”?
I don’t even know what you consider to be “my take on it,” but in any case, you shouldn’t be ignoring what he said. You explained the decision in two parts, using your own ideas that he didn’t say, while making no use of what he did actually say.
So what you’re putting forward looks like it’s entirely “your take” as opposed to “his take” (and never mind mine). You don’t have to believe him of course, but this does seem to me like one instance where he was being relatively honest (is that where we disagree?). And it fits very comfortably with all of the other anti-Sanders machinations of the party establishment that we’ve seen, so there’s no particular reason to find it implausible in the first place.
@48: In the scenario I laid out, there isn’t going to be a fight. That’s the point. The Democratic party won’t be standing up to conservatives. I’m not someone who’s going to give unlimited support to a cause when the cause is actively turning its back on me.
Anyone attempting to equate any Dem to the orange shitgibbon must be brain damaged. Completely ignoring the threat Darth Cheeto poses to our democratic institutions, our infrastructure and our pool of independent subject matter experts, not one of the Dems rejects the reality of climate change–which potentially poses an existential threat not just to the US but to global civilization. Four more years of Darth Cheeto, and we may be past the point of no return.
Please, get serious.
Also, I think Buttigieg dropped out prior to Super Tuesday in no small part to save money on last-minute ad buys, which would then be much harder to pay off after a poor showing followed by a drop in fund raising.
On a more pedantic note, Pete would almost certainly get more delegates than Gabbard (maybe he will anyway). Not many, sure, but he wouldn’t have been the biggest loser tomorrow. Now telling why Tulsi hasn’t also dropped out, if we’re going to play this armchair psychology game, but nobody in their right mind would say she’s more shameless than Pete.
Sorry: “No telling why”
@8: “the only way to win this is to keep the left united”
The big problem with this argument is that there is only one possible leftist candidate. It’s not Warren, who declared loyalty to capitalism.
aspleen, it doesn’t cost more money to simply make an announcement two days later. There is no need to buy ads. (Also, he already knew it would be next to impossible to fund and launch many ads in such a short time period after SC, so even a miraculous result in SC wouldn’t have made a difference.)
For all I know, it could have even cost him more to head back home to Indiana so quickly and set up the event, just hours after acting in front of the cameras like it wasn’t over for him.
@consciousness razor, #55:
To me, Gabbard staying in the race makes much more sense than Warren. Unless the results of today’s primaries are wildly divergent from what was indicated in advance by polling — really, really completely different, further from the predictions than anything that has come so far — neither one has any chance of winning on delegate count. Both are hoping that they can talk the DNC into picking them at a contested convention, or — failing that — that they will be picked as VP to balance the DNC’s inevitable you’ll-vote-for-who-we-tell-you-to-vote-for selection of Biden (or possibly Hillary Clinton on the grounds that “none of the candidates were able to win so let’s get a wildcard and nothing is more of a wildcard than a rich right-of-center person who put more than half of us on this committee in the first place”).
If Warren can’t win on delegates, though, she’s toast. The DNC were the ones who sabotaged the things she tried to do under Obama (for example, her consumer protection agency had practically no legal jurisdiction because DNC insiders like Debbie Wasserman Schultz teamed up with Republicans to block it from passing). Whether she was sincere about it or not, her voting record is not in alignment with the DNC’s goals. She’s not going to be on the 2020 ticket as VP except possibly with Sanders — and she’s basically not just burning that bridge but dynamiting the piles to make sure nobody ever rebuilds it.
On the other hand, if you’re a DNC member, you sincerely believe that the average Democratic voter doesn’t care about policy or history but about demographic identity. Gabbard is a woman! She’s Hindu! She has Samoan ancestry! A minority on two counts and not a man! Just what they need to offset Biden or Bloomberg or whatever other rich straight white caucasian they bring in! Of course, her resignation from the DNC to endorse Sanders in 2016 probably disqualifies her anyway, but she’s still a more likely VP pick than Warren, and she can always frame her continued presence as an attempt to keep Sanders from getting more delegates, to prove her loyalty.
gdmit.
lost my entire cut/copy.
guess, I’ll short post, yaay. [Condensed] None of this Demo shit matters. Swing the Pendulum Left. PLEASE. If trump wins, and the Donkeys have to accept their golden Bussinessman Boy was not the Stock Trader Controller he claimed he was after Obama, there’s a hope that those guys, and our new stock traders actually understand that INVESTING IN THE US HEALTH SYTEM makes sense. ‘It’s the new UK!” So much of our world is regrettably influenced by people we can’t touch. We can only touch them via proximity.For many Under 20, the world sucks, proximity to your Voice is a real thing.
I’m Angry my voice is Socialist, welcome to the echo chamber, what the fuck else are you doing about it besides posting anger.
Next stage is bargaining, but backslide into denial all you want in responses, it’ll come back to anger. Depression is next, welcome to it.
I do not speak for Millenials. I speak for Medical Professionals. The above was an accurate proceeding from a therapeutic session
@53
Mindless partisan aestheticism at its finest, as if merely running as a Democrat is some magical quality all its own.
Buying your way into the presidency with the assistance of a political party hegemony is indeed a threat to our democratic institutions. Unfortunately, that would describe a Bloomberg candidacy to the exact same extent as a trump one.
As we all know, explicitly racist political policies, massive cash handouts to big corporations, and explicitly mocking matters like women’s and LGBT healthcare is not a threat to infrastructure when a democrat does it.
Literally meaningless without actual policies behind it. Corporatist democrats paying lip service to the concept of climate change while putting forward toothless legislation that defends the industries that actually cause climate change is not actually a good thing.
Further, if you are legitimately naive enough to think that the republicans actually disbelieve in climate change, rather than using it as a way to push their corporate interests with low-information voters, you have the political awareness of a middle schooler. Given that you apparently think it’s some cutting insult to call a corporate fascist millionaire in the most powerful position in the world elementary school neener-neener nicknames, I wouldn’t be surprised.
If Bloomberg got anywhere near winning the election, it would also put us past the point of no return. If you think a republican with largely the same values as Trump switching parties and buying his way to the presidency is even remotely democratic, you have a meaningless definition of democracy. But hey, our corporate oligarch would be for the blue team, so it’s all good!
Pete dropped to help to stop Sanders
Warren stays to help to stop Sanders (for eample stopping him in Minnesota from wining with Klobuchar) and attacks Sanders,
Either she is delusional or she tries to kneecap Sanders campaign as a play for administration position with any other democratic nominee
Basically at this point any vote in the primary is for or against Bernie. Either he will get majority or he will get plurality and DNC will do whatever it can to stop Sanders even if that will mean handing victory to Trump on a silver plate.
Sanders is the only candidate who has his own voters – every democratic voter will vote for democratic nominee but Sander has people who don’t care for Democrats but believe in Sanders.
Should people vote against Trump whoever the democratic nominee will be? That’s an issue that happens in most of democracies, voting for lesser evil allows to stop a bigger one, but not voting for lesser evil gives you a hope, that establishment will stop forcing a lesser evil on you and finally will put something at least okayish on the ballot. It is hard to ssy which decision is better.
In case of US – if DNC puts Mitt Romney on the ballot because he is better than Trump, should you vote for him, or stay at home hoping that next time DNC will choose better?
Amy Klobuchar is ending her campaign. There are reports that she plans to endorse Joe Biden.
Honestly didn’t see Klobuchar dropping out just yet, and yes, she’s endorsing Biden now.
Amy Klobuchar ends campaign for Democratic presidential nomination
The Vicar:
Being VP with Sanders seems like a very remote possibility to me. Six months ago, it would’ve made sense, but not now. She has burned all of those bridges. There is a semi-progressive veneer that she needs to keep polishing for some of her supporters, but that isn’t really what she’s about.
What I can easily imagine is the centrist/conservative leader (Biden, let’s say) propping her up as a “progressive” running mate to “balance” the ticket. Much like Obama wanted someone (barely) to his right with Biden, but this time they’ll need someone (barely) to the left. Biden has much worse options, strategically speaking. But this assumes something like intelligence, in addition to the cynicism. The choice could be Biden and Corn Pop for all I know. Maybe Mandela could have a posthumous cabinet position just to round things out?
Really, it has seemed like Warren has been running for Secretary of the Treasury. That seems fairly plausible in a lot of scenarios (except with Pres. Bloomberg). Along with Vice President Mayor Pete, they could be aiming for a dream team which is supposed to satisfy everybody but the left.
It’s as if the idea is to make the last year or whatever of the campaign (including the votes) totally irrelevant. You’re supposed to be completely bored and jaded and gobble up the maximally-bland option that they serve you, because that’s supposedly what voters will want more than the spicy Trump. That’s where the DNC thought process seems to be right now.
@52
“…there isn’t going to be a fight…”
Hmm. Quite a pickle I agree. Well then, I guess we could all go roll up in a ball and roll into a corner somewhere.
Actually I suspect a fight will be coming after the election. I doubt it will be pretty.
@#66, consciousness razor:
I can’t see Biden picking anybody who even has a veneer of progressive politics as his running mate. The furthest he would go would be somebody like Buttigieg — and I don’t mean “a gay man”, I mean “somebody who is actively racist — but does not use crude racist language to ensure that any charge of racism can be denied — and who is blatantly willing to sell their policy positions to the highest bidder”. Given Biden’s openly stated love of Republicans, his statement that he intends to make no significant changes to the way Trump has run the government, and his statement that the very rich are good people, he will definitely want somebody who is for sale on every level.
I don’t like Warren very much these days, but my impression is that she is not for sale on every level; I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think she’s precisely “for sale” at all. Although her approach to economic issues still bears a “white well-off former Republican” stamp, I think she is entirely sincere in wanting to help people, and I don’t think she’s actively racist, even in the “never comes out and says it but there’s no way to parse their statements except to assume they’re thinking it” way that Biden is. Biden would find her intolerable. (I think she would get along a lot better with Bloomberg, ironically, because they both have technocratic approaches to government, and are very strictly pro-free-market-capitalism on the financial front, even if they disagree on goals.)
Did you see the link I posted in the other thread recently?
Elizabeth Warren Super PAC Run by Former ‘Oil Advocacy Group’ Frontman
That’s at least a little bit for sale. Also, the superdelegate stuff, her regressive approach to funding M4A (if she’ll ever do it at all), the clear and vocal support for capitalism, and several other points.
Maybe … if your impression of her is closer to being right than mine. (We’re not far apart though.)
Either way, Biden doesn’t really seem like he’s behind the wheel, even if he’s the presumptive/actual nominee. If that’s right, it comes down to what the inner circle of the party thinks is Most Bland™ which is probably Pete, if I had to guess now. On the other hand, the media do like Warren quite a bit too, which they can definitely use to their advantage, so it’s hard to guess.
Heh. Well, maybe we just have different ideas about “for sale” means.
Yep, the KPD would have been in total agreement. Just ignore the immediate danger of the far right consolidating their power and completing their project of trashing those elements of democracy that enable you to burble complacently about “retaking the presidency”, while spinning unsupported conjectures about what will happen four years or more hence if – say – Biden becomes president. Both Trump and the Republican senators have made absolutely clear their determination to hang on to power by any means possible. If he is re-elected, it is highly doubtful there will ever again be an election which the left – or centrists – are allowed to win.
And by the same token, Trump leaving the Paris Accord, trashing the EPA and limits on vehicle emissions, opening up federal lands to drilling and mining, etc. – those are all good things, because none of the institutions or regulations concerned are adequate to the scale of the danger, so having them in place was clearly not a good thing. Right?
come on the “right wing movement ” is not the a product of the republican party grass roots voters it is astro-turf for the republican establishment party bosses trump hijacked the tools already in place and took over and I do not think that the establishment republican party bosses like that he is not very controllable but they are stuck because he can energize the unthinking mob.
there is a similarity with the democratic bigwigs in many ways just look at the last presidential race and its results.
How is it that the conflict has been accepted to be one between capitalism ,the free market and socialism , soviet style communism. when it is in reality a contest between democracy and tyranny that is what was seen as the conflict at the republic’s founding and now after the horror and fear of the cold war it has changed to this. Is unfettered wealth and power incompatible with democracy?
How is the effect of the tyranny government any different from the tyranny of the corporation on the experience of those who have neither riches nor personal power?
uncle frogy
If there is anything other than a socialist being sworn into the White House in 2021, then expect to see a story in the media about a guy in SE Wisconsin who ate a bullet rather than live under Trump or Biden.
Don’t call it suicide, it would be self administered euthanasia to prevent a longer, slower, more agonizing demise: Death by barbarism.
right. get back to me when the dems start pushing laws to ban abortion.
you stupid motherfucker.
@Ichthyic: And start defunding the NIH. And dismantling environmental protection and what pathetic little public health insurance we have. And building torture and concentration camps. Yeah, the Dems aren’t great, but anyone that can’t tell them from the Reps just isn’t trying.
I have to add more, because I am so FUCKING tired of the “they’re all the same” argument.
say you have two uncles that come to visit.
They both work in construction, but they both lie to you.
One says they work as a spy for the government, while the other says they are an astronaut.
Oh, and one of them kidnaps dogs from neighborhood families and tosses them in the river to drown.
but you… since you don’t have a dog, decide you don’t care and thus they are “both the same” since they both lied to you.
such narcissism, so wow.
@dianne:
I’m with you and ichthyic in that there are serious differences, but this one?
I’m not sure that maintaining the camps built by the previous administration is much better, and because of classification, we can’t be at all sure that Democratic administrations (mainly Obama, I guess? He’s the only democratic president since 9/11) haven’t built such camps either completely de novo or in order to replace camps that had become a PR drag.
But yes. The Dems are better. I agree with both you and ichthyic. I just wouldn’t try to prove it using that one particular claim.
@71
Literally toothless and incapable of doing anything =/= “none of the institutions or regulations concerned are adequate to the scale of the danger”
@75
The overwhelming majority of immigrants that I represent were put in their horrifically torturous detention centers under Obama, and the conditions did not magically get worse over the last four years. People were still hanging themselves in their cells and being withheld food and blankets just as much under Obama as they are under Trump.
The democrats are better than the republicans on select issues, but this isn’t something where the democrats took a principled stand and can be contrasted against the republicans.
@Porivil Sorrens & dianne:
Eh, for some reason my brain went to the other camps, probably because although I made the argument that the camps where children were held committed torture according to the UN definition, the other camps were created literally for the purpose of torturing information out of people. So I neglected to include the camps Porivil Sorrens mentioned when I was talking about camps above, but now that they’re explicitly brought up, I’m fully with PS on this as well. Detention and torture camps, whether for migrants, refugee claimants, or supposed terrorism suspects were all terrible under Obama.
I repeat what I said above about the “suspect” camps now in relation to the migrant and refugee camps: I wouldn’t want to try proving the Dems better based on that issue.
But I’ll add that PS’s “on select issues” kind of undersells it for me. While rule of law has never been important enough to Dems to try to create equal justice for all, rule of law has meant something very different over the last 28 years to Dems and Reps. Rule of law isn’t just an “issue” for me. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible. We’ve been on shaky foundations lately, but the Dems, even though I think they won’t improve the foundations much, are not invested in sweeping them away entirely as this Trump administration obviously is and as congressional Republicans will do so long as Trump leads their party.
The Dems are like dialysis: Dialysis feels crappy and doesn’t actually cure people. But it does keep people from dying and in relatively good shape until either their kidneys recover or they get a transplant. The Dems aren’t enough, but they may keep the democracy from collapsing completely while third parties form. Which they are, with some local level successes that can build into a real movement as opposed to the Green astroturf. Or until they finally listen to their left wing. Or both.
I suppose in this analogy Republicans are a high salt diet and 3 pack a day smoking habit: addicting, feels good in the moment, and kills you.
This day has been coming at least since Reagan’s tax cuts added a few people to the upper class and many people to the lower class. And the day that Reagan came for the unions and we cheered him on because strikes are inconvenient and everyone knows that those ATC were lazy and greedy anyway. A few extra crashes is a small price to pay for freedom, right? Or maybe it was since Nixon noted that he couldn’t make it illegal to be black but he could make drugs that were used predominantly by blacks illegal and the penalties harsh. Or maybe since the day the US decided to drop city destroying bombs to demonstrate to the world that they held it hostage and no opposition was allowed. I’m sure earlier time points could be argued. However you look at it, it’s been a long time coming and won’t go away in a day. There’s a lot that needs to be undone.
I actually like this metaphor.
QFT
Much of the above commentary has made my head spin. Honestly, to equate the Dems to the GOP is laughable at best. The Dems are not perfect by any stretch, but lets face it: if you’re waiting for a perfect candidate you’ve got a looong wait. Hell, the last Republican to actually stand up the masses was Teddy Roosevelt! If not for the Dems, there would be no Social Security, no Medicare, no desegregation, no Voting Rights Act, no EPA, no Clean Air and Water Acts….We are slowly slipping toward Fascism here, folks , and if we wait until 2024 to do anything about it–too late, amigos. With the total disregard for the rule of law in this administration and among GOP lawmakers we can’t afford to wait to act. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that Don McGann does NOT have to comply with congressional subpoenas! Really?! To sit out this election is a coward’s copout. Plato said, “Your silence gives consent.” By being silent you condone Trump’s corruption, and to condone corruption is to be corrupt. Stand up and be counted! Work on someone’s campaign, drive people to the polls; get involved somehow. Fight for what is right, despite the flaws in the system. Stay engaged. Democracy ignored is democracy lost.