Monday, February 24, 2020

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.


The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.


MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.


For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.


I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.


But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.


Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.


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I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.


Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.


Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more 
delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.
My published response:
 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.
 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.
I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 
As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.
  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.
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Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."

This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.
As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.
My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")
 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.
Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 
As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.
But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.
The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.
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Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:
Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."
The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.
 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.
Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."
 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.
There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.
 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

4 comments:

  1. The accusations against Bernie of Putin's backing did not have the intended effect.

    However, I don't think it accurate to say that voters "ignored" the accusations.

    It made me angry. I think it made a lot of people angry. I think it motivated some of us for Bernie.

    I think that effect was great enough that it undermines past use of the accusation against Trump. If they are lying about Bernie, did they lie about Trump too? Some of us are so offended that our automatic disbelief extends that far.

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  2. Mayor Pete, the ex-military intelligence Trojan pony (as if anyone with them is ever really “ex-") is showing his true colors.
    After he tried to tar Bernie by blaming him for not controlling trolls and bots on the internet in the Nevada debate, Buttigieg spews more bile as reported in today’s headlines on DemocracyNow. —

    https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/25/headlines/bernie_sanders_defends_praise_for_fidel_castros_literacy_program

    Tonight I’ll be attending my caucus in Minnesota, so I’ll have to await a recap of the South Carolina debate, but won’t look for that from the corporate media.

    "Who owns communications now controls the country. Much more than it's ever been true in history.”
    ~ William Burroughs

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  3. Re:Debate - for anyone who missed it, you were lucky!

    This was the worst debate of them all, but I'd have to say that Sanders won mainly because the others were so bad. Warren and Biden in particular blew it. They all tried going after Bernie but fizzled out, except for Pete wouldn't wait his turn and acted like every question was for him. The moderators were terrible.

    I had been thinking that Pete was another Eddie Haskell character, but he's actually 100 times more obnoxious, and worse yet, he's for real. They should have cut off his mic when he talked nonstop over Bernie's entire response to a question. He kept interrupting others as well. What an ill mannered, spoiled, pompous asshole. I kept yelling "SHUT UP!" when I wasn't gagging over his smarm. He sure does like to hear himself talk and is unwilling to stop. The moderators should have cut his mic. What a waste of oxygen.

    Mike Bloomberg bragged about spending something like $100 million over the past few years for 40 new Congressmen. He started saying "boug.." but caught himself and said "spent". So he admits to hand picking his own Congress one (or dozens) at a time to go along with his purchase of the DNC and half the mayors and governors (automatic superdelegates). He's promoted himself from Oligarch to Plutocrat.

    If that wasn't bad enough, we had to suffer through his paid campaign ad during the commercial break.

    The audience booed Bernie repeatedly and also booed Warren. The moderators never cautioned them to remain silent. I guess that's because they were Bloomberg's paid audience and it was their job. They were probably the only ones who could afford the ticket price of thousands to attend as 'sponsors'.

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  4. Annie, thanks for that report on the so-called debate. The anguish you accept for those of us wallowing in the comfort of no TV is much appreciated.

    Kudos also to the Best of Bloggers. Through what may become known as the DNC's 'Democratic Spring' and later in the Duopoly's Quadrennial Wrestling Match the fundamental thought to keep in mind can be found in this most beauteous nutshell:

    "The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term."

    ReplyDelete