The biggest rationale for Bernie Sanders staying in the race was the very real possibility that Joe Biden might collapse, either physically or mentally, before Election Day. With so many states cancelling primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden reaching the requisite majority is doubtful. The Democratic National Committee likely will still have had to change its rules to allow the loathsome "I'm the guy" guy with the most votes to become the nominee of the party.
Forget about the dreaded second ballot. There won't even be a first ballot, whether at a public convention or in a back room on a billionaire's yacht.
Today, Bernie relinquished any remaining leverage he still had over the corrupt Democratic party. Was his heart ever really in actually winning in the first place? With sickness and misery raging all around me, I must confess that I don't much care at this point whether he was sincere or whether he was a sheepdog herding the straying-from-neoliberalism lamb chops into the Democratic fold prior to shearing if not outright slaughter.
To be fair, though, Bernie probably rushed the performance of his last bow in order to prevent any more infections among voters, who risked their very lives going to the polls in Wisconsin yesterday.
Even with the country in economic and social shambles, the corporate media propagandists are busily trying to sell the narrative that the barely-there Biden will now finally be free to forge a "unity ticket" to attract both Republicans and "progressives." The fact that he's also under pressure to name his entire cabinet right now is probably a good sign, because if he chooses a retro Obama era cabinet lousy with corporate CEOs and Citigroup and Goldman Sachs bankers and war-mongering neocons who style themselves as "liberal interventionists," then we won't have to wait till November to find out that the beatings will continue and that we'll be well and truly screwed for at least another four years. With Biden's insane vow that there will be no single payer health care system under his watch and with a thousand more Americans dying of the virus in just one day, many of us won't even be around to vote for anybody.
It'll be interesting to see whether Biden would retain torture maven "Bloody Gina" Haspell as his CIA director, or whether Russiagate troll and Kill List architect John Brennan would get his old job back.
The news that Black people are being disproportionately infected with and killed by this virus should also give Biden and the centrists some serious pause. Black voters didn't come out for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because she was such a horrible candidate. And they might not come out for Biden in 2020 - because despite Jim Clyburn's previous success at herding his South Carolina constituents into the Biden tent, the voter rolls will be purged more effectively by sickness and death than by the standard kind of suppression so beloved of Trump and the Republicans.
Depending on your perspective on probably the most important Greater Lesser Evil election theater of our lifetimes, it's also probably a relief that at least the televised debates will also be a no-go. Trump will be deprived of the opportunity to upstage and destroy Biden before a live audience. One-on-one Face Time sessions between these two doddering dolts will just not have the excitement and drama of the unreal real thing we've already been enduring for far too long.
I have already written for far too long and far too often about the corporate media's unfair and disgusting coverage of Bernie Sanders, as well as Bernie's own self-defeating knee-jerk "Joe Biden is a good friend of mine" reactions to any and all invitations to destroy Biden's candidacy while he still had the chance. I'll leave the post mortems to others and also avoid reading all the phony ass-covering praise of Bernie Sanders popping up all over the corporate media.
Life is, quite literally, way too short and too precious to dwell on this stuff. Because as I have also written before, revolution never comes out of a presidential election.
I hope my readers are all safe and in good health.
14 comments:
Thank you for asking Karen. With my MS-induced compromised immune system, I am not even allowed, by my wife's dictum, to venture to the grocery store I am doing well. Swimming at the gym has stopped, so all I get to really do is walk the dog at the lake! I know two people very well, my wife's BFF and her younger brother who both voted for the Gutter Rat in 2016. I have removed all vestiges of the BFF from my life: email, telephone numbers, mailing addresses etc and will have nothing to do with her ever again. The brother I have opted to limit the time that I will spend with him as in this past XMAS holiday when we all went to Atlanta to spend the holiday with he and his family. I opted to drive with the dog to Asheville, spent a few days with my sister and left the dog with her and then on XMAS Eve drove to Atlanta. We returned to A-ville on Boxing Day. The brother asked my wife when he picked her up at the Atlanta airport why I was not with her? She replied: "it was too long to spend with her since we are seeing a marriage counselor." I was in shock when I learned this. We are seeing a counselor sure, but to help me deal with my anger towards the best friend and her brother. And she continues criticizing me for my actions and cannot understand nor accept the fact that the BFF is important to her and he is family. My response to her would be if I wanted to continue the conversation is that "life is short, hard and then you die." I would add that the BFF might have been important at one time and he is not my family. Luckily my older brother and sister are in the same ballpark as me. So why would I want to waste the limited time that I have left with people like that? I am certainly dreading The Gutter Rat's reelection as I am not sure how I will survive.
I'll drag my previous comment to this post and add some more. The Bernie news is worth grieving over, at least for a day.
Even though I expected little from Bernie I am disappointed to hear he just dropped out. No longer is there a flimsy democratic socialist to push away thoughts about the inevitable catastrophe up ahead. Nothing, nothing at all, left between the greed and whims of billionaires and the rest of us––except the one and only Joe Biden, a life-long corporatist and misogynist whose mind is slipping fast. Our Guy. Tell me who will be the lesser of two evils this time around and you may discover yourself in a corner with the DNC.
It's like we're in Byzantine times wandering through a desert with a diminishing number of stylites, ascetic pillar-dwellers, whose honesty and courage aimed to pull the rest of humanity back from one brink or other. The most foolish observers are those who mock them. The rest of us manage to ignore the stylites of our day––we're too busy––and so humanity will head over the brink again.
The American stylites, who were they? Are there any left? Maybe Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, Henry Wallace, Elliot Richardson, Malcolm X, Ralph Nader, Wayne Morse, Martin Luther King, Jr? Might Bernie have been included in that crowd? What's clear is that there are no stylites still standing in 2020. The American desert is devoid of hope and living ideals.
Megatall skyscrapers on Billionaire Row have replaced the stylites. Behold the ideals, the leaders, the winners. The masses milling around below are left with themselves to think things over.
Bernie's out finally. Sadly, he wasn't even a competent community organizer, never mind a leader of a 'political revolution', nor was he President/Commander-in-Chief material. I'm not shocked or disappointed.
His campaign was more of a revival tour. He used the presidential primaries as a platform for talking up his issues, not to win - the DNC would never allow anyway - but to build a political movement which he promised to engage in collective action. I supported him because I didn't doubt his intentions in that regard. When he repeatedly failed to fight for us though, it was unsettling. The time to fight is while you're still in the ring. I started to doubt his sincerity.
When the pandemic hit, it revealed that emperor-wannabe Bernie had no clothes. Despite the situation presenting the perfect opportunity for Bernie to grab the reins and lead, he did nothing. He didn't attempt to engage us into action or even try to grab some headlines by voicing the truth: A PRIVATE HEALTH CARE MARKETPLACE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A PUBLIC HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, to name just one. But noooo, he didn't say or do anything except urge us to take care while risking our lives to vote. It's not just the virus that's sickening!
Timid Bernie the toothless windbag is toast and so is our movement. Oh sure, it might rise again someday under some new charlatan, but probably not until some of us are gone. It was fun while the hopium-induced fantasy lasted though, wasn't it? No, not for me. I hate being suckered, especially twice, or is it 3 times? (including Obama). I'm losing track of all these phonies. At least Hillary was honestly corrupt in the same way Trump is, although not flaunting it like he does.
Speaking of Hillary, she said she felt sorry for voters who were being suckered by that fraud Bernie. Well, I can now announce that I'm eating crow - HILLARY WAS RIGHT ABOUT BERNIE. And I'm no Hillary fan.
We have no political allies in Washington. We only have each other.
Mehdi Hasan and Naomi Klein on Coronavirus Capitalism —
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/06/live-mehdi-hasan-naomi-klein-coronavirus-capitalism/
April 7, 2020
The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan speaks with Senior Correspondent Naomi Klein about coronavirus capitalism and the selective use of emergency measures to offload risks onto workers and families, while the people who are relatively more secure get no-strings-attached bailouts.
RUMBLE with MICHAEL MOORE — Ep. 64: It’s About F*cking Winning (feat. Jane McAlevey)
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-xiwvb-889099e?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share
2020-04-08
Jane McAlevey is a lifetime agitator and shitkicker. So why haven’t you seen her on TV? Why don’t we ever see any of our brightest thinkers and doers in the mainstream media? This is one of reasons I started RUMBLE — to bring brilliant voices like hers to you. Jane and I discuss how we can start creating 2021 now — the world we want to live in, the things we want to change. Aggressive organizing, including strikes, will be necessary regardless of who wins the 2020 election. And, surprise, surprise — we can end up as the real winners once we realize we’re the ones who truly hold the power.
Bernie Sanders not fighting as hard as he might have, bare knuckles, is regrettable. Him getting sandbagged by the Democratic establishment and the servile mainstream media is despicable. But a campaign post-mortem is almost irrelevant. Because I predict that the United States will not exist as a nation within just a few years.
And many of the right-wingers will be seriously conflicted.
On the one hand, their desires for rugged individualism, free-dumb, AR-15s as everyday accessories, patriarchy, no social distancing or shutdowns in pandemics, no common good, no precautionary principle, no taxes, no education about "dangerous" ideas such as evolution, biodiversity, socialism, and the like, will all probably see full physical expression, at least in some geographical areas.
On the other hand (except for those megalomaniacs who think that they will build the next Reich, and rule -- and there will be some of those), they will have to face the fact that they will at most be citizens of one out of a multitude of much-smaller countries that will come into existence from the collapse of the U.S. -- so citizens of a small nation with far less power, stature, and influence in the world.
And who knows what will then happen, perhaps many of those smaller states fighting amongst themselves. In the Middle Ages, that would have played out over a timeline lasting centuries. Here, it'll all be over much faster, since at least some of those states will have nukes.
Looking at the grim present and wondering about the precarious future, I happened to hear a recent interview on “Useful Idiots” with Johann Hari, an author with whom I was unfamiliar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA9c8tB1BNU
At about 50 minutes into this, he made a keen remark, contrasting the American's “pursuit of happiness” with the Russians' “pursuit of meaning” that evoked these quotes by Vaclav Havel:
"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
“Man is not an omnipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.
“Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.
“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.
“The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Let’s hope our distancing leads to enlightened perspective, and summons the collective guts to take action accordingly.
p.s. This is apropos and timely:
Paul Simon ~ American Tune for Til Further Notice 03/19/2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVYPVvS-mI4 *
* I never look at comments on YouTube, but happened to see this one, worth noting:
The melody of this tune resembles an adaptation from the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” that was used by Johann Sebastian Bach four times in his Saint Matthew Passion. The words to the hymn are attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). Paul Simon’s words were written 40+ years ago but they seem like an accurate lament for 2020’s sorrowful Lenten season of the COVID-19 crisis. Mr. Paul Simon, thank you for sharing.
Joe Biden, reading from a teleprompter:
Friends, Democrats, countrymen, give me your ears;
lend me your hears…your ears
I come to praise Bernie, not to co-opt him.
The concessions men make live after them;
Their revolt is oft blocked on Twitter;
So let it be with Bernie. The noble Bernie
Hath told you Biden was a warmonger:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Biden answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Bernie and the rest–
For Bernie is an honourable man;
So are all the Bernie Bros, all honourable men–
Come I to speak on Bernie’s concession.
He was my friend, a member of the club…
the, the Senate:
But Bernie says I was against Social Security;
And Bernie is an honourable man.
He hath brought many progressive ideas to Congress
Whose sausage making did the general public benefit:
Did sausage making by Biden seem duplicitous?
When that the poor have cried, Biden hath wept:
Sausage is made better with the salty stuff:
Yet Bernie says Biden was a stooge of Wall Street;
And Bernie is an honourable man.
You all did see that loose regulations
Gave more credit to the poor folks,
With which they did buy more record players?
Yet Bernie says this was not educational;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Bernie spoke,
But here I am to spook…speak what I do know.
You all did love him once: ‘you, not us’… ‘him not me’…
‘us, not…whatever’:
What cause withholds you then, to campaign for Biden?
O judgment! thou art fled to revolution,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My mind is in the White House there with Obama,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
“Joe is a good politician,” he added. “And he understands that in order to defeat Trump, he’s gonna have to bring new people into his political world and that he’s gonna have to listen to their needs — young people, working people — and MAYBE START moving in a different direction, TO SOME DEGREE, than he has in the past.” (Caps mine)
Timid Bernie
I think Bernie Sanders helped to bring important issues into the mainstream that were not there a few years ago. Did anybody really expect much more from anyone running for the office against the current establishment in place. Blame the democratic establishment and people to lame to understand the issues that will continue to make their lives more miserable. It's up to the movements to promote change. And if DT is re-elected the movements will probably be put down. Slo-Joe is a sad choice. He's going to need a sharp, popular VP candidate to win. And then, things will still suck but at least movements may have potential for some success. With Trump, things could get very militaristic against dissent.
Hey Karen,
Forgive me for being a little OT.
During this pandemic, the New York Times has relented and allowed us riff-raff to a limited lifting of its firewall.
I suppose it's useful to know I don't miss it. What a awful pointless piece of birdcage liner. I give you continued props for putting up with its drivel.
I can't imagine what it is like to be a well-informed junior or senior in high school with the world that they are facing.
For those of us who read/write here, an older demographic, we can get settled in our bunkers and listen to Bob Dylan from 1965, with his "Desolation Row." Available on both Youtube and Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/11222889
I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is gone in the least. Like Anonymous said, or started to say, Bernie brought important issues to the forefront that didn’t exist a few years ago. And he is still a US Senator, who is much more well known than before.
I have to take a few ideas from Naomi Klein. One thing she said, I believe on Democracy Now or in her recent Intercept interview with Mehdi Hasan, was that Bernie broke the spell of the Regan era in 2016 when he first ran for office. He foresaw from the start, the dire needs of the poor and working poor, and that is what makes her love Bernie so much. She spoke of how very hard Bernie’s recent campaign was, especially at some crucial points.
Bernie Sanders ran for office purely and solely out of love for the people; not for himself, and my opinion is that he is playing the political system so well and so cagily as an insider. His praise of Joe Biden as a decent person and good friend (and of course he knows him better than we do but I find it hard to believe, myself), is perhaps with the hope that he will be able to slip some of his ideas, for a single payer health plan, helping house the homeless, etc., into his agenda through whatever means, should Biden become our next president.
From what I have read, I think Bernie works harder than perhaps anyone. I can’t agree that his heart and soul was not in this race. He was and is, as Senator, doing this as a member of the Democratic Party; not through a futile third party attempt. He may have been naive enough to trust the Democratic Party to act fairly, but he is crafty enough to know how to play the system to get what he so desperately wants for the future and health of the country and the world.
I am impressed at the level a couple of you––assuming you are two and not one––have reached with irony. You've struck twelve when readers can't tell whether you're a DNC troll, an unsinkable naif, or a wickedly droll provocateur.
JO. Thanks for seeing my comment as ironic. I don't identify with those other labels, but I could simply be an "unsinkable naif". Hmm? I assume you are addressing my comment. Please explain your disdain.
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