This is how desperate the Democratic establishment is getting: One of Bernie Sanders's campaign officials recently circulated a clip of Joe Biden seeming to make nice with that notorious Ayn Rand fanboy, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. The subject was Social Security. Since Biden used the coded language of Social Security "reform," rather than calling for outright cuts, the clip is being widely - and wildly - construed as Bernie "smearing" Biden.
Granted, the clip was taken out of context. But compared to the buckets of mud they're slinging at Bernie, it was but the gentle flicking of a few grains of sand at a corrupt politician who isn't getting anywhere near the media criticism he so richly deserves. The kid glove treatment is largely due to Donald Trump's own smearing of Biden and the Biden-centric Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate.
Paul Krugman is among the righteously incensed about the latest manufactured scandal, and he demands in his latest column that Sanders apologize to Biden, "abjectly" and pronto (I believe Sanders might even have already caved to this demand by the time the column appeared, but I could be wrong.)
Krugman effectively says it's worse to be falsely accused of saying nice things about Paul Ryan than it is to have spent your entire political career, as Biden did, in making the lives of millions of people nasty, brutish and short.
Biden did make a misstep in his counterattack, mislabeling the misrepresented video clip as “doctored,” but that doesn’t mean he’s not still due an abject apology. Instead, however, the Sanders campaign has doubled down. Rather than admitting that it smeared a rival, the campaign is going around claiming that Biden has a long record of trying to cut Social Security. There is, unfortunately, some truth in that claim — but it doesn’t excuse either the original lie or the refusal to admit error.
Unfortunate that Biden has tried to cut Social Security, or unfortunate that the Sanders team refuses to retreat from its fact-based claims? It seems to really hurt Krugman that although the tactics might have been wrong, the essential truth of the matter is not.
My response to Krugman's specious claim that poor goofy old Joe was simply "swept along" by the overpowering austerity craze afflicting the Washington establishment:
Joe Biden didn't simply go along with the "consensus." As a founding member of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, he was one of the architects of the consensus to cut Medicare, Social Security and other New Deal/Great Society programs.
The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens." Instead they would distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity.
As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star, Biden, and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the GOP in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century.
And Bernie comes along and 'unfairly' links him to Paul Ryan?
Come on, man.
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Krugman's previous column was even worse, because he used children as the weapon with which to attack Sanders. His twisted logic is that because Bernie's signature campaign issue is Medicare For All, he thereby is willfully ignoring the way America treats "our children."
Most readers didn't seem to get that particular Bernie smear, because he nonchalantly tacked it on at the very end of his piece after spending numerous paragraphs doing what he does best: shooting diseased Republican fish in a polluted barrel. Krugman actually sounds a bit like Paul Ryan himself, with his open sneering at desperate people (rainbow and unicorn-chasers) who can't afford basic health care. He writes:
So we should be talking a lot more about helping America's children. Why aren't we?
At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare For All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that could greatly improve American lives, and are far more likely to become law. But it's not too late to refocus.
My published response, along with some follow-up comments in response to other readers:
Well, if you're going to accuse Sanders of sexism, you might as well accuse him of child neglect while you're at it.
The whole premise of this column is fallacious. To wit: since Bernie is for Medicare For All, it naturally follows that he doesn't care about kids.
The fact is, M4A would help moms, dads and kids. If parents can't afford to see a doctor when they get sick, their kids suffer as well. If parents spend thousands of dollars on co-pays, premiums and deductibles, there's less money to feed, clothe and educate the kids. How can you say that calling for M4A is neglecting kids when it would provide them with a good start and quality of life for both them and their parents?
Times are so hard and good paying jobs are so few that adults can no longer afford to have babies, let alone afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in most areas of the country.
Warren's plan is good, but the catch is that the states would administer the programs and disburse the funds. Bain Capital, for instance, already runs a billion dollar-plus chain of day care centers. With more federal money possibly on the horizon should Warren's plan pass. look for Goldman Sachs and Evercore and KKR Little Tots Schools to pop up all over this land, raking in the cash while parents slave away at precarious low wage jobs with no health insurance.
This is not an "either/or" thing. If we spend a trillion bucks a year on war, we can afford to take care of our people.... cradle to grave.
My follow-up comment to a reader echoing the establishment talking point that Medicare For All unfairly takes attention away from women's issues and reproductive rights:
True, Sanders doesn't do pigeonholing of issues as wonkishly as some might prefer.
Despite all the media claims. he also doesn't harp on M4A to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, he has stated many times that climate change is the critical issue of our time, with myriad repercussions on the economy and health. This usually gets drowned out by the media concern trolls demanding "But how you gonna pay for Medicare For All?!"
Poor and minority women are disproportionately adversely affected by both climate change and our highly restrictive health care marketplace, particularly in states which have barred the ACA's Medicaid expansion.
M4A by definition IS reproductive health care. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long included abortion rights and birth control in their definition of reproductive health care. They also don't pigeonhole women's medical issues into a separate category that becomes ripe for ideological and moral arguments and misogyny by the right wing.
As a single mom facing my own share of child care issues and emergencies through the years, we absolutely do need relief. But it needs to be simple, guaranteed and universal relief, administered at the nonprofit, public, federal level and designed to be as repeal- proof as we can make it.
And my reply to another reader who really liked Krugman's column and was bemused by my reaction to it:
Krugman took a perfectly good column advocating for children and managed to turn it into a smear of Bernie. He comes right out and says that Sanders "bears part of the blame" for "us" not talking about our children.
True, Krugman doesn't get together with his fellow pundits to plot strategy, but they do feed off one another's discourse. You can see the same talking points all across the A to B spectrum of centrist neoliberal narrative. One common trope is "you can't have this or that program because then Ivanka and her spawn would only take advantage of it."
We should have guaranteed universal programs for everybody, both rich and poor. Warren's child care plan is certainly better than nothing, but parents would have to jump through many bureaucratic hoops to get approved, the govt would not build new centers or train and pay providers -- and the biggest catch of all, as I mentioned before, is that it's voucherized. Red states, especially, would find ways to re-allocate the money for other programs or just use it to reward cronies and private equity vultures. We saw this with Clinton's welfare reform package. The job training money that went along with kicking people off the rolls went to subsidizing businesses. Moms got zilch and the poverty rate skyrocketed in the ensuing decades.
Warren's plan is capitalist to the bone, which is not so much of a good thing when the whole point of capitalism is to extract resources and dispossess people.
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This week's adventure in commenting-land concludes with Maureen Dowd's observation that Trump's misogyny is infiltrating the Senate impeachment trial by way of his two attorneys, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz -who themselves have been joined at the pervert hip by defending Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar should stop "whingeing" and start acting as tough as Nancy Pelosi.
Why even bother joining in this kind of simplistic, identity-politics shallowness?
So I tried tor a little more perspective in my published response:
The devolution may not even be televised. Whenever King Donald looks vulnerable, his courtiers have the power to kick the cameras and the reporters right out of the room. This archaic rule makes the Starr Chamber description all the more apt.
It's gotten to the point where even the National Archives is censoring photos of Women's March anti-Trump signs,
Since Trump has been getting away with high crimes and misdemeanors his entire adult life, nobody's gonna stop him now. His rise to infamy coincided with the dawn of neoliberal austerity during the New York City debt crisis in the 70s, ushering in a second gilded age of obscene wealth inequality. The corrupt Empire State political machine allowed him to commit real estate and tax fraud with impunity, in the hopes that his flamboyance would attract even more speculators to the Big Apple.
Trump always thrived at the direct expense of the poor and working class. He got his welfare, and the unions gave up their pensions to save NYC from bankruptcy. He helped turn it into the wealth disparity capital of the country.
The media rarely challenged Trump, and if they did, it was with a grudging admiration. He's always been a ratings bonanza.
Dershowitz and Starr, both of whom should have been disbarred long ago, are more fiendish proof that this is a full fledged oligarchy.
In a subversive nod to Nathan Hale. Trump is essentially saying: "I only regret I had but one Roy Cohn to give to my country!"
