Drop out, Mayor Pete


I enjoy a good morning scathe of a contemptible politician, don’t you?

Now do Biden. And Yang. And those horrid billionaires. All you have to do is look at the field of potential presidential candidates and see that there is something deeply wrong with the Democratic party — there seems to be an absence of guidelines on what it means to be this thing called a “Democrat”.

Comments

  1. snark33sian says

    A good takedown.
    If only it didn’t come from someone who is a vile rpe-apologist who also supports Gmetgate-also-ran sh0eonhead and their recent harrassment of Anita Sarkeesian…she deserves it, you see, for not being left enough for Coffin’s tastes. ..also blah blah social capital blah blah parasocial blah blah feminism is a marketing ploy and other cr*p of this sort….
    Choose your sources carefully, PZ…

  2. Susan Montgomery says

    Again, I think it needs to be said that a President Bernie will do precisely jack going up against a party full of people like Mayor Pete. To get to universal health care, we need to do more than just persuade. We need to do what the conservatives and the Alt-Right have been doing for decades and use their tactics to bring the country around.

  3. microraptor says

    Susan Montgomery @2: What tactics are you referring to? The tactics of lying about everything and whipping up the constituents into an emotional frenzy about things that aren’t true?

  4. Porivil Sorrens says

    @1
    That’s a…creative way of framing that Coffin made a now-deleted twitter thread about how they dislike Sarkeesian’s analysis, followed immediately by dozens of tweets that explicitly state that she doesn’t deserve harassment.

  5. Susan Montgomery says

    @3 Well, I wouldn’t put it so crudely…but, yes. We do have the truth on our side but I should think that the last 4 years alone have conclusively demonstrated the value of truth to the American people. After all that he’s said and done, there is still at least a %50 chance of Trump being re-elected, after all.

    But it’s not that. Not so much as it is how, over the last 25 years, conservatives have managed to shape public discourse to their own ends. How they manipulate language and mass media – not to challenge progressive ideas directly but to generate fear and mistrust to them. And there’s how they’ve used our own better natures against us by co-opting and subverting our terms and symbols.

    What evidence do you have that what we’ve been doing up till now has been successful?

  6. microraptor says

    @5: Wasn’t saying that we’ve been successful, and I do think a change in tactics are needed, but I think that the problem is that the Democratic Party is too much like the Right because they keep trying to move to capture the illusive “middle ground” but at that point I think we’re both arguing in favor of the same thing and our argument is over semantics.

  7. snark33sian says

    @4) oh, I certainly recall the white-washing/covering of tracks and back-pedalling. Thanks for mentioning it, I should have included it in my comment, along with Coffin’s whingeing ” Why are you caring about her harrassment and not miiiiiine, waaaaah,waaaah” and his insistance that we all welcome Gmetgate abusers in leftist space and make nice with unrepentant *ssholes.
    He also deleted the Stream where he and Angie laugh at the women his friend r
    ped, didn’t he? Scrub scrub scrub….

  8. says

    Why all the shock? The party has been pushing betrayal of the base in favor of the very rich for decades now — the original justification offered by the Clintons for NAFTA was that if multinational corporations faced fewer trade barriers they would be able to employ more people at better wages which would benefit everybody. Notice anything? That’s just Reagan’s Trickle-Down with “the rich” crossed out and “multinational corporations” written in in crayon. (Later on, when it became obvious that this was not happening, the narrative changed to “well, those poor people down in Mexico are having their lives improved by the influx of new jobs and industry so don’t be xenophobic and just enjoy the cheap manufactured goods”, totally ignoring the way that the Mexican farming sector was devastated by NAFTA.)

    The party sold its soul a long, long time ago. The DLC disbanded in the mid-2000s because they had taken over enough of the DNC itself to no longer need a separate organization, but these are exactly the candidates they would have been funding and encouraging if they were still around. Hell, Biden was actually a member of the DLC. The time to protest all of this was the 1990s, but instead everybody decided to back up the former chair of the DLC as he got caught up in repeated sex scandals and ended the party’s 40-year control of Congress. This isn’t your party, and it hasn’t been for decades.

  9. George says

    Sorry, but the Democratic Party is NOT a monolithic organization where everyone agrees with everyone else. It’s a collition party with a bunch of different factions and caucuses. No healthy political party is going to full of people who agree with each other 100% of the time. Nor are they static. The Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of 1990, much less, 1970. Same thing with the Republicans.

    Also, the DNC is not some all-powerful controlling force. It’s mostly about Fundraising and trying to get candidates to run for the thousands of Federal, State, and local offices around the country. But it can’t make someone run for office, nor can it stop someone from running for office. We have Primaries and Caucuses. Individuals decide to run. If they get enough votes, they get the nomination. There is no “Smoke-Filled Room” where some Star Chamber can decide that Bernie Sanders will never get the Nomination for President, or whatever. If Sanders or Warren gets the votes, the Corporate Dems will be stuck with ’em, just as the Republicans were stuck with Trump in 2016.