He talks with Seth Meyers about why we should get beyond personalities and whether we like or dislike a candidate, why Hillary Clinton’s policies are far superior to those of Donald Trump, where the Democratic party has failed, and what it still needs to do. Elsewhere, Sanders said that Trump’s campaign was based on bigotry and his focus on president Obama’s birth certificate was emblematic of that.
Sanders recalled how Trump was “the leader of the so-called birther movement. And what the birther movement was about…was not being critical of Obama. This is a democracy. We can criticize Obama. It was delegitimizing the first African-American president in the history of our country. And the reason for that was clear.”
The reason, Sanders said, is that “There are racists in this country who could never accept the fact that we had a black president. And that’s what Trump was trying to do, delegitimize the president, not disagree with him.”
As a result, the senator said, “I think this is part of his entire campaign of bigotry. It’s against Muslims. It’s against Mexicans, attacking women’s — women, you know. It is not acceptable for a candidate for president of the United States to be arguing whether or not our president was born in this country.
Yeah, Bernie’s no radical.
I hope there’s a radical progressive candidate someday, instead of radicals on the neofascist side of the spectrum.
@Marcus:
I don’t see that happening without either the death of the GOP or their reforming into a textbook conservative party. There just isn’t much incentive for the Dems to go too far beyond “less bad or significantly less bad” party.
Blood Knight in Sour Armor@#2:
I don’t see it happening, either, unless there is a tremendous increase in inequality and we get protest candidates on both ends of the political spectrum. I think Trump and Sanders are harbingers of more extreme positions to come. Eventually the democrats may have the same kind of populare split as the republicans suffered with Trump.
A pox on both their houses.
There is a civil war in the Dem side. Clinton is a disunity candidate.
@Marcus & Bloodknight
There is a civil war on the democratic side as well. Clinton, by recent polls, has divided and weakened the democratic party. There will be a progressive primary challenge if elections are held against Clinton in 2020. Sanders has laid the groundwork for an actual revolution -- even if he himself is no longer contributing to it. People are questioning the political system more than ever.
On Bernie, he’s not perfect and I believe he’s completely bought into the notion that Donald Trump is an apocalyptic candidate of Hitlerian proportions rather than a petulant attention-seeking troll.
Honestly, it has been Clinton that has flaunted the rules of democracy more and seems to believe herself above the law. Haiti, Honduras and Syria were all her doing. Colin Powell’s comments have reinforced that notion. Trump is just an internet troll who says stupid shit and begs for attention. He’ll be irrelevant even as president.
my emphasis
um wut?
Clinton that has flaunted the rules of democracy more
Irrelevant. The electorate that’s going to radicalize coming out of this and the next election won’t care about who was worse, they’ll just want to see the whole pseudodemocracy plowed under. I don’t want to see that happen, because sufficiently severe political turmoil just invites more opportunists in. The government has done a good job of building a military/industrial/police-state and centralizin the reins of political control -- it’s an environment that begs for a strong dictator to declare the 1st american empire.
If Secretary Clinton has “disunified” the Democratic Party then please explain why she has stronger support of democrats than Trump has of republicans.
@John Smith
Wow a candidate who can single handedly manage all that ? (or you might be binge watching House of cards)
@6
Whoops. Flout. I was tired when I typed that.
@7:
That’s why I think getting Trump in the White House is probably better in the long term. Obama also kills the families (drone strikes). Hillary will expand on them. Trump is fairly incompetent and doesn’t believe what he says. Rather than laying the groundwork for the next fascist demagogue, let this one -- the best of them -- rise to power.
@8:
Not in the most recent polls. Democrats are leaving her because she’s courting republicans and due to her numerous scandals.
@9:
Regarding Honduras -- she kept the coup government in place by preventing Zelaya from returning to his country and held elections that were thought to be rigged. The US government supports the coup government’s death squads, and there is a refugee crisis of children coming from there, which she as SOS blocked to “send a message.”
Regarding Syria -- she armed the rebels, bombed Assad and created the vacuum for ISIS to form and perpetuated the civil war there to displace Assad.
Regarding Haiti -- she ripped them off after the Earthquake via Clinton Foundation. Rigged the election there and empowered her loyalists. Advocated against increasing the minimum wage there and destroyed the economy.
Obviously she’s not the only actor in all of this, but she bears a lot of the blame.
Even if Obama hadn’t been born in this country, I’d say it would be moot after a majority of the people voted for him, and after he was sworn in. If we decide to vote for someone ineligible, we are also voting for a rule change, informally. And if the majority of Congress and the Court show up, and swear someone in, it’s hard to argue that it was informal -- they just made it legal.
I have a slightly different take on what the future may hold.
As I see it, the current status of the two major parties are directly a result of the tactics they’ve been using over the past 30+ years. If you recognize that to many of the party insiders (I’m not talking elites, but those people who have spent their lives working within the party), the primary objective is to marginalize the other party until it cannot win elections. The insiders have internalized the hatred of the opposing party so much that this has become part of their identity.
The tactics each party has been using to destroy the other are different. The republican party has focused on getting the people who support them to vote in down-ticket races, getting majorities in the state legislatures so they can arrange the districts to favor their candidates. This strategy abandons the big cities, because even if a large city has a number of districts there are usually more districts outside of the cities than in them. So to gain control of a state it is only necessary to control the non-city districts. It is also cheaper, and faces less opposition as the democrats tend to spend more time and money in the cities (where there is a larger population).
The democratic tactic has been different. They have been chipping away at republican voters for decades. Promising (and delivering) business-friendly legislation, moving toward a more laissez-faire approach. Engaging in wars for ‘compassionate’ reasons. Turning a blind eye toward tax cheats and the bankers who collapsed the economy. The democrats have, deliberately, adopted a more conservative stance in order to attract voters who generally vote republican.
We are now seeing the results of the two strategies. The republicans have always used an element of tribalism and fear as a way to maintain their hold over the suburban and rural communities. As US society is becoming more liberal, the rhetoric and fear-mongering has to increase in order to motivate voters. As RINOs leave the republican party due to the democrat’s strategy the remaining republicans are more likely to turn to demagogues as the savior of the nation.
On the flip side, the tactics used by the democratic party have unavoidably shifted the democratic party to the right. Continually working to grab voters from the conservatives has put the democratic party into a position where they have to lose in order for the republicans to win. That is, if the democrats run good campaigns, and a good GOTV, they should be able to win most elections going forward. If the republicans continue their tactics, and there is no evidence that they can change, they will be increasingly hateful, fearful, purified, and marginalized.
So what does the future bring? Well, with a right-leaning democratic party suffocating the far-right republican party, there is ample room for a true left-leaning party to develop. The members of the democratic party will fight against this, because they still hate the republicans with a passion and want to see them wither. They’re argument is that so long as the republicans have a chance to win elections, we should always vote democratic. That is where the democratic party leaders are coming from, and what Bernie is saying.
But society and history doesn’t work that way. Unless the democratic party does things which the more liberal parts of society wants (which might alienate the conservative democrats who have recently joined), there is room for a new political party to grow on the liberal side of the spectrum.
So rather than both parties nominating demagogues, I suspect the republican party will continue to do so, but the democratic party will be dismayed that their big tent no longer covers the most liberal section of society and a new popular liberal party will grow. I don’t see it in the Green party at the moment, the positions of the Greens are too radical to be popular with a lot of liberals. But there is now room for such a party, and the positions of the Greens may change to be more popular.
We’ll have to see.
t Donald Trump is an apocalyptic candidate of Hitlerian proportions rather than a petulant attention-seeking troll
I believe the German elite cira 1932-33 saw Hitler as a little man that they could control or manage.
@10: That’s a lie. Currently she has 81% of dems, he has 76% of republicans. What else do you want to make up?
@9 deepak shetty
I wonder if you’d be such a snarky little shit telling that to the people who have to live the consequences of her bullshit decisions.
No, you dumbass, she didn’t single-handedly do those things, nobody’s saying that. But every time shit happens she joins the dog pile of corporations, elites, militaristic maniacs, dictators, illegitimate regimes and many other deplorables. You don’t give a fuck because you’re a privileged asshole and you never have to see that shit first-hand. It’s other people’s wages that stagnate, it’s other people’s children who have to run away from their own country, it’s other people’s houses that get bombed.
You get to just sit back as the smug entitled piece of shit that you are and gaslight the people who suffer under the politicians you support.
In any case, is that your best defense? She and 31 other people stabbed the guy, therefore she’s 100% innocent of the murder? Fucking moron.
@10: Actually, liar, people are saying exactly that. Stay in your failed state, you piece of filth.