By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Here is a fourth post debunking common talking points by die-in-the-last-ditch Clinton loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives. For this talking point, I’ll give a quotation that illlustrates the myth, followed by rebuttals. (Three previous talking points are debunked here, two more here, and two more here.
Talking Point: Sexist BernieBros were one reason Clinton lost election 2016.
Here’s an example of the talking point from Democratic strategist Karen Finney on CNN (November 16, 2016):
[FINNEY:] I think given the level of sexism and misogyny that we saw come to the surface and be very public, I think that supports the fact that in this country we are going to have to have a real conversation about that….
And I will be really honest [hoo boy], and some of my colleagues won’t like this, but I think even in the primary, some of what we saw with the Bernie bros had a real chilling effect on a lot of women, young women in particular.
We learned about during the primary there were a number of these secret Facebook groups of young progressive women who were supporting Hillary but frankly, they didn’t want to deal with the backlash online from some of the Bernie bros. So again, I think, you know, there’s a lot of pieces to sort of tease out in this conversation.
(Ugh. A “conversation.” Twice.) So, we have a number of things to look at. First, we need to assess Finney’s Facebook anecdote. Second, we need to ask how significant “a lot of” really was. Third, we need to examine the category: Is #BernieBro even a thing? And finally, we need to ask who Sanders supporters really were, and whether #BernieBro can be used as a synecdoche for them. (Note the subtle smear in the midst of Finney’s blather: When she says “some of the Bernie bros” I read that as implying that all Sanders supporters are bros, although some are less obnoxious than others.)
Normally, I’d define the term #BernieBro (Know Your Meme has a fine discussion of the history of the term, along with a valiant attempt at definition.) However, anticipating point three, it has no taxonomic value; in fact, its very vagueness contributed to its virulent spread.
First, Finney’s claim of #BernieBros on Facebook has little support, even at the anecdotal level. It does seem to be true that some Facebook users complained about users they termed “Bernie Bros.” J.M. of Somerville wrote the Boston Globe’s advice columnist, Miss Conduct:
I try to be open-minded and tolerant of everyone’s views. A longtime Hillary Clinton backer, I limit my political commentary to supporting my candidate, not trashing others. So am I wrong, or is it really rude for a rabid Bernie Bro to post Hillary-hostile links directly onto my Facebook page? What is an appropriate response to this?
Personally, I think it’s rude to post anything onto anyone else’s Facebook page no matter the topic, but let that pass. If behavior like posting links onto a Facebook page, even on a mass scale, affected the outcome of election 2016, then the Clinton campaign was more fragile than anybody ever imagined. (Note again the same sleight of hand that Finney used: All Sanders supporters are bros, although some are “rabid.”)
Did offensive #BernieBro behavior occur on a mass scale on Facebook? If so, I would expect it to show up on Twitter, since that’s where operatives go to propagate talking points, and media types go to pick up on said talking points. So I searched the Twitter on “#BernieBro Facebook” (All, From everyone, From everywhere) between January 1, 2016 and October 1, 2016; time enough #BernieBro-dom to really get rolling, if it existed, and cutting off when the general was well underway. I found 42 responses (and you can use the link to check for yourself). Here’s a typical tweet about Facebook:
Y'all I got a #BernieBro in my Facebook timeline. He said he "expected better" of me. Woooo boy here we go
— Celeste (@celeste_perilla) April 3, 2016
Quelle horreur! And here is the worst one I can find:
Bernie bros harassing @SenWarren on her Facebook page because Bernie bros. https://t.co/VPNc8XnVzm #berniebro pic.twitter.com/D927zWoiRC
— berniebropoetry (@berniebropoet) March 15, 2016
Obviously some poor lost soul. Again, if this can swing an election, the Clinton campaign was in terrible trouble[1].
Second, Online #BernieBro-dom has no statistical significance. Rebekah Tromble and Dirk Hovy did a study of Twitter data in February 2016, again, plenty of time for the phenomenon to have gotten rolling. The Washington Post:
In the end, we found that 23 of the 30 gendered slurs were directed at Clinton. However, out of a total 52,181 tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton, just 606, or 1.16 percent, contained these insults. While these slurs only represent one particularly overt form of sexism, the fact that so few were present in these tweets is remarkable.
Are Bernie Bros [if indeed they exist, which the writers take for granted] behind the slurs?
This is quite a small number. But any such slur is troubling. And we still need to know who is responsible for the invective.
Therefore, in the final stage of analysis, we coded whether each slur originated from a Bernie Sanders supporter (as determined by their Twitter bios or corpus of tweets) and, among verifiable Sanders supporters, whether the sender was male, female, or unknown.
The vast majority of the slurs were associated with Twitter users on the right — particularly self-identified Trump supporters. But 14.7 percent came from those backing Sanders. Among Sanders supporters, 60.6 percent tweeting gendered slurs were men, 29.2 percent women, and 10.1 percent unknown. Most slurs are used by both genders, but some seem more specific: in the data, “whore” was used as an insult mostly by female Sanders supporters.[2]
Thus, while we do find some evidence of Bernie Bros’ bad behavior, abuse against Clinton by Sanders supporters — both male and female —seems relatively limited. Clinton certainly faces a barrage of negativity and a heavy dose of sexism on Twitter. But that mostly appears to come from the right.
And though any and all instances of sexist slurs deserve condemnation, Sanders’ keyboard warriors accounted for just 89 such tweets during the New Hampshire primary. That is a mere 0.17 percent of all the tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton that we examined.
89 tweets have a “chilling effect”? It’s like the S.S. Clinton sank after striking an ice cube![3]
Third, #BernieBro has no taxonomic value. Adam Johnson writes in Alternet:
[T]he term’s definition, as Elizabeth Bruenig of The New Republic notes, has reached “critique drift”, stretched to the point of utter meaninglessness. The definition has morphed into basically: “Sanders supporters whose argument I don’t wish to engage”. In fact, the following non-sexist, non-bro-y examples have been labeled “Bernie Bros”:
- Elizabeth Bruenig herself when writing about the topic in The New Republic.
- A fake account for a fake US Congressmen that was used as evidence in several pieces on the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon.
- A woman named “Carol”
And now a new addition to the Bernie Bro catch-all has come from Paul Krugman, who has pre-emptively leveled the term at critics of Clinton who think her exorbitant Wall Street speaking fees are potentially corrupting:
Certainly taking a harder line on the corruption of our politics by big money is important — and no, giving some paid speeches doesn’t disqualify her from making that case. (Cue furious attack from the Bernie bros.)
Certainly, this argument by Krugman could solicit criticism from a whole cross-section of people; including women, non-bro men, Clinton supporters, Marxists, Republicans, and Independents. Yet here we are: the term “Bernie Bro” is knee-jerkingly used to dismiss a very valid criticism that Clinton’s $2.9 million in speaking fees from Wall Street may undermine her independence when it comes to regulating Wall Street.
In this sense, those still holding on to the idea that the label of “Bernie Bro” has any taxonomic value that helps define something urgent and relevant should vehemently oppose its ever expanding use.
And the inventor of the term has disavowed it, for the same reasons Johnson outlines. Robinson Meyer:
O reader, hear my plea: I am the victim of semantic drift.
Four months ago, I coined the term “Berniebro” to describe a phenomenon I saw on Facebook: Men, mostly my age, mostly of my background, mostly with my political beliefs, were hectoring their friends about how great Bernie was even when their friends wanted to do something else, like talk about the NBA.
In the post, I tried to gently suggest that maybe there were other ways to advance Sanders’s beliefs, many of which I share. I hinted, too, that I was not talking about every Sanders supporter. I did this subtly, by writing: “The Berniebro is not every Sanders supporter.”
Then, 28,000 people shared the story on Facebook…. [N]ow that the Berniebro lived in the world, it started to grow and change, and I remained its Dr. Frankenstein. In November, Rebecca Traister used Berniebro to refer to leftist writers who expressed their grievances with Hillary Clinton in sexist ways. Then other writers employed it to other ends. “Berniebro” came to imply that some men only supported Sanders because he was male. Then it stood in for the roving horde of Twitter users who respond to any sufficiently prominent skepticism about Bernie with outrage, alarm, and hate.
So here I am: The prodigal father has returned. And I think I have a solution to all this—or, at least, to the Berniebro problem. The Berniebrosplosion doesn’t betray a unique crisis in civility, nor a long-term problem for the Democratic base. It signifies, rather, something much simpler: category collapse.
The Internet is impoverished of vocabulary. People want to describe the emerging Sanders coalition, yet when they reach their hands behind the veil of language, they come out grasping only “Berniebro.”
So we’re back to synecdoche, aren’t we? When “people” (who?) wish to describe all Sanders supporters, they “grasp” for some: “bros.” Odd. I wonder why?[4]
Fourth, Sanders had significant support among women, especially young women. CNN:
CNN’s Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta analyzed the age and gender breakdown in 27 states where CNN conducted exit and entrance polls during the primaries — and found that overall, Clinton led Sanders 61% to 37% among women.
But when she analyzed the age and gender breakdown across those 27 states, Sanders led Clinton by an average of 37 percentage points among women 18 to 29 — a stunning result given Clinton’s emphasis on the historic nature of her candidacy.
Support for Clinton rose as the age of women went up. Women who were 30 to 39 were more likely to support Clinton by an average of 53% for Clinton and 46% for Sanders. And among older women, Clinton dominated Sanders by huge double-digit margins.
At Clinton rallies, a number of older women were critical of the younger generation, arguing that they are not backing the former secretary of state’s candidacy because they never faced the kind of discrimination that women of Clinton’s era did.
But in interviews during the final days of the California campaign, many young women at Sanders rallies said they would never vote on the basis of gender. They cited trust and integrity issues as the reason they weren’t voting for Clinton, and said their support for Sanders’ platform and policies trumped any notion that they should back a candidate angling for a historic first.
Remember that Karen Finney pointed specifically to young women as having been intimidated by Bernie Bros. Again, if that was sufficient to cause a 24 point difference in women 18-29, the Clinton campaign was terribly fragile. That would also imply that forty-something years of feminism has made no headway whatever (which I do not believe to be true at all).
So, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that many young women have been harassed on Facebook by #BernieBros even though there are few anecdotes to be found where we would expect to find them, that sexist Tweets from male Sanders supporters on the scale of two digits amount to a bro-dom sufficient to affect election outcomes, that #Berniebros is a term instead of an vague epithet, and that the behavior of #BernieBros was so powerful as to effect a 24% differential between Sanders and Clinton support among young women.
Conclusion
I think, actually, that is is a lost cause, even though it makes me crazy. I sometimes now see random Sanders supporters un-self-consciously describing themselves as bros; and perhaps “bro” will go the way of “guy,” once gendered, but now no longer. Perhaps the rapid spread of the original meme — aided not only by its virulence but by the highly tendentious Clinton campaign — has also led to its attenuation. One can only hope.
NOTES
[1] Here is an article in Cosmopolitan giving anecdotes about #BernieBro harrassment on Twitter. Make of it what you will, but I discount it for several reasons: First, the main source for the story, Clara Jeffreys, was in essence a Clinton campaign operative operating under deep cover as an Editor (at Mother Jones). Second, complaining about tone on Twitter is like complaining about the dietary habits of lions in the Roman Coliseum. I draw the line at doxxing, as in the GamerGate case, and I’ve beaten up on a fair number of trolls myself, but Twitter is as good as the blocking tools it has (which have been improved, helpfully). Third, Twitter is a rough neighborhood anyhow. Neera Tanden, after all, used Twitter to give a thumbs-down to a writer, getting him fired. Finally, hearing well-paid public figures of any gender complain about online behavior leaves me unsympathetic. Have your assistant screen the tweets!
[2] “Whore” is not gendered. Ask Barney Frank.
[3] This is Twitter, not Facebook, but Twitter, again, is a rough neighborhood, so I think it’s a reasonable proxy for online behavior in general.
[4] Meyer concludes: “The Berniebro, as originally conceived, was a tragic figure; his loyalty and dudeish certainty made him a poor proxy for his favorite candidate. But what’s tragic about some Hillary voters is not really gendered in the same way or at all. The tragic Hillary voter, the truly pitiable figure, is the Democrat who would love to line up behind Bernie’s sunny ideals but knows that he just isn’t electable. I speak, of course, of the Hillarealist.” That was written in February 2016. It reads differently now, eh?
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Soooooooo….we have reached infinity plus one.
Something unpossible….except with the Clintoons.
Infinite excuses to blame everyone else.
If Hillary and the Establishment Democrats are looking for someone to blame, they need to take a hard look in the mirror.
They were remarkably tone deaf about the needs of the people, who save the 1% have not recovered from the mess they helped cause in 2008. They still are. I hate the conservatives with their “personal responsibility” lectures, which are usually towards poor people, but in a situation like this, it is well deserved. Why don’t rich Establishment people ever take “responsibility”?
They failed and the Democrats need to clean house.
If nothing else, this election has been a serious eye opener as to who is on whose side. Many supposedly left wing sources showed their true colours.
Especially since they pushed Bernie Bro to the media.
https://twitter.com/olivianuzzi/status/740367983466414080
Every time they see a mirror, they mistake it for a window. That will not ever change.
Fraud is not a mirror nor window, and has nothing to do with so called Berniebros. We need honest elections to have voters capture any meaningful power to direct the future of their families, communities and nation. Both major parties are too quiet about this long sordid history. We need our Democracy:
https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount
Election Integrity depends on YOU!
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Find answers to frequently asked questions.
…………
Yeah, Howling Green Dogs!
Or a glass ceiling
Doesn’t it all come down to “…anyone who didn’t vote for Clinton is sexist and racist.” The whole Berniebro thing was so offensive as well as a blatantly obvious falsehood, that it became yet one more reason not to vote for Clinton in the general.
Right. It’s tragic.
I just caught up with Kevin Drum’s latest, and he takes the stock market’s climb since the election as evidence that Hillary was really the tough on Wall Street candidate. But their favorite, Krugman, posted that the stock market might never recover once he learned that Trump would win. Certainly Kevin Drum wasn’t posting that a Clinton win would be bad for the stock market.
Wall Street and our 401K plans and health savings accounts are invested in the casino that is Wall Street. The Hillary faction is okay with this. I believe they are somewhat unnerved that the Trump victory turned out opposite to their expectations. Can anyone point to a Hillary supporter predicting a stock market melt-up if Trump would win?
The Clinton supporters believe in 401K plans and health savings accounts and the Affordable Care Act. Once again (they were caught off guard by the 2008 crash, just not as off guard as McCain and the Republicans) by the fact that no one cares about the deficit, least of all Wall Street
investorsspeculators.I hope and pray that we’ll have a changing of the guard in the Democratic party.
I’d rather BE sexist, racist – et cetera – No, In fact I would rather deliberately work my way to mastery in the entire rainbow of Clinton’ista-grades of deplorable than support Hillary and the Clinton Clan.
“89 tweets have a “chilling effect”? It’s like the S.S. Clinton was sunk by an ice cube![3]”
LOL!!!!
I’d say that’s more like 72 degree tropic water instead of 75 degree tropic water sank the H.M.S. Titanic Clintoon….
H.M.S. Titanic Clintoon inquiry: We have found the chilly, chilly waters off Barbados led to the failure of hull rivets in the preternaturally cold waters (which sure seems weird in a time of global warming, but any harbor in a storm) and untimely sinking of the most unsinkable female ship ever….
I did tinker with that joke a little…
Thanks for this post and some very funny lines. “…sunk by an ice cube!”
Again the DNC and surrogates talk identity only, never mentioning economy or economic class. Not surprising. The US top 0.1% now holds the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% . The neolib Dems worked as hard as the GOP to make this outcome happen. This economic reversal for the 90% has been underway since 1987. Must not talk about that. Nope. It was phantoms like ‘Berniebros’ or ‘russia hacking’ that swung the election.
See this chart and note the trend line change being in 1987:
http://ritholtz.com/2016/11/top-0-1-holds-amount-wealth-bottom-90/
flora
November 25, 2016 at 1:54 pm
I almost posted that myself, but I have posted it so, so many times from Charles Huge Smith that I decided not to….
but it sure shows we’re getting poorer and they are getting richer, and its not nature or some immutable law of physics. Never the less, I’m glad Barry brought it up – the broader the audience, the more the chance to do something about it….
Everyone should let Yves know that Naked Capitalism has been slandered/libeled as a “fake media” site that is influenced by Russia and helped elect Trump, according to the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2016/11/23/20161125_prop2.jpg
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-25/washington-post-names-drudge-zero-hedge-anti-clinton-sophisticated-russian-propagand
Pot calling the shiny stainless steel kettle black…
A simpler way to say that might be:
Pot calling the mirror black.
It’s more chilling than that.
Trump turns out to be a weak strongman, as he is not going to go after his opponent, Hillary, not putting her in jail, even though the MSM had said he would…because he was a strongman.
In the meanwhile, we are lucky she lost (or has not claimed victory so far, pending recounts). Otherwise, people working for Russia, including bloggers and commenters who frequent the mentioned websites will be most severely dealt with (whatever that may mean).
Now, who is the strongman here?
For the record, I believe she should be our Queen or Empress.
Probably some very senior Establishment figures, the sort who go to Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg meetings, told Trump that if the Clintons go down, they will take some of the very Greatest and Goodest of the Great and the Good down with them. And those very senior figures probably told The Donald that he had Better Not Go There.
Congratulations naked capitalism for being among the Russian-sympathizing anti-Clinton deplorables.
I think we need a return of some good patriotic American McCarthy witch-hunt hearings to cut through the Russian propaganda. Real Americans will thank us.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-25/washington-post-names-drudge-zero-hedge-anti-clinton-sophisticated-russian-propagand
That is truly hilarious. Truth Out and Black Agenda Report among the kremlin’s stooges.
The picture of HRC blaming the Russians was so wonderful I just posted it at Daily Kos. Am awaiting being banned. I’ll be in good company.
This is what happens when the propaganda machine gets called out—they employ the tactics of the right, whose favorite way to dismiss anything factual that contradicts their narrative as being from the “liberal media,” and any source that presents said facts as thus not a legitimate one.
Interesting that the fake-news thing arose right after more and more people, including disgusted journalists, began warning everyone the corporate media aren’t to be trusted and recommending sites that do, in fact, offer reasonably balanced information. I won’t say “unbiased” because there ain’t no such critter, and I include myself in that. However, I also make an effort to pause and reflect on whether I’m allowing too much cognitive dissonance to determine my choice of what goes on the news aggregator group I set up on Facebook.
What’s sad is that those fully immersed in the cult of the establishment will embrace this kind of list because for that same reason—their desire to have it their way. Could we call that Burger King journalism?
The previously useful Josh Marshall is giving the Bezos Light & Shopper a shout out for this story. I refuse to link.
Didn’t y’all get that memo from 1956? Everyone on the left is a commie.
I think the WaPo has just been goosed. All carefully sheathed in a well lubricated ‘ruskie’ poke. Hahahahahaha. The gullible, goosed by the ‘experts’.
How did Clinton lose again?
The Tipster
November 25, 2016 at 2:01 pm
I actually think it is great!!! Hear me out – for too long the sycophantic, stenographer, run by money mainstream media has not had an adversarial group with the ability to challenge and distribute to many, if not most people, their critiques and facts.
The mainstream media was able to just shut down any critique of itself by simply not talking about it.
That time has ended. The whole era of “anonymous, unnamed sources” is gonna come to an end.”
People can read Wikileaks for themselves. THEY CAN ASK WHY DOES THE WASHINGTON POST THINK THAT WHEN WIKILEADS GETS PRIVATE INFO, AS OPPOSED TO WHEN THE MEDIA GOT THE PENTAGON PAPERS, IT IS BAD, AND WHY IS THERE NOT ANY DISCUSSION WHATSOEVER OF THE CORRUPTION EXPOSED IN THE EMAILS????????????
The very idea that the corporate media is an objective, dispassionate bunch without an agenda is ridiculous.
Got a link to the WaPo article itself? Because this sounds like another Internet rumor. I’d suggest tracing back to original sources.
I did a bit of digging, and it doesn’t seem to have been the WaPo – it was a site called “PropOrNot” – and they merely identified sites which repeated fake stories. Here’s the link: http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html – and here’s some of the text from the post (emphasis added):
Given the echo chamber of the Internet and the limited resources of bloggers, it’s easy to get taken in by memes which confirm our biases. It’s always best to follow things back to their original sources rather than find out that the thing which upset you was the result of an Internet game of “telephone” , where, like a fish story, the tale grows in the repetition.
1. A lawyer on a later post has already advised that we get counsel, in that we have a case for defamation against the Post. Litigation is tiring but we are considering that option, since we already have inside intel that the national security section of the Post had nada to do with this story.
2. Your reading of the PropOrNot site is very selective and falls well short of digging. It accuses all of the sites listed as being “propaganda outlets” under the influence of “coordinators abroad” (#11 in its FAQ). Several individuals on Twitter called this out as libel with respect to NC. And under #7, PropOrNot accuses “some” of the sites as being guilty of violating the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, as in accusing them of being spies and calling for investigation (by implication of all, since how do you know which is or isn’t) by the FBI and DoJ.
Even if the case itself goes nowhere, the discovery phase could be interesting re shedding some light on relationships betwen WaPo and various other actors. As they say, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-25/washington-post-names-drudge-zero-hedge-anti-clinton-sophisticated-russian-propaganda
Also, Naked’Capitalism was also named as such by the Washington Post!
Of course it was! Just look at this picture of Yves and Lambert: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hTzuO24i-YA/hqdefault.jpg
Yves has grown more attractive with age.
Lambert, eh, not so much.
Thanks for this, nicely done.
I think another point about the Berniebro thing is that it reinforces the basic strategic incompetence of the Clinton team. I’ve posted several times over the last year here that the Clintonites are tactically smart, but strategically inept, and propagating the Berniebro meme seems a perfect example of this. No doubt it seemed a great idea to everyone involved that spreading the meme was a good way to bash Sanders without appearing to bash him. Its the sort of idea which I recall from my days in student politics that popped up all the time over a few beers, and would be quietly dropped on sober reflection then next day.
If you go back to when Sanders first started to appear a real threat, it would at that time have been obvious (or should have been) to HRC’s team that there was a movement there which had to be both defeated and co-opted. They no doubt knew they would tack right when the nomination was won, but they also must have known they would have to rely on people who were attracted to Sanders to vote for HRC in the main election. Its a given in nomination battles that you fight to win, but not by using tactics that will blowback on you in the later main election – this is especially so when you are a frontrunner with no need to use nuclear tactics. Throwing out a meme like this was surely guaranteed to infuriate most Sanders supporters, in particular young women.
A strategically smart campaign manager would surely say when presented the berniebro idea ‘cool idea, but I’ve looked carefully at the polls and the figures, and if we start accusing all those young women and older working class folks who like Sanders that they are just the mindless associates of college jerks, then that’s going to cause us all sorts of problems down the line. Come up with something new – something that attacks Sanders without insulting his supporters, we’re going to need them’.
Unfortunately ‘smart campaign managers’ were in short supply for the Clinton campaign. They convinced themselves they didn’t need Sanders supporters, that moderate and even further right Republicans would be so disgusted by Trump they would have ‘bipartisan’ support. They believed their own version of unicorns without realizing that bipartisan don’t mean diddly.
Any belief that Republicans would tack to Hillary was delusional.
Polls would tell them that.
Q: Are you a registered republican?
A: Yes.
Q: Will you vote for Clinton if Trump is nominated?
A: [Revealing]
Adherence to Dogma would not. There is no persuading true believers with facts. Hopefully many of those true believers are now among the truly powerless (aka: in hell), and possibly unemployed (Purgatory).
Yes, the whole campaign seemed riddled with groupthink. There seem to have been a complete absence of critical voices within the campaign.
It’s been a cliche for some time now that the reason Obama won the nomination and the election in 2008 was that Hillary had locked up all the top Democratic campaign consultants – folks skilled at losing elections. It’s probably one of the big reasons that she lost the 2016 election. (She’d probably have lost the primary to Bernie if he’d been a lifelong Democrat rather than someone who changed parties just to challenge her.)
I’m not sure they were tactically smart either.
More like malicious and ruthless about using the DNC to sabotage Sanders. They also had helped from the plutocratic owned media.
The DNC tried to feed us the Clinton dog food (sh*t) back in 2008 but where blind-sided by Obama, for probably a lot of the same reasons that many of us found her unacceptable in 2016. The Clinton campaign was a bit more ‘prepared’ in 2016, and had the backing of a sitting Democratic president to put thumbs on the scale, but just barely enough to slap down a 70 year old socialist. Same dog ****.
Question: Who determines the order that primaries are held? It seems that after the Southern primaries were finished, building up a big lead for Clinton, Bernie had an almost insurmountable mountain to climb. Would it have made a big difference if the primaries were held in reverse?
I have read that the DLC Democrats thought that it would have made exactly the difference you ask about ” if held in reverse “. The DLC crats didn’t want any such challenges so they put the Super Tuesday primaries near-first to kill any McGovern Eruption early in the process.
Some of the leaked DNC and Podesta emails address exactly this issue. They intentionally worked to put conservative states early, both to thwart a Democratic challenge from the left, and to help a far right candidate on the Republican side, as part of their “Pied Piper” strategy.
Hillary has no strategic vision beyond “First Woman President Hillary Diane Rodham”.
So without a strategic vision, she was racing around purely tactical…
My metaphor was that she was like the fastest, best clipper ship in the Atlantic without a course,
merely sailing the fastest at any time. Yesterday she was headed to Boston, This morning she
was headed to Bermuda, Right now she’s making for Africa. Not that she has been getting anywhere, but she certainly has been making great speed. Her friends in the Media are always willing to give her great press
but, a month later, she’s still at sea, in about the same place.
She’s been very good at stabbing people to death, whenever they were inconvenient, but never
been able to take a loss, or accept other people had different opinions..
it’s why she’s been so ineffective for so long. It’s easier to always oppose her then to get close to her and try and line up with her.
Thanks PK, I agree they were tactically smart but they were so severely straight jacketed by their absent/vacuous/more of the same policy agenda that they had no where to go to advance their candidate. I believe they would have cruised to victory if they could have adopted a chimera of Bernie’s platform with a believable advocacy. THAT was anathema for them and so they used the long discredited attack dog strategy. That strategy is a serious turn off for many and so it just reinforced the ‘oh I can’t listen to that woman/, read that story any further’ response. Very few people recover from three assaults on the credibility factor that ‘attack dog’ generates. It is a loser strategy and Bernie Sanders NEVER went there.
All the Clinton campaigners had left was ‘competence’, ‘track record’, ‘qualified’. Each of which was under perpetual assault on a daily basis from day one through the primaries and right up to November. $Hillary’s tracks are littered in trash and blood and there was no way enough followers would stay the course.
I do appreciate your note that ‘whore’ is not gender specific. I have used the term “corporate whore” for years to describe a certain type of Democrat epitomized by the Clintons and the DLC, but not limited to them. Most of those I have referenced this way were not female.
I really did not want to break out “corporate rent boy” mostly because this is an instance where gender has nothing to do with the lack of ethics and corruption and I see no reason to change because a deeply flawed candidate who happened to be female lost her long sought prize.
I’m Chuck Schumer and I resent the implication.
Krugman’s defense of Clinton is particularly rich, given that we now know that part of those speeches was the statement that Clinton had public and private positions, with the implication that the public positions were free for the masses, but her private audiences heard her private positions. This is exactly the kind of corrupt dishonesty that attacks on the private quarter million dollar speeches were meant to expose.
As for concern over levels of micro-intimidation evidenced by the numbers cited, one might want to consider the intimidating effect of hearing Madeline Albright condemning young women to hell, a place which she will surely know well.
Maggie Thatcher and Imelda Marcos and Indira Gandhi await her.
I don’t understand why anyone would complain about Hillary’s speeches. Didn’t she tell them to, “cut it out?” She even went so far as to explain what she meant when she was asked, “cut what out?” Without hesitation she replied, “you know, the shenanigans.”
What more could anyone expect?
Let us propose: If Clinton wanted to win the Election, nominate Bernie as Vice President, as a question to the Clintonistas.
Why, if Clinton wanted to win the Election, did she not nominate Bernie as Vice President?
Clintonistas, DNC and DLC, please explain.
Easy. Because bankers heads would have exploded.
And neither bankers or corporatists prefer Bernie to trump… maybe not sure of trumps positions, quite sure about Bernie’s. he was an existential threat, would have put some on jail.
Because noone wants a vice president more popular than they are.
1. Clinton didn’t really understand the appeal of Sanders; he is literally so off-the-charts to her way of thinking that she literally did not recognize the desire for functioning, ethical government that Sanders conjured up for millions of us.
2. Like me, the Clintonistas and DNCers have traditionally watch very little reality of ‘entertainment’ tv, so they did not understand the neural pathways that years of watching Trump fire people has had on the cognition of millions of Americans. Many people, including me, wanted the entire lobbyist-expert-corruptCongress ‘fired’ and exiled from DC. And along came the very guy who became famous for hollering ‘You’re fired!’, but millions of us don’t watch tv enough to realize just how incredibly resonant Trump’s ‘You’re fired!’ would be after several decades of bank bailouts, being lied into ME wars, and other flagrant, obnoxious insider varieties of incompetence.
3. It’s my sense that Clintonistas probably assumed that they could triangulate Bernie because that’s how they think; so rather than learn from him or work with him, they sought to neuter him. Stupider than pond scum, but there you have it.
That’s all I got.
I voted for Clinton in the end because Trump reminds me of some business slobs that I used to have to deal with, and also because he made that comment about ‘What a Nasty Woman’ in the third debate. But I salute him for exposing the Bush and Clinton dynasties as past their pull dates. I think that the majority still voted for ‘None of the Above’.
However, after a short holiday in a verrrry red state, it’s been interesting to hear why people voted for Trump; in the end, I still think it was a gigantic ‘F*ck you’ to a power structure that looks out for money, rather than having any respect for those who actually serve in the military or volunteer in communities. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires, but every single conversation that I had was civil and fascinating. All of the Trump voters that I talked with had plenty of smarts, that’s for sure.
Clinton had no real grasp of how resonant Trump’s “You’re FIRED!” was in 2016. Sanders did, but he couldn’t get Hillary to grasp the fundamentals.
FWIW, I’m convinced that Warren shares Bernie’s grasp of the dynamics still in play.
It is a matter of poetic justice that Clinton lost due to her poor performance with Midwestern voters (who she called deplorable) and low Generation Y turnout (who they dubbed Bernie Bros).
Did they not think that running such a smear campaign would not have consequences?
The reality is that they had this sort of myopia. Getting celebrity feminists like Steinem may have worked with a less critically thinking population, but it didn’t this time. People could see through Clinton to what she really was, a pro-war, pro-Wall Street candidate that would sign a lot of TPP-like deals that extended corporate welfare, while outsourcing what jobs remain.
The funny thing is that they accused Bernie supporters of being superficial. It turns out they were the superficial ones. The reality is that most Clinton supporters tend to be left wing, both socially and economically. If they looked hard at Clinton’s record … well they wouldn’t be supporters much longer. They were close to her because they thought that she was a woman and therefore on their side. By contrast, many Sanders supporters refused to fall in line when Sanders himself endorsed and actively campaigned for Clinton.
That probably cost Clinton many states, considering how thin a margin Trump won many of them. Let’s face it, Clinton deserved to lose. Not saying Trump is any good (I think that his supporters are going to be very disappointed soon), but Clinton was unworthy to lead.
If Trump prevents any more Free Trade Agreements or even (oh please! oh please!) engineers the abolition of the ones we already have . . .
and if Trump re-normalizes relations with Russia, and prevents war with Russia . . .
and if Trump forcibly stands-down American assistance to the Globally Organized Axis of Jihad (GOAJ) and the Cannibal Liver Eating Jihadis (CLEJ) in Syria, such that the R + 6 are able to hunt down and exterminate every last trace of rebellion in Syria . . .
then I will have gotten what I voted for when I voted for Trump.
And if I get all that, I will endure all the collateral damage Trump inflicts in the next four years.
You may get item 2. You are not getting item 1 or 3.
Trump is a billionaire cur who could easily stand to directly benefit from trade agreements. Billionaires DGAF about anything other than themselves. The TPP may get scuttled, but you will be stabbed in the back on this front. Even if the Democratic Party somehow retakes Congress Count on it.
Item 3 is even more laughable. The Deep State Blob goes back generations. Trump or Clinton or even Stein would not be able to mount a forcible resistance to it. Why would Trump stick his neck out to prevent killing a few hundred thousand non-rich foreigners?
I’m guessing you either aren’t receiving Social Security and/or are dependent on Medicare or feel you won’t need either anytime soon. I keep hearing your kind of response when what we can expect from the Trump administration, and it so clearly reflects the outlook of someone living comfortably whose only concern is for the kind of issues you’ve listed.
There are going to be very real, very horrific consequences to having our federal government owned by the plutocrats, and anyone who bothers to consider that all of the cabinet appointees to date are notorious for their skills in destroying what those cabinet posts are intended to protect should be thinking long and hard before feeling too smug.
The threat to social security was a main reason to vote against Clinton, with her grand bargain and plots for privatization. I’m guessing you were not paying attention to the campaign, or have sufficient privilege that a candidate wholly owned by Wall St. does not represent a threat.
Amen.
Clinton was planning to gut Social Security and death spiral Medicare futher. It was covered extensively here and elsewhere. It wasn’t just who her donors were. It was also her internal campaign team, the people she empowered to speak on these issues in the closing weeks of the campaign (when she thought she had a lock), and her actual proposed policy details, such as they were.
The Republicans supposedly “forced” the good progressive Democratic majority in 2009 — a much bigger majority than the Republicans have now in the Senate — to deliver Republican approved or developed legislation again and again. Why could the Republicans do that then, and the Democrats can’t now rein in Trump’s excesses? Could it be that the Democrats weren’t progressive then and aren’t progressive now? The alternative would be that the Democratic Party elects dumber, less effective legislators than the Republicans. But how can that be? I thought by definition, to be a liberal Democrat is to be more intelligent, meritorious, and competent?
So if the Democratic Party can’t use legislative processes in the minority to impact policy under Trump, it is either corrupt and dishonest, or weak and stupid. Hmmm….
Clinton lost because of her policy positions. There’s a lot of USA between SF and NYC.
There were going to be very real, very horrific consequences to having Victoria Nuland as Secretery of State. Maddy Albright, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin GHWB and GWB, probably even darth Cheney supported Clinton. Public/Private positions which always and not so ironically were basically excuses to lie to the people most affected by them, grand bargain. the horrific ACA (or maybe you work in healthcare nd thats your own special rice bowl) The list goes on forever. I’ll dredge one up from the long ago files, a question no Clinton supporter ever answered…without naming any other candidate, give me one single reason for a working class person to vote FOR Clinton? No one ever answered that, and if you can I will acknowledge the blue moon.
Actually, Elizabeth Burton, I am 59.5 years old at this very moment. And I hope to live long enough to collect the Social Security and Medicare which I have spent my entire working life paying to receive. And Protecting my Social Security and Medicare was one reason I voted against the arch Catfood Democrat Clinton.
The Republicans will be facing their own base of howling mobs screaming “Keep your God Damned fucking Government Hands off my Social Security! And off of my Medicare too!” President Republitrump will have a hard time Ryanizing our benefits in the teeth of that . . . and the Catfood Democrats will seek to preserve their false-faced brand value by pretending to oppose Ryanization of our benefits. Just as they had to pretend to oppose SocSec Privatization under the Bush Administration.
There. Happy now?
Honestly, I don’t see how the Catfood Dems have enough credibility to last.
According to my health care policy acquaintance, Obamacare tried to address ‘the access problem’ (not enough people covered) in hopes that down the line, that would translate to somehow addressing the economics.
I have no clue how anyone expects a system run for profit (or even non-profits who pay *exhorbitant* salaries!) to be stable in an economy full of outsourcing and offshoring.
The next time that I pick up 2 pounds of flu, 3 cups of fibromyalgia, and a quart of insulin resistance at my local grocery is the moment that I’ll ever believe that medical care can ever be structured in a for-profit fashion. The problem is that we are ALL at risk when people can’t get antibiotics or meds. (This became crystal clear to me when my spouse nearly died of Swine Flu, which he contracted from people too poor to get medical care. Quite the eye-opening experience about how nothing that involves contagion should ever be allowed to be priced in a for-profit system.)
DC, from your keyboard to God’s ears.
I voted for Hillary b/c Trump reminds me of some guys that I really can’t stand, but I do hope the very best going forward.
Well . . . its not as if I liked Trump as such. I would have preferred Sanders. But when the DemParty gave us Clinton, I felt I had to do what I could to stop the Clintons before they kill again.
Talk about tone deaf…..I couldn’t believe who Clinton trotted out for credentials.
*Henry Kissinger! A bona fide war criminal for foreign policy….for crying out loud….I grew up during Viet Nam…talk about baggage.
*Gloria Steinham as a feminist who insulted the millenials by saying they were voting for Bernie for “free stuff” (becaused they don’t want to be indebted for life for education??) What a dinasour….
*Madelyn Albright…..that disgusting war horse….not a feminist ideal…
You can’t make this stuff up.
No kidding. Well Kissinger ain’t going away just bc Trump won. His evilness will still be manipulating behind the scenes. But to think that Clinton held out Kissinger as part of her bona fides is just revolting. Just ask lawfully elected Salvador Allende for his opinion. Oh wait…
I like Gloria Steinem but was really disgusted with her comments to the effect that if all women didn’t vote for Clinton they were brainwashed by men & traitors to their gender. Geez. Way to encourage votes, Gloria. Don’t get me started on execrable Albright. Ugh.
Clinton ran a crap campaign for all the reasons cited in the post & comments. The D party is almost totally bought off & sold out to the 1%. That far too many D party voters refuse to see these very clear facts is more than discouraging.
Rumor has it that Bill told HRC to address economic issues & to campaign in what’s called the Rust Belt. Allegedly HRC & her advisers said no & tacked right. Allegedly Bill was really angry with them. No verification if true or false but believable.
Clinton deserved to lose. The D party really needs some solid self examination & to clean house PDQ. I won’t hold my breath.
Kissinger is a wonderful elder statesman, and a great man. Benevolent, honest, experienced and gives consistently good advice for the benefit of all mankind.
Well, Henry was, relatively speaking, the sanest of the “foreign policy experts” who allied themselves with Clinton… which is completely and utterly terrifying.
The whole Clinton campaign came across
as a long episode of the TV show
“Black Adder”. For example, “Baldrick,
I have a cunning plan for getting more
votes, lets call the white mid-westerners “deplorables” …”
That’s so politically incorrect:
It’s
I hope someone somewhere is doing a forensic autopsy on the Clintonite BrockMonkeys who invaded Sanders Facebook pages and in some cases are reported to have posted pornography, including child pornography, to those pages. If that really happened, one hopes it could be described in such step by step detail that law enforcement authorities are shamed and humiliated into opening investigations about the alleged posters of such child porn. And if prosecution seems called for, prosecutions.
Because if any Clintonites actually can be proved in court to have possessed child pornography and then delivered it to Sanders Facebook pages, those Clintonites deserve to die in prison.
Missing a central point of the current state of America The Beautiful:
There is no “law.” One of the subheads under the larger category “NOTHING IS EVER WHAT WE THINK IT IS.”
And:
Because if any Clintonites actually can be proved in court to have possessed child pornography and then delivered it to Sanders Facebook pages, those Clintonites deserve to die in prison.
Can you listen to yourself? Hear what you said? Reflect on what you mean?
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” In reference to the review of ”Guilty Conscience,” (May 20) Leah D. Frank is inaccurate when she states that when Shakespeare had one of his characters state ”Let’s kill all the lawyers,” it was the corrupt, unethical lawyers he was referring to. Shakespeare’s exact line ”The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” was stated by Dick the Butcher in ”Henry VI,” Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/17/nyregion/l-kill-the-lawyers-a-line-misinterpreted-599990.html
Of course, as in Elizabethan times, the corrupt judges and lawyers still far outnumber the ones who “instill justice in society.”
And if Brock and Hillary cooked up this scheme, they should go there also.
I can personally attest to the posting of child porn to the Bernie site to which I belong. This happened many times, so proof shouldn’t be particularly difficult to gather from all of the site admins if one were so inclined.
One hopes that very detailed articles can be prepared and footnoted and everything. And then weaponised and disseminated far and wide.
Also, all the digital evidence should be preserved somewhere on stand-alone air-gapped storage devices where professional “skeleton removers” can’t get in and erase the evidence.
In particular, if this evidence could be ordered and systematized and presentationized, it could be given to various Evangelical counter-Clinton organizations ( which ones? all of them) who also disapprove of child pornography. Perhaps they in their millions will have the power to torture the pro-upper-class legal system into taking up this matter.
Did you and every other Sanders Facebook Page receiving this unsolicited child porn material go to the police and report it? If not, is it too late to do so now? I believe possessing child porn is considered to be a crime and the kiddieporn planters couldn’t have planted it on your Facebooks if they didn’t first possess it themselves to begin with.
That said, I would carefully consider the following. Whoever placed it there probably knew it was illegal to possess. The fact that they possessed it anyway, in order to be able to impose it onto your Facebooks, indicates that they felt legally safe to do so. Almost as if they felt they had political-legal protection and cover ( “roof” if you will) from the Clintonite authorities they worked
for. They may even have been undercover police or secret-police operatives themselves. Perhaps you want to consult with the ACLU or the National Lawyers Guild on how to protect yourselves against diversionary arrest and prosecution your own selves by Clintonite-influenced legal enforcement personnel before you report it to police which could themselves be Clintonite fronts.
Perhaps the ACLU and/or National Lawyers Guild experts could also tell you how to broadcast all the details of the Clintonite Child Porn Conspiracy to so many millions of people so Fast and Furious that you render yourselves safe from malicious arrest and prosecution your own selves under the self-servingly Clintonite theory that if you possessed the machines and Facebook Pages on which this kiddieporn arrived, then YOU yourSELVES poSSESSED the kiddieporn and can therefor be prosecuted for receiving it instead of the prior possessors who sent it to you.
After all, Clintonites operate from the same set of moral principles as the people who put Polonium 210 in Litvinenko’s tea. One must be careful when engaging Clintonites in Legal Combat.
I’m sorry, I just saw this.
http://nypost.com/2016/04/26/hillary-supporters-spam-bernie-groups-with-kiddie-porn/
To the best of my knowledge, this article tracks fairly closely what was known about it at the time. I can say from my experience, though, that FB did not immediately disable the site posting them as this happened over a period of a week or so. Everyone was notifying the site to take them down. No one, to my knowledge, reported it to the police thinking that FB would handle it.
Perhaps Facebook is a Clintonite organization. And perhaps “taking it down” was never the point here.
Perhaps the point was Legal Combat to “exterminate” a nest of Clintonite Child Pornography criminals. Perhaps that is still the point if evidence has not been destroyed and if statutes of limitations have not run out. And if the Legal Enforcement System can be trusted not to treat the bringers of a complaint as whistleblowers to be padillafied or guantanamized. That is asking an awful lot of trust, I know.
That’s awful. Got screen dumps?
Between the deplorables comment, the BernieBros bs & demanding that all women vote for Clinton just so she could break the glass ceiling, Clinton really displayed how tone deaf, stupid, ineffectual & condescending she was towards all US citizens.
Clinton’s inability to run a better campaign against someone like Trump really calls into question how she’s supposed to make a great leader. She’s had 8 years to prepare & this was the result. Pffft. Loser.
Now I read with repulsion that the Clintons have turned to “managing” Chelsea to further their “brand.” Oh dear gawd please No!
The non-existence of the Bernie ‘bro’ suggests they must be misspelling the label.
Better explanations of the ‘rabid’ opposition
1) Rabid Berniebrows: well-read voters who preferred to think for themselves, and
2) Rabid Burniebras: principled voters identified with 1970s feminism
(Most of the Bernie supporters I know who became thoroughly anti-Clintoon were women of a certain age who would not put up with that sh*t.)
Lambert, I’d like to suggest a Point Five: there were lots of WOMEN [a h-u-g-e number, perhaps] who hated Hillary, and who were not Trump supporters. I was one of them, and I heard from and about a lot of others.
All loathed the “First Woman President” meme, and tried to ask Hillary supporters if they would have voted for Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman, just so this dubious “first” could be achieved. Usually this was met by befuddlement.
The term “BernieBro” leaves out all the women who hated Hillary.
My wife has an elderly female cousin who was very concerned on the eve of the election that if Hillary won the Bernie Bros and the Trump supporters would wreak great violence upon the country. It took us a while to talk her down. Clinton’s hysterical propaganda in the final weeks of the campaign really took a toll on her. In my opinion the Clinton campaign was just as vile as Trump’s and equally as racially divisive.
Thanks Lambert this was clarifying and a they have all been just mighty fine reading.
“Bernie bros harassing @SenWarren on her Facebook page because Bernie bros. https://t.co/VPNc8XnVzm #berniebro pic.twitter.com/D927zWoiRC”
This could have been black propaganda. A dirty trick political campaigns sometimes use is to masquerade as the opponent and do something obnoxious.
Poor Hillary, victim of a vast Bernie Bro conspiracy. Two weeks ago, it was a vast Comey conspiracy. Do the Clintonites ever look in the mirror?
Every time they do, they think its a window.
No .. they can’t … Every mirror they stare at shatters !
This is about power and privilege. After Gore 2000, the Clintonistas should have been stuffed in a rocket and fired into a mountain or something.
Based on the emails, they aren’t loyal to the Clintons because the Clintons are wonderful. They are loyal because they are otherwise unemployable. Obama brought back in a bunch of Clinton dopes because he usually picks the easiest course which gets him back to the golf course, but the Clintonistas lost to Obama, Trump, Shrub (c’mon a male cheerleader at Yale), and oversaw three Democratic federal wipe outs.
Most of their advice can be acquired through a Netflix subscription and West Wing reruns.
Nevada was the culmination. Craven Bernie Bros throwing chairs . . .
We should thank the WaPo and propornotdotcom for that excellent list of left websites including Naked Capitalism.
The Real News Network now reports “Did Trump Win Through Vote Flipping and Vote Stripping?”
Well, call me old fashioned, but Clinton would have won if she had adapted those views held by the majority of the American people:
Medicare for All
Decent Paying Jobs
Strengthen Social Security
Free College
Wealth Inequality – raise taxes, get rid of stupid loopholes, bust up the TBTF banks, and go after criminal bankers.
Oh, gee, maybe the Dems should have run Bernie for President if they wanted to win the election. Maybe Trump won because he said some of those things.
Whokuddanose? Anybody with half a brain that lived outside the bubble knew. Voting for the person that represents your views – what a concept. And if anybody says we needed to vote for the lesser of two evils, I would just like to point out that it was a coin flip as to who exactly was the lesser evil.
That’s the real problem with Berniebros, they were right.
+1 … if Clinton saw her dubious emergence as the Dem nominee for what it truly was – a snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat by DNC and MSM malfeasance – she would have just gone ahead and parroted Bernie’s talking points. If the Dems had adopted the five things itemized above, Philadelphia would have been more of a Like-fest (was never gonna be a Love-fest with #Berners in tears), and at the very least, a conciliatory platform would have energized the youth vote and shored up some of the older voters who ultimately defected to Trump, stayed home or chose none-of-the-above.
Also: Thanks for this Lambert. This was one of my biggest peeves during the election. There was enough visual evidence on social media to put paid to the #BernieBro myth – photos, videos etc. It’s was never solely or primarily a “bro” thing.
Thanks, Lambert.
I read your Archdruid link in yesterday’s links, and it is probably the best, most thorough and balanced analysis that I’ve read.
The so-called ‘BernieBro’s’ that I know are actually just people completely disgusted at the two parties and their elaborate, manipulative systems for choosing the same insiders that maintain neoliberalism.
Were the BernieBros who decided to vote for Jill Stein instead of Hillary Clinton being sexist?
One excuse the establishment Democrats are very much hanging their hat on is voter suppression in the rust belt states. Has that been analyzed and rebutted here at nakedcapitalism? If not, it needs to be because there will be no end to establishment Democrat whining, avoidance of culpability, resistance to change, embrace of neo-liberalism, unnecessary giveaways to the American right economic bucket list, and continued right-wing dominance of the conversation in all aspects of society, even after this historically global disaster.
The (establishment) Democratic arguments and excuses, such as they are, need to be thoroughly crushed or the establishment neo-liberals will continue wreaking havoc with determined impotence and stubborn comfortable cowardice, all behind a mask of false reasonableness and chin-stroking decency.