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mhatrw

(10,786 posts)
Mon Oct 5, 2015, 04:36 AM Oct 2015

Tom Toles: What Bernie Sanders’ newfound money has just bought him, and us

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2015/10/04/what-bernie-sanders-newfound-money-has-just-bought-him-and-us/

Coverage. What ever-growing crowds and poll numbers failed to deliver, money has: coverage. Bernie Sanders nearly matched Hillary’s fundraising in the third quarter and all of a sudden the media takes notice that he’s out there. We are supposed to keep up the pretense that a campaign is about ideas, but we don’t practice it. What we practice is poll-driven coverage, fake-controversy coverage, and worst of all, strategy coverage. Everyone is an armchair general pushing little plastic candidates around a tabletop map of the US. Great fun, no meaning.

...

And so now it’s Heeeeere’s Bernie! I’m not sure whether the intent of this story was to play to the expected narrative that Bernie is a wild-eyed radical crank, but the lead paragraphs certainly suggest that. But I suspect the result will be different. It appears readers have been waiting for some bigger Bernie coverage, judging by the number of responses in the comments thread.

But here’s what coverage of Bernie is going to yield. Finally, the range of acceptable political discourse is going to broaden, to the left. It’s about time, you say? I’d say. What have long been considered taboo topics about income redistribution are in fact no more extreme than positions taken by EVERY SINGLE GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE. They are ALL proposing vastly MORE tax cuts to the already obscenely wealthy, and MORE regulation-cuts of the sort that led to our recent economic collapse, all tied up in a ribbon of gigantic deficits. (Deficits are only reported as crazed when proposed by the left). Oh, and lest we forget, a continuation of the extravagantly irresponsible anti-science anti-planet climate position that they are STILL taking, thanks in part to the decades of respectful reporting they’ve received on the subject.

Bernie Sanders is an implausible candidate, with a very modest chance of success: in being nominated, being elected, or being an effective president. But thank heavens he has finally broadened the debate that has so long been strangled, chained and locked away in a vault of silence, ever since the Reagan’s Morning in America led to today’s Fright Night of Failed Ideology.
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Tom Toles: What Bernie Sanders’ newfound money has just bought him, and us (Original Post) mhatrw Oct 2015 OP
Bernie - More Similar To FDR Than Clinton Will Ever Be cantbeserious Oct 2015 #1
Implausible? Only if you go by Third Way Rules Demeter Oct 2015 #2
 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
2. Implausible? Only if you go by Third Way Rules
Mon Oct 5, 2015, 09:09 AM
Oct 2015

Implausible, my foot!

If by implausible, you mean it's unlikely that this nation would get this high-caliber a candidate to run successfully, well, THAT I'd agree with, based on the historical record.

But the nation has grown up a bit in the interim. And the Press (Internet) is finally free, for each of us has access to it. That makes a difference. The Internet and Edward Snowden may be the only forces for Democracy in the world right now.

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