Melissa McEwan on Bernie

[boston bean]

I honestly don't even understand, at all, what the Sanders campaign is doing at this point. Yesterday was another totally confounding day, leaving me struggling to make sense of what Bernie Sanders is even doing.

On Wednesday, I wrote about rapper Killer Mike, who has been campaigning with and for Sanders, saying during a Sanders rally that a "uterus doesn't qualify you to be president."

Sanders finally issued a statement on that incident, and it is truly astounding:

What Mike said essentially is that is that politics should not be, people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender, but based on what they believe. I think that makes sense. I don't go around, no one has ever heard me say, 'hey guys, let's stand together, vote for a man.' I would never do that, never have. I think we—in a presidential race we look at what a candidate stands for and we vote for the candidate who we think could best serve our country.
Welp. A couple of thoughts here:

1. No one has ever had to say, "Let's stand together; vote for a man," because there's literally never been a female presidential nominee for which people could vote from a major party. So this is some aggressively disingenuous shit.

2. Some people's beliefs include, all things being relatively equal, that a vote for a marginalized candidate is a valuable and legitimate choice. That Sanders doesn't acknowledge voting "based on what [you] believe" and voting for a woman because she's a woman aren't mutually exclusive options is a big problem.

Read the whole thing... she really lays it out there:

http://www.shakesville.com/2016/02/i-am-just-baffled.html?m=1

[Sancho]

1. Another excellent read...

And it points out a campaign strategy that Bernie clearly employs against women. It's particularly interesting that he claims to be astounded when Hillary called him out at the last town hall.

Sanders may be able to legitimately claim he's never explicitly said that he's never called people to "stand together; vote for a man," but when he has run against women, he has very pointedly made issues of his opponents' gender. When he ran for governor of Vermont in 1976 as the Liberty Union candidate, against Republican Richard Snelling and Democrat Stella Hackel, he said: "The only difference between Richard Snelling, a Republican, and Stella Hackel, a Democrat, is that one of them is a man and one a woman." A decade later, when he ran against then-Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin: "He urged voters not to vote for me just because I was a woman. That would be a 'sexist position,' he declared."

He also said, of Kunin and her Republican opponent Peter Smith, "It is absolutely fair to say you are dealing with Tweedledum and Tweedledee," despite "Kunin's solid, groundbreaking record on women's issues." In 1974, he called Connecticut gubernatorial candidate Ella Grasso, against whom he wasn't running, "nothing more than a political hack," singling her out after saying he was "not impressed with other women candidates elsewhere."

Over and over, he has said that voters should not support women just because they are women, and repeatedly called female candidates part of the establishment, virtually indistinguishable from Republicans.

So, sure, he's never said the words "vote for a man," but he has sure stuck to the same shitty critiques of female candidates for 40 years. None of them are progressive enough; all of them are shills; no one should vote for them just because they're women. This is a pattern. And it's an ugly one.

[boston bean]

3. Yep, it's not a new tactic to him. blech.

[leftofcool]

2. I am not surprised at anything Bernie says or defends.

I think one needs only to read Killer Mike's lyrics to see how/what he thinks of women. If Bernie wants to defend that type of trash talk, hell let him. Democrats are seeing him for what he really is and they are not liking what they see.

[seaglass]

4. I read that yesterday BB, a great piece. n/t

[brer cat]

5. Very good read!

A minor part of the blog but something that make me jump up and clap:

"But maybe I'm just literally the tiredest of hearing a white dude shit on what I think is a cool relationship between two people who aren't white men."

[mcar]

6. K&R

A good read. Thanks.

[George II]

7. While reading the beginning of Sanders statement I started thinking about this issue, and then....

....BAM, there is exactly what I was thinking in her #1!

The reason no one consciously thinks about a "man" as their candidate is because that's all anyone has had to choose from for almost 250 years.

[eridani]

8. Elizabeth Warren was my first choice

Sanders is the candidate closet to her on policy. Clinton is too gutless even to defend reproductive rights.

Hillary Clinton: I Could Compromise on Abortion If It Included Exceptions For Mother's Health

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/29/hillary_clinton_i_could_compromise_on_abortion_if_it_included_exceptions_for_mothers_health.html

My husband vetoed a very restrictive legislation on late-term abortions and he vetoed it at an event in the White House where we invited a lot of women who had faced this very difficult decision, that ought to be made based on their own conscience, their family, their faith, in consultation with doctors. Those stories left a searing impression on me. Women who think their pregnancy is going well and then wake up and find some really terrible problem. Women whose life is threatened if they carry their child to term, and women who are told by doctors that the child they're carrying will not survive.

Again, I am where I have been, which is that if there's a way to structure some kind of constitutional restriction that take into account the life of the mother and her health, then I'm open to that. But I have yet to see the Republicans willing to actually do that, and that would be an area, where if they included health, you could see constitutional action.

[KitSileya]

9. How is this even relevant? The thread is about Sanders, not Clinton.

So many times when people want to discuss Sanders, or even criticize him, the only defense Sanders supporters have is "Hillary Clinton is awful". Can you not see how weak that makes your arguments? Can you not see how weak that makes your candidate?

[ismnotwasm]

10. Omg

She Is hardly "gutless"