delrem
delrem's JournalPolitical parties can be bought out.
I saw it recently in BC, Canada, when the provincial Liberal party got bought out lock stock and barrel. It almost made me applaud, even though I was explicitly among the targeted "to be screwed".
It can only happen if the bought out party is extremely weak.
Once bought out, I don't see any possible redemption. You can't buy it back.
What can you say when already back in Oct. 45 members of the Democratic progressive caucus rushed out the door to endorse Hillary Clinton, and only one had the guts to back Sanders? That's so weak that it's barely perceptible. Clearly rife with trojans and other weak characters.
Big money isn't chickenshit. When big money buys a politician and buys a few think tanks to provide the MSM 24/7/52 fodder, and buys the MSM which in turn buys a few fake "progressive" opinionators/bloviators to round out a pretense, they cover every bet, and they do it by both instinct and training. They don't spare a nickel in vetting and buying the best.
Goldman Sachs and Haliburton rule with an advocate for "choice",
Bush and Cheney and Kissinger and Kagan's PNAC wars rule with "choice",
or the very same rule without an advocate for "choice".
That's about it.
OK. Y'see what I'm getting at?
Hillary Clinton is an advocate AGAINST universal single payer health care. She says it isn't pragmatic, realistic, or in tune with the invisible hand of the marketplace. Awhile ago she wasn't. Or she said she wasn't. But at this point what can we believe about what she says? $140 million in take home fees *have* to make a difference of some kind.
If I willingly go along with such a lie, then I'll only prolong the lie.
Whatever nice feeling it might give me to go along with it isn't worth it.
So it isn't a big statement in its individual component, but I would say that sometimes it's worth it to give a big Fuck You raspberry to the liars.
All through the cold war a certain "truth" was drilled into me,
which is that if the masses of people stay home at election rather than going out to vote, then it can be seen as a vote against the system itself, against "the regime". I say that this is a valid indicator. As a corollary I had it drilled into me that states that forced people to vote were by definition totalitarian.
"If you have a better way, I'm all ears".
Perhaps when there is no better way, declining to vote for any candidate, because all are reprehensible, is a valid choice.
Why vote for someone who denigrates your values,
and who promises to work closely with Republicans in a "bipartisan" ethic "to get things done", and who campaigns against her only other real contender with a meme that he can't possibly get things done, because nothing he wants to get done is in the Republican's interests?
That is lala land politics, my friend.
Wasn't it justice Kennedy, appointed by Reagan, who wrote the recent judgement on marriage equality?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/26/supreme_court_legalizes_gay_marriage_here_is_the_beautiful_last_paragraph.html
The best you can say is that some candidate might veto some Republican legislation?
How about usher Republican legislation through, in a thoroughly bipartisan manner.
How about "mending fences" or however it might be described with Netanyahu, during her first months in office, so as to get Iran squarely back in the cross-hairs of the PNAC wars? Because her "strength", as they call it in the MSM, is in her foreign policy gravitas?
That's what democracy is about.
They can buy a party.
They can buy a thinktank or 10.
They can buy the MSM.
They can game the system with big money and PACs.
They can buy the MSM pundits.
But they can't buy your vote without your consent.
They cannot hold your vote hostage.
I'm not sure if I like that. I don't like the term "inbred"
and don't think the invective serves a positive purpose.
It's the opposite of Obama, so why portray Obama as authoring it?
The American Enterprise Institute's "Tea Party" is muttering in a dead-end alley, at this point, and only had a voice through enormous astroturf operations. Their guy is now Donald Trump - to a "T" (haha). Trump won't win, except if the Dems are idiots and choose to run with Hillary Clinton, in which case all bets are off. She's such an incredible target for ads that'll turn off the left, that'll turn off thinking people, and that'll totally depress turnout because her campaign antics to date - especially the long-term excoriation of Sanders' and "Sanders' supporters" for promoting a concept of economic equality - have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to address the concerns of what turns out to be a majority of people. Her distrust/disfavor stats are insurmountably bad already. They won't get better - it's past time to hope for that.
It's like a huge dose of WTF, is what it is - $140 million in speaking fees alone in the past decade, $25 million in the past year and half, as she made her now habitual rounds? Her "charitable foundation" that launders money from criminal regimes like the House of Saud, etc., as if those psychopath criminals gave a damn for "women's rights", or anything but buying Hillary Clinton, betting on her being the future POTUS and discovering that yes, absolutely, she can be bought. And for relatively little in the scheme of things at that. Her record on war, her recent speech to Brookings, her friendship with Kissinger her devotion to Netanyahu even after the recent Republican/Netanyahu disgrace? That's way out there stuff, and it's not just a lot of Dems who look askance, but all people of good will look askance. She doesn't make the cut.
These are people who laughed at us, saying HRC was 85% in the polls,
that there were no contestants.
They laughed and laughed.
These are people who derided us for caring about "economic justice", and who said nobody could win without $$, and HRC has those $$. And they don't give a flying fuck for "economic justice" - except wait! It's Tuesday. I think HRC is a "progressive" on some Tuesdays! Please look it up.
Money to throw around. Enormous quantities of $$, simply enormous. Oh boy, especially on the net. They've been throwing it at all the takers. And now we know them.
A Clinton Foundation of money, where fonts of money like the House of Saud can launder theirs in return for their depraved security, while they party like there's no tomorrow, because for them there is none.
For "family values" Clinton style, because, like the House of Saud, she's conveniently "pro-choice" and pro "Planned Parenthood", and her charitable foundation has the scars to prove it.
You use the phrase "I stand with" a lot.
But what does it mean?
Here's what's bothering me. As a young teen I heard MLK's speech, "I had a dream" and in hindsight I can't even say how far I was from actually understanding what he was saying. After all, I was WHITE, and CANADIAN, and ROMAN CATHOLIC, and MOSTLY UNAWARE OF CANADIAN INJUSTICE TOWARD NON-WHITES.
That was the small pond I grew up in and I still cry inside when I remember how the only black kid in the junior high school up there was treated. "Hey bleck man!" It's just horrendous and maybe I didn't say the phrases, but the coolest kids did and I just stood there. Desperately wanting to be "in". That kid got it worse than even the first-nations kids, because he didn't have a larger community at all. I just stood there, without a hope of ever being "in", but I just stood there just the same. I didn't do anything.
That's for some context. But the MLK speech that I heard on the radio (at night - radio signals had better range at night back then) did move me and I wrote a trite little essay that mentioned it in a free-topic essay assignment for English that got an "A". And I knew that I got the "A" for showing that I was at least semi-aware of MLK's speech and his movement. The incentive worked. As I matured I became more socially aware. At a slow pace, to be sure, but no, I don't like Trump. I don't think Bernie is like Trump... I'm at least that aware.
So I'd say that back then and in my small way I "stood with MLK", and as my life progressed I've realized how any such kind of "standing with" is difficult, at best only partially understood, more of a learning experience where my "standing with" is to keep myself open to learning, overcoming my conditioning as best I can. But then, your colleague at DU, who you "stand with", has for several months now run a totally dismissive - disdainful even - sig line (copy/pasted):
"Please Note: I AM NOT SAYING BERNIE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE ... AFTER ALL, HE MARCHED WITH MARTIN!"
So what does "stand with" mean? Really.
Does it mean that my "standing with MLK" in my small and almost observable way is repugnant, wrong, a putting on of false airs by a "white progressive" aka "white supremacist", because I prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, whereas if I preferred Hillary to Bernie my idea that I "stand with MLK" would be righteous?
What the fuck kind of "standing with" is that?
This really bothers me about this Democratic Party primary.
eta: even abysmally unaware as I was back then, I knew that Barry Goldwater was bad news. I'd say that everyone who had a hope of "standing with" MLK in any kind of rational reading of the phrase could sense that much. Yet Hillary was older than me, back then, and she didn't see it. Why is that?
Perhaps because my questions sort of implicitly define "third way politics".
I'm so sick of this. All the pretence.
It's so fucking pointless.
Isn't that what some people think Dems ought to always do? Every time?
Shouldn't Dems always be reacting to Republicans, trying their best to please them - so Republicans don't say so many bad things?
Shouldn't everything that Dems stand for be defined to please Republicans? After all, unlike Dems who have nothing, Republicans have the filibuster to stop any independent Dem policy in its tracks. That's history.
I'm confused on this -- it seems to be a default go-to argument of many Dems who post to DU and though I don't like it at all, it sure seems to be a popular political approach.
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