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In reply to the discussion: Trash-talking Hillary on this board makes me more likely to vote for Hillary. [View all]byronius
(7,394 posts)I think it's an important group of people. I learn a great deal here. I listen. It changes me.
I've been a Bernie Sanders supporter since he started doing regular interviews with Randi Rhodes. He's obviously a great candidate. I think he could win; he seems to appeal to older cloth-coat conservatives who appreciate plain speech.
But read the comments on this thread. Pure bile. And maybe it is just from Sanders supporters who are full of bile, and not from a larger group of Sanders supporters like myself who don't hate Hillary.
Whenever I see progressive 'cleansing' I immediately suspect right-wing trolls or people working out deeper life issues with politics. It makes me hang my head, because an incoherent, splintered left leads to fucking awful things. I'm certain someone will immediately respond with 'a corporate left leads to fucking awful things', and that is true to my ears -- but if the only True Left is a tiny cadre of bitter, venomous banishers then I get stuck with the corporate Left, because that's all that's left.
I lived through Nixon. I lived through Reagan. I remember being mocked at a party in 2000 for wearing a Gore t-shirt by Green Naderites who insisted that GW Bush was exactly the same as Al Gore.
There are some who will still insist such a thing. It is an unhistorical opinion, however. Al Gore was a better person and would have been a better leader, and that's not so much conjecture as common sense backed with a lot of numbers.
Watching it happen all over again this season -- the vitriol thrown back and forth, the scorn, the absoluteness of it all, the permanent scars, as if we are not brothers and sisters at all, but scheming strangers -- it's disheartening. I'll probably take a break for awhile, but I wanted to express an opinion. The comments validate my conclusions succinctly.