Fair enough. Progressives implementing purity tests or demanding that 100% of the country abide by the will of 19% of voters is not going to work out.
Long wasn’t corrupt in the sense of enrichening himself from political office. The rest is true, sure, but so what? We are voting in politicians, not Sunday School teachers and I want people who are ruthless enough to get things done and are willing to punish those who don’t toe the line. After all, who was the better President-LBJ or Jimmy Carter?
Which is another reason I prefer Hillary over Bernie. Bernie is a cranky old man. Hillary seems far more ruthless.
BLM has protested Bernie Sanders, driving him off the stage.
You are taking the activities of BLM and attributing them to the Sanders campaign. They are different groups, and BLM is just as disrespectful of Sanders as they are of anyone else.
I think that most of the people who support Sanders, irrespective of their age or other demographic factors, support Bernie because they believe he is the most ethical candidate in the race. They believe in his values, and for them, they put values over making deals and keeping the government running. I think they see opportunities. All of that’s laudable.
My concern is that they’re being blinded by “opportunities” that don’t really exist. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama learned the hard way that winning an election isn’t necessarily a mandate for sweeping changes. Sanders has a movement and a following, but it’s not a mandate. Not yet anyway.
I don’t know what else to call this: (from Wikipedia)
I have to admit that I just found this one funny, though:
The thought of Long with a headlock on some hapless official is definitely chuckleworthy. 
You could have every candidate appeal to heads not hearts, or vice versa.
Stylistic successor?
Above all, Trump talks about himself. Above all, Long talked about poverty. They both had or have crackpot economic theories, but that’s not a stylistic similarity.
Read a Long speech:
Read a Trump speech:
Huey Long built up Louisana State University. While you can make fun of Long for paying more attention to the band than to the liberal arts, this was probably a good thing for academic freedom, and Long greatly increased academic funding.
Compare Long’s largely positive record on improving public education in Louisiana with the saga of Trump University.
Huey Long was before my time, but why all the hatred? Jimmy Carter was the most scrupulous of recent Presidents and his Presidency is regarded as a failure.
Donald Trump may not be clever enough to be as unscrupulous as Huey Long, but he’s very vindictive, and some of his dealings, e.g. Trump University, were probably criminal.
And I’d like those using superlatives when criticizing Huey Long to comment on the Bush-Cheney-Rove Administration. Long never destroyed a million lives to enrich his donors and pursue a juvenile ideology.
Carter had a lot to deal with. Failure or not, he managed to turn it around after his term was done.
You’re preaching to the choir on Trump. I’d never hold him up as a paragon of anything. And don’t even get me started on the Unholy Trinity.
Denying your opponents that mandate is also valuable. I trust Bernie Sanders to act as a speedbump if anyone tries to get another debacle like the Iraq War going. I don’t trust Hillary Clinton to do the same. The excuse is made that she voted for the Iraq War and against giving the weapon inspectors more time because she was tricked, but I don’t want a President who can be tricked into supporting an illegitimate war.
It’s fair to point out her errors, and the vote to authorize force in Iraq was indeed a mistake. Even so, there’s a lot more to being president than voting against a war. I think the next four years would be wasted if all we do is play defense. I want a president who can play on offense and defense, who can score and stop scoring, and more importantly, to know when it’s time to play offense and when to play defense.
Tricked into a war by whom? Who, in your hypothetical scenario, would be leading President Clinton astray?
The invasion of Iraq didn’t just happen. It was pushed by President Bush and his administration. They were the ones who created the pressure for the war. Hillary Clinton, the rest of Congress, and the American people are only guilty of believing what the Bush administration was telling them.
But how is that going to be repeated if Hillary Clinton, and not George W. Bush, is the President?
I know it’s been said, but…
Especially #3. I’m a pragmatic person by nature. I simply don’t trust idealists… well, I mean when you put them in charge of policy. I am fine with them framing the narrative or structuring the debate, but I want a pragmatist doing policy work.
I also appreciate that Hillary Clinton is like the wonkiest of all possible wonks. She has an incredible amount of information readily available and seems excited to learn about new things.
And as a lawyer myself, I instinctively trust people who talk more in nuance than “Yes or No”. I don’t trust “Yes or No” choices - I think the world is far more complicated than that.
That’s…umm…uncharitable to say the least, unless you were the only person to have the information that Iraq didn’t have WMD’s at the time. Nevermind that the entire population (including Hillary, I’ll wager) is now once bitten, twice shy.
That was part of the report made by the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the UN Security Council two weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
Why should I believe that she learned her lesson when neither you nor Hillary are even willing to admit she did wrong without trying to excuse her actions with objectively, provably untrue claims?
Nuclear weapons are not the only form of WMD. As I recall, there was also a lot of talk about mobile chemical warfare vehicles at the time, which would have been very easy to hide from international inspectors.
Also ‘nothing to indicate’ and ‘do not exist’ are by no means the same.
Typical black and white thinking. But I’ll play along. Hillary, along with roughly 70% of Congress, were hawks. That happened in a vacuum. There wasn’t a massive push coming from the executive branch for war. It was all Hillary’s fault. She just up and decided, “We need to go to war.” And she will involve us in a war in future, just because she wants to, and in the face of what would very likely be at least majority opposition from Congress and the public.
Give me a break.
I want a president who does not think in those terms at all because he/she knows it is not a game.
I am in favor of Hillary because I think that she will actually be able to do more to promote the progressive agenda that Bernie espouses, than Bernie himself will. We are in all likelihood still going to have a Republican House and closely divided Senate in 2017. With a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the house, Obama managed to get a warmed over Republican health care plan passed by the skin of his teeth and has had to fight tooth and nail to keep it. In this climate we should take it as a given that absolutely none of the things that Sanders is proposing will come to fruition until grass roots support for progressive revolution at the local and state level starts making waves. So Sanders has two choices.
First he can fight the good fight and lose at every turn. Becoming a historical example of the failure of the progressive agenda, effectively shutting it down for the next couple of decades.
Second, He can abandon his agenda and accept that reality that he finds himself in. At which point all of the previous followers call him a sell out and get discouraged, decide that all politicians are the same and either join the green party or else give up entirely. Allowing for a Republican resurgence.
Hillary is pragmatic, will get her hands dirty and do the deals that are necessary to get what she wants done. She is used to getting slammed and know how to play hardball behind the scenes. This is exactly what we need in the face of Republican intransigence. At her heart she pretty much wants that same things that Sanders wants, but is going to be more results driven than ideology driven. Yes her results won’t be as pretty as Sanders idealism but it will have a better chance of actually helping the disenfranchised.
I think she has a better chance of winning the general election. On politics, I’m probably closer to Sanders than Clinton, but I would be happy, and I mean HAPPY (not “less sad”) if Clinton wins. To me, she is not the least bad candidate. Her candidacy is a positive one for me and I would be happy to call her president