See, here’s the crucial lie, bolded. The demonstration in question was in fact organized and attended entirely by white supremacists.
So, if you wanted to be charitable, you could say that Trump was just misinformed. But he should have had his facts straight before making a statement on national TV. And he should have retracted his statement when the truth was pointed out to him, which to my knowledge he never has.
Well then, if what “Bernie and Warren stans” said on Twitter is somehow representative of their campaigns, it’s lucky for Buttigieg that you’re not on Twitter. 
Or maybe you are. If so, too bad for Pete. 
If Twitter had much power how is Biden still ahead? Twitter, or at least the blue-check accounts, hate him.
I actually believe one of the key reasons for Biden’s steadiness is he is the candidate who panders least to the extremely online, edgy crowd. The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t use Twitter and a smaller sub-section of those who do, use it for political engagement. To use an opposite example, Andrew Yang and the Yang Gang are huge on Twitter but in the polls he hovers around 2-3% and getting just 5% is considered a great result.
Then there’s also the election across the pond in December whereby Twitter would have led you to believe Corbyn was nailed on to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He ended up leading his party to their worst defeat in nearly ninety years.
Sanders has 50% of the Democrats under 30. Biden has a larger percentage of Dems over 60. He is also polling the best with African Americans. I don’t remember numbers for the 30-60 group. None of this should be hard to find. But Twitter is largely irrelevant.
Fair enough, but let’s revisit this again if Bernie makes it to the general and people actually start to envision the possibility of radical overhaul of the health system.
And of course you apply that same logic to people on the left who march alongside Marxists and anti-semites like Louis Farrakhan, right?
Or do you give your side a pass? Because those Marxists are representing an evil just as horrific as Naziism.
The fact is, every political march, unless it’s the March for Moderation, is going to pick up a certain percentage of kooks and assholes. The left has its share of radical anarchists, revolutionary Marxists, anti-semites and other deplorables.
But reasonable people do not use guilt by association.
The Unite the Right rally was organized by an avowed white supremacist and neo-Nazi. Anyone who responded to his call for a protest, even if their only objective was the preservation of statues of Confederate leaders (which is a whole other topic), is *not *a “fine person.” Anyone who will stand beside such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, Gavin McInnes and the rest of that crowd is not a “fine person.”
It’s cool seeing how far to the right of even a lot of conservative commentators our resident conservatives are. Lots of conservative commentators were able to bring themselves to condemn Trump for these comments. But not ours!
Keen.
You’re genuinely trying to “both-sides” this, as though having the Maoist Brigade show up at a teacher rally is the same thing as having white supremacists show up at a rally organized by a self-proclaimed “white advocate”.
That’s despicable. Your inability to condemn this white supremacist rally? Revolting.
Absolutely. Anyone who marches in a group totally dominated by Marxist chants and imagery, or anti-Semitic chants and imagery (like the march in question), can be characterized a Marxist or an anti-Semite.
Of course. But this wasn’t “a certain percentage”, this was a march utterly dominated by white supremacist and neo-Nazi imagery and chanting. It was very clearly a white supremacist march – they were chanting “Jews will not replace us” en masse!
Right. I’m not. I’m using “guilt by guilt”. Members of the KKK aren’t guilty “by association” – they’re guilty of being white supremacists because they chose to join a white supremacist organization. No one would march in a crowd totally dominated by Nazi chants and Nazi imagery unless they were absolutely fine with being a Nazi.
It really is okay to criticize white supremacists and Nazis. It’s not SJW-ism or some other such nonsense. These were white supremacists going to a white supremacist march. It wasn’t about culture, or heritage – it was a white supremacist march, organized by white supremacists, attended by white supremacists, in which white supremacists committed deadly violence. Good people don’t do that stuff.
Sam, if you were at an event and hundreds of participants started chanting “jews will not replace us!” what would be your next step?
Canadian. He’d apologize.
This is an interesting narrative mainly because it shows a tendency I find to be almost universal with “very liberal” Democrats, which I’ll define as Sanders supporters generally and probably “most” Warren supporters. There’s a built in concept that the only valid reason someone would have supported Hillary in 2016 or Biden in 2020, is because they believe those candidates were more electable. It entirely discounts that non-progressive Democrats even exist, and it almost furthers this idea that all Democrats are “very liberal” and only vote moderate out of…fear?
I’m not a Democrat, haven’t been involved in local Democratic party politics like I have been with Republican politics, etc; but as an outsider looking in I actually think the reality is a lot of Democrats are genuinely moderate, centrist, or even (a shrinking portion) conservative. These are people picking the more moderate candidate because the voter is actually more moderate than Sanders or etc.
There’s decent evidence out there that maybe any non-Hillary Democrat can just beat Trump straight up, and we’re al fighting over nothing. I’m not sure anyone can be honest and intelligent AND think they know the answer to this for sure though.
I think there’s definitely some element of people who like any outsider candidate, which would probably benefit Bernie and not Biden, and that benefited Trump. Given the available evidence I don’t know that I believe that makes Bernie a slam dunk win, and I have serious concerns when the full nature and scope of how he plans to implement his policies is given the full glare of a general election campaign, he could collapse to Dukakis or Mondale levels of failure.
I’m honestly kind of blase about it and generally disengaged from politics at this point. I’ll admit to having “lost some of it” when my party that I’d supported my entire life just went so far off the edge I realized it’d never recover. I know that I’ll vote for most Democrats, I know I cannot vote for Bernie Sanders. I’m one vote, in Virginia, so like I said before you guys don’t really need me. I would like to see a non-Sanders Democrat nominated though, because I’d like to see Trump defeated and I genuinely believe Sanders is the highest risk nominee. I don’t think any of the current slate of Dems is a slam dunker though.
I apologize if I gave that impression. Certainly there are some Clintonites who like her conservative Democrat policies, no doubt.
But I wasn’t responding to them. I was responding to your specific doubts about Sanders’s electability. It’s a little odd for you to raise those doubts, and then when I raise similar doubts about Clinton, to act like I’m saying nobody likes her policies.
And that’s what I’m saying. There are good reasons to doubt Sanders’s electability. But there are also good reasons to doubt Biden’s, based on what happened in 2016.
I find it interesting that Hillary Clinton spends a lot more time and energy publicly denouncing Bernie Sanders, who’s worst crime is not agreeing with her politically, than she does with former close friends like Harvey Weinstein who’s now well-known for decades of sexual harassment which he used his connections with her and her husband to cover up or war criminal Henry Kissinger. She seems much more interested in slinging mud at a politician who seems to be doing significantly better than her than she is in say, making amends to the people she indirectly helped victimize or even saying a single bad thing about someone with a body count of 3-4 million people, and I know I’d personally rather hang with ‘Bernie Bros’ than sex offenders and war criminals.
Yes, it’s really really interesting that Hillary is asked and volunteers to talk about politics rather than Weinstein’s rape trial. After all, her life has been spent in the backrooms of Hollywood. Her 2016 campaign is ancient history, why would anyone be interested in her opinion of Sanders now?
Veeeeery interesting
Yep - the fact that Hillary is willing to keep defending and associating with war criminal Henry Kissinger, who’s responsible for the deaths of 3-4 million people (though most of them are brown so don’t actually matter to a lot of people) and to deny any responsibility for her long association with a serial sex abuser who used his connection with her to silence people with a simple ‘oh, how could I have known anything about this open secret’ is a good bit of information to keep in mind about her.
I am interested in her opinion of Sanders now, but not in the way that you mean - the fact that she’s interested in spending what political capital she has left decrying one of the front runners in the attempt to get Trump out of office rather than getting behind ‘get him out at any cost’ makes it even more clear how bankrupt the ‘if you don’t vote for the Democratic candidate you’re voting for Trump’ line of argument is. And the fact that she’s fine with lionizing war criminal Henry Kissinger really underscores the kind of person and politician that she is. You would think that “I will not support any candidate who thinks that carpet bombing civilians in a country that we haven’t even declared war on is acceptable behavior” would be a non-controversial position, but that’s what her continued praise of Kissinger means in practice. And while her 2016 campaign attempted to paint her as the non-harassing alternative to Trump, it turns out that, while she doesn’t do that herself, she has close friends who do and she keeps associating with them even when what they do is well-known, as long as it’s not provable.
Mostly it makes me regret my ‘hold your nose and vote for her’ vote in 2016 even more.
I mean I don’t even agree she’s a “conservative Democrat”, her platform in 2016 was the most liberal the party has ever put forward. A conservative Democrat is someone like Jim Webb, Hillary certainly isn’t Bernie Sanders but he is so far left that he has largely chosen to not be a part of the Democratic party for most of his career.
Well it’s not odd when you literally say:
I’m simply responding to what has been posted.
Sure, agreed. I don’t even think electability should be a real topic of discussion because it’s always phrased as some sort of ephemeral attribute. I think it’s more helpful to actually be direct:
Is this person going to be able to win this specific election? Is this person the most likely candidate who can win this specific election? Will this person make a good President?
All of those are important questions in a primary. I never doubted Trump could win in 2016, but as a Republican I advocated strongly against his nomination because I felt he would be a disastrous President, I also felt his Presidency would represent a sort of “own goal.” A short term win that makes die hard conservatives strut around and be happy, but sets conservatism up for a generational period “lost in the woods” when the reckoning comes. The first two predictions I made were true, the third hasn’t yet, but I still suspect it will.
Henry Kissinger isn’t a war criminal. Hillary does not maintain a relationship with Harvey Weinstein.
Now, all that being said, I personally don’t care about Hillary’s opinions. I’m a conservative and I only voted for her to stop Trump and because she hadn’t strayed so far left that I was unwilling to vote for her even to do that, but c. 2020 her opinion doesn’t matter to me. I don’t have any problem with her expressing it though, and neither should anyone else. She has earned the right to express her opinions.
The idea that Hillary has spent most of her life hanging out in “Hollywood backrooms” is false and deceptive.
People are interested in her opinion because she’s a famous politician, this isn’t weird. As evidence that it isn’t weird many other (male) politicians in similar shoes have been asked opinions and it wasn’t considered controversial for them to express them.
I was being sarcastic and mocking the idea that Clinton should be spending her time denouncing Weinstein.