I think you know the answers to those questions very well.
The current crop of political rhetoric consists primarily of identifying scapegoats, ranting and raving about how evil they are, and promising to punish and/or destroy them. In this climate any politician bucking the trend, and focusing instead on rational discussions about what policies are likely to increase or maintain our well-being, is being kind of radical.
Nah. They’re being purple. No wait, they’re being extra-spicy! No, I got it, they’re being 80s electronica!
I mean, if we’re just going to redefine any old word to mean whatever we want, let’s go balls-out. It’s schnitzel on a loofah time, baby!
Slacker’s latest jab, about Sanders in the Soviet Union, reminds me of nothing so much as Trump’s oh-so-innocent questions about Cruz’s birthplace. He’s just trying to be helpful!
Sorry, could not find a thread for this.
I was not watching this evening’s face-off, but it was streaming elsewhere, within earshot. Mr. Sanders goes off on his usual tirade about getting money out of politics. Worthwhile, but he is starting to make a cliché of it (what, have you been living in a cave?).
So Ms. Clinton responds with something to the effect of “Let’s get this out in the open. You are just trying to use this as an attack on me. I have never cast a vote on behalf of any lobbyist.”
Yeah, that made me say “Whoa-h-ho!” Very dangerous words for her to utter. No one can actually prove, TBMK, that she has voted or striven on behalf of lobbyists or donors, but for her to baldly make that statement, given the general tenor of her performance in the Senate and in State, seems like a huge risk. It looks to me to be supportable only in the strictest of technical terms, and lowers my overall inclination to trust her about anything.
Well, and nevermind the fact that she leaped into the defensive posture so quickly. She seemed to perceive an attack where I am not convinced that very many others actually did.
You’re being tragically obtuse here, if I may speak for SlackerInc. The point isn’t Bernie’s intentions, it’s the optics with the swing voters. I have been to the USSR myself, pre-1989, and I don’t care if Bernie has either. But as an attack vector, the optics on this are awful. Who can be too blind to see this?
Sure, there are all kinds of possible motivations for his trip. But, the thing is, one of the many possible factors driving his decision to go there involves his political views, which I think most people would describe as being more sympathetic to Soviet Communism than the average American is or was sympathetic to it. Many would probably even label him as being closer to the political system in the former USSR politically than to that in the USA, though I don’t think that would be fair.
Remember when Obama went to India andcanceled his trip to Amritsar? There would have been nothing wrong with showing respect by covering his head when he visited the holiest site of a major world religion. No reasonable person would argue otherwise. But not everyone who votes is reasonable, had he been photographed with a dew-rag it may very well have increased his Muslimness, and decreased his appeal, in the eyes of a non negligible portion of voters. And so he wisely chose not to go (although personally I would have respected him much more for going, despite the consequences, but he is a politician, not a statesman). Bernie’s honeymoon in the USSR is a much bigger item of baggage than this would have been.
But, I never thought America would vote in Jr. Bush or Hussein Obama either, and look what happened.
You certainly do well enough at adopting Slacker’s tone, so sure, go ahead and speak for him :).
Whatever you may wish to say, the Soviet Union thing is a stupid, cheap shot. Nobody is unaware that the Republican party will take stupid cheap shots at whoever the Democratic candidate is, so you’re not adding information; all you’re doing is taking the stupid cheap shot while trying to avoid taking responsibility for it.
And while you’re at it? “Tragically obtuse” is another stupid cheap shots. Can you do better than those, or is that what you have to offer as far as political discourse goes?
Chrissakes, I’ve told you I’ve taken this same trip myself. And I’ve taken other trips like it. Far from taking a shot at Bernie, I admire him for it. But to assume the opposition will be equally discerning or open-minded… well… there’s exhibit A of the naïveté of the Bernie fan.
The term radical implies being near an extremity of some sort of spectrum of attributes. When any trend dominates, bucking the trend can reasonably be described as radical. In today’s political climate, ignoring the “i’m more progressive/conservative than you” gorilla display, and discussing solutions instead of vilifying scapegoats, is kind of radical.
Uh, yeah. Why would citing the dictionary definition of the word I used be an obvious joke? 
Yes, you may speak for me. Exactly right.
As admirable as your open-mindedness doubtless is, I don’t think you ought to use the word “discerning” just yet, at least not until you reread the post you’re quoting :).
As for you–Good lord, man, you do realize that you can read the entire post you quote before responding to it, don’t you?
I’m not trying to lay down a general rule, but in this case, I think you in particular should listen more to your mother.
Oh come on. You pretend I’m taking the cheap shot after I’ve explained multiple times that I’m just describing the cheap shot. How obtuse can you be, really?
And can you all really have lived through the Obama birth-certificate truther thing and not recognize the commie honeymoon thing might be a tetch more problematic? Really?
They do seem to be stubbornly, willfully obtuse on that point, HMS. :rolleyes:
I visited the USSR at around the same time, during the Gorbachev era, and I was enormously sympathetic to the Soviet system at that time. Not the previous system, that trampled on human rights and civil liberties; and not what followed after the collapse of the country. But for those five or six years, I believe they were absolutely on the right track, and that it’s a tragedy that they didn’t continue on it.
However, I can also be a grownup about it and understand that my believing this makes me absolutely unelectable in a presidential race, even if I weren’t already unelectable for a multitude of other reasons.
And it is naive for anyone to think that Bernie wasn’t somewhere in my ballpark, admiring what Gorbachev was doing. After all, he certainly admired the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which Sanders visited in 1985, three years before his “honeymoon”:
I felt the same, and continue to feel warm and fuzzy toward the Sandinistas. But to anyone over 50 who is not wayyyy over on the far left, this is serious pinko talk. (I’m only barely over 40 myself, but I think it’s fair to say I was precocious.)
This letter was unearthed by the UK Guardian:
If you don’t think those 50 boxes are going to be a field day for the GOP oppo research team in the event Bernie gets the nomination, then yes: you are hopelessly naive.
And it wasn’t just Nicaragua and the USSR in those days, though that would be plenty. Bernie achieved a hat trick:
Look, it was a good idea to try to move the Overton Window a bit by backing a candidate who is a little more to the left than the usual suspects. But it was a wild, lurching move to go straight to Bernie. Way too far, way too soon.
Thanks, but no. Her heart is mostly in the right place, but she voted for Ralph Nader three times. Did you know he ran three times? Most people don’t even know about 1996, but she was an early adopter. :smack: Like Bernie, she’s been to Cuba, though, and did get to attend a Fidel Castro speech.
So we can’t nominate a Socialist and win, even though we have nominated a Socialist Communist Nazi Atheist Muslim Caesar and won. Got it.
C’mon.
Too radical for Hillary Clinton, I would say.
It is entirely possible that HRC was to the left of a center-right conservative like her husband and to the right of a “centrist” like you. In any case, she’s not a revolutionary.
I hope that if she is nominated, she will be willing to work with left-radicals and progressives that get into Congress. But I don’t expect her to lead them.
I wish I were seeing more leadership from Sanders. Right now, running for President instead of backing more socialists for Congress feels a bit quixotic and Nader-like. But then, I would have happily voted for Nader if Nader had done what Bernie is doing right now. And maybe we will see Baby-Bernies get into Congressional and statehouse races over the next few months.
That is quite an impressive pile of ingenuous bullshit you’ve piled up there. You know perfectly well why a clarification is required. It’s pretty much exactly the same reason you brought up his honeymoon destination. “Golly gee, I just mentioned his most romantic time was spent in the bosom of our cold war enemy. Why so defensive?”
Huh. Has there ever been another Democratic Party President of the USA who lost Congress two years in and failed to regain it? What kind of weird unlikeable prat would he have to have been? Man, I wouldn’t want to nominate him, and I’d think twice about nominating his wife or his Sec’y of State.
I think you meant disingenuous? But no, I was sincere, and I think it’s a valid question. Maybe I should annotate the question a bit, given the reaction it’s getting:
So, if it’s damaging to his candidacy to have honeymooned in the USSR (and I absolutely agree that it is), how is it not damaging to take another kind of trip there? Especially given that his trip to Nicaragua three years earlier seems to have been undertaken as an official function, about which he sent an official mayoral letter lauding the Sandinistas’ “heroic revolution”? Is it just that in one case (the “Soviet honeymoon”), it sounds kind of laughable, while the other types of trips are more serious if even more seditious in the average person’s eyes? While those perceptions are a little different, I’m not sure how much the other interpretation improves things. Which leads to the other part:
Hopefully we can all agree that sounding defensive in politics is never a great look (this is actually something Trump seems to instinctually understand, which redounds to his great benefit). This is also expressed in the classic political truism “when you’re explaining, you’re losing”. But sometimes you have to take the hit you get from this sort of whininess, if it would be so much worse not to at least try to set the record straight. But how is “he took an official visit to the USSR which doubled as a honeymoon” so much better than “he honeymooned in the USSR”, full stop, that it outweighs the disadvantage of defensiveness?