As a liberal I pretty much agree with all the choices above (except for Hilary Clinton, who is too much of a hawk for my taste but whose personal demeanor is A-OK in my book).
The only new one I can add is long dead, and that’s John Silber, former president of Boston University, who was generally liberal-ish but certainly not a standard bearer for progressive ideas. Still, he was the Democratic candidate for mayor in Massachusetts.
He was so personally loathsome, and so insulting to gays and women, that he caused me to vote Republican for the first and only time in my life.
My first academic boss. A real prick.
Didn’t he run for governor, not mayor?
Yes, GOVERNOR not mayor! A brain fart on my part.
ETA: were you a Massachusetts resident when Silber ran against William Weld? If yes, who did you vote for? (Or did you know Silber from his Texas days?)
Oh, yeah, John Edwards is a good one. I really like him and his positions, but he was running for president knowing he was already in deep shit for his affair. What if he had gotten the nomination and then it all came out??
Kyrsten Synema and Joe Manchin are on their own side.
Nope. I don’t think I ever voted in MA. I was a grad student at BU in 1978-79.
I’d sure like to forget that Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein were both democrats. I don’t actively despise any lefty politicians, but those two…
As a leftist, it’s been pretty revealing just how many leftists are only “anti imperialism” because it gives them a chance to be anti American. A whole lot of leftists have been spouting utterly ridiculous arguments to contort themselves into believing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was Good Actually including parts of the DSA.
Yeah I’m going to need some names
I’m a lefty and expect someday the workers will have more control than the stockholders, and I was raised by parents active in the Civil Rights Movement. But whenever I see Angela Davis lauded as she is, all I think about is a helpless man with a few minutes left to live, with Angela Davis’ shotgun taped to his neck.
Re the left and Ukraine, I dug this up. I’m not sure what to think of it, and it’s probably a ginormous hijack, but here you go:
I actually knew Ayn Rand, and still agree with 90% of what she said. But I have always voted for, and campaigned for, Democrats. All Republicans (and some Dems) are repugnant to me.
Regarding Rand’s “devotees”, I agree with you.
This reminds me of another thing I despise–“libertarians” who always vote Republican. My two main problems with this:
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Republicans have tended to be blind apologists for the Police and Police Brutality/Misconduct.
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I am totally opposed to the Christian Right and its attempt to create a nominally theocracy in the US
Yeah, I’d have to say it’s Maher. I’m a leftist, atheist, pot smoker. My wife watches him, but I can’t stand to watch him whine and self-fellatiate his way through his boring ass show. I’ve tried many times, often can’t make it to the end of the panel discussion. Once he gets into his “comedy” bits, I’m absolutely done.
That whole laughing at his own jokes thing he does is pathetic.
Even worse is when he castigates the audience for failing to laugh at the jokes to the level he feels they deserve.
For Maher, the “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged” adage is “a libertarian is a liberal who’s applied for a building permit.”
But in Maher’s case, he went with the cheapest contractor, who took 3 years to complete a process that takes everyone else a few months.
I’m not sure there really IS a political “spectrum”? At least, a one-dimensional one.
There seem to be so many things bundled together in conventional political parties that I can’t give much of an assent to any of them?
Does he do that? What a douche.