Tag Archives: Democrats

Watch Democratic Convention Live Here

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To hell with Trump. To hell with today’s Republican Party. To hell with Fox News and CNN.

To hell with Trump’s buddy Putin. To hell with ISIS. To hell with the leaders of the NRA.

To hell with those who call themselves “Christians” and don’t practice Christianity.

To hell with the fools and money-grubbers who deny that global warming is real.

To hell with fanatics who spread fear, hatred and ignorance throughout the world.

Finally, to hell with any strong Sanders supporters who don’t apply at least some of their intensity to electing Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine and a Democratic Congress in November.

You can watch the unfiltered gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic National Convention, without “expert” analysis or commentary, at this site, even if you don’t have cable TV.

And have a nice day!

On Growing Up, Politically Speaking

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Kevin Baker writes for a living and voted for Bernie Sanders in the New York primary. In today’s New York Times, he calls on us liberals (aka progressives) to get serious: “Let’s Grow Up, Liberals”.

First, as preamble, he offers a critical analysis of the way Sanders endorsed Clinton this week: 

Senator Sanders’s embrace of the presumptive Democratic nominee included all the inclinations that many of us have come to find, shall we say, a tad grating about the man: his interminable, self-congratulatory stump speech, wearingly bereft of humor, argument, story or anecdote, more a listing of all bad things in the world and how they must be put right, delivered in his usual droning shout. The need to make it all about the platform concessions he had wrangled out of Mrs. Clinton, and the historical magnitude of the Senator himself: “Together we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution continues.” Followed by about as short and perfunctory an actual endorsement as possible.

At least it was done. If Achilles had sulked this long in his tent we would all be speaking Trojan, but never mind. Bernie Sanders did, clearly and unequivocally, say that Hillary Clinton had won the most elected delegates, that she “will make an outstanding President and I am proud to stand with her here today” …

Mr. Kramer then diagnoses a continuing problem with left-wing politics:

Polling shows that 85 percent of Sanders supporters are willing to vote for Mrs. Clinton in November… Most of the remainder will likely come around over the next four months… yet there is a lingering problem here…

With Bernie out of the battle, what remains is the left’s odd, outmoded doctrine of purity, of revolutionary posturing. This is a philosophy alien to the long legacy of pragmatic American liberalism. Its perpetuation speaks directly to the reasons today’s liberals seem to have such difficulty holding and wielding power in this country. “The worse, the better,” went the Leninist saw. There is no reforming the rotten old system. Best to “let the empire burn,” and have the fires purify the new society….

Change — lasting, democratic change, which is the only kind worth fighting for — is hard, slow, often exasperating. And yet the theatrics of revolution seem to mesmerize the left, over and over again. The concept, all too similar to the religious fundamentalist’s obsession with the end times, is that cataclysm will bring redemption. There is inherent in this a deep indifference to the historical recognition that one thing proceeds from another … and that when we start down an unknown trail we cannot be sure where we will end up….

The corrosive effects of a political philosophy devoted to waiting for the revolution can be heard in the oddly passive demands of those speeches by Mr. Sanders that lay out always what he wants, but not how we can get it. It is reflected in the left’s distraction over presidential elections while failing to build democracy on a state or local level….

He concludes by quoting Barry Goldwater’s call to action after Goldwater lost the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon in 1960:

This country is too important for anyone’s feelings,” Goldwater thundered at his delegates. “This country, and its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, conservatives. We want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let’s go to work.”

Goldwater backed up his words by campaigning hard in support of Nixon — and not incidentally, building a foundation for the right wing around the country. Four years later, he would use it to gain the nomination himself, and by 1980, Ronald Reagan had taken not only the party but the country for conservatism.

If Voting Was Considered a Sacred Responsibility

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Everyone would be willing to visit the VOX site and watch the 41-minute video in which Ezra Klein interviews Hillary Clinton on subjects like poverty, deficit spending and immigration. Or else read the slightly edited transcript.

After they did that, they’d be curious enough to read Mr. Klein’s associated article: “Understanding Hillary: Why the Clinton America Sees Isn’t the Clinton Colleagues Know”. He has an interesting answer. It’s not one I’ve heard before.

The video and transcript

The associated article “Understanding Hillary”

Then, in November, they’d vote for the candidate they prefer and the Congressional candidates who’d help her do her job.

Reasons to Smile, Clear Sailing Ahead

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Who wants to read depressing crap every day? Not you! Not me! Hell no!

That’s why I’m planning to devote this blog to good news and encouraging thoughts until after the election.

That means I won’t quote from, comment on or link to disheartening articles like these:

“The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump”, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: It’s excellent:

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger….

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by PerĂłns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks…. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.

Or “Trump Has Taught Me to Fear My Fellow Americans”, by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Maybe Mr. Cohen hasn’t been paying close attention in recent years, but now he understands:

Donald Trump has taught me to fear my fellow Americans. I don’t mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest. I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way. If you had told me a year ago that a hateful brat would be the presidential nominee of a major political party, I would have scoffed….

When I see these Trump supporters on television — the commentators …  — I have to wonder where they would draw the line. The answer seems to be: nowhere. They want to win. They want to beat Hillary Clinton, a calling so imperative that sheer morality must give way. Muslims and Mexicans are merely collateral damage in a war that must be fought. What about blacks or Jews? Not yet.

Maybe the talking heads on TV would draw the line at some mild version of fascism, but would the American people do the same?

And “Trump’s Lies and Authoritarianism Are the Same”, by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

Donald Trump is a wildly promiscuous liar. He also has disturbing authoritarian tendencies. Trump’s many critics have seized upon both traits as his two major disqualifications for the presidency, yet both of them frustratingly defy easy quantification. All politicians lie some, and many of them lie a lot, and most presidents also push the limits of their authority in ways that can frighten their opponents. So what is so uniquely dangerous about Trump? Perhaps the answer is that both of these qualities are, in a sense, the same thing. His contempt for objective truth is the rejection of democratic accountability, an implicit demand that his supporters place undying faith in him. Because the only measure of truth he accepts is what he claims at any given moment, the power his supporters vest in him is unlimited….

Truth and reason are weapons of the powerless against the powerful. There is no external doctrine [Trump] can be measured against, not even conservative dogma, which he embraces or discards at will and with no recognition of having done so. Trump’s version of truth is multiple truths, the only consistent element of which is Trump himself is always, by definition, correct. Trump’s mind is so difficult to grapple with because it is an authoritarian epistemology that lies outside the democratic norms that have shaped all of our collective experiences.

Those are just a few examples of the kind of material I’m going to avoid from now on. After all, our political situation isn’t all bad. Some in the press are waking up to the fact that they can’t cover Trump as if he were a normal candidate. Some Sanders supporters are accepting the fact that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee (and not because the super-delegates are all corrupt). More stories are appearing about Trump’s nefarious past. The businessman’s campaign is running out of money, while Clinton is sharpening her attack and correctly labeling Trump as a fraud and a con man. On top of all that, we’re only a few days away from the end of the primary election season! What’s there to worry about? Life is good! 

Ignoring the Next Six Months – Day Two

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I set up my browser to stop me (ok, discourage me) from visiting a few sites that tend to upset my digestion (yes, Salon, I’m looking at you). But I haven’t entirely cut myself off from the current events pipeline.

So I saw the story about Trump’s plans to address the national debt. Here’s the headline from a news story in the New York Times:

“Donald Trump’s Idea to Cut National Debt: Get Creditors to Accept Less”

And a representative passage:

But Mr. Trump’s statement might show the limits of translating his business acumen into the world of government finance. The United States simply cannot pursue a similar strategy….The government runs an annual deficit, so it must borrow to retire existing debt. Any measures that would reduce the value of the existing debt … would increase the cost of issuing new debt. Such a threat also could undermine the stability of global financial markets.

Simply because he will be the official nominee of the Republican Party, the Times treats him with respect. The “might” and “could” imply that Trump’s approach isn’t out of the question. Maybe he has a creative solution that never occurred to previous Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury. After all, he doesn’t have mere business “experience”. He has business “acumen”! In the ordinary sense of the word, that means “keen insight” or “shrewdness”. Maybe we were wrong about this Trump guy.

But less encumbered by traditional journalistic standards, Vox, the online site that attempts to “explain the news”, came up with this headline for the same story:

“Donald Trump just threatened to cause an unprecedented global financial crisis”

And a representative passage:

With this statement, Trump not only revealed a dangerous ignorance about the operation of the national monetary system and the global economic order, but also offered a brilliant case study in the profound risks of attempting to apply the logic of a private business enterprise to the task of running the United States of America.

I offer this post as an example of how the “mainstream” journalists will lift Trump up during the next six months. It will be easy to find cases in which the same people tear Clinton down in an attempt to be “objective” and “non-partisan”.

PS – They’re selling “Never Trump” lawn signs online for less than $20 (plus shipping and handling; stand not included). Hurry while supplies last!