Bernie vs Tulsi: How to Identify Controlled opposition
Bernie bros vote shamed Tulsi voters, but who should feel shame?
Bernie bros vote shamed Tulsi voters, but who should feel shame?
Smear: Tulsi was stealing Bernie’s votes
Reality: Bernie supporters used this smear to shame Tulsi supporters, many of whom were Bernie supporters in 2016 — including myself.
Tulsi has shown nothing but respect towards Bernie. She was actually his biggest supporter in 2016. But there is a reason she was running against him in 2020 — there were clear distinctions between the Sanders campaign and Tulsi’s, distinctions that Gabbard and supporters such as myself evidently believed to be important. It was not our fault that Bernie couldn’t represent us and give us a solid voice, if one at all, on vital issues we cared about.
I was an avid Bernie supporter myself in 2016, and so this smear particularly irritated me. When Bernie endorsed Hillary at the convention, it made many of his supporters, including myself, feel betrayed. We fought so hard to get him in such a good position, maybe even farther than many anticipated, and then he unnecessarily threw in the towel at the final stretch. But the Clinton endorsement could have been forgiven if he had not proceeded to help campaign for Clinton after she conspired with the DNC to steal his nomination (talk about interference in elections), even going on to help perpetuate the Russia gate madness after she lost. Sanders put much, if not all, of the blame on Russia, and little to none on the DNC and Clinton.
Admittedly, this being updated and published after Gabbard left the race during the coronavirus outbreak before going on to endorse Biden… Tulsi prematurely stopping her campaign instead of taking it to the convention made me feel similar to when Bernie prematurely threw in the towel and endorsed Clinton in 2016. However, to her defense, she did join all other democrats in the race, including Sanders, in pledging to support the eventual nominee. The key difference between the two concessions however is that Tulsi has not gone on to campaign for Biden and shame her voters into voting for someone who does little to nothing to represent them — as Bernie did in 2016 for Clinton and has been shamelessly doing in 2020 for Biden.
Bernie has been campaigning for Biden, even going on to preposterously claim that Biden would be “the most progressive president since FDR”…meanwhile Gabbard had dropped out, endorsed Biden as the eventual nominee.. but has been silent on the matter since. No vote shaming or patronizing as Bernie has done. During the primaries, Gabbard also had consistently acknowledged the DNC’s bias/interference that was working against her, which Bernie had consistently avoided and deflected from.
Tulsi did not only defend herself better, swinging back with no fear while Bernie was prone to needless apologies, but her policy platform and history had some significant differences compared to Bernie’s— policy differences on issues that matter — alot. After all, the Commander-in-chief, the most powerful person in the world, should be chosen based off of substance and policy. The pressure on supporters of candidates such as Tulsi (Yang too) to coagulate into Bernie’s camp because he had a better chance of winning was manipulative and reprehensible, as ex-Bernie supporters such as myself remember being attacked and shamed in 2016 by Hillary’s camp under the same premise of needing to “unite against Trump” — even if that meant abandoning our core principles and values.
Tulsi’s husband would tweet on the matter –
As Tulsi said in the context of defending Bernie against Hillary Clinton’s most recent attacks on Sanders-
“Look, it’s time to grow up. This isn’t high school. We are talking about real challenges that our country that our country needs to address, and the need for real leadership to focus on them. Not in what’s going on in Washington and ‘the schoolyard clicks’ or whatever else it may be — there are real issues that people are struggling with and they’re wondering why are our leaders not working for us. This is why I am running for president — to change that, because Washington is so disconnected from the reality of what people deal with everyday.”
Not only did Gabbard step down as vice chairwoman from the DNC months prior to the 2016 convention to endorse Bernie, but she fought harder for him than he did himself at the 2016 convention, where she officially nominated Sanders after he had already handed the nomination to Clinton on a silver platter by endorsing her instead of making a historic speech. At the convention, Sanders was nominated ahead of roll-call by Gabbard who called his campaign a “movement of love and compassion”. The Hill would report,
“Though Sanders has repeatedly pushed his supporters to back Hillary Clinton for president, Gabbard didn’t echo his unity message in her speech.
Gabbard was one of only a handful of lawmakers who formally endorsed Sanders and was one of the campaign’s superdelegates. She stepped down from her post at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to support Sanders.
Paul Feeney, Sanders’s Massachusetts and Connecticut state director, spoke after Gabbard, urging the party to unite around Clinton ahead of the fall fight against Donald Trump.”
Sanders supporters would be noted to have repeatedly interrupted the new DNC chairwoman, Marcia Fudge, by chanting “Bernie”. Marcia Fudge replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairwoman following a massive Wikileaks dump that “showed DNC officials giving preference to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the prolonged primary contest against Sanders”.
So,the DNC was caught actively rigging the election in favor of Clinton becoming the nominee, and instead of challenging it, Bernie simply capitulated to it, endorsing Clinton instead of bringing attention to election interference and resisting— allowing the DNC to smooth it under the rug — and then proceeded to help campaign for the woman who rigged the nomination against him — all with no shame. Chris Hedges eloquently conveyed the frustration of disenfranchised Sanders supporters, including myself, by stating,
“Sanders squandered his most important historical moment. He had a chance, once chance, to take the energy, anger and momentum, walk out the doors of the Wells Fargo Center and into the streets to help build a third-party movement. His call to delegates to face “reality” and support Clinton was an insulting repudiation of the reality his supporters, mostly young men and young women, had over overcome by lifting him from an obscure candidate polling at 12 percent into a serious contender for the nomination. Sanders not only sold out his base, he mocked it. This was a spiritual wound, not a political one. For this he must ask forgiveness”.
Not only did it feel like betrayal to those of us that put so much energy into getting him to such a prominent position by the time the convention rolled around, but Bernie’s constant parroting of the Russiagate narrative to blame Trump’s election on Russia, rather than chastising the DNC for interfering in our democracy and conspiring with the Clinton campaign, was further disappointment… And it has continued up until this point, shamelessly.
The #DNCFraudLawsuit was a debacle, with the DNC arguing in court that they are allowed to favor a candidate, and have no obligation to provide a level playing field..an admission of guilt, arguing that the election rigging they were guilty of is not a punishable crime. You can’t make this stuff up.
There have been ample opportunities to challenge Russiagate and condemn the DNC’s interference, many of them direct attacks on Sanders.. and he fails to seize them. For instance, take this interview between Hillary Clinton and Howard Stern which Town Hall reports on, in which Hillary claims that the Russians were doing everything in their power to help elect Sanders, before going on to add that he could have endorsed her quicker.
“While elaborating on her conspiracy theory of how Russia stole the election from her, the two-time presidential loser told Howard Stern that the Russians also wanted to do everything they could to help elect Bernie Sanders.
— ‘You know, basically, [the Russians] were like, hey, let’s do everything we can to elect Donald Trump,’ Hillary explained to Stern. ‘Those are words. And they also said Bernie Sanders, but, you know, that’s for another day.’
‘Do we hate Bernie Sanders?’ Stern felt compelled to ask.
‘No. I don’t hate anybody,’ Clinton responded.
‘Bernie could have endorsed you quicker,’ Stern prodded.
‘He could have. He hurt me. There’s no doubt about it,’ Clinton admitted.
‘Have you ever spoken to Bernie about that?’ Stern continued. ‘No,’ Hillary answered.
‘Do you ever talk to him?’ Stern asked.
‘I don’t talk to him,’ Hillary said. “I mean we did when he finally endorsed me and all that.”
‘But you’re upset with him,’ Stern followed up.
‘No. I’m disappointed,’ Hillary explained. ‘Disappointed. Ok. And I hope he doesn’t do it again to whoever gets the nomination. Once is enough. We have to join forces.’ ”
Hillary said she “hopes he doesn’t do it again to whoever gets the nomination”… But there is a problem with that statement….Sanders had endorsed Clinton before the nomination, before the convention...as previously acknowledged by the excerpt above discussing Gabbard’s formal nomination of Sanders at the DNC convention(after Bernie had already endorsed Clinton). Instead of seizing the opportunity to fire back with a strong response, Bernie did not respond to the McCarthyism and self-entitlement and seemed to take the “unity” lecture to heart, tweeting about a month later:
Weak. This is Bernie bending over backwards for the people who actively interfered in the “democratic” process to steal his nomination. Bernie not only used Trump’s allegation of the “DNC rigging the election again against Bernie Sanders, just like last time” to deflect to Russiagate, but he provided an implied denial of the DNC’s bias against his campaign, rather than acknowledging the truth of the matter. Tulsi in that position would certainty not have rolled over to the DNC by deflecting and peddling Russiagate while ignoring and denying internal DNC interference against herself and her campaign. 3 days after Bernie’s response to Trump above, Clinton would attack Bernie again, claiming that “nobody likes him”. If that doesn’t show she is out-of-touch, I don’t know what does. Bernie didn’t respond. Imagine that.
Many sympathetic to Bernie’s platform feel that instead of him apologizing to corrupt centrist Neolibs like Biden (who was the frontrunner at time of writing and is the president according to half the country at the time of publishing) for their corruption, he should be continuing to call it out. In a primary between Sanders and the other Democrats, a competition to decide who will be the democratic nominee, if you were to observe Bernie’s twitter feed over any given period of time during his campaign trail, the majority of its substance is differentiating between himself and Trump rather than differentiating himself from other potential democratic nominees, along with calling for unity.
Hillary Clinton must be proud. In situations where he can and should stand his ground, maybe even go on the offensive and take some, he instead gives ground to those who have already smeared him and attacked his movement.
Many voters sympathetic to or supportive of a variety of Bernie’s policies would wish to see him respond to attacks in a more assertive and aggressive manner. Whether it be Clinton, Biden, Warren, or the DNC.
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When Bernie apologized to Biden for a surrogate writing an op-ed that claimed Biden has a “big corruption problem”, many progressives started to feel disgruntled and misrepresented.
Even people who didn’t support Tulsi as their candidate of choice appreciated this head-on approach of responding to smears and attacks. The opposite of this is Bernie’s approach, avoiding eye-contact and giving the bully what they want. Its as Bernie didn’t even try to win: peddling “Unity” the entire time, focusing on Trump rather than his advantages over other democrats. He acted like the Titanic’s captain, except for if the captain secretly saw the iceberg and still drove right into it, all the while telling people they were part of a political revolution and not a sinking ship of a campaign.
In regard to Bernie’s defense of Biden and the stifling of his surrogate’s criticism of his opponent’s very real corruption problem, Michael Tracy would tweet,
To which Currie Dobson would reply,
Jimmy Dore would comment on Bernie’s apology for his surrogate’s op-ed:
Tracey provoked multiple responses that offered explanations to his prompt…
The end of the Consent Factory’s article sarcastically reads,
“Oh, yeah, and in case you’re worried about Bernie backing the empire’s ongoing regime change op in Venezuela, don’t be. He’s just playing 4D chess, like Obama did throughout his presidency, by pretending to do the empire’s bidding while he actually went about the business of resurrecting hope and eradicating racism. Bernie’s just being sly like that! It might seem like he’s aligning himself with mass murdering thugs like Elliot Abrams and sadistic ass freaks like Marco Rubio, but he isn’t. Not really. It’s just an act. I mean, he has to get elected, doesn’t he?”
Another response to Tracy’s tweet read
@NoMoreWars2, prompting a comparison between Tulsi and Bernie’s responses to Clinton, was referring to Tulsi’s famous “Queen of Warmongerers” tweet, a strong show of strength all by itself, let alone compared to Bernie’s meek silence and deflection. Days after the tweet above, Tulsi Gabbard would sue Hillary Clinton for 50 million dollars. Needless to say, Bernie and Tulsi go about defending themselves and “challenging the establishment” in a very different manner. Why? Why is Bernie incapable of confrontation with corporate-owned ideological opponents in the DNC that are a bigger threat to preventing progressive change than the GOP who bear the weight of all his criticism?
The quote that @NoMoreWars2 displayed was from an article titled, “Bernie Sanders Phantom Movement” by Chris Hedges. In the article, Hedges alludes to how Bernie is essentially what many would call controlled opposition — or in his words — How Bernie is “part of the Democratic establishment’s campaign to neutralize the left”.
“Sanders is, in all but title, a Democrat. He is a member of the Democratic caucus. He votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996 — after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare — and for John Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders for his role as a sheepherder.”
In 2015, the year before Hedges wrote the article from which the above excerpt comes, Paul Street wrote a piece for CounterPunch titled, “Bernie Out of the Closet: Sanders’ Longstanding Deal with the Democrats” which detailed how Sanders made a deal with the DNC that was essentially an agreement for Sanders to stifle the then-growing threat of a 3rd party movement in Vermont in exchange for the DNC not supporting any candidate to run against him.
Sanders did not “fight the Democratic establishment in Vermont his entire career.” As the left University of Vermont philosopher Will Miller noted in a 1999 essay recounting left peace activists’ occupation of then U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders’ Burlington, Vermont office to protest Sanders’ support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing U.S. War on Iraq, Sanders sold out to the corporate and war Democrats as early as 1990.
Between 1981 and 1988, it is true, Sanders “presented himself to the left outside of Vermont as the leader of the third party movement, vanquishing the two major parties in every Mayoral election.” But in 1988, Sanders got a lesson on the perils of third party politics when he ran for federal office. In the election for Vermont’s seat in the House of Representatives, the independent Sanders and Democrat Paul Poirer divided the majority vote and the contest went to a Republican. Sanders responded by drifting right and cutting a deal with the Vermont Democrats: the party would permit no serious candidate to run against him while he blocked serious third party formation in Vermont and adopted positions in line with the national corporate war Democrats.
Infamous Democratic National Committee Chairman and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, once described Sanders as an “ally who votes with the Democrats ninety eight percent of the time.”
With matters of foreign policy, this seems to be somewhat of the case as well, which will be discussed in the next part.
The “independent” Sanders has enjoyed a special agreement with the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. He votes with the Democrats on all procedural matters in exchange for the committee seats and seniority that would be available to him as a Democrat.
Paul Street would also write that,
“Consistent with this party loyalty, Sanders refuses to seriously or substantively criticize his ‘good friend’ and Democratic presidential primary ‘rival’ Mrs. Clinton — a militantly corporatist and militarist right-wing Democrat. Sanders has backed Obama’s numerous murderous military actions and provocations around the world, from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq to China, Ukraine, and Russia.”
On a related note, Steer would write that
“In his presidential campaign speeches, Sanders has been unwilling to mention the corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem. Presidential candidate John Edwards fulminated consistently against “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” when he ran in the Iowa Caucus eight years ago. Sanders, by contrast, focuses almost completely on corporate Republicans.”
Keep in mind, that was written in 2015 for the last election cycle. The same dynamic of Bernie focusing on the corporate Republicans(mainly Trump) and completely turning a blind eye to corporate democrats had persisted into and through his 2020 campaign.
When one of Bernie’s “surrogates”, Representative Tlaib, booed Hillary Clinton, she would subsequently apologize after many attacked Bernie for Tlaib’s actions, to the dismay of much of Bernie’s base..
Tlaib’s apology raised eyebrows. Hillary had constantly attacked Bernie, so it should be acceptable to display discontent with the woman that stole his nomination and gave us Trump. The people demanding an apology from Tlaib did not say anything through Clinton’s smears of Bernie — Clinton was allowed to drag Bernie’s name through the mud without protest, but God-forbid Bernie or his political surrogates reciprocate. But despite the justification, Tlaib mysteriously gave in to the neoliberal outrage and apologized.
Throughout Bernie’s campaign there had existed a consistent and observable pattern of conceding to the establishment, and not speaking the truth — even retroactively apologizing for it. Allowing the DNC establishment to influence the campaign’s narratives — what should be spoken and what couldn’t – is a red-flag of controlled opposition. When Bernie’s surrogate accused Biden of having “a corruption problem”, he wasn’t wrong. So why apologize?
While Bernie was seen apologizing for his surrogates throwing some well-deserved punches, Tulsi was slamming Clinton on twitter, asking her to apologize, and suing her for 50 million dollars because of the damage not just done to her reputation, but to the country and its democracy.
Tulsi didn’t back down, she doubled down.
Tulsi didn’t allow herself to be bullied by the democratic establishment or the powers behind it. As Tulsi supporters have pointed out in frustration …while Bernie defended corrupt neolibs like Biden and Warren after they attack him, Sanders ironically failed to defend Gabbard despite her defending him every turn of the road, her being a close ally on policy, and it being the right thing to do.
When CNN’s New Hampshire townhall excluded Tulsi but included candidates who were polling much lower than her, including Deval who was polling at 0%, it upset many who had still clung to the hope that we live in a somewhat fair democracy that isn’t *completely* controlled by a corporate oligarchy. Many were pressuring Sanders, who CNN did allow on stage, to speak up for Tulsi’s right to speak.
What was particularly telling, beyond the not-to-surprising erasure of Gabbard by CNN and the DNC, was Bernie’s own form of erasure of her candidacy.
The problem with that statement? It was a blatant lie. It wasn’t down to two… It was Three. It was one thing for the Corporate News Network(CNN) to pretend Gabbard wasn’t in the race, it was another for “progressive” Bernie Sanders to actively partake in the erasure and pretend she was already out.
But Sanders failing to defend Tulsi is to be expected, as he does a poor job of defending himself, let alone other people. Warren’s attack on Sanders was worse than Hillary Clinton’s attack, not just because of the method of attack, but because it was in the back. Warren, after posing and posturing as an ally for months during the campaign, would turn around and claim that Sanders said in a private meeting that a woman cannot be president.
Sanders and Warren were close up until this sudden accusation… the Sanders campaign was even considering appointing Warren as both Vice President and Secretary of Treasury, researching constitutional law to confirm that those positions were not mutually exclusive, as it has never been done before, potentially allowing her to hold both positions at the same time. Warren would double down on her claim during the 7th debate, with CNN moderators apparently having had taken sides.
Voters in alignment with many of Sanders policies (which includes a large amount of Tulsi supporters as the grievances of Bernie supporters and Tulsi supporters strongly overlap on many issues) wanted him to stop dismissing the DNC’s corruption, because it did not all just magically go away.
The DNC’s actions have prompted headlines such as, “Are Tom Perez and the DNC preparing for a battle against Bernie Sanders and the left?” and “To rig primary against Bernie, DNC chair Tom Perez nominates regime-change agents, Israel lobbyists, and Wall Street consultants” — which Tom Perez would expectantly deny. Yet Bernie had not laid a verbal finger on Perez, or the DNC throughout the campaign. He failed to defend Tulsi from shameless smear attacks while he defended Biden and co from his own surrogates’ jabs. He couldn’t even stand up to the slimy betrayal from Warren.
@NoMoreWars2 corrected his second to last statement, telling him to “fix your typo!” and replace “doomed” with “OWNED”, implying that Sanders’ campaign’s refusal to swing back combined with the defense of Bernie’s own attackers is a result of him being “controlled opposition”.
Cameron would also reply in the thread that
After Politico published a headline that read “DNC members discuss rules change to stop Sanders at convention” , Tom Perez would tweet the headline, commenting,
He would of course be slammed with a slew of replies, one of which read,
Referring to a petition that Tulsi Gabbard created and posted on her campaign’s website that demanded Tom Perez’s resignation, Alex Rubinstein would tweet,
To showcase what happens when you allow, or even defend, corruption in your own party, and only call it out on the other side— look at the career of Hillary’s campaign manager in 2016, John Podesta. Podesta is a reprehensible figure notorious for corruption exposed through “the Podesta leaks” published by Wikileaks, as well as some other, even more disturbing, accusations that are still relevant, especially considering the Epstein debacle that followed — and Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest and trial ahead. Podesta’s career should be over. But instead, he is still welcome within the political community. It has been brought to attention that John Podesta will be serving on the 2020 DNC’s Rules Committee for the convention …
If that does not enrage you, then you have not been exposed to the Podesta leaks — which proved beyond a doubt the case for corruption in regards to the DNC establishment co-conspiring with Clinton Inc. to ensure Clinton secured the nomination over Sanders.
Referring to Podesta, who is in Clinton’s inner circle, being selected for a committee at the DNC convention, @Fiorella_Im would tweet,
Jill Stein, provoked by the obscene corruption of the DNC, would pull no punches by tweeting,
But despite the DNC’s undeniable corruption, Sanders refuses to hold them accountable, choosing to tow the establishment’s line instead and blame Russia for 2016 and the consequences of the DNC’s shortcomings.
Bernie would release a statement condemning Russian interference in 2020, urging Big Tech companies to combat this interference — which would provoke comments such as Donna’s below:
Marc Caputo tweeted out that
Bernie Sanders could’ve trafficked in conspiracy theories in his Caucus Night speech. He could’ve said how suspicious it was for the vote tallies to not be posted. He could’ve said the spiking of the Iowa Poll was unfair to him.
But he didn’t. And that’s to his credit.
Robert Barnes snapped back, retorting that “It’s how they know they can steal it from him without consequence”… Bernie could have stirred the pot and “trafficked in conspiracy theories” that concern anomalies in the “democratic process” the DNC is overseer too, but instead he was a good boy and didn’t tug on the leash that the DNC has on him.
Undoubtedly surprising to some, while predicted by many, this tweet has aged as well as fine wine:
But Bernie seemed to be more focused on the DNC beating Trump rather than himself beating the corporatists running the DNC and securing the nomination so that he could actually be in a position to beat Trump.
Sanders conceded to the establishment that gave us Trump, in the name of beating Trump. Albiet, conceding implies he was putting up much of a fight to begin with. To be fair, in the context of having inserted that last tweet, Tulsi Gabbard did sign the same pledge as Sanders, promising to support the eventual DNC nominee. However, she was not making statements like this at anytime during her campaign, especially not during the climax of the primary like that above.
Bernie’s already-scrutinized tweets did not age well, considering the Iowa caucus debacle, which the DNC chairman, Perez, said “should never have happened” — although the shenanigans were still ongoing at the time he said that. This would lead to Gabbard demanding Perez’s resignation- while Bernie was silent, whose campaign had far more to lose- saying that “It’s both because of what we’ve seen happen in Iowa, but also over the last several months the growing skepticism that I hear from Democratic voters”.
The first contest of primary season that sets the stage for the entire primary process, the Iowa Caucus, which the DNC in their own words had for three years been preparing for, was obviously corrupted — and it would not be a stretch to say rigged.
Hell, the company that created the app that handled the votes, Shadow, had conspicuous ties to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, being created by the wife of a senior political strategist of Buttigieg’s campaign. As reported by AP news, “Resumes posted on the online business networking site LinkedIn show the company’s top executives all worked in the Clinton campaign’s digital operation in 2016.”
This would include–
– The CEO, Niemira, who was Clinton’s director of product
– James Hickey, Shadow’s chief operating officer, was an engineering manager at Hillary for America.
– Krista Davis, the chief technical officer and chief software architect at Shadow, who was a backend engineer for the Clinton campaign.
Green Greenwald would sarcastically tweet about the Iowa caucus,
In a clever reference to Shadow, the company who produced the voting software previously mentioned, @Primonutmeg would joke,
The thread the two tweets above are apart of would continue if one is interested to read it.
The Iowa caucus debacle would spur another round of Tulsi supporters using the hashtag #Tulsiwasright, as well as Bernie supporters giving her credit where its due.
In regards to @KyleKulinski of Secular talk tweeting the following
Bre Miche would tweet,
Immediately after Iowa, Tulsi would double down on the issue of electoral reforms,
Now while I personally think we should look to blockchain to make our elections more secure, Gabbard’s proposals on election integrity have been by far the best out of all the 2020 DND primary candidates.
Meanwhile Bernie was pretending it never happened, even though he was impacted by it, and preferred to focus on Russia and Trump. Even at the 8th democratic debate, mere days after the Iowa caucus, he would meekly fail to bring to attention the serious allegations around the Iowa caucus that were favorable for him to mention during the debate.
Currie Dobson would tweet after the 8th debate that,
Two days after the Iowa caucus, Bernie would tweet in relation to Trumps impeachment case,
“A president who is allowed to show contempt for Congress and its oversight duties.
A trial without a single witness.
I am disturbed by the precedent this sham process sets for this country.
This is not a good day for our democracy, the Constitution, or the American people.”
This would earn many frustrated remarks from progressives. For example, Shawna Burley would mirror his tweet with some minor adjustments
Having thoroughly acknowledged Bernie’s timidity in truly challenging the DNC, and their corruption, it should be stated that the main reason why Tulsi supporters owe no apologizes, why the shaming by Bernie supporters is a smear, apart from the difference between Bernie and Tulsi in attitude/fight/approach to “challenging the establishment”, is because they have some radically important differences in platform and policy, and we should feel free to vote for the candidate that best reflects our own views.
Bernie Sanders should be a blue print for what *not* to look for in a candidate, and a reminder to keep a critical eye even on our favorite political candidates to look for neglection of issues, or blind spots or stains on their platform — and this includes everyone no exceptions, even Gabbard supporters. No one is perfect, and the idea is to elect the person who *best* reflects our views…but when you settle on a candidate…..that doesn’t mean to put on rose colored glasses and ignore any and all criticism of them.*If anything*, we should know more than others about our own candidate.
Everyone focuses on the strengths, because we think they have the strongest case, but we should strive to know their flaws and weaknesses in order to push them into better positions – rather than pretending that they are perfect and those flaws don’t exist. Similarly, keeping a critical eye on elected officials is important, holding them accountable to the rhetoric they used to get elected.
The real problem is when supporters defend their flaws, positions, and actions that deserve a degree of criticism. When populists like Sanders consistently appease the corporate democrats and even assist them in their efforts and agenda, foreign policy and domestic, and vote with them 98% of the time, even helping campaign for some of the worst of them…. followers should suspend their preconceived notions and question whether Sanders was truly working against the establishment or not. What if he was working with them, as Chris Hedges and Paul Street suggested?
“As Hedges explained in a recent interview on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Sanders’ candidacy lends undeserved credibility to the thoroughly corporatized Democratic Party. Sanders has pledged that he will support the corporatist military hawk Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general presidential election. Sanders stirs up legitimate progressive energy and popular anger and then ‘funnels it back into a dead political system,’ Hedges observes. Sanders fails to confront the American Empire and military state, and, Hedges adds, has unforgivably ‘abandoned the Palestinians and given carte blanche to Israel.’ ”
Regarding the quote of Hedges directly above, it is worth noting that Gabbard’s views on Isreal/Palestine is probably one of her weakest stances. While it s worth pushing her on that issue going into the future, the point being made is that Sanders’ foreign policy is full of blunders and support for interventionism. More over, because of his willingness to concede and submit to the corporate establishment, he effectively has taken all the energy gathered from his movement, and as Hedges put it, acts to “funnel it back into a dead political system”. Gabbard’s differences with Sanders on the issues will be discussed in the next part.
The problem is when these same “populists” on leashes cant bring themselves to stand up for themselves, their supporters, or their movement, and then go on to apologize to people who helped rig the nomination from him. Or when they roll over during smear campaigns against their own campaigns with accusations of Russian support being made . The problem with “populists” that consistently bow to the ruling establishment and fail to challenge them is that they, wittingly or unwittingly, effectively act as “controlled opposition”: they stagnate, dampen, and ultimately hurt the populist political movements that they are supposed to represent and champion.
Now lets get on to the issues, which you can find in the next part. You can find the next part by going to my profile, following me, and look for the next article posted after this one.
