War Room Lounge v40: Mixed Feelings about Natural Disasters

[Gregolian]

Her "gaff" or whatever you want to call it about Crenshaw was facepalm worthy though.

 

[Trotsky]

Her "gaff" or whatever you want to call it about Crenshaw was facepalm worthy though.

Meh, Crenshaw can go fuck himself or maybe go down on Daddy Trump some more. He's gotten a free pass from being rendered a cyclops from his past career as cannon fodder.

Zak Cheney-Rice in New York Mag:

Calls for “civility” in politics are as likely to elicit ridicule as they are plaudits these days, due in large part to their repeated deployment in the face of escalating state violence. Those who insist that, for example, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has the right to dine at restaurants without being confronted by angry constituents betray a disconnect in how different Americans view accountability for government officials: Some feel that locking children in cages makes Nielsen fair game for a public reckoning, no matter when or where she is; others believe that her job entitles her to a respectful distance between her life as a public figure and as a private citizen.

Where one falls on this spectrum in any given instance is often, but not always, a partisan calculation. Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky provides a recent example of how malleable the standards can be. There was nothing civil about Barr’s Republican colleague, Dan Crenshaw, implyinglast week that Ilhan Omar said the 9/11 terrorist attacks were trivial events, setting in motion a right-wing outrage cycle that culminated in an inflammatory video tweeted by the president and death threats against the congresswoman. Yet it was Crenshaw whom Barr saw fit to defend in the name of civility after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused him of “[drumming] resentment” toward Omar. “Your recent comments about Congressman Crenshaw demonstrate a lack of civility that is becoming far too common in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Barr wrote in a letter to the Bronx congresswoman demanding an apology, which he then tweeted to the public.

Ocasio-Cortez’s incivility, in Barr’s view, stemmed from her claim that Crenshaw has done little to support 9/11 victims or curb right-wing domestic terrorism, which of late has killed more Americans than any other kind. A former Navy SEAL, Crenshaw is one of many Republican members of Congress who have not supported renewing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Their reticence has placed its survival on shaky ground, even as the number of incoming claims rises to unprecedented levels. “In 2018, right-wing extremists were behind almost all U.S. domestic terror killings,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “Why don’t you go do something about that.” Barr addressed this claim by pointing to Crenshaw’s military service in Afghanistan. “Not only has Congressman Crenshaw ‘done something’ to combat terrorism, he was wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED) while serving.”

Enlisting in the armed forces has little to do with combating white-supremacist extremism domestically — which, on the contrary, has found plenty of foot soldiers among both active and former service members. Nor is Barr an ideal ambassador for defending the military’s merits: One of his more famous attack lines in the 2018 midterms against his Democratic opponent — Amy McGrath, a former Marine combat aviator — entailed equating his service as a politician with hers as a soldier, and then contrasting the two by saying his was a job “where ideas matter.” In fact, Barr did not engage substantively with any of Ocasio-Cortez’s critiques — which was the point, really. He seemed interested in scoring political points against her and little else. In doing so, he made clear that there is little merit to a civility that gives a free pass to Dan Crenshaw for drawing on Islamophobic stereotypes to mischaracterize Omar’s words — especially knowing how beset she is already by right-wing threats — but cries foul when Ocasio-Cortez speaks honestly about his record on the issues that he claims to care about.

Ocasio-Cortez was not taking Crenshaw to task merely because she enjoyed it. She was denouncing a colleague who had warped another colleague’s words to cast her as a terrorist sympathizer. Listening to Omar’s remarks in Los Angeles last month, where she declared that American Muslims like her had been transformed into a perpetual suspect caste because “some people did something” — referencing the handful of Islamists who committed the 9/11 attacks — it requires a profound ungenerosity to interpret them as trivializing the attacks themselves. That is, unless one is predisposed to believe what the right seems intent on propagandizing about the Minnesota congresswoman: that she is somehow linked, or at least sympathetic, to the violent ideology that precipitated 2,997 murders. It is difficult to imagine the blade cutting the other way: As Elizabeth Spiers writes for GQ, plenty of Republicans “refer to 9/11 in passing all the time without rending their clothes, publicly grieving in demonstrative ways, and going out of their way to emphasize that the terrorists were evil. They are allowed to use oblique descriptions like ‘when the towers fell’ or ‘the events of 9/11.’ We all know what they’re talking about, and no one thinks they’re reducing the terrorist attacks to a meaningless abstraction.”

Crenshaw embraced this Islamophobic line of attack anyway. And there is little doubt that doing so has material implications — Omar has said that she receives regular death threats, and the FBI recently arrested a New York man for threatening to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.” President Trump, following Crenshaw’s lead, tweeted a video interspersing her remarks with actual footage of the airplanes colliding with the Twin Towers. Through it all, Andy Barr said nothing. As with the rest of his Republican colleagues, the Kentucky congressman allowed a willful misreading of Omar’s remarks to serve as unchallenged pretext for dubious claims about her loyalty. And he did so knowing the potential dangers and recognizing that plausible deniability — namely, that Crenshaw and Trump did not explicitly call for Omar to be threatened — would shield them from having to take responsibility for whatever happened next.

Barr then invoked the need for civility in navigating the fallout — in particular, to ensure that Crenshaw’s behavior was not cast by Ocasio-Cortez as a referendum on his integrity. But the reality is that it was. If there was any dishonesty or maltreatment from one colleague to another at play here, it was that of the Texas congressman against Ilhan Omar. But good-faith interpretations of a Democratic colleague’s remarks do not fit Barr’s rubric for civility. It is for this reason that his conception of the term is useless, except as a political cudgel for him to use at will. By this definition, the kind of civility that Barr claims is missing in Congress is not missing at all. Bad-faith outcries about civility aimed at deflecting from Republican misdeeds are the order of the day.

​

Really unfortunate that not more Democrats have the balls that AOC has and let Omar twist in the wind against racist and shamelessly hypocritical attacks.

 

[Gregolian]

IDK wtf you did with that post @Trotsky but I can't parse out the parts of that article I want to respond to without the formatting going to complete dogshit.

Summary of what I had posted:

1.) Crenshaw shot from the hip in his response to Omar. BUT, I'd argue just saying "some people did something" sounds like the sort of argument a sophomore in high school would use during a civics debate in class

2.) The bit where the article does the "white domestic terrorism which has a ton of vets a part of it" is the article doing EXACTLY what it accuses Barr and Crenshaw to a lesser degree of doing, trying to score political points. It's like a steroid cheat accusing someone else of being a steroid cheat to me.

3.) This idea that any criticisms of Omar immediately gets the "stop being an Islamaphobe" is really starting to get tired.

 

[kpt018]

But until he does...he's your number one? You must recognize how inconsistent that position is.

Again, way too early #1. What about that is difficult for you?

Ninja-edit, please. edit: that wasn't an ninja edit, my bad, it was just a post I missed.

here is your quote from https://forums.sherdog.com/threads/pelosi-throwing-shade-at-aoc.3947073/page-3



Now he's your "way too early favorite" lol

I've been clear about that so I don't know what the "lol". And it should be obvious anyway since it's fucking April. I don't know what your fucking problem with me is.

 

[kpt018]

He said this 2 days ago:



And if kpt doesn't mind I can otherwise vouch for him being very in tune with the idea of early support being speculative and contingent.

Thanks for clearing that up man. Anung just has a bug up his ass about my posting for whatever reason.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

He said this 2 days ago:



And if kpt doesn't mind I can otherwise vouch for him being very in tune with the idea of early support being speculative and contingent.

must have missed that seems like its from the same thread.

@kpt018

 

[Trotsky]

IDK wtf you did with that post @Trotsky but I can't parse out the parts of that article I want to respond to without the formatting going to complete dogshit.

Summary of what I had posted:

1.) Crenshaw shot from the hip in his response to Omar. BUT, I'd argue just saying "some people did something" sounds like the sort of argument a sophomore in high school would use during a civics debate in class

"Some people did something" wasn't the argument, though. It was just the language of some explanatory aside by a person who, let's face it, may not have the deepest English vocabulary. If it was said by Trump, someone with a considerably more limited vocabulary but who is held to much lower standards of communication, it wouldn't get picked up by a single source.

2.) The bit where the article does the "white domestic terrorism which has a ton of vets a part of it" is the article doing EXACTLY what it accuses Barr and Crenshaw to a lesser degree of doing, trying to score political points. It's like a steroid cheat accusing someone else of being a steroid cheat to me.

I don't think it matters whether it scores political points when it is undeniably true: right-wing domestic terrorism ala Dylan Roofe, the Synagogue shooter, and the Trump-supporting piece of shit down in New Zealand pose a much more serious threat to Americans than Islamic extremists. Yet these putzes are completely ignoring the graver threat that they are stoking while wringing their hands about a left-wing Muslim being sympathetic to right-wing Muslim extremists.

3.) This idea that any criticisms of Omar immediately gets the "stop being an Islamaphobe" is really starting to get tired.

How else would you describe saying a Muslim is a terrorist or supports terrorists? It's not "any criticism of Omar" getting labeled Islamaphobic: it's juxtaposing her face on a fucking video of 9/11 and putting posters in state legislative buildings saying her election is proof that 9/11 has been forgotten that is getting called Islamaphobic.

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

Her "gaff" or whatever you want to call it about Crenshaw was facepalm worthy though.

What was it?

 

[Gregolian]

"Some people did something" wasn't the argument, though. It was just the language of some explanatory aside by a person who, let's face it, may not have the deepest English vocabulary. If it was said by Trump, someone with a considerably more limited vocabulary but who is held to much lower standards of communication, it wouldn't get picked up by a single source.



I don't think it matters whether it scores political points when it is undeniably true: right-wing domestic terrorism ala Dylan Roofe, the Synagogue shooter, and the Trump-supporting piece of shit down in New Zealand pose a much more serious threat to Americans than Islamic extremists. Yet these putzes are completely ignoring the graver threat that they are stoking while wringing their hands about a left-wing Muslim being sympathetic to right-wing Muslim extremists.





How else would you describe saying a Muslim is a terrorist or supports terrorists? It's not "any criticism of Omar" getting labeled Islamaphobic: it's juxtaposing her face on a fucking video of 9/11 and putting posters in state legislative buildings saying her election is proof that 9/11 has been forgotten that is getting called Islamaphobic.

It wouldn’t be picked up cause Trump would say something far more idiotic let’s be honest.

Is it concrete the NZ Guy was a Trump supporter? I haven’t followed shit about it other than hearing (aka reading) rumblings he was yelling he did it to force America to start debating gun control again and that about where I personally did the “this dude is a nutbag shitheel” and moved on

I was talking about Crenshaw. I thought all he did was respond with a typed up response whereas Trump dropped the vid.

 

[Gregolian]

What was it?

See above. It’s what me and Trotsky are talking about

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

Meh, Crenshaw can go fuck himself or maybe go down on Daddy Trump some more. He's gotten a free pass from being rendered a cyclops from his past career as cannon fodder.

Zak Cheney-Rice in New York Mag:

Calls for “civility” in politics are as likely to elicit ridicule as they are plaudits these days, due in large part to their repeated deployment in the face of escalating state violence. Those who insist that, for example, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has the right to dine at restaurants without being confronted by angry constituents betray a disconnect in how different Americans view accountability for government officials: Some feel that locking children in cages makes Nielsen fair game for a public reckoning, no matter when or where she is; others believe that her job entitles her to a respectful distance between her life as a public figure and as a private citizen.

Where one falls on this spectrum in any given instance is often, but not always, a partisan calculation. Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky provides a recent example of how malleable the standards can be. There was nothing civil about Barr’s Republican colleague, Dan Crenshaw, implyinglast week that Ilhan Omar said the 9/11 terrorist attacks were trivial events, setting in motion a right-wing outrage cycle that culminated in an inflammatory video tweeted by the president and death threats against the congresswoman. Yet it was Crenshaw whom Barr saw fit to defend in the name of civility after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused him of “[drumming] resentment” toward Omar. “Your recent comments about Congressman Crenshaw demonstrate a lack of civility that is becoming far too common in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Barr wrote in a letter to the Bronx congresswoman demanding an apology, which he then tweeted to the public.

Ocasio-Cortez’s incivility, in Barr’s view, stemmed from her claim that Crenshaw has done little to support 9/11 victims or curb right-wing domestic terrorism, which of late has killed more Americans than any other kind. A former Navy SEAL, Crenshaw is one of many Republican members of Congress who have not supported renewing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Their reticence has placed its survival on shaky ground, even as the number of incoming claims rises to unprecedented levels. “In 2018, right-wing extremists were behind almost all U.S. domestic terror killings,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “Why don’t you go do something about that.” Barr addressed this claim by pointing to Crenshaw’s military service in Afghanistan. “Not only has Congressman Crenshaw ‘done something’ to combat terrorism, he was wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED) while serving.”

Enlisting in the armed forces has little to do with combating white-supremacist extremism domestically — which, on the contrary, has found plenty of foot soldiers among both active and former service members. Nor is Barr an ideal ambassador for defending the military’s merits: One of his more famous attack lines in the 2018 midterms against his Democratic opponent — Amy McGrath, a former Marine combat aviator — entailed equating his service as a politician with hers as a soldier, and then contrasting the two by saying his was a job “where ideas matter.” In fact, Barr did not engage substantively with any of Ocasio-Cortez’s critiques — which was the point, really. He seemed interested in scoring political points against her and little else. In doing so, he made clear that there is little merit to a civility that gives a free pass to Dan Crenshaw for drawing on Islamophobic stereotypes to mischaracterize Omar’s words — especially knowing how beset she is already by right-wing threats — but cries foul when Ocasio-Cortez speaks honestly about his record on the issues that he claims to care about.

Ocasio-Cortez was not taking Crenshaw to task merely because she enjoyed it. She was denouncing a colleague who had warped another colleague’s words to cast her as a terrorist sympathizer. Listening to Omar’s remarks in Los Angeles last month, where she declared that American Muslims like her had been transformed into a perpetual suspect caste because “some people did something” — referencing the handful of Islamists who committed the 9/11 attacks — it requires a profound ungenerosity to interpret them as trivializing the attacks themselves. That is, unless one is predisposed to believe what the right seems intent on propagandizing about the Minnesota congresswoman: that she is somehow linked, or at least sympathetic, to the violent ideology that precipitated 2,997 murders. It is difficult to imagine the blade cutting the other way: As Elizabeth Spiers writes for GQ, plenty of Republicans “refer to 9/11 in passing all the time without rending their clothes, publicly grieving in demonstrative ways, and going out of their way to emphasize that the terrorists were evil. They are allowed to use oblique descriptions like ‘when the towers fell’ or ‘the events of 9/11.’ We all know what they’re talking about, and no one thinks they’re reducing the terrorist attacks to a meaningless abstraction.”

Crenshaw embraced this Islamophobic line of attack anyway. And there is little doubt that doing so has material implications — Omar has said that she receives regular death threats, and the FBI recently arrested a New York man for threatening to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.” President Trump, following Crenshaw’s lead, tweeted a video interspersing her remarks with actual footage of the airplanes colliding with the Twin Towers. Through it all, Andy Barr said nothing. As with the rest of his Republican colleagues, the Kentucky congressman allowed a willful misreading of Omar’s remarks to serve as unchallenged pretext for dubious claims about her loyalty. And he did so knowing the potential dangers and recognizing that plausible deniability — namely, that Crenshaw and Trump did not explicitly call for Omar to be threatened — would shield them from having to take responsibility for whatever happened next.

Barr then invoked the need for civility in navigating the fallout — in particular, to ensure that Crenshaw’s behavior was not cast by Ocasio-Cortez as a referendum on his integrity. But the reality is that it was. If there was any dishonesty or maltreatment from one colleague to another at play here, it was that of the Texas congressman against Ilhan Omar. But good-faith interpretations of a Democratic colleague’s remarks do not fit Barr’s rubric for civility. It is for this reason that his conception of the term is useless, except as a political cudgel for him to use at will. By this definition, the kind of civility that Barr claims is missing in Congress is not missing at all. Bad-faith outcries about civility aimed at deflecting from Republican misdeeds are the order of the day.

​

Really unfortunate that not more Democrats have the balls that AOC has and let Omar twist in the wind against racist and shamelessly hypocritical attacks.

I was hopeful that Crenshaw would bring the GOP somewhat back to normalcy but I follow his twitter and most of the stuff I read leads me to conclude he's either an idiot or a liar on most issues.

 

[Fawlty]

But in the meantime lets devote enormous amount of lip service and media coverage to his campaign...

I think he's got a very good philosophical mind. He distinguishes between bipartisanship and the need for an "era" of the Democratic Party over being reactionary toward the Republicans.

For instance, he says this to Preet Bharara on his podcast:

"I think in some ways the test of whether our democracy is in good shape is whether it’s able to deliver on things that are objects of consensus across the American people. One thing that’s alarming right now is on everything from economic justice, the general intuition among Americans that not everybody’s paying their fair share and that wages need to be higher and working conditions need to be fairer."

It's not just that we should get work done where we have consensus, it's measuring the health of a democracy by its ability to deliver those things. It's a very important point across worker rights and healthcare.

On the other hand, he recognizes the party's need for independence:

"I think the future of the party is in bold and structural ideas that speak to the flaws in our economy and our democracy that made the current presidency possible. A figure like the current occupant of the white house should never have been able to come even within cheating distance, unless something were seriously wrong in our country, and frankly communities like mine have long felt, here in the industrial midwest, that we’ve been left out of a lot of the growth and progress that leaders of both parties have been touting over the course of my lifetime.

So I think for the Democratic Party to have a future, we need to be developing messages that are going to make as much sense in 2030, 2040, 2050 as they do in 2020. Which means that they can’t be messages that revolve around the other guy. I do think one of the biggest problems we’ve had, really across my lifetime, is a fixation on what the republicans are doing. Whether it’s trying to outdo each other in being against it, or whether it’s the formula that dominated in the 90s which was trying to imitate it and go halfway there. Either way, you’re in trouble when your policies and priorities are all keyed off the other party’s policy and priorities."

https://www.cafe.com/transcript-nadlers-requests-the-youngest-contender-with-pete-buttigieg/


He reconciles a conflict well here. The Democrats are constantly being jerked around by Republicans on matters of consensus, and he can punch through that, rhetorically, and he will push matters of consensus. He has the courage to blame Democrats for being too reactionary and dependent on Republican policies for their own (at the political, not popular level I assume), which is required of anybody not talking out of both sides of their mouth on this point. Every politician tries to be that guy or gal, but he appears to be that guy. This is also one of my favorite things about Sanders, whose courage Buttigieg admires so much that he wrote an award-winning essay about him, which is quite impressive for a high-schooler (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/ed...-essays/2000-winning-essay-by-peter-buttigieg).

What people suspect about Buttigieg being a corporate shill is probably exactly wrong, as his life and politics suggest that he is trying to learn all he can to be effective, which requires understanding that big evil corporations will be the organizations that do the work to right the climate ship and continue expanding and creating new tech hubs, especially in *gasp* automation, instead of telling people they will get their father's old factory job again (which the whole Republican Party spews and many Democrats go sort of noncommittally halfway on).

What's especially funny is that people want him to be liberal-folksy (he's accused of brushing off the homeless and janitors at Harvard, so he has no grass-roots cred), but he's not that guy. I respect that, he's contemporary. He does lack grass roots, especially compared to Sanders, and that's a point of interest but it's not automatically a mark against a candidate.

What domestic policy he has hinted at, is that out front will be wealth iniquity and climate, and that he's progressive on both. I'm interested to see his proposals and I anticipate them being just as smart as he is and also reconcilable with other progressives on those issues. Healthcare is still a bit up in the air, but he seems to be in favor of expanding both Medicare and the ACA, or if I have that impression, it's his fault. I think his major weakness will be foreign policy, evidenced by his recent glowing comments about Israel, which are quite disturbing to me initially, and are something to keep an eye on (though I rate Israeli policy fairly low in importance).


So anyway, that's a lot of my thinking on the guy, and some good reasons to have him near the top for me.

 

[Trotsky]

It wouldn’t be picked up cause Trump would say something far more idiotic let’s be honest.

Is it concrete the NZ Guy was a Trump supporter? I haven’t followed shit about it other than hearing (aka reading) rumblings he was yelling he did it to force America to start debating gun control again and that about where I personally did the “this dude is a nutbag shitheel” and moved on

I was talking about Crenshaw. I thought all he did was respond with a typed up response whereas Trump dropped the vid.

Crenshaw definitely wasn't as overt as Trump, but no one is.

Yeah, the NZ shooter was very much a part of the MAGA derp brigade. Hailed Trump as a "symbol of renewed white identity and purpose."

I was hopeful that Crenshaw would bring the GOP somewhat back to normalcy but I follow his twitter and most of the stuff I read leads me to conclude he's either an idiot or a liar on most issues.

Never trust a Republican to ever be anything but a piece of shit. You might be able to find some who have left office that seem respectable - Jon Huntsman, George Pataki, Jeff Flake in a few years probably - but it's likely that any one of them would, if they were currently in Congress, vote with Trump 90+% of the time and gladly cosign disastrous bills and utilize shameless political hypocrisy.

 

[Jack V Savage]

"Purity tests" = basically analyzing and vetting candidates in an election. You'd think that all Democrats, particularly those belonging to the wing with a professed-at-length commitment to experience and institutional competence, would be open to attempts to analyze a presidential candidate with such a skimpy resume and short list of policy prescriptions as Buttigieg. I'd say it's better to get it out sooner rather than later.

I think that refers more to the idea that a candidate who isn't perfect is unsupportable, which, if widespread enough, essentially guarantees the exact opposite of progressive goals. Obviously you want to get the information needed to rank candidates properly. But it seems equally obvious that being a responsible citizen means voting for the highest-ranked candidate (according to your own, consistently applied criteria) in every race. The kind of hostage model that is popular among the loony left relies for its effectiveness on the belief that their coalition mates care more about getting results than they do, while proponents of it simultaneously claim the opposite.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

Again, way too early #1. What about that is difficult for you?



I've been clear about that so I don't know what the "lol". And it should be obvious anyway since it's fucking April. I don't know what your fucking problem with me is.

The problem I have, I wouldn't say its with you personally, is that by every measure Bernie Sanders is the perfect candidate for the left and people like yourself (and others) have done nothing but try and diminish his campaign since its inception. And saying you would vote for him over Trump is not an endorsement. I guess I can see supporting Hillary over Bernie in 2016 (I really can't, but I'm trying to be nice), but in 2017 people are already trying to find an excuse to replace him. And you just can't. You may not be on board with 100% of his policies, but you're not going to find a politician who can duplicate his record on the policies Democrats and the Left say they support.

For a person like yourself (and again, others, too) to all of a sudden to be enamoured with Mayor Pete is crazy to me.
Its like favoring Transformers over Schindler's List for Best Movie after already seeing Schindler's List and only seeing the trailer for Transformers.
If you can't describe a candidate with anything but buzz words and speculation that he might say the right words at the right time, then how can he/she be a favorite, early, or otherwise, for anybody?

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

 

[Jack V Savage]

"Some people did something" wasn't the argument, though. It was just the language of some explanatory aside by a person who, let's face it, may not have the deepest English vocabulary. If it was said by Trump, someone with a considerably more limited vocabulary but who is held to much lower standards of communication, it wouldn't get picked up by a single source.



I don't think it matters whether it scores political points when it is undeniably true: right-wing domestic terrorism ala Dylan Roofe, the Synagogue shooter, and the Trump-supporting piece of shit down in New Zealand pose a much more serious threat to Americans than Islamic extremists. Yet these putzes are completely ignoring the graver threat that they are stoking while wringing their hands about a left-wing Muslim being sympathetic to right-wing Muslim extremists.





How else would you describe saying a Muslim is a terrorist or supports terrorists? It's not "any criticism of Omar" getting labeled Islamaphobic: it's juxtaposing her face on a fucking video of 9/11 and putting posters in state legislative buildings saying her election is proof that 9/11 has been forgotten that is getting called Islamaphobic.

Good piece from Chait here that you might both like:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...-not-omar-but-all-muslims-and-minorities.html

 

[all caps]

Tulsi gabbard is the only person I would even almost consider voting for. But shes not anti war enough and would just fall in line like all the rest.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

I think he's got a very good philosophical mind. He distinguishes between bipartisanship and the need for an "era" of the Democratic Party over being reactionary toward the Republicans.

For instance, he says this to Preet Bharara on his podcast:

"I think in some ways the test of whether our democracy is in good shape is whether it’s able to deliver on things that are objects of consensus across the American people. One thing that’s alarming right now is on everything from economic justice, the general intuition among Americans that not everybody’s paying their fair share and that wages need to be higher and working conditions need to be fairer."

It's not just that we should get work done where we have consensus, it's measuring the health of a democracy by its ability to deliver those things. It's a very important point across worker rights and healthcare.

On the other hand, he recognizes the party's need for independence:

"I think the future of the party is in bold and structural ideas that speak to the flaws in our economy and our democracy that made the current presidency possible. A figure like the current occupant of the white house should never have been able to come even within cheating distance, unless something were seriously wrong in our country, and frankly communities like mine have long felt, here in the industrial midwest, that we’ve been left out of a lot of the growth and progress that leaders of both parties have been touting over the course of my lifetime.

So I think for the Democratic Party to have a future, we need to be developing messages that are going to make as much sense in 2030, 2040, 2050 as they do in 2020. Which means that they can’t be messages that revolve around the other guy. I do think one of the biggest problems we’ve had, really across my lifetime, is a fixation on what the republicans are doing. Whether it’s trying to outdo each other in being against it, or whether it’s the formula that dominated in the 90s which was trying to imitate it and go halfway there. Either way, you’re in trouble when your policies and priorities are all keyed off the other party’s policy and priorities."

https://www.cafe.com/transcript-nadlers-requests-the-youngest-contender-with-pete-buttigieg/


He reconciles a conflict well here. The Democrats are constantly being jerked around by Republicans on matters of consensus, and he can punch through that, rhetorically, and he will push matters of consensus. He has the courage to blame Democrats for being too reactionary and dependent on Republican policies for their own (at the political, not popular level I assume), which is required of anybody not talking out of both sides of their mouth on this point. Every politician tries to be that guy or gal, but he appears to be that guy. This is also one of my favorite things about Sanders, whose courage Buttigieg admires so much that he wrote an award-winning essay about him, which is quite impressive for a high-schooler (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/ed...-essays/2000-winning-essay-by-peter-buttigieg).

What people suspect about Buttigieg being a corporate shill is probably exactly wrong, as his life and politics suggest that he is trying to learn all he can to be effective, which requires understanding that big evil corporations will be the organizations that do the work to right the climate ship and continue expanding and creating new tech hubs, especially in *gasp* automation, instead of telling people they will get their father's old factory job again (which the whole Republican Party spews and many Democrats go sort of noncommittally halfway on).

What's especially funny is that people want him to be liberal-folksy (he's accused of brushing off the homeless and janitors at Harvard, so he has no grass-roots cred), but he's not that guy. I respect that, he's contemporary. He does lack grass roots, especially compared to Sanders, and that's a point of interest but it's not automatically a mark against a candidate.

What domestic policy he has hinted at, is that out front will be wealth iniquity and climate, and that he's progressive on both. I'm interested to see his proposals and I anticipate them being just as smart as he is and also reconcilable with other progressives on those issues. Healthcare is still a bit up in the air, but he seems to be in favor of expanding both Medicare and the ACA, or if I have that impression, it's his fault. I think his major weakness will be foreign policy, evidenced by his recent glowing comments about Israel, which are quite disturbing to me initially, and are something to keep an eye on (though I rate Israeli policy fairly low in importance).


So anyway, that's a lot of my thinking on the guy, and some good reasons to have him near the top for me.

This reads like part 2 to the article @Trotsky posted. There is literally nothing there but political jargon. Its the textual representation of a man with his shirt sleeves rolled up looking tough while sitting in a boardroom.

 

[kpt018]

The problem I have, I wouldn't say its with you personally, is that by every measure Bernie Sanders is the perfect candidate for the left and people like yourself (and others) have done nothing but try and diminish his campaign since its inception. And saying you would vote for him over Trump is not an endorsement. I guess I can see supporting Hillary over Bernie in 2016 (I really can't, but I'm trying to be nice), but in 2017 people are already trying to find an excuse to replace him. And you just can't. You may not be on board with 100% of his policies, but you're not going to find a politician who can duplicate his record on the policies Democrats and the Left say they support.

For a person like yourself (and again, others, too) to all of a sudden to be enamoured with Mayor Pete is crazy to me.
Its like favoring Transformers over Schindler's List for Best Movie after already seeing Schindler's List and only seeing the trailer for Transformers.
If you can't describe a candidate with anything but buzz words and speculation that he might say the right words at the right time, then how can he/she be a favorite, early, or otherwise, for anybody?

Buzzwords? He's highly intelligent, well educated and a very impressive thinker. I don't know what his policy agenda is but I do like that he is focused on political reform (we need it badly). As I've already stated, I reserve the right to change my mind and probably will. If he's bad on policy that matters to me I will change my mind.

The charge that I'm trying to diminish Bernie's campaign is ridiculous. I've said that I admire Bernie a million times on here and would have voted for him over Trump with a huge smile on my face. And yes, I'm not on board with 100% of his policies but that's true for every candidate. In fact, I'm worried about some of his policies. But that's ok!

The problem is I don't love Bernie as much as you so you have an immediate reaction to defend him which is weird man. Same seems to be true for AOC (and she is someone that has many unimpressive even down right stupid moments but has very admirable qualities).

It's really annoying and boring to defend my "way too early" rankings to you especially after stating that I will likely change my mind and the candidates are pretty close and there are others I like. It's more like having to defend why I like Aaron Judge over Giancarlo Stanton. Idk man, they're both great and as a Yankees fan I like both players but I have a view on it.

And I really don't want to address it anymore because as I keep repeating - it's too fucking early!!!