But it’s not about “fatalism” or “defeatism,” Norm, it’s about strategy.
It’s about recognizing that the leader of our movement is wearing kid gloves as he’s fighting for all of our lives — and pulling his punches, at that.
Bernie’s campaign is now referring to the rigged 2020 Iowa Caucus as a “focus group” and saying “Let’s move on.”
Forgive me, Senator, but that’s just foolish. Just as firing Matt Orfalea when he was slandered was foolish. Just as chastising Zephyr Teachout for calling Joe Biden “corrupt” – when Joe Biden is manifestly corrupt — was foolish. Just as distancing yourself from Cenk Uygur over a bunch of college-boy nonsense was foolish…
It’s bad strategy, Bernie.
(I’m with Jimmy Dore on this one).
Refusing to call out the DNC’s theft of the Iowa Caucus — not even criticizing Buttigieg’s Guiado-esque power-grab (or CNN for legitimizing it) — is like signaling surrender to the establishment at the very onset of the rigging of the 2020 primary.
It does not augur well.
It’s like Obama allowing a Citigroup executive to name his first cabinet — then “looking forward” and shielding Wall Street executives (along with war criminals) from anything resembling justice.
When the left refuses to fight, our neo-fascist establishment comprehends that none of its high crimes and treachery will be challenged. They can butcher millions of Muslims (literally, under Trump’s three immediate predecessors alone). They can torture the hell out of thousands of totally innocent civilians. They can illegally spy on everyone and TOTALLY GET AWAY WITH IT.
They can rig as many primaries as they want, as blatantly as they want, with no repercussions.
The famous quote from Frederick Douglass comes to mind:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”
There’s a reason I call these usurers, slavers, election-riggers, and mass-murderers of Muslims “neo-fascists” — in so many ways, all they offer the world is duplicity, genocide, tyranny, and wholesale ecological collapse.
It is no exaggeration to say that they are humanity’s and democracy’s worst enemies…
…and Bernie’s playing fucking “footsie” with them!
In his own way, Bernie is far too like Sen. Warren, who has been debasing herself on behalf of the establishment ever since 2016, when the Dems first began dangling VP slots before her.
For as long as Sen. Warren has been involved in national politics, “Harvard’s First Woman of Color” has always signaled total acquiescence to the powers that be. She openly promises to work within the allowed parameters of the system — meaning that, like Obama, the only “incremental” progress she genuinely offers will be for the neocon agenda and Wall Street: drone attacks will continue; the Iran regime-change project, advanced by our last several presidents, will continue; GITMO; spying on citizens; militarized police; school privatization; fossil-fuel exploitation; austerity; the Prison Industrial Complex; and Military Industrial Complex will flourish.
Wall Street insolvency, “trade” pacts that elevate corporations over sovereign states, and the deregulation of our banking (and other) laws will continue… until the U.S. economy and our infrastructure — along with the oceans — simultaneously collapse. (That’s karma for you!)
Like his “friend,” Elizabeth Warren (the Senator from the Cherokee Nation — only not), America’s most popular politician, Bernie, signals that he’ll never truly hold the neo-fascists’ feet to the fire.
He always plays nice.
He never delivers the knock-out blow.
He doesn’t care about Sec. Clinton’s “damn e-mails” (over 30,000 privatized e-mails on an insecure server in the Clintons’ closet… a server that was supposed to be secure and also the property of the people of the United States, subject to review under normal FOIA rules — that’s the Freedom of Information Act, which Sec. Clinton violated in order to run the U.S. State Department as her own private piggy bank for influence-peddling and self-enriching… Ask the Saudis and the Russians if they didn’t “Pay to Play.” Uranium One isn’t some “Republican conspiracy theory,” it’s evidence of the corruption of our government… like when Clinton’s State Department faked its environmental review of the Keystone KL pipeline in order to get the project moving, as was reported in The Guardian).
Like Sen. Warren, Bernie often refuses to challenge the establishment’s bogus narratives, like virtually all of Russiagate. And he refuses to refute war-fostering lies about Venezuela, Syria, Russia, and Iran.
In 2016 and now, in 2020, Bernie’s genteel restraint, going along to get along, has only emboldened these criminals.
And that in my opinion is a YUUUGE strategic miscalculation — one that promises to hobble our movement, once again.
The DNC and Clinton/Obama cabal, representing the oligarchy, has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow Bernie Sanders to be nominated, no matter how brazenly they need to rig this process.
They are throwing everything at him — and not just “shade.”
With their billions of dollars (counting Bloomberg alone) and corporate media backing them every step of the way, they will most likely succeed: once again, our movement will be knee-capped.
The establishment has signaled, “WE WILL RIG THIS PRIMARY EVERY BIT AS MUCH AS WE HAVE TO!”
In response, Bernie is signaling:
“I’ll only hit back occasionally and never hard.
“I won’t demand audits of obviously rigged primaries.
“I won’t insist that international election monitors, including the Carter Center, oversee the rest of the primary.
“I won’t point out when exit polls are way off in multiple southern states using Diebold machines — so far off that they far exceed the international standard for election fraud.
“I won’t beef when scores of precincts are closed on election day in state after state, or when hundreds of thousands of voters are removed from the rolls, or when millions of votes go uncounted, as they did in California, alone, in 2016, thanks to the efforts of CA Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who inexplicably remains in that job (because progressives don’t have half the fight in us that the Tea Party did).
“And at the Convention in July, I’ll just roll over and support whatever neoliberal, neoconservative scumbag the DNC selects as our nominee, even if they’re arguably as bad as Trump or worse…
“I furthermore promise that, even after you cheat to ‘win’ this primary, I will not join the Green Party or Democratic Socialists of America or Nick Brana’s People’s Party.
“Instead I will do record numbers of stump speeches for the corrupt loser that Trump will very likely annihilate in November, dragging a Republican super-majority behind him.
“My name is Bernie Sanders, and I am a genuine mensch and lover of humanity.
“BUT I AM A NEAR-TOTAL PACIFIST IN THE THOROUGHLY CORRUPT BLOOD-SPORT OF AMERICAN ELECTORAL POLITICS.”
That, dear Bernie, is why you will “lose” in 2020 the same way you “lost” in 2016: because you refuse to fight for yourself, but more importantly, you refuse to fight for our votes.
(That’s why you’ve only got my writing, this time around, and nothing more — not my dollars, nor my activism, which I’m saving for local causes, including defending teachers. In 2016 you let me down in a big way, then did 40 rallies for the only candidate running to Trump’s right — an amoral authoritarian arguably posing a greater threat to America and humanity than any presidential candidate since George W. Bush. After you folded to Sec. Clinton like a cheap tent, I literally had a nervous breakdown. YOU LET US ALL DOWN.)
Bernie, “Tio Bernie,” even though you often shun progressives and disappoint us, I love you like an uncle!
You’re truly, positively the best politician we’ve seen in generations.
I sincerely believe in your movement, and I’m immensely grateful that you’ve done so much to birth it.
I think you’re easily the most electable candidate against Trump (and I believe that you’re the only genuine lefty in this race, save for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard).
I think you have been brilliant in articulating a cohesive strategy for mobilizing our movement — a movement that is greater than any individual person and promises to wring progress out of our corrupt political system.
But grow the fuck up:
Our movement can be crushed and dispersed with ease. Barack Obama proved that when he crushed and dispersed Occupy Wall Street (to the deafening silence of establishment “liberals”).
Bernie, you are so fantastic that you are capable of creating an American version of the “Yellow Vests! But you know full-well that any such movement will be crushed with brutality worthy of most dictatorships. Obama took OWS, a totally peaceful movement that had mobilized scores of thousands, and demolished it with jackbooted violence: mace in the face, tear gas fired at point-blank range, our libraries burned, our activists entrapped and false-arrested by the hundreds, including several journalists.
Bernie, for an American politician you are amazingly unique, and I mean that in the best possible way. You’ve consistently supported the civil rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community — ever since you were a young man (before it became fashionable).
You were arrested in 1963 for protesting housing discrimination against African-Americans — and later marched for freedom with Martin Luther King.
You’ve fought most every horrible degradation of our society that I can think of, from the Vietnam war to the wars on Iraq to the wars on Libya, Yemen, and Syria to NAFTA to CAFTA to the TPP to “Grand Bargain” entitlement-slashing to The New Jim Crow to the privatization of schools/prisons to Wall Street-deregulation and more… all the way down to the media-ownership deregulation that’s left us with merely the burlesque of a “free press” (the corporatized media that’s spent the last several years trying to smear and disappear you).
In 2016, you challenged Sec. Clinton — a Cheney clone on foreign and domestic policy, Trumpian in her politics (full of race-baiting, demagoguery, and ratfucking lies) — and you “lost” due to corruption and cheating, involving the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of Americans.
(Millions of Americans whose votes you refused to fight for.)
And then you campaigned for Sec. Hillary Clinton, Trump-family friend and the embodiment of corruption, an unambiguous threat to world peace, the biosphere, democracy, and the rule of law.
BERNIE, BABY, EITHER START FIGHTING LIKE A TIGER FOR OUR VOTES, OR YOU CAN GO STRAIGHT TO HELL WITH TRUMP, OBAMA, BUSH, THE CLINTONS, MITCH McCONNELL, AND AL FUCKING GORE, WHO ALSO REFUSED TO CHALLENGE A RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, LEAVING US WITH EIGHT YEARS OF BUSH/CHENEY.
(And fire your establishmentarian consultants — especially the ones behind your “nice guy/doormat” political strategy, which is bound to fail.)
Sincerely, UNCOUNTED in CALIFORNIA