"Do not call up that which you cannot put down."

It was just a matter of time for this to happen.

endorsing our nominee didn't save him from these sorts' rage and furious denouncement of him and his "betrayal."

The table-flippers have long operated on the "principle" that simply wanting to serve in political office automatically makes a person unqualified to serve in that office because they are inherently corrupt.

It's just an excuse. They want everyone to see how clever they are, how above-it-all, because they refuse to participate, and this justifies it. You can scream at them, plead with them, threaten them, beg them, even calmly explain the consequences to them...and they'll just giggle at you with the same bemused smirk that the Turtle wears so well and snivel "but my conscience" as they jerk off to all the attention.

Them that can’t don’t!

Or something like that!

Sanders actually should apologize—not about Bernie bro tweets but to his followers for leading them to believe America would elect a socialist.

And what made them think Sanders was such a great debator? He never stood out in any of the debates. It was always just MFA and snippets from his stump speech".

The bros tweeted 'Biden senile' so many times that they believed it themselves to be true. Meme trick brain somehow. They figured it'd be easy for Bernie to out debate the afflicted Biden.

Bernie should apologize for giving the progressives the hope that maybe America is ready for progressive ideals?
the majority of Americans agree with Universal Health Care.
the majority of Americans want corporate money out of politics.
I could go on, but deaf ears....

sorry, i'm a progressive, have always been a progressive.
We were given hope for America and now we are forced to settle. It will take some time, as I'm sure it would if the situation were reversed.

also, again, "Democratic Socialist".

Most Americas want those things in the abstract but still won't elect a socialist. And let's face it, a democratic socialist is still a socialist.

It amazes me that a nearly 80-year-old man who has lived in this country all his life seems to have forgotten that his generation and the two following, boomers and genXers, all heavy voters, were schooled for years to fear socialism/communism, the iron curtain, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Red China, failed communist collectives, the Cuban missile crisis, etc.—and many millions of voters still hold those views. How does he not know that?

Sanders has got to be smarter—although it's too late for him now. Neither FDR nor LBJ ran on their New Deal or Great Society programs. They got elected first then initiated their programs. And they never said they were socialists.

Because Sanders was a 'hands off Cuba' type from his college days into his middle age. In the dorm rooms and communes he inhabited into his thirties this was a common view, but it was not a common view elsewhere. All those other people, however, dupes of Establishment propaganda, were wrong --- either foolish people who were deceived and could not see the Truth so clear to 'Bernie', in which case it was his calling to teach them better than they knew themselves, or else they were actively aligned with the Establishment, in which case they were actually and actively wrong and had to be shut down and otherwise got out of the way by Revolution. In any case, their views did not count, because those views were not the Truth known to 'Bernie'. In essence, this view of the people around him has not changed. Their views, the views they think they hold, are mistaken and wrong, but it is all right, because all they need is 'Bernie' to think for them, and lead them to what they really want --- which is just what 'Bernie' wants. The man is incapable of comprehending disagreement with him, cannot accept there are views that are not his, but nonetheless are sound and legitimate views.



"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

misreading of the nation.

have risked turning it over to today's conservatives to destroy. You might want to consider that our liberal progressivism is in the way of Sanders' LW revolutionary dreams. It makes people happy and content, which is death to revolution.

When a politician's actions don't just conflict with but are often in direct opposition to what he's currently schmoozing prospective voters with, believe the actions.

would not settle for a safe moderate candidate at a time when our country is in desperate need of progressive policies. In all of my 50 years, the country has never been more on a precipice like we are today. That is just my opinion, sorry.

And a fair rule of thumb, by the way, is whenever 'true' is tacked onto the front of a word perfectly serviceable on its own, the view being expressed is that of a cramped and crabbed minority, wholly atypical of what the word to which 'true' has been thus affixed generally is taken to mean.


"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

Raz, denying that well over 150 million people who believe in progressive government are progressive, and empowering RW opponents of progressivism by also fighting them, is what set The Only True Progressives up for guaranteed failure in 2016 and again now.

Now, why on earth did they do that? What's really more important to them? Progressive ideals or screwing Democrats so they can call themselves The Only True Progressives?

They would turn out to vote and care about local and state offices and Congress more.

his "..last chance.." We saw what happened to his last chance>

Biden. He is so done.

So much wrongness. How can they not look at themselves in the mirror and always think 'So much wrong, so much wrong.'


New Hampshire 2020: In Supreme Irony, the Horse Race Favors Bernie Sanders

'The hapless Joe Biden, 2020’s clear answer to 2016 establishment Hindenburg Jeb Bush, finished a disastrous fifth in New Hampshire. Joe should drop out. The world knows it. The man shouldn’t be driving, much less running for president.

Nonetheless, because Biden is perceived to have a “firewall” in the South — the “firewall” of minority voters enjoyed by this or that corporate-funded candidate is one of the more vile campaign clichés — he will certainly not drop out. His campaign, even before Tuesday, was directing reporters to ignore New Hampshire and look to Nevada, South Carolina, and Super Tuesday.

This means once again, it will likely be (at least) a five-person race through Super Tuesday, this time between Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, Sanders, and Mike Bloomberg, the detestable oligarch who has not even test-driven his eleventy-gazillion election-buying dollars yet. If Elizabeth Warren stays in [checks Twitter], the pie will be split in at least six big parts.

The Democratic Party’s argument against Sanders for years has been his alleged inability to grow beyond his base. Now, things have been arranged so that he may not have to dispel these notions before Super Tuesday. This may or may not be a good thing — beating Trump is important and the Democratic nominee should have to demonstrate the widest appeal — but the brutal irony of Bernie Sanders boosted by horse-race luck and conventional-wisdom miscalculation is difficult to miss.'

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bernie-sanders-new-hampshire-2020-democratic-primary-2016-trump-951614/

Every paragraph a massive choke. Cha.

Spectacular Tuesdays Irony For Joe Biden.

Wait just a damn minute.. !! ".. Joe should drop out.. ".. after two states?! This is Gold! You should make this an OP!

Taibbi is so full of himself..

Except he didn’t!

Joe had his facts, laid them out, called out the lies when he had to.

Then after the votes were in he gave a speech of unification!

hasn't mentioned the trouncing.

Biden was/is Platinum!

As they say, Matt, that piece didn't age well.

The best ones falling from presumptive inevitable for all February 12th to 'in retrospect I should have used a qualifier now and then' March 3rd.

I don't see how that guy still has a job. I guess accuracy isn't a requirement. No one will be touting Rolling Stone's political astuteness this election.

'...the “firewall” of minority voters enjoyed by this or that corporate-funded candidate is one of the more vile campaign clichés —''

All he had to do was look at the polls and see Biden usually had strong support in the South. Like Hillary, Obama, Clinton, etc. before him. Or look at past campaigns. Like 2016 when Hillary beat Bernie 3 to 1 in S. Carolina. That's what Bernie was heading for. Getting snitty about a Biden advantage and quote marking it and calling it names doesn't make it go away. Jesus he's fucking stupid.

in the losing column BS got by insulting the Democratic Party.

"..even temporary immunity from dirty tricks and slander.. " omg.. Freaking Gaslighter!

Taibbi knows nothing except this..

To use the same tactics when you are witnessing the opposing party imploding all over with the same tactics.

Glenn Greenwald, John Turley, Michael Moore, Cenk Urek and Matt Tabbi. Even in the midst of the Trump Presidency, they seem to spend most of their time attacking the Democratic party.

Two crusade-like full roar campaigns greased by tons of money and reams of fluffing have accomplished naught. Sad. An attack from the left person finally attacking the left though is a happy sight. I checked Glenn's Twitter today for tears. Still holding the fort. I don't think that position is tenable for much longer.

This caught my eye.

'He also all but handed Biden the nomination when he renounced surrogate Zephyr Teachout’s op-ed about Biden’s “corruption” problem, but that’s another issue.'

Kind of an obscure little scuffle to hang such a pronouncement on. The op-ed that wasn't an op-ed. It was a copy/paste hit piece rolled out under Corruption Experts name to lend authority to what turned out to be baseless nonsense.

I read one paragraph. Four accusations of corruption. Two were linked to Intercept articles, one linked to a Guardian article, and one I forget. Two accusations were for not doing what Bernie said to do. Two accusations were for contact with people who Bernie said no one should contact. No actual corruption IOW. Just disobedience of the revolution. Bad article. Shunned by Bernie for a reason. Reason? Bad. Dropped like a hot potato. Never referenced again until now. And this doofus claims the nomination hung on its acceptance by Bernie. WTF ROFL Who's checking this garbage before publication? Don't they do that anymore? Where's that Jann Wenner dude? He always edited Hunter S. Thompson's stuff. I think.

A longtime, somewhat misfit Doctor, finds a long cold corpse of an idea (socialism) and gets resources from wondrous adherents who flood to the light to help resuscitate the wonderful idea. The Doctor goes about creating a monster, one that was destined from the beginning to consume him. And it is left to the villagers in the valley below to rise up and try to slay the monster, as the monster and the Doctor's erstwhile, and fully engorged, adherents rampage on the outskirts of the glens above the village.

in your OP but now I can't find it.. it said something about.. BS didn't owe the Bidens and the Pelosis.. and I don't remember anything else but now I can't even find that..

It was the last sentence..

Anyway.. this is my reply to MT.. This is what Pelosi does for our people.. what the hell has MT ever done?

Pelosi Tells Mitch McConnell No Pro-Corporation Coronavirus Stimulus

while pretending to be truth tellers. Never trusted either. Glad that everyone now sees them for who they truly are.

I read a lot of Taibbi back during the Dubya years...simply adored his writing style. Watching him pound away at Dubya, Big Dick, Rummy, Condi and the rest of that entire rotten administration was truly a thing to behold. Those were mighty dark times for us Dems back then...they had totally botched our response to 9/11 and lied us into a tragic bogus war where we ended up losing thousands of patriotic American troops and spending trillions of precious American dollars and all we got for all that spilt blood and spent bucks was a destabilized Middle East. The Goppers had the White House, the Senate and the House and we were totally powerless to stop this idiotic war or the GOP's reckless tax cuts or any other stupid shit they could think up.

Back then, guys like Matt Taibbi and Michael Moore and a small handful of others were our only way of fighting back and voicing our opposition as we Democrats were carried against our will to places we didn't want to go. They were the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. Who woulda thunk that a scant number of years later those very lights would turn out to be trains bearing down on us in 2020, with Bernie as the conductor? But the more derailed Sanders' campaign became the more deranged these once-valiant progressive punchers have become.

I stopped participating in political forums not long Obama got into office and also stopped reading Taibbi, so I wasn't aware of his downturn. A quick google now reveals recent articles like "Bush was tougher on Wall Street than Obama was" and other nonsensical shit like that. And of course we've all seen some of the rants that Moore has gone on in recent times. We have a VA to help take care of our old and broken valiant military warriors...I think we may need to start a similar institution to take care of these totally spent progressive warriors, before they hurt themselves or somebody else. After Truman had fired him, MacArthur told Congress in his farewell address "old soldiers never die, they simply fade away". It's about time for these formerly fierce social soldiers to be put out to pasture and "simply fade away". And take their cult leader with them while they're at it.

Up until 2008 it was mostly bash Bush here and all was well. Obama gets elected and some people kept on bashing like nothing happened. I was like , eh? wha? Obama a Democrat. We are Democratic underground. For Democrats. LOL I guess all they saw was underground. I even pointed out that the French underground didn't keep fighting as a force after the Nazis in France were defeated. They folded into the French army. To no avail. These guys are the same. Sure they went after Bush. Then it was Obama's turn as soon as he got elected. Turns out attack is all they do. Matt was a Bernie backer back when they were trying to get him to primary Obama. 2010ish. He's spent a lot of time pushing him. Penned some pretty awful stuff too to make him appear to be what he really ain't. Now it's all a big freaking fat failure again with no hope for a new go in 2024 because that is just too old for even Matt. Isn't going to even try. It's over and he's distraught and lashing out. 'I spent ten years promoting that?' Oy!

Fox is that retirement home your thinking of. All of them can find succor there and a platform from which to vent.

I was posting over at WaPo's political forum back during the Dubya years. It wasn't all Dems and liberals like it is here...quite a few conservative Republicans so it was constant war all the time, which I REALLY enjoyed...LOL. After Obama won I sorta got away from it because a lot of the Goppers left and it lost a lot of its appeal. But I learned an awful lot because I would often research the shit outta stuff before making a long serious post...we lefties like to get our facts straight and not look totally stupid in public...traits that none on the right who posted ever seemed to be very concerned about.

WaPo was an interesting place...not only did we have Pubbies to pound but we also had quite a few folks from all over the world to offer their perspectives. We even had an old lady from Vietnam who I got the distinct impression was involved with the Viet Cong! She was pretty progressive and had some really good input to think about...and was a terrific source of history in that region and at that time whenever that war got brought up. She was also a moderator who had to give me a time-out or two when I knowingly crossed the line dealing with them damn clueless cons on occasion.

Ah, the good ol' days of the WaPo Wars.

I remember 'Stockholm Syndrome' very well.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10027693888

Soooo many fall into that camp that thrives when there's a wingnut in the Oval Office and declines into irrelevance or worse when it's Barack or Bill Clinton. Sometimes I wonder. . . .

They're like those asshole athletes who you just love to watch play when they're on your favorite team but suddenly realize what total jerks they are when they get traded and are now on the opposing squad.

I know who the real enemy is...and it ain't Bernie or Hillary or her hubby or Pelosi or any other Democrat. There's nothing wrong with bashing them when you believe one of their policies is boneheaded or their behavior is out of line. I had a few run-ins with my own liberal allies on WaPo over this. Even back then I was a Joe guy...in fact, my DU ID here is the exact same one I took back in the mid-2000s before he even decided to run in 2008. I looked over the political landscape after Kerry lost in 2004 and IMO Biden was the best Democrat to run in the next election at that time. I didn't see Obama coming outta the blue. Once it quickly came down to Barack vs Hillary some major squabbling between Dems took place on WaPo just like it apparently did here at that time. This delighted the Goppers who were on that forum no end which kinda upset me because the last thing I ever wanna do is give a Republican the smallest iota of pleasure.

I voted Obama in 2008/2012 and Clinton in 2016. In 2020 I'm gonna vote for the guy who I thought was best a dozen years earlier. You can't carry any intraparty grudges when you're about to do battle against evil. Trump is pure evil. The GOP is evil. It'll be a lot easier to vanquish them without any of Bernie's anarchists stabbing us in the back while we're trying to slay the true enemy at the same time. Let American traitors and Russian meddlers divide us and we will be the ones who get conquered. Bernie's people better wise up and wise up fast.

Gonna be one helluva campaign, boy. Best strap yourselves in.

over some obscure issue regarding NDAA reforms, which they felt weren't moving fast enough. It was splashed all over the media though I can't find the photos of their grinning mugs now. That took assholery to a whole new level. And that was just one week. They collectively shat their pants over one ginned-up non-issue after another, like drones, and couldn't slobber fast enough over jerks like Assange or Snowden when they pulled one of their stunts. You really have to wonder what drives guys like that.

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/11/michael_moore_chris_hedges_on_challenging

"With friends like these..."

Dems have often shot themselves in the foot over the years but this isn't the year to blow our own toes off.

The second a Republican became president we never heard about drones again.

I was skimming a drone article at the Guardian around 2016 to test my gag reflexes (still gag) and at the bottom of the article was a blurb '1,103 articles like this' or something, linking to much more drone plaint. I know it was over a thousand. That I remember. Don't hold me to that figure. It was a lot. Probably at least half penned by Glenn Greenwald I bet.

Anyway, Trump has increased drone usage three times what it was under Obama. Nary a plaint nowhere in sight at all. Put me down too for not understanding why among all our deadly weapons, drones were singled out by the left to demonize. Why not the M16 rifle or M203 grenade launcher? Grenade launcher? As if grenades weren't killy enough. Now they launch. Soon they'll launch themselves. Like the evil drone. *weep* Think of the Jonas Bros. Target of Obama's vile threats. He might target me next for I bravely speak out against his tyranny a la drone struck al-Awlaki. Oh, my.

A few more years than that, I'd venture.

I came across a few of his articles not too long ago when doing a little background research for a post. Was blown away by his writing...reminded me a lot of early Taibbi before he caught a bad case of Sandersitis. I wanted to read more of what he wrote but when I started looking into him was shocked to find out that he died in 2017 while still in his mid-40s due to a drug overdose...

https://thedailybanter.com/2017/02/in-memory-of-chez-pazienza/

I thought I had a discovered a brilliant new writer I could start reading...didn't agree with everything he said but damn, could he ever say it like few others...

https://thedailybanter.com/author/chez-pazienza/

Only the good die young...even if they are tormented souls.

and devotional screeds.

And a misogynist but I like seeing the squabbles and that he’s generally unhappy with the primary results. Matt will be trolling for Putin in the fall though. Just like always.

He is boorish, smug, arrogant, privileged, entitled, and incapable of handling anyone disagreeing with him.

A small fraction of Bernie supporters fit the "bro" archetype so well, but Taibbi is without question a full-on misogynist and entitled jerk.

I still can't believe that his career survived the disclosure of his bizarre MRA rants.

replacing what we have with a universalist, collectivist society, even if by far most don't want it. And Sanders is ALSO one of the extremely aggressive, antagonistic populists who are drawn to him, not so much by ideology, but by eagerness to destroy. Sanders didn't just create a mob for them to join but a mob for him to lead.

"These true believers have derailed Sanders’ campaign and made their leader unelectable."

They followed and reflect their leader, and he them. Sanders failed to lead them all to success, even with the GOP's and Russia's assistance, by making himself unelectable, though it took time for the electorate to make that last clear. And Katie bar the door if he believes he has another potential path to power. It would require destroying Democratic Party opposition. And, I'm assuming, the assistance from hostile powers he has not refused to date.

And no use wondering how Sanders would have done if he'd run on the liberal Democratic principles and promises that draw the large mass of liberal Democratic voters to him, as Biden did. That's literally not in him. He is what he leads.

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal Democrat." Sanders

Is this what they call karma?