General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 51

weird assumptions about supporting Bernie Sanders here. I don't like Bernie Sanders

 

i didnt vote in the primaries, i dont even like bernie very much. i have no candidate. i just think you're a moron.

 

I wish there was just a moratorium on all public general election polling until minimum 30 days after both primaries wrap up.

 

that and a moratorium on think pieces about those statistics

 

i dont see how a club is relevant

 

it's a spade.

 

It's completely beyond me. I know in PA, there was a US Senate candidate in John Fetterman who could have been a big Sanders ally. Sanders was straight up asked in a town hall why they weren't campaigning together, and his response was basically "I don't know John".

The real unsaid reason was probably that the top two candidates were Katie McGinty, who is nothing but an unqualified shill for the establishment, and Joe Sestak, a somewhat liberal guy with good name recognition who the establishment hates because he beat Arlen Specter in 2010. Until a few weeks before the primary, Sestak was winning, so I bet Sanders thought he could bond with Sestak over the anti-establishment stuff, but Sestak ended up finishing a distant second.

Even then, I doubt there are many cases like that. There's no reason for Sanders to not support Tim Canova, for instance.

 

Is he not doing that? He's endorsed one of the women running for the WA 7th congressional district. I thought there were others running who've gotten his seal of approval.

 

Clucky, I know you think you're being an upstanding white person by voting for Hillary. Please don't do it in my fucking name. We don't need any saviors to vote for the woman that referred to us as super predators, ran a racist campaign, helped end welfare as we know it, along with other policies that have disproportionately effected marginalized people. Do not use our suffering as a rationalization for a vote you were going to cast anyway. Do not invoke our respective groups' oppressions, which has been as bad, if not worse, under democrats,as a basis for your terrible politics. Thank you.

 

As far as I know, he has endorsed three congressional candidates, but no one else.

It's baffling that he hasn't endorsed others.

 

I just want to post this for Clucky and his ilk who think Sanders needs to get out of the race:


As she begins to pivot to the general election, Clinton might be peeved by Sanders’s stubbornness. But her past (and political savvy, perhaps) handcuffs her from calling on Sanders to quit. She used to be in his position. On May 13, 2008, she said, “This race isn’t over yet. Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win.” The claim was a dubious one, given that Obama’s delegate lead was virtually insurmountable. But Clinton’s argument that all Democratic voters deserved to be heard was a fair one, just as Sanders’s same argument is.....The problem in 2008 was the racial tinge to Clinton’s last-ditch defense: that Obama was a doomed candidate because of his alleged inability to win over white voters. On May 8, she argued that “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” and cited an article whose findings she summarized thus: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” The contrast between Obama’s base of black voters with the “hard-working” white Americans supporting Clinton, made on the eve of a primary in West Virginia, carried clear racial overtones....Clinton’s rhetorical strategy of insinuating that Obama was too black to be president was echoed by her campaign. On CNN, Clinton surrogate Paul Begala claimed that Obama’s coalition of “eggheads and African-Americans” was too narrow to win. Former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” When the Drudge Report posted a photo showing Obama on an official trip wearing Somali garb, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Clinton surrogate, said on MSNBC “I have no shame or no problem with people looking at Barack Obama in his native clothing, in the clothing of his country”—an obvious nod to birtherism. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, dismissed Obama’s support in South Carolina by implicitly comparing him to a failed black presidential candidate: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”

And then:


"Perhaps the most disturbing comment along this line came from Hillary Clinton herself, who in late May 2008 justified staying in the race by saying, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” This came after months of worry that Obama, as the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, would be a target for assassination. Two weeks later, on June 7, she finally suspended her campaign."


https://newrepublic.com/article/133587/comes-losing-ugly-bernie-nothing-hillary


So, yeah. Might be best to just be quiet on such issues, given that when Clinton was in this position at this time, she just adopted a straight up racist tone in her campaign.

 

I don't mind Sanders staying in the race, especially with the legal troubles clouding over Clinton it makes sense to have Sanders remain as a fallback and sends a chilling message to Clinton that she still has a lot of work to do in order to win people over which is a good message for her to internalize

What bugs me is Sanders playing up stuff like the "Nevada was rigged" angle.

 

She won't do that.

To your second point, what do you think her actions in '08 were about? She was cynically appealing to things to undermine the credibility of Obama. In Bernie's case, right or wrong, it is a more legitimate grievance. Again, you're not applying your issues with the behavior of candidates consistently.

 

My question is unrelated to the overall theme of your post, and probably belongs in the racism thread, so feel free to answer it there. But this is something I've never fully understood. Hillary's use of 'super predator' was clearly in reference to violent criminals that repeatedly hurt other individuals. The phrase has a racially charged history and she may or may not have been aware of it's previous usage when she said it. But again, she was referring to a specific type of individual that acts a very specific way. So why do you take her words and apply them to the entire race as a whole? 'She referred to us as super predators'. Well no, unless you are a violent criminal, she didn't.

 

I've posted this article before, but:

The term “superpredator,” in the context used by Hillary, was popularized about 20 years ago by political scientist John Dilulio Jr. In a 1995 article, “The Coming of the Super-Predators” (most people would later drop the quaint hyphen), published in conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Dilulio darkly warned of an impending, apocalyptically dangerous crime wave from a new breed of criminal: “hardened, remorseless juveniles” who “kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive,” psychologically stunted kids unable to see the relationship between action and consequence.

Who were these kids, and where did they come from? Dilulio’s prototypical superpredators grew up in urban environments “surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings.” If this thinly coded description wasn’t transparent enough, Dilulio added that “the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods.” (He’d later dispense with the pretense of colorblindness altogether in anessay for City Journal titled “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours.”)

The article is thin on evidence and analytically sloppy — for instance, Dilulio says that superpredators are “radically self-regarding” and “regret getting caught,” but in the next paragraph says “they fear neither the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment” — but its thrust is unmistakable: The country was under a rising threat from more than a quarter of a million violent, remorseless sociopaths, most of them clad in the bodies of black boys. Just like Hillary Clinton when she said that these so-called superpredators must “be brought to heel,” Dilulio writes as if he’s describing a pack of feral animals, not human beings.

Some people have implied that perhaps Hillary Clinton didn’t quite intend to use the term as Dilulio had (but in some other, unspecified way in which the racist connotations are miraculously diluted, I guess?). This seems implausible, since, as Dilulio says himself in “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” the Clinton administration had previously invited him to the White House to advise them on crime policy. You can chalk that up to coincidence if you like, but to me, the simplest and most likely explanation is that Hillary Clinton learned the term from Dilulio and his work, that she intended to use it in the same way that he did, and that the Clintons used this racist narrative as a guide for creating and promoting policy that harmed black people.

The word “superpredator” is part of the long lineage of language used to strip black people of their humanity in order to justify treating them inhumanely. It became popular because it put a clever name to what was already in the air, and this dehumanization has had real, material consequences. It is why black children are seen as inherently guilty, why police officers are more likely to use violent force against black children if they are accused of a crime, why people are more willing to condone police violence if it is against black bodies. It is this stripping of humanity from black bodies, the stripping of childhood from black children, that leads to police officers looking at a 12-year-old with a toy and seeing the threat of an adult “active shooter,” and it is that same dehumanization that saw this as reasonable and allowed those police officers to walk free.

As important as language is in shaping the way we think, Clinton’s superpredator comments weren’t just ugly rhetoric. They were also translated into policy. You can see the concrete results of viewing crime this way when you look at the 1994 crime bill.

 

Those words are not neutral. They are racialized. You can speak about them being for very specific people, but it was and is understood for whom the term, and consequently the policies that ensued, were meant. It is sort of like the term "thug". There is a a definition, but we also understand that it is a term used to denote a racialized community that is depicted as inherently criminal.

 

Two different polls in June 2008 found nearly 40% of Clinton supporters would not support Obama in the general

 

Reading the article tkamb posted, I was unaware that the clintons had previously interacted with the originator of the phrase, so it's hard to argue that she was ignorant of its history. That pretty much negates anything I was going to say.

 

hey, thanks for posting this. i had heard the name Zephyr Teachout but just looked into her because of your post and realized she's running in my district!

 

How am I not being consistent?

If Sanders somehow wins the nomination, I'll fully support him. There is also plenty I don't like about Clinton, she is just better in my mind than Trump. The fact that I don't like some of Sanders campaign tactics this past week certainly doesn't mean I support all of Clinton's campaign tactics in 2008, why would it?

Miss this cause it was on the last page on the thread, but if you for one minute thing I care about your approval or am doing anything in your name, you need to get over yourself. There are plenty of other oppressed groups out there, and I'm certainly not going to let the fact that some black man doesn't like Clinton stop me from voting for the candidate I feel would be far better for LGBT people, far better for women, far better for latin americans, far better for muslims, and far better for America as a whole. You don't own oppression.

 

Great piece on what's been going on with the Oklahoma budget the past few years and how it's destroyed the public school system while states in similar situations have prospered: When oil boom went bust, Oklahoma helped drillers and squeezed schools

While they've been facing those problems, they decided to take action by... criminalizing abortion.

A bill brought to you by the same dipshit who authored the "Guns Everywhere" proposal.