Who's The Best Candidate To Clean Out Trump's Filthy Pigsty-- Be It A Man Or A Woman?

Who's going to clean up the disgusting crap Trump and the Republican Party took on America? Electing a Democratic Congress next year will be a start but it won't be enough. America is going to need a smart, strong, capable and determined president in 2020. When Eurystheus ordered Hercules to clean up King Augeas' stables, he only had one day to do it and he altered the course of two rivers-- Alpheus and Peneus-- to get it done. Cleaning up after Trump will be an even tougher task. Yesterday two of the Beltway trade papers, The Hill and Politico were speculating about who the Democrats would nominate for the job. "Democrats," according to Amie Parnes, "predict that as many as 30 candidates will compete in their party’s presidential primary in 2020." Sounds silly? Well, speaking of silly, there's already a declared candidate: right-wing New Dem multimillionaire congressman, John Delaney, a real pile of crap himself. But he's not on anyone's short list of likely nominees. (Vanity candidates Jeff Boss, Rocky De La Fuente, Geoffrey Fieger and Robby Wells have also declared.)

But to get to 30, you have to also include Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris (an unaccomplished former California Attorney General who somehow wound up in the U.S. Senate, where she hasn't accomplished anything either), Terry McAuliffe, Joe Kennedy III, Julian Castro, Tom Steyer, Stephen Colbert, John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Mitch Landrieu, Eric Holder, Dwayne Johnson, Seth Moulton, Martin O'Malley, Tulsi Gabbard, Deval Patrick, Mark Zuckerberg, Jason Kander, Steve Bullock, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, Mark Warner, John Bel Edwards, Sherrod Brown, Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, Tim Kaine, and anyone else whose name has been in the newspapers more than twice this year.

"A year after a devastating 2016 defeat, Democrats are craving new faces with fresh ideas," wrote Parnes. "Yet many of their leading contenders for the White House in 2020 are politicians who have been around for decades. There’s also no clear standout in the potential field," apparently forgetting that every poll shows Bernie is the most beloved and popular political leader in America and that he would crush Trump by double-digit margins. But that isn't part of the establishment media narrative so... "'You have a bunch of Celine Dions but there’s no Beatles,' said Phil Singer, a Democratic strategist who served as press secretary on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run... The Hill interviewed nearly a dozen prominent Democrats to find out who has captured the party’s attention in recent months and who has fallen out of favor.  Here’s how they see the field stacking up right now."

• Bernie
• Biden (the top choice of the desperate corrupt Beltway establishment that fears change)
• Elizabeth Warren
• Kamala Harris (who not even voters in California have ever heard of or give a shit about)
• Sherrod Brown
• Deval Patrick, some inoffensive guy from Massachusetts

Well, at least they didn't include Kirsten Gillibrand on the list. Politico did though. Bill Scher's pathetic list is like an ad for EMILY's List: "Why 2020 Will Be The Year Of The Woman." It's all about Harvey Weinstein (and sex perv Trump) and the other pigs and it's a girl's turn (like last year). His post is full of crap like "Democrats, who have been unsparing to their own in this post-Weinstein moment, may be hungering for a Year of the Women 2.0-- one that tells male Democrats to take a backseat for once and catapults a woman into the Oval Office. As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer proclaimed, 'Trump’s election ripped wide a wound in America, and only a woman president can heal it.' If so, she’s likely to have an early advantage: The 2020 Democratic primary landscape looks to be tilted to another woman presidential nominee. In 2016, women composed nearly 60 percent of the Democratic presidential primary electorate, many of whom are understandably pining for the karmic justice of defeating Trump with shards from a glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton could not break."

There are two equally great candidates in the mix: Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. Bernie isn't on that short list because he's a man and it takes away from Elizabeth Warren to lump her in with garbage like Gillibrand and Harris as "a girl." She's tied for the best candidate for because of her ideas and her abilities. No doubt one of the reasons she's as magnificent as she is has to do with her gender, which helped form her. But that isn't why she should be the nominee. I love the idea of a woman president-- but only if the woman is the one who would make the best president. Elizabeth Warren could clean out those Augean stables. Kamala Harris? There's no reason to believe she has the ability to do much more than wake up in the morning and get showered and dressed. Kirsten Gillibrand? A pig in a poke who is the classic example of a political opportunist. Ever watch Veep? Most of these candidates are as qualified to be president as Selina Meyer, the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character. Watch White House chief of staff Amy Brookheimer tell President Meyer what an utter, unmitigated disaster she is: "You have achieved nothing, apart from one thing. The fact that you are a woman means that we will have no more women presidents because we tried one and she fucking sucked!"



Scher's an idiot and he names Kristin Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren as possible candidates and wrote that "if a woman is going to lead the party, she will have to overcome some major obstacles, probably including one or two old white dudes and a few other women with the same bright idea," perfect framing for Politico. And he gets worse: "Outrage alone is not going to produce another Year of the Woman. One woman will need to have ample reservoirs of charisma and guile in order to crush her opposition." And when he stumbles on something intelligent-- "Faced with a president Democrats consider the greatest disgrace in American history since slavery, an obsession with the demographics of their next presidential nominee may seen gratuitous, even counterproductive. Shouldn’t Democratic energy be laser-focused on winning back wayward working-class Trump voters? The ones who decided Democrats care more about political correctness than bringing jobs back?"-- he makes sure his readers remember what a fool he is: "That attitude fails to appreciate what has defined modern liberalism over the past century."

Biden will have no problem speaking knowledgeably and passionately about sexual assault. But he may have a harder time when it comes to speaking about sexual harassment.

Over his 40-plus years in office, Biden lived through a changing national understanding of the issue. And because he was in office at a time when sexual harassment wasn’t taken as seriously, he has a glaring weak spot: He was the chair of the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, and Anita Hill blames him for how she was effectively put on trial, and for failing to allow corroborating witnesses to testify.

Earlier this month, while speaking at Glamour’s Women of the Year event, Biden offered an apology, along with a defense of his own actions: “I believed Anita Hill. I voted against Clarence Thomas … I am so sorry that she had to go through what she went through.” But in a new interview with the Washington Post, Hill remains critical: “I still don’t think [Biden’s statement] takes ownership of his role in what happened. And he also doesn’t understand that it wasn’t just that I felt it was not fair. It was that women were looking to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his leadership to … show leadership on this issue on behalf of women’s equality. And they did just the opposite.”

For his own part, Sanders has shown an ability to win votes from women who see feminism and socialism as intertwined. “Feminism is a worldview that understands and critiques power,” wrote Slate’s Shiva Bayat during last year’s primary, and Sanders reflects that worldview because he “dares to challenge the economic system.”

But Sanders has always seemed more conversant on economic class issues than those that touch on feminism and identity. And he has yet to find a way to address those topics that suggests he understands why they’re important separate from class struggle. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” Sanders said in a Boston speech two weeks after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries.”

Beloved as he is to so many on the left, Sanders’ prominent speaking slot for last month’s Women’s Convention caused so much division among the progressive attendees that he belatedly declined the invitation. In April, the Vermont senator was scorched after he unapologetically endorsed an Omaha mayoral candidate deemed “anti-choice”; NARAL President Ilyse Hogue said that the decision to “support a candidate for office who will strip women-- one of the most critical constituencies for the party—of our basic rights and freedom is not only disappointing, it is politically stupid.” (The fact that Sanders doesn’t seem to connect reproductive rights with women’s economic autonomy continues to frustrate many pro-choice activists.) And it’s hard to imagine Sanders’ strange 1972 essay about rape and gender roles being brushed off as dismissively now as it was just two years ago.

With the two male Democratic front-runners hobbled post-Weinstein, the opportunity is wide open for a strong woman-- or four--to run.

Such a fucking jackass. "Hobbled." How the establishment assholes hope and pray every day! He does know enough, though, to have written that of the 4 women he thinks should be candidates, "Warren is the only one with a national following. In early primary polling, no other woman reaches double digits." His case for Kamala Harris is so silly as to be insulting to women. "Harris-- the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India-- is the only woman of color seriously mentioned as a 2020 candidate, having instantly attracted presidential buzz upon her election to the Senate last year." Unfortunately she doesn't stand for anything in anyone's mind except for being anti-Trump, something only Beltway imbeciles think is enough.

And does he ever tip-toe around Klobuchar's dull, anti-inspirational, energy-free centrism: "Of the lot, Klobuchar is the least left wing. In Iowa earlier this year, the Minnesotan expressed allegiance with those 'in the middle of the country,' geographically and politically. She is only one of the Big Four who has not backed Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation, and she has said that while she is pro-choice herself, being against abortion should not disqualify one from being a Democrat. If she runs in 2020, her challenge is to convince progressive primary voters that to get Middle America to accept a woman president, you need someone from Middle America more than you need ideological purity tests."

Scher ends on an intelligent note, even if he has trouble applying it: "[F]or a woman to win in 2020, she can’t be a pedestrian politician. She must be a superstar. And she won’t become a superstar by anointment, as Obama was in 2004. She will have to make it happen by breaking out of the Senate procedural muck, delivering soaring speeches, crafting signature policy ideas, picking high-profile fights, outwitting conservatives and proving she knows how to triumph over the inevitable misogynistic attacks."