Do You Know Anyone Who Says "Vote Blue No Matter Who" Who Isn't An Insufferable Cretin?

That's a powerful statement from Bernie on how existentially crucial it is to defeat Trump. Not a word though about electing Status Quo Joe. That sums it up for almost everyone I know: hold your nose and elect the worst Democratic nominee for president since... let me see... there have been some real stinkers... ummm... Biden is worse than Hillary, who was so bad she even lost to Donald Trump. Biden is worse than Gore who was another Senate conservative and who picked Joe Lieberman as VP, making it impossible for progressives to vote for the ticket. Biden is worse than Bill Clinton, the man who turned the party from a worker-oriented party to a neoliberal corporate-oriented party. Biden is worse than John Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Alton Parker, Grover Cleveland (the original corporate whore Blue Dog, although they were called Bourbon Democrats at the time), Winfield Scott Hancock, Horatio Seymour, George McClellan, Stephen Douglas... Oh, wait... James Buchanan. That's the one who was a worse Democratic nominee than Biden-- the 15th president of the United States, a Pennsylvania Federalist who switched to the Democratic Party where his states' rights views were in vogue among the pro-slavery base of the party. Historians inevitably include Buchanan in any list of the 3 worst presidents ever and as one of the causes of the Civil War. Biden's probably not as bad. Probably.

The CDC is predicting that something like 11,000 people will die every week this month because of Trump's epic pandemic failures-- that's over 40,000 in the lead up to mail in ballots going out in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and other swing states.

Last week, Murdoch's right-wing NY Post headlined a nothing-story about how Rashida Tlaib refuses to endorse Biden. Beyond the headlines, it is a story about how she is fighting to defeat Trump. Although there may be a tiny and utterly insignificant cohort on the fringes of politics who believe to bring down the corrupt system, we need an armed civil war-- and therefor the worst outcome (another Trump term)-- progressives all want Trump to lose, even if they abhor Biden.

Polls have shown over and over that there is virtually no enthusiasm for Biden. But there is gargantuan enthusiasm to see Trump turned out of the White House. He is the most despised president in any of our lifetimes, more so than Nixon, let alone Bush. Last week, writing for The Atlantic, right-of-center journalist Peter Nicholas listed half a dozen reasons how Trump could win in November. One of them, of course, is Biden. Nicholas began by conceding that "Trump is losing this race. Set aside the particulars-- how suburban voters are migrating toward Joe Biden, and how seniors are rethinking their support too. Consider the basics. Presidents are supposed to keep Americans employed. The jobless rate now stands at 11 percent-- more than 3 points higher than when Jimmy Carter lost reelection in 1980 and when George H. W. Bush was defeated in 1992. Presidents are supposed to keep Americans safe. About 140,000 have died from COVID-19, more than twice the number that perished in the Vietnam War, which doomed Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection chances in 1968. Presidents are supposed to attract voters outside their loyal base. Trump’s approval rating stands at 38 percent, according to Gallup; no president since Harry Truman in 1948 has won reelection with a number less than 40 percent. So what-- it’s over, then? Maybe not. Facing the combined calamities of a pandemic and an economic meltdown, Trump hasn’t collapsed. His base never really grows, but neither does it crumple, keeping him competitive."

And then there's Biden:

Biden’s got his own problems.

Biden has suffered personal loss, which has made him a comforting figure to grieving Americans who have lost jobs and loved ones in the pandemic. Yet he still symbolizes a brand of establishment centrism that leaves some younger voters and some in the party’s activist wing uninspired.

“We have to be true to ourselves and acknowledge that Biden is a mediocre, milquetoast, neoliberal centrist that we’ve been fighting against in the Democratic establishment,” Cornel West, the Harvard University professor and a Bernie Sanders supporter, told me.

If Sanders’s primary voters stay home on Election Day out of pique, that could damage Biden’s chances, especially in must-win swing states.

Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told me she has no appetite for the choice she faces: “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”

Expect Trump to aggravate a dispute that advances his own interests. As I’ve written, he spent months wooing Sanders voters during the primary, trying to convince them that the senator was the victim of a Democratic conspiracy to prevent him from getting the party’s nomination.

Last month, Bernie's former press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, penned a long think piece for Current Affairs, In Defense of Litmus Tests, laying out why progressives need to keep the pressure up on Biden. She began by asking swing state voters if there is "a single issue, or an approach to governance, or a character deficit, or a past vote that you would consider to be disqualifying for a Democratic presidential nominee? A commitment to preserving the for-profit healthcare system, perhaps? Waffling on the right to choose? A yes vote for the Iraq War? Would you decline, maybe, to vote for a candidate who had accepted corporate money to fund their campaign? Or one who had been credibly accused of sexual assault? What about a candidate with a record of trying to cut social safety net programs like Medicare? Or one who had eulogized a segregationist? If your answer is no-- that no single issue or 'litmus test' is disqualifying-- was there once a time, before Trump perhaps, when you would have answered 'yes'?"

“Vote blue no matter who,” has become a sort of gospel among moderate Democrats and “Never Trump Republicans.” The logic is simple: Trump is so cruel and presents such an enormous threat to, well, nearly everyone, that he must be stopped at all cost. As my former colleague Mehdi Hassan has argued forcefully and often, no matter what Biden’s flaws are, Trump is worse.

...[A]lthough I agree Trump must be defeated, I don’t think it must come at the price of abandoning the values which ostensibly motivate our opposition to him. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this “vote blue no matter who” orthodoxy really promotes.

...Now that Joe Biden is the nominee, “vote blue no matter whoism” is principally deployed to shield him from personal accountability and calls to move left-- where the bulk of American voters are on policy. To criticise him or merely decline to endorse him is to “cast a vote to support Trump,” according to prominent pundits.

But, of course, it’s possible to defend the choice of Biden over Trump without pretending he’s flawless.

If we accept the binary that your vote is either unconditional or pledged to Trump, it removes our ability to affirm the values which will remain important long after the election is over.

...[T]he urgent desire to beat Trump-- an urgency I share-- has given rise to an approach to politics that refuses to admit error, concede flaw, or consider improvement. A world where Trump must lose is also one, according to influential members of the corporate political and media establishment-- in which any criticism of the Democratic nominee, no matter how mild or factual, is unwelcome. “No matter who.” No matter what.

...What is it that actually drives Republican message discipline? Too often, liberals cast party differences as a battle between “good guys” and “bad guys”-- principles vs power-- but more often than not, the answer is “money.” Republicans present a united front because the party leadership is committed to core conservative economic principles shared by both leadership and, sadly, much of their base. The Republican establishment ultimately coalesced around Trump because they believed he would protect the most fundamental conservative economic interests. And they were right. Trump’s first major action as an executive was a $1.7 trillion tax cut for the rich. He has stacked the courts with judges who protect corporate interests, and has worked to discourage antitrust litigation. Conservatives don’t do anything which fail to advance those ends.

The problem is that corporate Democrats serve the same masters, but must operate under a veil of pretense. Their corporate donors are equally motivated as Republican donors to cut the social safety net, preserve for-profit health insurance, protect private real estate against profit-undermining housing laws, and slow the pace of environmental reforms. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republican messaging aligns straightforwardly with their economic goals: Cut taxes for the rich. Protect “individual freedoms” from government overreach. Encourage “self sufficiency.” They’ve branded austerity so that it’s welcomed by their constituents. Meanwhile, Democrats attempt to disguise that they’re offering versions of the same wrapped in rainbow flags and kente cloth, but have the clumsy task of rationalizing why they fail to deliver more than tokenism and lip service.

For Republican corporate donors to be happy, Republicans must win, and they do. For Democratic corporate donors to be happy, Democrats must lose. And they do.

Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramilla Jayapal and Jamal Bowman excite voters and are able to message differently exactly because they don’t take corporate PAC or lobbyist money. And in the context of the 2016 and 2020 primaries, millions of Americans got a taste for what it felt like to be offered concrete, people-funded plans to advance their lives.

“When I graduated in 2011, I owed $137,000 in student loans. Today I have $175,000 even as I continue making monthly payments. I will never own a home, start a family, or live debt-free. @BernieSanders is the only person running who will cancel ALL student debt.” writer David Ian Robin tweeted as part of the Sanders’ “#MyBernieStory” campaign. “I got a bill for my miscarriage because my insurance only covered my child as long as the child was ‘viable.’ What a wonderful country we live in, huh? #whyIamForBernie #MyBernieStory” tweeted a supporter named Georgia, who, like millions, was inspired by Medicare for All.

Now, establishment Democrats want the base to put their substantive differences aside and coalesce behind Biden. But for millions of voters, what they’re getting for that exchange feels inadequate.

If Democrats want the same party cohesion conservatives enjoy, the answer isn’t to become more like Republicans and coalesce behind a flawed candidate. It’s to start acting like Democrats. It’s time to regain the public trust. And you don’t do that by asking them to vote for a “D” before an idea.

Being clear about what you’re fighting for matters. Especially in the shadow of the incredible health and economic crises currently facing America, universal healthcare still matters. Abortion rights still matter. Climate change absolutely matters. And backing popular, progerssive solutions to the COVID crisis-- solutions like monthly relief checks-- would certainly go a long way toward proving that the country wouldn’t just be better under a Biden administration, it could thrive.

“Can we all just admit this,” New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently wrote, “the transformational changes that COVID, the economic crisis, police brutality and racial turbulence will force are precisely some of the things Bernie Sanders was talking about but may have sounded too extreme to some just months ago.” Blow is right, but it’s not enough to admit that reality has endorsed Bernie. Biden should endorse his policies too. And we shouldn’t be sheepish about pushing him to do so.

...But Biden declines to support popular progressive policies because, frankly, he, and the people who run his campaign, are paid not to. Biden’s senior advisor, Steve Richetti, is a former healthcare lobbyist. The organizers of his super PAC include Larry Rasky, whose lobbying firm works for Raytheon, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. More billionaires donated to Joe Biden’s campaign than any other-- at least forty-four billionaires, in fact, representing the real estate industry, the finance industry, and big tech. Voters may want Medicare for All, but what incentive do these men have to kneecap the for-profit healthcare industry? How will the needs of renters and unemployed gig workers stand up against the interests of real estate and life insurance billionaire Eli Broad, who contributed $25,000 to a Democratic Party PAC?

Biden has openly admitted the influence corporate donors have on politicians. At a 2007 campaign event, he explained: “If you, Lynn, bundle $250,000 for me, all legal, and then you call me after I’m excited & say, ‘Joe, I’d like to talk to you about something. You didn’t buy me. But it’s human nature, you helped me, I”m going to say, ‘Sure, Lynn, come on in. The front of the line is always filled with people whose pockets are filled.”





“It’s human nature,” he added.

...Most Democratic voters can accept that they need to vote for Biden to prevent a second Trump term. But more voters, particularly new or formerly disaffected voters, would be convinced to turn out (and volunteer and donate) if party leaders truly recognized what’s at the root of Sanders’ appeal. In his platform, millions of working class and poor Americans felt their most fundamental concerns were genuinely being addressed-- often for the first time in their political lives. They saw in him a candidate with a values-based vision of what this country could be: a belief that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was not just a slogan, but a bedrock principle that life shouldn’t be contingent on a co-pay, race shouldn’t influence liberty, and happiness shouldn’t be held hostage by corporate titans too stingy to pay a living wage. I suspect that many can’t forget the feeling, cultivated by Sanders’ movement, that a better world was possible and that yes, they deserved it. And frankly, they shouldn’t ever forget.

The way to put together a massive coalition that will be unstoppable against Trump is not to shame Americans-- struggling now more than ever-- into a fidelity pledge. The way forward is to put together a platform that so completely meets voters’ needs it becomes irresistible.

I am deeply concerned that each time a corporate Democrat attempts to disavow us of our principles by smearing our values as  unreasonable “litmus tests”-- each time they tell us that a policy implemented the world over is “pie in the sky,” that demanding healthcare as a human right is akin to whining for “a pony,” that women’s rights are conditional on who the woman is and how powerful the man is that she’s crossed-- we lose our ethical moorings.

And with each election cycle, as progressive candidates are openly thwarted by big monied interests who are deeply invested in the status quo, I’m concerned that we have no strategy to ratchet back the rightward creep that “lesser of two evilism” enables.

“Vote blue no matter who” lowers the floor of what Democrats stand for to a hair’s breadth above Trump’s scalp. And the effect of repeatedly lowering the standards of the only powerful resistance party is grave. It establishes a slippery and ever inclining slope, a race to the bottom that has skewed American politics such that the “liberal party” is well to the right of American voters on all but certain social issues.

I agree that Donald Trump presents a unique and grevious threat to this country. But it’s also true that every four years we’re told the same. Republicans are becoming more right-wing, more reactionary, more openly white supremacist. But it happens, in part, because Democrats chase them to the right, thinking electoral victory can be found in splitting the difference rather than taking a stand for good. Year after year, Democrats vote to keep Republicans from winning “at any cost.” At some point, the conscience coffers will be empty.

 

Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President: Seth Moulton

I wasn't sure if we'd have a Part VIII in this Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President series but today, after extensive focus group-testing in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Seth Moulton went on Good Morning America and declared his decision to run for the presidency (as a Democrat). Here's the announcement video that the polling firm and the advertising company he hired came up with:



The best possible outcome will be that he loses reelection to his Massachusetts House seat and that he's replaced by a progressive, like, say, Barbara L'Italien. ProgressivePunch rates him an "F" and his lifetime crucial vote score-- 74.68-- is pretty shitty, especially for someone in a district with a D+6 PVI. A member of the uber-corrupt and Wall Street-owned New Dems, he, predictably, opposes Medicare-For-All. He calls himself a Democrat but when he first considered running for Congress in 2012 he was a registered independent and didn't re-register as a Democrat until he figured out that his district wasn't going to elect anyone but a Democrat. He ran as a conservative Democrat in 2014-- replacing a tired old establishment liberal-- and served as a conservative Democrat ever since. He's also a member of Mark Penn's and Nancy Jacobson's Problem Solver's Caucus-- which has never solved a problem-- and that should tell you a great deal about who, and what, he is. A bit of a tangent but if Moulton really thinks he can run in the Democratic primary as an opponent of Medicare-For-All, maybe he should look at the Tulchin data that came out yesterday when voters in swing states Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were queried:

In a post for Alternet RJ Eskow dubbed him "a a custom-crafted biography in a suit who appears to hold no core beliefs" and reminded his readers that "has aligned with Republicans on some policy bills, ranging from a ban on the gun accessories used in last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas to a recent legislation allowing veterans to use medical marijuana... Moulton has been well-rewarded for his ideological plasticity. During his short political career, Moulton has received a total of $1,723,870 from the investor class that comprises the so-called “FIRE” sector-- financial, insurance, and real estate. He has also received more than $160,000 from Pharma." By the way, the two other military vets trying to use their service as a reason people should vote for them are Tulsi Gabbard and McKinsey Pete.

The attempted palace coup he led to de-rail Pelosi's speakership was widely recognized as a bid to block any semblance of a progressive agenda. It failed miserably and left him in an untenable situation in the House, where Pelosi and her allies now hate his guts. Hopefully this idiotic presidential run will be his last hurrah in politics. Maybe Pete can get him a job at McKinsey.

Anyone actually believe that Seth Moulton will shake this up: Sanders Increases Lead Over Biden As Buttigieg Vaults Into Top 3? The Granite State poll released this morning shows that Biden and Buttigieg are battling it out for second place, while Bernie has continued to increase his lead over Status Quo Joe. Meanwhile, a plurality of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters agree that Bernie is:

a- the most progressive Democrat in the race, and
b- the candidate with the best chance of beating Trump in 2020

But... it's still early and you never know what will happen. After all, Amy Klobuchar has lifted herself out of the 1% Club and is now tied with Andrew Yang and Tim Ryan at 2%. It shouldn't take more than a month or two (or three) for Moulton to work his way into the 1% Club with Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Eric Swalwell, John Delaney, Julian Castro and Jay Inslee.

The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President, Part VII: Frackenlooper

Yesterday Terry McAuliffe's vile SuperPAC-- Tenaciously Moving America (TMAC 200 PAC)-- sent another note trying to sell McAuliffe-branded merchandise, like they do every few days. "We're counting down to March 31st-- less than 27 days until Terry announces his presidential plans! In a race as important as this, Terry has proven his dedication and service to the American people... I have made it clear to [another candidate], as well as every other person who has approached me, including five or six of them running, that if McAuliffe runs, I am supporting him."

And, on the same level... "Today, Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hickenlooper announced his decision to run in a campaign video, 'Stand Tall.'" McAuliffe was episode 5 in the DWT series, The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. I hoped I would never have to write one on Frackenlooper. The Dylan song on this video of him playing banjo with Old Crow Medicine Show is almost prophetic: "You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere."



It came as no surprise to anyone that Hick was going to run, since he started a SuperPAC for himself in September of last year. In October there were even rumors that he and John Kasich would run as a centrist ticket. I can only imagine the argument between 2 alphas over who'd be top and who'd be bottom. Frankenlooper immediately started down the Clinton "no-can-do" path that lost her so many millions of votes: "I’m running for president because we need dreamers in Washington, but we also need to get things done." But, but, but, but, butt, butt, butt... I hope Kasich screwed you up the butt, you loser. Fake moderates don't get anything done. They never have and they never will. It's all greasy baby step incrementalism that voters are fed up with. Go away, you butthole. I'm glad you didn't run for senator and now you'll be politically obliterated completely.

Hickenlooper leaves for 2 days in Iowa Thursday where he hopes voters who remember his distant cousin Bourke Hickenlooper from when he ran for lieutenant governor in 1936 or when he saved a woman from drowning in the Cedar River in 1942, are still among the living. Ole' Bourke himself, a Republican of course, passed in the 1970s. His followers though, if there are any, will feel comfortable enough with the current Hick's right-of-center policy agenda. In fact, most of his campaigning will be in Steve Kin's district, the most conservative part of Iowa. Still, Hick is only polling zero in the current Iowa Democratic surveys.

The case he makes is that he can work with both sides. Neither side, though, likes him much. He opposed the legalization of marijuana ballot measure in 2012, which passed despite him. Now he tries to take credit for it. He's proud he got background checks passed-- even though it wasn't until after the Aurora massacre. He doesn't support Medicare-For-All or the Green New Deal or anything else that is inspiring Democratic voters.

I don't have many friends in Colorado-- maybe a dozen. But they all agreed on one thing: Hickenlooper would lose his own state, a blue-trending state that Obama won both times and even Hillary managed to win (with 48% to Trump's 43%). They also generally agree why he would lose Colorado. "He sold the state to the oil and natural gas interests," one pal in Denver told me, something echoed by everyone else I know there. That's how he got the widely used Frackenlooper nickname.

Folks in Denver also blame him for-- and hate him for-- the I-70 expansion, which is making parts of the city primarily lived in by poor people and minorities, unlivable in terms of air quality. Last year, David Sachs wrote that Hick wouldn't "admit that widening I-70 through Elyria Swansea is a mistake that will clog Denver streets with more traffic and spew more particulate pollution into the air. In fact, he insists that the project will be great for public health... Expanding I-70 requires digging up contaminated soil from a Superfund site in the country’s most polluted ZIP code. But Hickenlooper stuck to his claims that adding more car lanes will be good for our air quality and our health... The north Denver residents who live with alarming rates of respiratory problems aren’t buying it. Along with Denver’s largest neighborhood organization, they have demanded an end to the I-70 project."

A friend of mine who I went to college with and who lives in Chaffee Park just north of the I-70 said there isn't a person in North Denver that would vote for Hickenlooper. I said, what if it's him or Trump. "I don't know anyone who would ever vote for either. No one here thinks he has any chance of being nominated anyway... He ain't goin' nowhere."

The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President, Part VI: The Starbucks Guy

The Starbucks guy deserves a 60 Minutes feature? Do they think he's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or something? He isn't. He's just another super-rich, under-taxed old white guy who thinks he should be king. I think 60 Minutes would be better off-- as would America-- if they ran an interview with author Marianne Williamson, who is announcing her campaign tonight in Los Angeles. She sure has more interesting things to say than Schultz does! Schultz showed himself to be nothing but a rich asshole and moron (trained monkey). And yes... of course he said, "Extremists on both sides." When Schultz says "I want to see the American people win; I want to see America win," he's already exhibiting symptoms that autocrats all have-- an identification with their self being the nation. He looked dangerous on 60 Minutes last night.



When publishing the Nick Troiano/Charles Wheelan OpEd on Howard Schultz Sunday, the Washington Post identified them as officials of "Unite America," without identifying Unite America as the new name for the failed Centrist Project that formed, in part, around an attempt, through the Simpson-Bowles Commission (Obama's very worst policy thrust), to wreck Social Security and Medicare at the behest of wealthy donors who hate paying taxes to help poor people. In 2018, Nick Troiano and Charles Wheelan ran 3 gubernatorial candidates, 2 U.S. Senate candidates and 10 state legislative candidates, all of whom lost. Now they are eager to run another right-of-center turd, Schultz, the Starbucks billionaire, this time as president. In 2018, the Unite America superPAC raised $209,020 and contributed to just one federal candidate, $5,000 to Marty Grohman, an independent congressional candidate in Maine who ran against progressive Democrat Chellie Pingree and took 29,670 votes (8.7%). Of the $209,020 they collected, another $40,914 went to the Centrist Project Election Fund. The rest... who knows?

Anyway, their OpEd is worthless drivel and although I included the link, I don't recommend anyone read it... unless you like hearing from conservatives trying to mask what they are by calling themselves "moderates." How about this for a clueless suggestion, considering the abject failure Macron's presidency has been: "By choosing a Republican running mate to forge what they might call a unity ticket, and assembling a bipartisan Cabinet, Schultz could unite center-left and center-right Americans who would vote as a coalition without having to leave their current parties, similar to what independent Emmanuel Macron did to win France’s presidency."

If you need to read something about Howard Schultz, over and above the ego of a (billionaire) man who thinks his very first foray into political service should be as President, try Edward-Isaac Dovere's piece in The Atlantic Saturday, Ex–Starbucks CEO Could Get Trump Re-elected. "Before there was Jill Stein," wrote Dovere, "there was Ralph Nader. Before there was Nader, there was Ross Perot. None won. All argued that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were basically the same, and the only way to make real change was to ditch them both. Each was blamed for siphoning off enough votes to throw the presidential elections. These days, the difference between the parties is starker than it’s ever been in modern times. Yet here comes Howard Schultz, a billionaire who feels that he might be the answer to American politics, and that he’d run for president as an independent."

What happens when Schultz wakes up and realizes how hard it is-- and expensive-- to get on the ballot in all 50 states and DC? Will he then decide to enter the Democratic primary after all? Remember, any anti-Trump vote in 2020 that doesn't go to a Democrat-- be it a progressive like Bernie, Liz Warren or Merkley or to a corporate shill like Biden or Gillibrand or any of the 20 others-- helps reelect Trump and end American democracy. One Democratic strategist put it this way: "He’s Ralph Nader without any of Nader’s redeeming qualities. What’s his value proposition for America? Make America like a corporate chain?" Or is it that anyone who has $3.3 billion must be great?



He can call his new independent party the How Are We Going To Pay For These Things? Party LLC. "It concerns me," the billionaire who's apparently never read any MMT literature told CNBC's Squawk Box last June, "that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. I say to myself, 'How are we going to pay for these things,' in terms of things like single payer [and] people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job. I don't think that's realistic... I think we got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises... I think the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations. The only way we're going to get out of that is we've got to grow the economy, in my view, 4 percent or greater. And then we have to go after entitlements."

"And then we have to go after entitlements." No wonder Nick Troiano and Charles Wheelan were so excited about him! This guy is pure poison. It is hard to imagine him taking votes away from A Bernie/Stacey ticket. He will attract conservatives who hate Trump but can't bring themselves tp support anyone who backs a pro-worker agenda. If he runs-- and stays in the race-- he's likely to do to Trump what that Ross Perot did to George H.W. Bush. 

One thing is sure... after his 60 Minutes appearance last night, Twitter showed it was revolted by him. Gee, just in my own little Twitter poll (above), 92% of the voters picked "against him" or "donate to his opponent" as their reaction to his appearance and only 5% said they want to vote for him.

Another view of the same tweet stream, but with a little poll I ran. It was before 60 Minutes ran. He would have probably done worse if I ran the roll afterwards. Still, 9% of respondents said they would vote for him. What  country! What a world! What a species!

Did Kirsten Gillibrand's Interview With Jake Tapper Yesterday End Any Chance She May Have Had For A Place On A National Ticket?

I'm not the only one who's noticed that Trump would have probably been happier as a TV critics than as a failed, illegitimate fake-president. And, sure enough, former White House aide Cliff Sims' new book, Team of Vipers described Trump as he watched TV in his private dining room off the Oval Office: "He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies... He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look? With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the 'chyrons,' the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing. 'People watch TV on mute,' the President told me, 'so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter.' ... When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House. The goal was for Sarah or Hope or me-- or whoever hadn’t traveled with him-- to meet him on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet to review mere moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn."

(By the way, since we're quoting from the not-yet-available Team of Vipers, I noticed that the NY Times previewed it this morning as describing "a nest of back-stabbing and duplicity within the West Wing, a narrative by now familiar from other books and news media reports. But Mr. Sims, who left last year after clashing with Mr. Kelly, is one of the few people to attach his name to descriptions of goings-on at the White House that are not always flattering to Mr. Trump, and many of the scenes are not particularly flattering to anyone, including himself.)

Jake Tapper's State of the Union yesterday was smokin' hot-- between the 2 "I'm sorr" candidates, Tulsi and Kirsten and the sorry excuse for a lawyer, Rudy. The clip above is the interview with Kirsten Gillibrand, someone I've been writing about since 2006 when she first ran for Congress with help from Blue America. The chyrons on Tapper's show look pretty neutral. I even tried to do what Trump think people do-- I watched it with the sound off. The Chyrons didn't change the content or the context of the interview, they just left the meaning less clear, which might actually explain why so many otherwise rational people-- not the racists-- voted for Trump. Let's come back to that interview in a second.

Earlier Sunday, Elise Viebeck, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Gillibrand overhauled her political identity during this period, abandoning the conservative positions that made her popular upstate and embracing or even moving further left than the liberal consensus on guns, immigration, Wall Street and same-sex marriage. As the Democratic Party itself moved left, she staked out positions popular with the party’s swelling base of liberals, a posture most evident when she called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has voted against President Trump’s agenda more than any other senator. Gillibrand’s evolution seemed to reach its apex last week when she introduced herself as a candidate for president and a fighter for liberal values. But her shift in views from a decade ago is already raising questions among Democrats and provoking attacks from Republicans eager to define her as a flip-flopper. Experts who have followed Gillibrand’s rise said the impression that she has hair-trigger judgment and an overriding instinct to capi­tal­ize on the political moment could prove more problematic than any one shift on policy." I did my best to explain just that-- and answer the question about what Gillibrand really stands for-- in Chapter II of The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. Yesterday I tried it in tweet-form:

I started the clip at almost 3 minutes in so we'd get right to Gillibrand's well-practiced "I'm sorry" shtik. Tapper asks her if-- since she describes Trump's immigration positions as "racist"-- her immigration positions (identical to Trump's until political opportunism encouraged her to do a 180 on them) were also racist. It's a horrifying segment and I almost feel sorry for Gillibrand. Almost. If she didn't want all this ugliness to come up again, she probably shouldn't have run for president. "I know you have very different positions today," said Tapper, after laying out the hideous mess she ran on during her 2008 reelection campaign, which sounded like a campaign from Mississippi, not New York, "let me ask me, if Trump's immigration positions are 'racist,' were they racist when you held some of those positions as well?" She knew what was coming, of course, but she seemed kicked in the stomach by how Tapper phrased it. Brutal!

"They certainly weren't empathetic and they were not kind," she said, trying to soften the enormity, before admitting she is-- or at least was-- a classic sociopath: "and I did not think about suffering in other people's lives." And one thing I did 10 years ago when I became senator and was going to represent twenty million people across our state, I recognized that a lot of places in my state were different and I needed to understand what those constituents needed too."

Pure fucking evil! If she were to be elected president-- God forbid-- would she feel compelled to find out what her new constituents in Alabama and Mississippi and Idaho needed to and then start advocating for lynchings? She's the most horrible candidate running in the primary and there are some really bad candidates in this primary.

"So I went down," patting herself on the back. "I went down to Brooklyn; I met with Nydia Velázquez, who's been a leader in fighting for families for a long time, and I listened. And I realized that things I had said were wrong. I was not caring about others; I was not fighting for other people's kids the way I was fighting for my own and I was wrong to feel that way. And so I just said I'm not going to stand by and do nothing for families that are suffering in my state and in my communities." She shouldn't be running for president. She shouldn't be a U.S. Senator. She should be getting mental health therapy-- perhaps in a group session with Trump and Steve King. Watch the rest of the clip. This is a really sick, unself-aware person, completely messed up with confusion. She said he values haven't changed. What does that even mean in the context of her bullshit story about changing?

There Are Democrats... And Then There Are Democrats-- They're Not Interchangeable

Rolling Stone's politics guy, Matt Taibbi welcomed the new version of the Weekly Standard (RIP), The Bulwark by noting that "Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears."

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.

The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

Using this strategy, this self-appointed “handful of sages” rode the mule of Republican politics all the way to the White House. By the early 2000s they achieved such status that David Frum, the speechwriter who coined George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” felt confident in publicly calling for the excommunication of libertarians, isolationists, nationalists and all sorts of other breeds from the Church of the GOP.

“Antiwar conservatives” had “turned their backs on the country,” Frum wrote. “Now we turn our backs on them.”

Having alienated big chunks of the Republican coalition, the group then sank the mainstream GOP politically with the idiotic prosecution of the Iraq war.

Because they started this Middle East disaster on a lie and even bragged about doing so-- “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”-- they undermined faith in a smorgasbord of American institutions, from the news media to the presidency to the intelligence community to their own party.

This was a huge reason for the rise of Trump, who ran against “elites” and capitalized on voters’ loss of trust in institutions like the press. Conveniently, neocons had already begun tacking back to the Democrats by then.

...[L]ongtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party’s own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original “Third Way” Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives.

This overlaps nicely with neocons’ efforts to stake out the same turf between Trump and Sanders.

This is becoming a little like watching two people pretending not to be attracted to one another even though everyone knows they make each other horny. I’d say the Bulwark neocons and their Democratic allies need to get a room, except they already have MSNBC (as noted by recently resigned reporter William Arkin, who complained the network had become a forum for a “single war party”).

As Glenn Greenwald noted in the Intercept last year, the “most extreme and discredited neocons” began uniting with Democrats “long before the ascension of Donald Trump.”

These two groups came together over a common enemy: the insufficiently bloodthirsty Barack Obama. In July 2014, in “The Next Act of the Neocons,” New York Times writer Jacob Heilbrun predicted the future union:

“Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Democracy Journal ran a similar piece in 2015, in which Robert Kagan talked about a union with Democrats, hoping to replace the term “neoconservative” with the less-infamous-sounding “liberal interventionist.”

The union achieved formal expression in 2016 with groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is backed by neocons like Kristol and Jamie Fly as well as former Joe Biden and Clinton campaign security adviser Jake Sullivan. These are the same people advising Facebook about which sites to zap (last week, Revolutionary Left Radio was the latest alt media voice to get the axe).

Both groups praised Trump’s early missile strikes on Syria (Kristol, echoing his dad, said Trump had been “mugged by reality”; Kagan said the strikes should just be an “opening salvo”). Both were horrified by Trump’s recent tweet about withdrawing from the Middle East.

The neocons are trying to create with Democrats a true political movement of shared goals and common adversaries. Apart from “liberal interventionism,” they’re emphasizing stridently anti-populist leanings, making little distinction between Trump and “mouth-breathers” like Rep. Steve King on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other.

Onetime neoconservative icon Max Boot even went so far as to compare Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin, bemoaning the fact that she has more Twitter followers than Nancy Pelosi-- more evidence of democracy’s imperfections!

Both groups get starry-eyed around generals and spooks and mourned the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis like music-lovers after the death of Prince (“I am shaken,” said Nancy Pelosi). There were even shared fantasies about a presidential run by the Nosferatoid ex-Defense Secretary, whose greatest achievements to date had been grimacing with military severity while standing next to Trump, and clamoring for an increased role in the bombing of Yemen.

If you’re not concerned about undead neocons making a comeback while Trump is in office, that’s understandable. Many people will take allies against Trump from wherever they can.

Just don’t be surprised if “liberal interventionists” are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who’ve been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there.

OK-- time for an OpEd from The Guadian by Bhaskar Sunkara on one of my favorite topics: These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don't be fooled by their progressive veneer. I've been dealing with this in a series of posts called Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. So we have Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Jeff Merkley on the one hand and then a bunch of others who are running as conservative Democrats (Bloomberg, McAuliffe, Delaney, the Starbucks guy, Biden, Klobuchar) or who are conservative but have decided to run as progressives or progressive-lite candidates (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Beto). I'm guessing Gillibrand's focus group testing isn't complete but she'll get back to us what mix of right and left she "is." And everyone's running on an anti-Trump platform, of course, hoping that's all that's needed to make it over the finish line and then "be" the president.

"[M]ainstream Democrats, such as the likely presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand," wrote Sunkara, have "been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare. Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren’t everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late-- on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC’s story about Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take “no corporate Pac money.” But what’s most telling isn’t that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street’s money, it’s that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn’t take their contributions, she’s signaling that she’s just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

...Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don’t have a labor-backed social democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It’s telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper’s recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: “We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors.”

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn’t take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don’t really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn’t a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn’t going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it’s going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders. It seems likely that he will run for president, but he’s been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team’s experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn’t afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It’s afraid of the Democrats who will take them on-- and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.

Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President Update: Gillibrand Cozies Up To The Banksters

Yesterday, we posted Chapter V of The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President: Terry McAuliffe. You can take a look at the entire series here. Chapter II was New York's crooked, opportunistic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and I'm afraid we need a little addendum today, based on some reporting by Brian Schwartz from CNBC. First, consider this. Since first being elected to Congress in 2006, Gillibrand has taken $9,788,569 from the Finance Sector, $1,958,256 last year alone.

Let's narrow that down to just the investment industry-- Wall Street. And let's look at the men and women still in the Senate. Who got the most from Wall Street, in other words, the half dozen most corrupt members of the Senate?

• Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney (includes presidential run)- $31,663,118
• New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer- $13,051,252
• Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio (includes presidential run)- $5,075,974
• New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand- $4,828,111
• Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell- $4,547,348
• Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman- $4,136,809

And last year, Gillibrand took $893,683 from Wall Street. What about Hedge Funds? Gillibrand took $731,220 since first being elected and the 4th most of any senator running for reelection last year ($156,297), beaten only by 3 desperate Democrats in 3 states Trump won: Jon Tester of Montana ($254,072), Claire McCaskill of Missouri ($231,180) and Bill Nelson of Florida ($161,773). Mind you, she has publicly sworn off Wall Street bribes, another of her lies. That makes Schwartz's reporting all the more interesting. She's been "reaching out to Wall Street" to see if they'd help pay for a presidential campaign. And she's not calling tellers; she's calling banksters and plutocrats-- the enemies of American working families... like when she used to be the chief attorney defending the tobacco companies who were consciously giving Americans cancer. Down deep, this one never changes.

Gillibrand has personally been working the phones and calling senior executives at Wall Street firms in recent weeks to see whether they would back her campaign if she jumps into the race, according to two senior business leaders who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Donors in the financial community helped back Gillibrand's successful re-election bid last year. Her effort to connect with business leaders this time comes as she contemplates entering what will likely be an expensive and protracted Democratic primary.

Gillibrand has gotten a mixed response from the executives, however. Some have enthusiastically kept the door open to helping her finance her possible 2020 operation while others are hesitant to return her calls.

A few business leaders and other Democratic Party donors have been privately critical of Gillibrand's early efforts to force the resignation of former Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, according to one of the sources familiar with the discussions. Gillibrand was the first Democratic senator to publicly call for Franken, a fellow Democrat, to resign after he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women in 2017.

"While Senator Franken is entitled to have the Ethics Committee conclude its review, I believe it would be better for our country if he sent a clear message that any kind of mistreatment of women in our society isn't acceptable by stepping aside to let someone else serve," she said at the time through a Facebook post. Gillibrand's comments led to several other women in the Senate demanding Franken to step down, including at least one other prospective 2020 presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).

Franken supporters in the business community argue Gillibrand should have allowed the eventual Senate Ethics Committee investigation to conclude before rushing to demand the resignation of the Minnesota lawmaker. They also believe he was a champion for women during his time in the senate.

...Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Gillibrand, insisted that if the lawmaker from New York ran for president she would build her operation off of grassroots fundraising and would not confirm or the deny her efforts to reach out to Wall Street leaders.

"If Senator Gillibrand decides to run, she will run a campaign that takes no corporate PAC money and is powered by grassroots donations, and based on her values of standing up to those in power and returning our democracy to the people where it belongs," Caplin said in a statement to CNBC.

...[T]urning to Wall Street investors and business titans could be a risky tactic in the next election, particularly after Sen. Elizabeth Warren called on 2020 hopefuls to stay away from political action committees, say "no to the billionaires" and to focus their efforts on fundraising through the grassroots community. Warren, a frequent Wall Street critic who announced an exploratory committee for president last week, has been following her own advice and recently started shuttering her own joint fundraising committee, which allows megadonors to write six figure checks in support of candidates for public office.

...Nationally, Gillibrand is not faring well in early polls. According to a recent CNN poll, she garnered 1 percent of the vote after participants were asked who they preferred to carry the party mantle in 2020. She is not doing much better in the early caucus state of Iowa. A CNN/ Des Moines Register/ Mediacom poll shows she only picked up 1 percent of the vote from likely Democratic caucus voters in the state. Iowa's caucuses will kick off the presidential contest season in January 2020.

She's made herself into one of the most unlikeable politicians in America, even for people who don't yet know her truly disgusting record as a politician. But if she ultimately does decide to run, they will.

The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President: Terry McAuliffe, Part V

Reports have it that Trump wants Jim Webb as Defense Secretary. He might even make a good Defense Secretary (or a lousy one; I don't know) but I think the two prima donnas deserve each other. Webb was a dickwad senator and in 2014 he decided to run for president (as a Democrat for some reason I'll never figure out) only to withdraw from the race while whining that he was "unhappy" and "not comfortable" with the policies Democratic grassroots voters seemed to favor. He had garnered virtually no support except from the same kind of inside the Beltway assholes who always claimed Biden would be a shoo-in every time he ran one of his single-digit campaigns for president. Webb said he might run as an independent and then, thankfully, more or less disappeared from the national stage... til Trump found him this week. (Remember, in 2016, "Democrat" Webb had said he would never vote for Hillary and that he might vote for Trump.) Lesson: all kinds of shit floats briefly to the surface in the lead up to a presidential election-- and then, thankfully, disappears.

I didn't think Terry McAuliffe, another creepy Virginia right-of-center faux-Dem like Webb, was even worth a chapter of our series The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President... but while I was writing this post, I changed my mind. McAuliffe was a career bankster and he entire life has been built around one shady insider business deal after another. Those deals define who he is and who has always been and will always be-- someone who has been at war with ethics for a lifetime. Like Trump, he got rich by manipulating sleazy real estate opportunities. He was a master of raising immense amounts of money for the Clintons and making sure he would benefit from all sides of every transaction. In 1999 he admitted to the NY Times that the success of his grubby business dealings stemmed from his relationship with Bill Clinton, as well as other Democrats who played fast and loose with ethical considerations, particularly Rahm Emanuel role model Tony Coehlo and Missouri sleaze bag Dick Gephardt. "I've met all of my business contacts through politics. It's all interrelated."

And speaking of the vile Gephardt, currently a lobbyist who might have been re-sworn in as Speaker Thursday instead of Pelosi had he not thrown his lot in with Bush when it came to the attack on Iraq-- which is how Pelosi pushed him out of Congress just before the Dems won it back and made her Speaker. Off the point, but the only time I ever met McAuliffe, a character I had always avoided, was through Gephardt, then a candidate for president. The back story is long and stupid but, at the time, I was listed-- mistakenly-- as a $50,000 donor to a Clinton-related Committee. So every Democratic presidential candidate would call me to schmooze me and try to get me to write them a big check too. I met some nice ones that way. But one day Gephardt called me and wouldn't take no for an answer. He whined so pathetically the I actually felt sorry for him and agreed to meet him. When I agreed to meet Howard Dean around that same time, I was happy to invite Deanover to my home. Gephardt... I agreed to meet him in a public hotel lobby. When I got there though, he insisted I come up to his suite. I knew I shouldn't, but I did-- and what was waiting for me at the door? "Howard Klein, allow me to introduce you to [and by this time we're shaking hands] "Terry McAuliffe." Instinctively, I reacted as though I was shaking a rattlesnake and grabbed my hand away. McAuliffe headed for the exit and... well the rest is a boring story about me telling Gephardt why I thought he would make a terrible president and why I was supporting Howard Dean.

Yesterday I got an e-mail-- spam-- from McAuliffe, trying to build up his mailing list for a presidential run. "Hi there," his fundraiser pretending to be him wrote, "I want to take a moment to share my latest op-ed with you, which was published this morning by the Washington Post. I hope you'll take a look! — Terry McAuliffe."

Dull crap about Trump being a bad, bad man. But then came the last paragraph (in the e-mail): "Voters are now looking for a more realistic alternative. Leading up to 2020, Democrats must maintain our credibility with a pledge of results that are honest and achievable. We can expand the Affordable Care Act and take on pharmaceutical companies' cartel pricing, pass comprehensive climate change legislation and substantially raise incomes through minimum-wage increases and tax fairness. And that's just the start." So that was it... except for a link to click on that brought the reader to the Washington Post article itself. Those who didn't click, probably more than half, likely more than 90%, didn't see what came next, a veiled attack on progressives (i.e., Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, the 3 top candidates with vision) from the transactional scumbag dying to follow Trump into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and steal whatever Trump left over. Here's what came next:

These changes would be revolutionary for average families. Americans are asking us to focus on improving their lives, not to make unrealistic ideological promises.

For example, some senators have started to discuss a “federal jobs guarantee”-- a promise that, in certain formulations, means that anyone who wants could have a government job paying $15 an hour with great benefits. Sound too good to be true? It is. Proponents of a jobs guarantee are smart people with good motives, but they surely recognize that it is not a realistic policy.

[Note: he didn't include this video:]

Similarly, a promise of universal free college has an appealing ring, but it’s not a progressive prioritization of the educational needs of struggling families. We need to provide access to higher education, job training and student debt relief to families who need it. Spending limited taxpayer money on a free college education for the children of rich parents badly misses the mark for most families.

[Note: he didn't include this video:]



He kept going: "When the stakes are another four years of Trump degrading our country, do we really want to use the 2020 campaign as a first-time experiment on idealistic but unrealistic policies?" Unrealistic? Ah... yes, the old conservative trope. If you read DWT with any regularity you know what else conservative have always claimed was "unrealistic" or "pie-in-the-sky."

• The American Revolution
• The Bill of Rights and the forging of a democracy
• Universal white male suffrage
• Public education
• The emancipation of the slaves
• The national park system
• Food safety
• The breakup of monopolies
• The Homestead Act
• Land grant universities
• Rural electrification
• The abolition of child labor
• The eight hour workday
• The minimum wage
• Social Security
• Civil rights for minorities and women
• Voting rights for minorities and the poor
• Cleaning up our air, our water, and toxic dump sites
• Consumer product safety
• Medicare and Medicaid

Yeah, like Bloomberg, McAuliffe is another crooked political hack who can't imagine anything great ever, since he himself could never be great and he realizes that to the core of his being. "As we approach 2020," the pompous jackass droned on, sounding more and more like Claire McCaskill, "we should look at the candidates who won in swing districts in 2018. They are an energetic, diverse group who ran on realistic goals of lowering the cost of health care, improving education and raising wages. These are credible promises that Democrats have a proven record of addressing. We are the party that created the Affordable Care Act, raised the minimum wage, invested in education and even balanced the budget... Resisting dishonest populism is not just a policy imperative for serious Democrats but also a political imperative for 2020. Across the country, voters just sent a powerful message that they are tired of the broken promises of this administration, especially on health care and taxes." As soon as you see this corporate marketing tool on an e-mail, delete at once: