I started writing this a few days ago. In this day of instant reaction to the news via twitter that might as well be decades, but I’m going to post it anyway.
As I browsed through my blog reader recently I found a number of common themes. I have nothing to add to the universal scorn being heaped on Mitt Romney, except to add that, true to form, the mainstream is hailing him as a hero, instead of writing him off as this year’s Jeff Flake.
What I’ve seen just in the past few days, and what I’ve seen commented on in a number of places, is the beginning of the compartmentalizations of potential presidential candidates. This is generally not done with Republicans, perhaps because none of them ever present a real threat to the pocketbooks of the people who own major media. For instance, we’re seeing Elizabeth Warren being written offas “unlikable”, though there is little basis for the charge, except in the minds of those asking how she can overcome it, who happen to be the same people who will work hard to spread the “unlikable” meme. Pride of authorship, don’t you know.
Warren, like Hillary, can do no right. No matter what she does, the press will give it a negative spin. Her release of her DNA results is a good example. Had a Republican male subjected to similar charges (not that such charges would have had any shelf life against a Republican male) done exactly the same thing he would have been pronounced triumphantly absolved. With Warren she somehow “handled it wrong” by proving the charges against her were without merit. Had she done nothing, the same media that criticized her handling of “it” would have provided an echo chamber for Republican sniping at her Native American ancestry.
The real objection to Warren is that she poses a threat to the oligarchs. She even names them by name. We can’t have that. It’s one thing to demonize immigrants. Tasteless maybe, but not the threat posed by someone demonizing the people actually responsible for impoverishing the 99.9%.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects are hard at work pumping up Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the oligarchs, since he carried water for them while in the Senate, and he is sure to run the kind of bland, inoffensive, and uninspiring campaign the mainstream expects from a Democrat. I should add, parenthetically, that they were fine with Obama’s inspiring 2012 campaign, because while he talked in lofty phrases, they were gratifyingly devoid of any substantive content, and he never had a bad word to say about the oligarchs (In fact, he took great big gobs of their money). Back to Biden: the media loves his shtick about being a regular Joe and a friend of the worker, though they know whose interests he served when push came to shove. And lest we forget: Clarence Thomas.
Part of the process by which the media exalts shitty Democratic candidates is by giving prominence and credence to Republican concern trolls, who tell us they are only giving us advice for our own goods. Atrios points outthat the reverse is never true; Democrats are never quoted giving advice to Republicans.
Generally there’s always a push from centrist types for Democrats to put a Republican on the ticket, and a lot of concern trolling from Republicans telling us about the one Democrat that maybe they could vote for (but won’t). No one ever tells Republicans to run a “unity ticket” and Professional Democrats don’t pitch editors for pieces about Who Republicans Have To Nominate If They Want To Win because that’s stupid. So is the reverse, which happens all the time.
If we’re going to win we can only do it by giving people something to vote for. We shouldn’t take a win for granted, since the Republicans have proven beyond doubt that they are good at stealing even not so close elections. As others have noted recently, and as I’ve noted before, we also need to focus people’s anger where it belongs. Warren, Sanders, and I think, O’Rourke all understand that. They, or at least Warren and Sanders (not sure about O’Rourke) are proposing easy to understand, popular proposals to reverse the tide of inequality in which we are presently drowning. That’s why the mainstream wants to marginalize them. But they can only succeed if we let them. They wanted to marginalize Trump too, and they couldn’t, even though, in his case, he was an obvious fraud. We can win with a real progressive as our candidate. We will not win with a Biden or a –shudder-shudderGillibrand as our candidate.
On a slightly different subject, all hail Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As all the world knows by now some Republican troll attacked her on twitter for having (gasp!!!) danced. It didn’t go over well, and her response was perfect. It’s about time Democrats learned that they have to stop apologizing for every made up transgression that the Republican media concocts. I agree with the author of the post to which I’ve linked that the attacks on her are both sexist and racist (that’s pretty much standard Republican fare) but I think there’s more to it. I think they’re scared of her and what she represents: an aggressive progressivism that doesn’t back down or propose timid half measures in the name of a one-sided bipartisanship. If all Democrats followed her lead, the media, which in the name of both-siderism, tolerates Republican racism but gets in a twit about a Democrat being “uncivil” would have to start changing its behavior as well. They are the way they are because Republicans bullied them for years; they will only change if we start bullying them too, and that means pushing back vigorously every time they promote a Republican attack meme.
This post is too long and has no unifying theme, but that’s okay. I’m putting it up.
