***Official Political Discussion Thread***

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[noskey]

Get owned by the president to own the libs

 

[youngogjosh]

Pissed on him and he enjoyed it

 

[cakeddout]

When you’re in a cult, getting acknowledged in any form is always a positive. These ****ers are insane

 

[debso]

unless dems have an answer for the above its a wrap in 2020.

 

[ajiiiplatinum]

I don't really have an opinion on the latest "controversy" around Bernie's criticism of the Washington Post, other than that Bernie's politics generally place him outside of the corporate media's parameters of "reasonable" political discourse, so it's not surprising to me that they don't give him or the policies he (and others) support a fair shake. This establishment bias was on full display during both of the Democratic debates, as many of us remarked on in here at the time. To be clear, I don't think this is a "conspiracy," this is just how people and ideas that threaten in a fundamental way our incredibly unjust social order are going to be treated by institutions with a vested interest in said order.

That said, this is a good article suggesting that this may be a more insidious and intentional strategy of dishonesty and disinformation, at least with respect to MSNBC.

There is definitely a bias.
We dont need numbers to tell us that.
I have not seen a positive article for Sanders (about his policies or character) in either the WshPost or MSNBC. One website was tracking anti Bernie wash post articles and they averaged like 5 a week lol
CNN may have run something positive about his policies influencing other candidates a few months ago.
What is funny is that comments made by his opponents like Warren and Buttigieg are more flattering than the "non-bias media" lol
Some say it's because Bezos owns Amazon and is a Billionaire. The WashPost editor said Bezos is not involved but come on...are you really gonna write a positive article about a guy railing against your boss and expect to get promoted. They know how to please the boss.
Also, from personal experience working in a congressional office in DC I know there are WashPost people connected to democrats in the DMV area that are pissed they didnt get to go to the white house with Hillary. They still think Bernie and his "Bros" lost them the election and thus a cushy job on Penn Avenue.

After college I worked for Merrill Lynch in New York and there is a NYtimes Wallstreet Influence complex there too. People think the WS Journal is the pro capitalist and anti Dem Socialist paper but the NYtimes bashes leftist policies that dont favor big banks. They would not support nationalizing banks.
It makes sense though. It is common for you to work at the Times and have a spouse, friends and family working at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, etc or hedge fund

P.S.
my two years there taught me how corrupt the system really is. No checks and balances just make money at all costs. Find margins anywhere. Elect those who will help you make more money. Even though you make good money... people want more. Who cares if the default swamps are putrid. Who cares that they are gambling with other people's money. Who cares that they are making money off companies poisoning domestic and foreign environments. The world revolves around money. I was disgusted when i left.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Couple reason I am not shedding an extra tears for Bernie:

-Mass media has a right wing bias, this is something every Democrat has to deal with. Bernie didn't have a problem taking advantage of this when he wanted to institute Hillary Clinton was not to be trusted even though she was putting out policy proposals. When at the same time the GOP was going on the same outlets to spam folk with that nonsense too.

And Like I said the worst hot take after 2016 was that white Trump voting midwesterns were motivated by "economic anxiety" and not regressive racial views. Sanders was all up on CNN and MSNBC cosigning that trash and doing Townhalls with Trump people. He was probably shouting this same steez to every WaPo reporter he could too.

I am sympathetic to his frustration at the outlets, because they a lot of ****ty criticism against him too. I am not sympathetic to the argument that they are just out to get dude. And I would be if he didn't opportunistically play in the **** with them so much when he wanted to raise his clout.

-Leftist media is pretty much 100% behind Bernie and routinely make bad faith arguments against other Democratic candidates. Bernie has a loyal media machine behind him too. It is just it not on the scale as the big boys but they are loyal to Sanders on the same level Fox is to Trump. Everyone is committed to the "Sanders must win" so all other candidates, except Warren as a fallback plan, needs to painted in the worst light possible.

 

[Belgium]

 

[boris]

Still waiting for that amazing healthcare Trump promised back in 2016.

 

[boris]

But you better not call these people racists.

 

[ajiiiplatinum]

Makes sense
"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters" - Trump

Dude is a retired Vet
I guess Kneeling > Calling you fat

 

[RustyShackleford]

Trump really these fools Zaddy

 

[aepps20]

Trump really these fools Zaddy

As he should be. He motivated this man to lose 45 lbs.

 

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[-Red-]

Couple reason I am not shedding an extra tears for Bernie:

-Mass media has a right wing bias, this is something every Democrat has to deal with. Bernie didn't have a problem taking advantage of this when he wanted to institute Hillary Clinton was not to be trusted even though she was putting out policy proposals. When at the same time the GOP was going on the same outlets to spam folk with that nonsense too.

And Like I said the worst hot take after 2016 was that white Trump voting midwesterns were motivated by "economic anxiety" and not regressive racial views. Sanders was all up on CNN and MSNBC cosigning that trash and doing Townhalls with Trump people. He was probably shouting this same steez to every WaPo reporter he could too.

I am sympathetic to his frustration at the outlets, because they a lot of ****ty criticism against him too. I am not sympathetic to the argument that they are just out to get dude. And I would be if he didn't opportunistically play in the **** with them so much when he wanted to raise his clout.

-Leftist media is pretty much 100% behind Bernie and routinely make bad faith arguments against other Democratic candidates. Bernie has a loyal media machine behind him too. It is just it not on the scale as the big boys but they are loyal to Sanders on the same level Fox is to Trump. Everyone is committed to the "Sanders must win" so all other candidates, except Warren as a fallback plan, needs to painted in the worst light possible.

To be clear, I'm not shedding tears for Bernie because of this. I'm just pointing out the facts as I see them with an eye toward encouraging the vigilance necessary to consume nominally "progressive" corporate media as it relates to politics that pose a threat to the status quo in some major way. We saw Warren get a taste of this same medicine in the debates and post-debate coverage because of her support for Medicare for All, as well.

I agree that Bernie has some semblance of his own media machine in the form of online leftist publications (and probably podcasts, though I don't listen to those so I don't know). And I agree with your characterization that they generally portray every other Democratic candidate outside of Warren in a negative light. I guess where I think we diverge is that I think their takes on those candidates are a lot more well-founded and accurate than the mainstream media's, since the latter generally just gives anyone an unofficial stamp of approval who falls within the parameters of establishment politics.

As for the response to the 2016 election, I felt like CNN and MSNBC especially were clearly playing up the racial animosity narrative about white Midwestern Trump voters. But more generally, the notion that racism functions as an independent ideological motor that exists outside of history is something we really need to disabuse ourselves of. Racial ideology can't be divorced from political economy and the social order that said political economy produces. Period. This isn't making excuses for white supremacy or absolving white people for racism, as I know you've expressed in the past. This is trying to understand the phenomenon as it exists within a particular sociohistorical context so that it might be more effectively counteracted and dismantled.

 

[elpablo21]

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation.

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

s Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

 

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[kdawg]

This is interesting reading.

https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/dfe6ac8e-78ad-4e59-bcda-d612c382ec2f.pdf

There are definitely grounds for impeachment of a few big ranking members of government.

 

[Mark Antony]

Still so wild to me. A politician could give me everything i've asked for and i'm not going out there to ride his meat like this. It's like these people forgot what his role is supposed to be and are just enamored by his persona.

 

[ajiiiplatinum]

To be clear, I'm not shedding tears for Bernie because of this. I'm just pointing out the facts as I see them with an eye toward encouraging the vigilance necessary to consume nominally "progressive" corporate media as it relates to politics that pose a threat to the status quo in some major way. We saw Warren get a taste of this same medicine in the debates and post-debate coverage because of her support for Medicare for All, as well.

I agree that Bernie has some semblance of his own media machine in the form of online leftist publications (and probably podcasts, though I don't listen to those so I don't know). And I agree with your characterization that they generally portray every other Democratic candidate outside of Warren in a negative light. I guess where I think we diverge is that I think their takes on those candidates are a lot more well-founded and accurate than the mainstream media's, since the latter generally just gives anyone an unofficial stamp of approval who falls within the parameters of establishment politics.

As for the response to the 2016 election, I felt like CNN and MSNBC especially were clearly playing up the racial animosity narrative about white Midwestern Trump voters. But more generally, the notion that racism functions as an independent ideological motor that exists outside of history is something we really need to disabuse ourselves of. Racial ideology can't be divorced from political economy and the social order that said political economy produces. Period. This isn't making excuses for white supremacy or absolving white people for racism, as I know you've expressed in the past. This is trying to understand the phenomenon as it exists within a particular sociohistorical context so that it might be more effectively counteracted and dismantled.

I am shedding tears my friend lol

Tears for Bernie and for America
We live in a society were people don't fact check.
If tomorrow they said Bernie attended Fidel Castro's funeral and that he calls his friends comrades...people would believe it.
People are fed and nourished by headlines.
I cant count how many times acquaintances have watched Bernie on a late night show or most recently on Joe Rogan (dislike that guy btw) and said "wow I agree with Bernie on a lot of things. he sounds like a good guy."

 

[gry60]

unless dems have an answer for the above its a wrap in 2020.

I work with Trumpists. They talk about attending his rallies like they're going to the Up in Smoke tour. Dudes discussing dates and venues and ****.

It's either Bernie or Warren to beat Trump. These are the only two I see generating this kind of excitement on the left, despite what the TV channels are saying. Biden is not winning the general.