Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Convention coverage continues

Tonight, this is what I posted in the comment thread of a Jill Stein story on Huffington Post today. I'm not gonna waste time re-wording it for a fresh audience here on the home page. My thoughts today after a dark day of watching Bernie Sanders go through his inevitable and ritualistic endorsement of Secretary Clinton. Thank you, Democratic National Committee, may I have another?

My words, moments ago...

The terror expressed on this thread over Jill Stein's candidacy explains why she is the new ballcarrier in the revolution. The Clintons and the DLC gave us Trump, nobody else did that. Chasing Wall Street cash, to be more like Reagan, gave us Trump. The Clintons played Republican-lite for a quarter century, spit on the working class, and the results were the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, gerrymandering, massive losses in the Senate, Congress, statehouses, and in governorships. Obama took Bush's two wars and mushroomed it to five, six, I lost count. But by all means, blame the Greens, blame Nader, because we are your conscience, the reason you can't sleep at night when your standard-bearer is vacationing with the man that dropped 790,000 cluster-bombs on peasant farmers in Southeast Asia. You are older now. You still think the electoral college is bad, and superdelegates are bad, but what are you gonna do? The kids are still protesting in the streets, but you know, I see now where Mayor Daley had a point. Bernie was your lifeline, better than the party deserved, and you screwed that up, didn't you? Possibly alienated an entire generation of voters by discounting their votes. And you'll get Trump, and then 2020 will be the "most important presidential election in our lifetime," where there's entirely too much at stake not to vote for the Democrat. And that will make five presidential elections in a row.

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Democrats should view Dr. Stein as a solid back-up candidate in case Julian Assange really has indictment-worthy reveals on old Hill.

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I love that Americans are fascinated by just how complicated and arcane their nation's nomination and electoral processes are. When actually the whole thing should be considered criminal.

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The revolution is down the street. To your Left.

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I have a lot of political anger inside of me. You know this. It has sustained more than 11 years of blog postings. But here are two subtle things about oligarchic politicians that annoy me.

One, they use the phrase “middle class” incessantly, but never utter the phrase “working class.” I’m not sure what focus group told them to do this, but one certainly did, and it’s a more damaging action than one might think. We’ve been conditioned by lying scoundrels to believe that we are all “middle class.” But we can't all be, right? Hillary Clinton has middle class tax cuts that cover families up to $200,000 of annual income. According to economic numbers, that is not middle class. That’s rich. Conversely, and much more damaging, many very poor people consider themselves to be middle class when they are actually far from it. Poor people live next to other poor people (and rich next to the other rich, with security gates instead of dog fences) so being well-off becomes a matter of relativity in people’s brains. Nobody likes to believe they are poor, but politicians capitalize on this ignorance because it tempers class resentments that would certainly foster if people knew just how much more money some Americans were making than they do. I think that they see the numbers, but they don’t "see" the numbers. They don't fully comprehend what they mean. At a certain point, you can’t appreciate the practical difference between someone making 20 times more than you and someone making 200 times more than you.

And then the rich get richer.

“Lower class" is no good as a phrase because the word class has two different connotations. And we all know that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, for example, while each being quite wealthy, have no class. What I don’t get is why anybody would resent being called “working” class? Would they prefer being the opposite, the “idle” class?

Second thing that bugs me: When being interviewed, politicos start the answers to their questions with the word “look.” As in “Look, we know that supplying arms to al Qaeda in Syria is going to be unpopular but we need to defeat ISIS.” Or “Look,” it’s not going to be easy to infiltrate protesting pacifists but national security is at risk."

Is it just a verbal tick designed to ramp one up to his or her thoughts on a difficult subject? Is everybody just aping Vice President Joe Biden, who happens to be the worst offender to date? I personally find it lazy, somehow suspiciously test group-driven, but, most of all, condescending. I’m already paying attention to you. I'm looking!. How is it this person is struggling to come up with the words he or she wants to say, but I can so frequently predict what those words will be? 

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