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Open thread Dec. 12, 2018

Dan Crawford | December 7, 2018 5:04 am

Tags: open thead Comments (1) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
1 Comment
  • EMichael says:
    December 7, 2018 at 9:45 am

    oboy

    It’s going to happen again. Why do I smell Jed Weaver?

    “It is not a good thing that the 2020 presidential election is already showing signs of encroaching idiocy. It is not a good sign that the elite political press already is demonstrating that it has learned absolutely, 100 percent jack-squat from its demonstrable malpractice in 2016. This should be no surprise. The elite political press learned nothing from its previous exercises in demonstrable malpractice. Of course, this time around, there likely will not be a Clinton to kick around, so there will have to be some adjustments in the old playbook.

    It also is not a good thing that the Democratic Party seems to have learned even less from what happened a little over two years ago. For example, over the past few days, or ever since Beto O’Rourke took a meeting with Barack Obama, there appears to be a concerted effort from the Bernie Sanders camp to paint O’Rourke as a tool of the oil and gas industry based on his Texas Senate campaign’s acceptance of individual contributions from members of that industry. That this comes on the heels of the Sanders Foundation’s hootenanny up in Burlington is no accident. There is an obvious effort by those folks to clear the progressive side of the field as cleanly as Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to clear the field in 2016—an effort, it should be recalled, that was one of Sanders’s primary arguments against her….

    I have no idea whether O’Rourke will be a presidential candidate, and even less of an idea whether he’d be a good one. The run he made against Ted Cruz, and the coalition of supporters that his campaign constructed, was damned impressive for a heretofore obscure member of Congress from the deserts of East Jesus, Texas. But that’s not a presidential campaign. What I do know is that there is something a bit malodorous about the notion that he somehow has let down the progressive ballclub because of some entries on his FEC form—or, worse, that he is some kind of extraction industry mole.

    Similar objections have been raised against…checks notes…Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick, the latter of whom recently announced that he wasn’t running, and whose announcement of that fact was greeted by stories painting him as a tool of the subprime mortgage industry. They will get around to almost anyone who isn’t an Independent senator from Vermont. (Watch carefully as Amy Klobuchar goes into the barrel for not supporting Medicare For All and/or abolishing ICE. It’s coming.) And, of course, it is the young people who will save us all, if we just get behind a septuagenarian independent senator from Vermont.

    Clearing the field was a terrible idea at the time, and it looks even worse in retrospect. It was a terrible idea in 2016 and it will be a terrible idea in 2020. It’s a terrible idea no matter how pure its motives or for whom the field is being cleared. And allowing someone who isn’t even a Democrat to clear a huge chunk of the Democratic primary field is completely crazy. Alarm bells are ringing loudly that the Sanders campaign of 2016 has fully transformed into the Sanders cult of 2020.”

    https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25424052/2020-democrats-bernie-sanders-beto-orourke-media-elizabeth-warren/

    Please, just run on the issues. And get rid of the circular firing squad.

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