Discussion for article #246285
“For the record, sir, as you know, we never considered you a fringe candidate,” Tapper said and Sanders laughed.
Laughing was the appropriate response to that whopper.
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Given CNN’s general lack of seriousness, I’d say they and even the truly serious NY Times viewed Sanders as a “novelty candidate”. The “fringe part” just provided a framing for that.
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Translation: “For the record, sir, as you know, we never considered you a candidate we could make any money off of.”
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…but we do now.
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But Bernie…Tapper has his Very Serious Face on, how can you not believe him?? He spends hours in front of a mirror practicing it!
GOP water carrier Tapper saw Sanders merely as a way to damage Hillary, and nothing more.
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Well put. I must say that so did I!
Socialist nut job…but never a fringe candidate. Yeah Jake. We believe you!!! And all the other Villagers.
Bernie whining about his rather fawning media coverage is starting to sound like a Republican. Really.
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Jake is a Bernie Bro
I like Bernie and he is right about the corruption of big money owning Congress and the resulting flow of wealth to the top. He is also right about how other advanced countries are leaving us in the dust with regard to health care and education. Sadly, he thinks as President, he can make serious in roads into these problems. He can’t. It will take a couple of generations once Americans have lost so much they have nothing else to loose. What the country needs is a pragmatist that can incrementally erode the current system and someone that is tough and knows how to fight against the right. That is Hillary. She will be trashed by the GOP all the way, but she is a fighter. Bernie would be taken on by the GOP as a socialist, marxist, communist, etc. and the dumb Americans that don’t know the differnece will turn away from him. It is not fair, but it’s a fact. America is a long way off from voting for the good guy. We have only to look at Trump and his low IQ supporters to see first hand what America looks like.
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Just a suggestion, but slinging around moronic epithets like ¨socialist nut job¨, or ¨corporatist whore¨ tends to be singularly unproductive, and might be remembered when it comes time to rally your party´s voters at election time.
Eta: JGabriel points out that maybe you were characterizing CNN´s characterization of Sanders, and not making your own, when you said ¨socialist nut job¨. If that´s the case my apologies.
@Lacuna-Synecdoche
@dweb
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The mainstream media in the USA is almost totally owned by 6 giant multinational mega-corporations now. The very oligarchs who Bernie Sanders keeps saying can’t have it all are the owners of the mainstream media among other things, and they want it all. They want the USA to be an oligarchy with a government they have bought and paid for that does nothing but their bidding.
Honest Gil Fulbright Explains How The System Really Works.
.
It’s THIS system Bernie Sanders is committed to ending. Needless to say, those people who profit so handsomely from Washington Beltway establishment politics will do just about anything they think they can get away with to chop the legs out from under any politician threatening their ability to milk that old US taxpayer cash cow of theirs.
The mainstream just orders their well-paid political journalists to marginalize Sanders or … look for a new job.
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That video was a lot of fun…and frighteningly accurate as well.
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This 70 yr. old democrat thinks Sen. Sanders is a fringe candidate.
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“The Founders didn’t really want a country ‘by, for, and of’ the people – doesn’t make sense – no one would put that many prepositions in a sentence…that’s just bad writing.”
That one really struck my funny bone.
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If President Obama is, in some ways, a 21st C. African-American analogue to JFK, then I think Sanders may be the left’s Barry Goldwater - not as extreme, just as today’s left is not as extreme as today’s right wing, but someone unafraid to push the party and country leftward. And like Goldwater, I suspect Sanders - whether or not he wins the nomination - is creating a generation of activists that will achieve many of the changes he’s advocating within the next 2-3 decades rather than a couple of generations down the line.
After all Sanders support is strong not only in the under 30 demographic, but in the 30-45 year old demographic as well. In another 20 years, progressives / social democrats will dominate the under 65 demographic, and be the majority of Democratic voters.
I don’t know if Sanders or Clinton is the best candidate for this year or not. I’m leaning Sander’s way right now, but the primary in NY is still almost two months away, and I’ll wait until then to make a decision. But I’m pretty certain that the direction Sanders wants to lead us in will be the near-term future of the Democratic Party, whether or not he’s the one to lead us there.
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And both in NH (exit polls) and NV (entrance polls) Bernie’s strength has also been among working class and lower income folks – and I suspect especially among the group some folks have taken to calling “the precariat.”
Precarious work has been a growing portion of the labour force since globalization started taking off around the 1980s, but Standing says it really took off after 2008. And with the explosive increase in people who may be able to make ends meet today but have no long-term security, he told VICE that “we’ve seen a breakdown in the 20th-century income-distribution system, where profits and rental income are going to the plutocracy and elite. At the top, we’ve got a top one percent, who the Occupy movement portrayed. It’s [actually] much smaller than that. But below them, you’ve got a salariat, people who’ve got long-term employment security… But that group is shrinking. And the precariat, that’s growing instead of the old working class, consists of people who are being told they must put up with unstable, flexible labour.”
The precariat is similar to the blue-collar workers of yesteryear in that they earn less than what Standing calls the salariat, but they are unique in that workers in manufacturing jobs, for instance, tended to have job security, benefits, and often union protection (which played a large part in the presence of the first two). Today’s precariat usually has none of that, and spans income and education levels, from sub-minimum-wage illegal migrant work and low-wage retail or service work to highly educated but contract- and freelance-dependent industries (like, ahem, journalism). Members of the precariat also, unlike their working-class forebears, have to put in an alarming amount of work that no one considers “work” or compensates them for.
“Because they’re shifting in and out of short-term positions,” Standing said, “they have to apply [for jobs], they have to keep up their CV, they have to send around their CV, they have to apply and apply again, and when they do apply for jobs they’re often put through hoops of going through, you know, 15 procedures, like filling in aptitude tests, and going for interviews, and then going for more interviews.”
My guess is that many members of the “Precariat” may be more likely to be open to a sharper critique of the status quo, and less likely to be satisfied with a pitch based on slow, incremental change. It’s not hard to see how more of them might be attracted to Bernie than Hillary.
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I think we need to stop worrying about what the GOP is going to say about the Democratic candidate. Clinton or Sanders, whoever the candidate is, Republicans are going to call them a socialist, marxist, communist, etc. no matter what.
The only difference in how the GOP will portray them, between the two, is that Clinton is already damaged by two and half decades of such attacks on a national level and we know she can take it, versus Sanders not being damaged yet by GOP attacks on a national level and we don’t know for certain how well he’ll handle it (though I suspect 40 years in public office as a self-described socialist democrat in one position or another has already steeled him to such attacks on a smaller scale).
So basically it’s a wash. One is more damaged by previous Republican attacks than the other, while the other doesn’t have as much experience in handling such atttacks.
I may be wrong, but I think dweb was characterizing CNN’s attitude with those epithets, not expressing his/her own opinion - though I agree with the sentiment you’re expressing in general.