JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalTruth is, Sanders has been in as long as Clinton.
In the House since 1990, as an Independent, yes. Who has caucused and voted with the Democrats pretty much the whole way since then. And in all the exceptions, it happens he was right!
Yes. Thank you.
Beautiful post. I wish it was enough to say the truth as it is. Maybe soon it will be! This story doesn't end in July, or November, or January. It's not about Bernie - and he wouldn't think so, I do believe - it's about justice and peace and rational development! Enough of this failed establishment creating a bloody mess with everywhere and everything they touch!
She could always prevent this by keeping her promise.
A California debate was agreed upon months ago!
Categorical hairsplitting.
"Closeted partisans" = people who wish they had a better fucking choice but usually take what they see as the lesser evil.
"True independent" = ideal category that corresponds to no one in reality, and if you think about it would be a creature both frightening and boring. A blank slate. An idiot who can't even name the parties. Etc.
The only definition that could be valid on empirical grounds is just what the term means in the electoral context: someone not registered with a party. Otherwise obviously no two of them will be exactly alike.
Point is, Sanders has an easier time picking up support beyond the automatic voting base for Democratic candidates, and motivating people who might not vote. Call them by whatever label you will.
Except it was a primary in name only.
Was it a secret that this poll does not actually decide anything?
Was any campaign bothering with appearances or calls or spending to contest this "primary"? Was there GOTV?
It's a stupid set up and stupid rules, to have a caucus that counts and then weeks later to hold a "primary" that does not. But that's how the WA party set it up long in advance, independently of anything else.
Any complaints belong with the WA Democratic Party.
Oh please, the drama.
With a bit of luck, this will bring down HRC BEFORE the nom (or it will be a weapon for Trump). But let's be real here, okay?
No doubt felonies were committed with the set up of an insecure private e-mail server. But this was just a small part of the process for committing the crimes against humanity that make up routine United States foreign policy, under any administration, Republican or Democrat.
She risked some "secrets" in the process of managing the imperialist machine, oh heavens! (If she goes down for it, it has a certain ironic value, given the way she was acting about Wikileaks.)
Almost every goddamn U.S. politician is minimum knee-deep in the process of worldwide mass murder. Bernie's only in it up to the knees and that's supposed to be a reason to prefer him. Clinton's swimming in an ocean of it. There's no need to get this morally huffed-up about an insecure server.
The way of economists is to let some lame ratings system do the thinking.
In which reality is abandoned for convenience of measurement, even if it is facade and nothing important is being measured. Rather than bother to define terms like "liberal" or figure out right and wrong, some self-inflated think-tank duo aggregated and weighted a set of congressional votes they decided would measure "liberal," and gave us a number. Hooray! We can pretend political ideology is no different than batting average. She ranks 11th in the league! And you seriously repeat that bullshit as if it could ever mean anything. The positivism, it burns!
The New York Times surely objects.
They really don't want their readership reduced to subscribers.
But the Catholic Church from pre-Luther days tweeted to agree. Don't want people reading too much stuff for themselves, now.
I think Twitter should institute a paywall, personally. She could be making money for these gems!
One could go back to any given historical point
to justify any statement made about which invented nationlet supposedly belongs on what patch of holy soil in the Balkans. (I speak as someone with family ties to one of the many constructs.) Especially in the Balkans, every nationalism dreams of borders that conflict with every other, based on the claims and myths of long-dead generations that are often valid in their historical context, but border on the absurd or worse as justifications for present-day action.
What has been the result? The best damned idea was to fashion a single multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, and it's tragic that the various revanchists revived the micronationalisms (with support from the same old Great Powers) and brought on civil war when the economic crisis hit.
But anyway, I'm not getting into the Kosovo '99 business here. It's complicated, even if I have a firm opinion.
The Rwandan and Cambodian cases are much more clear cut. Both involved long-running RISK-style interventions by the U.S. (and France in Rwanda) so it's ridiculous to say there should have been a magical switch to a more high-minded form of intervention that saved people's lives at the decisive point. (How about a confession of the U.S. role and exposure of the French role, with an end to arms supply and a demand that all killing cease, for a start? It might actually provide the moral standing if you then want to play shining knight who prevents further killing.)
But more importantly from the present day, here too, it's arbitrary to choose one past moment over another as the one to debate on the question of "intervene or not intervene," especially in retrospect.
Rather, a rational policymaking elite would have stopped the geopolitical wankery known as "realism" and sought a long term global vision with integrity for peace decades earlier.
The big global power could have and still can lead the way in fostering a vision for peace that adopts a perspective of decades, rather than one focused on gaining next week's advantage in some geopolitical tabletop game with real blood on the ground 6,000 miles away. It is on the U.S. as top dog to initiate an end to the global arms trade and military aid system, cease supporting "enemies of my enemy" (no matter how evil), lead negotiations to scale back all militaries, abjure secret policies and covert interventions of all kinds, open records, stop developing the next generation of kill machines (and selling the last generation to despots), etc. etc.
Hardly. The U.S. was intervening the whole time.
The U.S. had armed the RPF, which had been organized in Uganda under the U.S.-backed Museveni. Kagame was training at Ft. Leavenworth when he received word he'd be leading the RPF on the death of its former commander. The indisputably government-run genocide took place in the context of this government losing the civil war against RPF forces entering from Uganda. At that point the U.S. was not going to intervene directly, because this might have had the effect of suspending hostilities in a war that its side was about to win.
France meanwhile backed the genocidal government with arms and special forces, and used a UN resolution as the pretext to intervene, securing a safe zone for the retreat of government troops and genocidaire militias into then Zaire. In the context of what was (also) a proxy war between the imperialist powers of France and U.S., the myth of Western "inaction" is a bitter joke on the victims. But it has persisted because it buttresses the R2P ideology (a.k.a. Samantha Power doctrine) that has justified other interventions since. Such as in Libya.
What if Western powers had shown vision and principle? What if they had steered clear of any covert or overt interventions, and given no military support to any side in the region, in the decades before 1994? What if they had consistently encouraged peaceful development and created fair trade conditions with these countries? We can never know if the outcomes would have been different in any given case.
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