LWolf
LWolf's JournalWhy I don't:
If I campaign for, and vote for, a candidate with the right policies, then I've got a win/or at least hold the line situation. If I win, then I've got a politician who is actually going to fight for the right policies. If I lose, then my party is the opposition, and will mount some sort of opposition to the enemy.
If I elect someone with the wrong policies because she can win, I've surrendered before we ever made it to the front lines. I've got at least a whole term, and probably longer, of my party feeling like they have to support the wrong policies. There's no opposition to the wrong policies. There are policy shifts within my own party and the nation that move both further away, that move me further to the fringe, or throw me completely under the bus, and I'm supposed to shut up and take it out of party loyalty. Electing someone with the wrong policies from my own party doesn't hold any line. It's a lose/lose.
It's throwing my party, my country, and the 99% under the bus.
Reading through this thread again leaves me with one question.
I agree with many in this thread that the primary poses a bigger challenge for Bernie than the GE.
Since that's the case, why would Democrats who have a chance to nominate a winner who is better on every single issue than HRC, who have a chance to nominate someone who would actually work and fight to lead the country out of her neo-liberal degradation, nominate a neo-liberal instead?
Why wouldn't Democrats who align more closely with Sanders on issues not throw him their support?
The answer to that question is one I can't, while trying to honor the TOS, answer.
Of course not.
There is a massive chasm between opposing someone politically and laughing about, taking pleasure in, the death of that person.
There's a big difference even between deciding that the person should be taken down, taken out of power, and laughing gleefully about that person's death.
One is reason. The other is psychopathy: finding joy in killing people.
As for Sanders and Gaddafi? I don't find him having much to say about Gaddafi at all, except in reference to this:
The total includes at least $3.2 billion in loans that the Fed was forced to make public today in addition to earlier revelations under a Sanders provision in the Wall Street reform law.
Sanders also asked why the Libyan-owned bank and two of its branches in New York, N.Y., were exempted from sanctions that the United States this month slapped on other Libyan businesses to pressure Col. Moammar Gadhafis government.
It is incomprehensible to me that while creditworthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit to a bank that is substantially owned by the Central Bank of Libya, Sanders said.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/release-why-did-the-fed-bail-out-the-bank-of-libya
More about the bailout he's referring to:
So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that, just a week or so after Obamas executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue operating without sanction.
I came across the curious case of the Arab Banking Corporation, better known as ABC, while researching a story about the results of the audit of the Federal Reserve. That story, which will be coming out in Rolling Stone in two weeks, will examine in detail some of the many lunacies uncovered by Senate investigators amid the recently-released list of bailout and emergency aid recipients a list that includes many extremely shocking names, from foreign industrial competitors to hedge funds in tax-haven nations to various Wall Street figures of note (and some of their relatives). You will want to see this amazing list when it comes out, so please make sure to check the newsstands in two weeks time.
This list became public as a result of an amendment added to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that was sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The amendment forced the Federal Reserve to open its books for the first time and make public the names of those individuals and corporations who received emergency loans and bailout monies during the roughly two year period between the crash of 2008 and the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-is-the-fed-bailing-out-qaddafi-20110401#ixzz3ayfjOksj
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
If policy is not the first priority of politics,
I neither need nor want anything to do with politics.
The reason why the political game smacks of deception and manipulation is because it IS all about deception and manipulation. I'm not easily deceived, and I respond to attempts at manipulation with a large push BACK...not with acceptance, compliance, or tolerance.
A worthy goal might be to work to put politics into the correct arena...the policy arena.
A statement to that effect might be that Democrats believe in people and finding a way to bring social and economic justice for all, whereas Republicans believe in a belligerent God, unrestricted aggression and weapons to back up their bullying, and unrestricted greed. God, Guns, and Greed.
If only that statement were true. It's not. The power center of the Democratic Party is all about unrestricted capitalism/greed creating social and economic injustices in the form of neoliberalism.
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Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 46,179