White fragility (lot of this around here recently!):

[Warren DeMontague]

84. Primaries are always ugly here, as you know.

Hell, I take a few days off of DU and I'm like "Hey, Hillary's probably going to be the nominee, the GOP is a train wreck in slow-motion, she consistently polls better than all of them as well as 'unnamed republican'"-- I'm a happy monkey.

Then I come back here and it's, like... ugh.

I guess the long and the short of it is, I don't let DU- or I try not to- affect how I view or approach the real-world candidates. (After the stuff he said recently, Webb is waaaaaaaaaaay far down my list, too) Sanders no doubt wanted to be accessible, and it backfired. He's not the first politician to make that mistake; hell, JFK insisted upon riding in a convertible, didn't he? But I don't think blaming Sanders- or even his supporters- is terribly fair based upon DU nastiness, any more than I'm holding Hillary Clinton personally responsible for the crap some of her more obnoxious boosters- and hell yes, they're here- say on DU.

I can't speak to what went down with bravenak- whom I like, I think she's one of the more lively, sharp, and witty contributors here, although I also don't believe ANYONE gets 4 hides in one day without going at least a bit off track- but I do know that Sanders supporters have had all manner of ridiculous crap thrown at them in recent months, most egregious being this stuff about racism or being white elitists or not caring about the "subaltern" or whatever the flavor of gibberish is, this week. And yeah, there's nasty stuff thrown at Hillary and her people, too- but IF I was going to make those sorts of primary preference calls based upon the shit that goes down on DU (I don't) I would already be sporting a Sanders bumper sticker, it's been that bad. It is absurd to somehow suggest, again, that the most left-leaning candidate AND his supporters are somehow closeted white supremacists and elitists and the rest of the insinuated nastiness I've seen put out there. It's possible that someone like bravenak got "push-back", as you put it, because Sanders people have had months of dealing with stuff like OPs implying he is somehow, bizarrely, responsible for stuff like a horribly racist picture taken by some Chicago cops years ago and as such are a bit fed up with it.



That DU would skew fairly strongly for Sanders shouldnt be a surprise, but some people do seem excessively put out by that mere fact. I accept that it's a function of where much of this place sits, ideologically, even as I accept that in national primary terms he's a long-shot, at best.

I do wish primary time wasn't such an ugly shitshow around here, but I suppose ever was it thus, at least in years when we don't have an incumbent President up for reelection.