2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I'm getting the feeling that Hillary supporters live in a bubble and... [View all]Jack Rabbit
(45,984 posts)I, for one, feel that having to choose between those two is like being asked if I'd rather be shot or hanged. Well, maybe that isn't quite right. It might be more like a choice between be shot or hanged (Hillary) or boiled in oil (Trump or Cruz).
However, I do agree that the Democratic establishment is telling me that I have no right to complain, and that there exists a long position paper form Jon Cowan, founder of the Republican Lite think tank, Third Way, which claims that there's no evidence that I or other Sandernistas are complaining at all. That kind of garbage was old when the DLC was promoting Blair Democrats in 2003 (here is a critique of the piece written after the British elections of 2005).
I was also told I had no right to complain when President Obama didn't put the kabash on Bush's infringement of the Fourth Amendment. I resented that establishment-knows-best smugness from the Obama ha sempre regione crowd, too.
Well, I voted for Obama twice. The second time I will admit that had to hold my nose, but the first time I really thought we were coming to end to all things Reagan, Bush and Bush. All that Republican crap that the DLC thought was so great that the Democrats should just wave a big white flag and join it. Like Bill Clinton did. He was one of the best Republican presidents ever.
When I joined the army in order to sit our a recession, the year was 1976 and Gerald Ford was President. I was one of six college graduates in my basic training company. Those were tough times. When I got out Jimmy Carter was President and things really weren't much better. How bad was Carter? To too many people, he made a second rate matinee idol look like a good alternative. I held my nose and voted for Carter. I think I did the right thing. While I've never been a Carter revisionist, Reagan's supply-side economics ushered in the era bubble-to-bubble booms and busts, where America enjoyed an illusion of prosperity within one bubble or another until each one burst. I have never in my adult life known a truly stable, robust American economy, like the economy after World War II that my parents enjoyed. During that entire period that I worked for a living, the rich got richer and richer, the middle class got smaller and smaller, and the Democratic Party establishment became as corrupt as the Republicans have been since the Gilded Age.
Well, establishmentarians, after 35 years of that shit, it's payback time. And you know what they say about payback. If you don't, ask King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette about it. Yes, I'm angry.