Clinton Loyalist Authoritarianism: Brad DeLong Threatens a Journalist and Economists. Who is Next? [View all]

[GRhodes]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/clinton-loyalist-autclinton-loyalist-authoritarianism-brad-delong-threatens.html

Clinton loyalists are now showing their true colors. And they are not pretty. Initially, it seemed better to leave Brad DeLong alone when he made a drive-by misfire at my Politico article on why many Sanders voters will never vote for Clinton. It’s a badge of honor of sorts when a Clinton hack, um, tribalist, gets so upset about a pro-Sanders story that he rushes in on the offensive.

However, DeLong’s piece was sorely deficient in intellectual integrity. He make it obvious he had not read the story by misattributing a reader comment to me and then compounding the error by riffing on the reader remark (Politico even provided the link so its audience could see the quote in context). What is telling is that diatribes against Sanders supporters are increasingly of the “shoot the messenger” or “shoot the voter” variety, as the case may be. The Clinton camp is responding with ever-escalating levels of abuse to evidence that Sanders supporters have serious, reasoned objections to the Clintons’ track record, Obama’s policies, which Hillary Clinton embraces, and her neoliberal economic stance. If you want to confirm the view of the Sanders bloc, that the Democratic party is not interested in their issues, this is precisely the way to do it.

But the Clinton loyalists are stooping even lower and are purging dissenters on the left. Mind you, this isn’t a new practice. As Jane Hamsher pointed out in 2009, the Obama Administration successfully most put left-leaning groups in a “veal pen,” by attacking individuals and organizations that stepped out of line by doing things like criticizing Blue Dog (pro-corporate, pro-bank) Democrats, or criticizing the payment of bonuses to AIG staffers. Those organizations that didn’t fall in lime and had institutional funding (most) would be disciplined by calls to important backers pressing them to end their financial support.

...And now, in a sort of piling on, Brad DeLong threatens Zach Carter, a Huffington Post journalist who has done some fine work in the financial services beat. This is the headline and first sentence of his post (emphasis original): The Huffington Post Has a Serious, Serious Quality Control Problem with Seth Abramson…Live from the Huffington Post’s self-made Gehenna of Lies: It has a serious quality control problem with Zach Carter too. But the time to talk about that won’t come until November…So we have a former Clinton Administration official calling a journalist a liar (with no supporting evidence) and threatening him with unnamed consequences in November. That is presumably on the assumption that Clinton wins, which is not at all a given. So what can we expect will happen then? That the transition team will issue a hit list of disfavored journalists and Carter is sure to be on it? That seems to be the drift of DeLong’s thuggish promise.