22 thoughts on “Elections: Where Hope Goes to DIe – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
task-attention.png
Comments are published at the sole discretion of the owner.
 

  1. All is lost only if Sanders puts personal virtue ahead of the national interest.

    One of the problem with elderly politicians is that sometimes old people lose it mentally. Not always: Sanders is still sharp as a tack. But sometimes: Biden is becoming a confused old man. It showed up again just today in that altercation he had with a factory worker in Michigan.

    Sanders still has one more chance. He’s about to have a debate with Biden; he can take the high road, or he can go for the jugular. Have a dignified debate and leave Biden as the front runner, or show Biden up as a doddering old fool — in the nicest possible way of course.

    It comes down to whether Sanders wants to be the good guy — and let either Biden or Trump become our next president — or choose the alternative.

    I don’t care about Sanders’ soul; I’d like to see him tear Biden a new one, take the nomination, and at a minimum, force Trump to agree to a pacific policy in the Middle East as the price of reelection. Unfortunately, I suspect Sanders may prefer to be the good man here.

    It’s too bad; nice guys finish last — and him losing won’t help the rest of us.

  2. Richard.

    You won’t vote for Biden even if the November election between him and Trump is close?

    My guy quit, and now I support Biden (and would have supported Bernie) to beat Trump.

    You come across as a little petulant.

    1. @ Lemontree: THe difference between us is that you supported a candidate who was a corporate shill and I don’t. So of course it’s easy for you to switch from BUttigieg to Biden since Biden is cut from the same cloth. Bernie isn’t, which is why I support him.

      You come across as a little petulant.

      I could give a shit.

  3. @Lemontree
    Capitalism is about “winning”
    Democracy should be about “social justice”
    Social Justice lost to Wall Street [R&D]

  4. Sanders was way too dogmatic for the American majority, so this is no surprise at all. Now the Democrats are stuck with a doddering senile fool. In 4 years Warren will beat Trump. She should have gotten the nomination this time too. (At least in 4 years she will not have these two old guys in her way anymore.)

  5. @Elisabeth
    Your anger is getting to you. Age has nothing to do with electability of Bernie Sanders.
    Over 4 yours another chance to beat Trump???
    Please ….

  6. Oui, I said nothing about his age in relation to his electability: I mentioned dogmatism. What I said about 4 years from now is simply that both Biden and Sanders will not run due to their age.

  7. 4 more Trump years. – guaranteed, by then bye bye America, it was nice knowing you, you may have the greatest Armada ever for what , to protect the Bezos and Apple, yahoo.
    Yet another election bought for and by money, people have no say, no health, no wealth, no way.
    Yet another match up of white old men.
    America is heading backward ruled by money and religion, Vatican type, Israel type. useless type.
    The only scary thing in Sanders is his defect of saying outloud the TRUTH. America doesn’t want to hear truths.
    America want to stay in a legal marijuana induced fog, so the poor stay poor and go broke buying a couple of shares whilst the Gates buy a couple of countries. While good old catholic Ireland is legalizing abortion America wants its women bare feet pregnant and in the kitchen,
    Biden has zero hope in hell of winning. Even California may go red

  8. Thank you for this commiseration about Sanders loss. He worked so hard!!

    Ironic that the panic over coronavirus and Sanders coincided. The comments I read, many simply anti-Sanders period. He’s not a Democrat! Socialist! People have been throughly drained by Trump and want comfort and normalcy,; they don’t want to be alarmed everyday. (The MSM will find a way.) Thus we have the resurrection of Biden. Good luck with that. I don’t think Biden is up to the job mentally, if he can win. He has perked up by his “success”, has a great smile and is a nice guy. We are not going where we need to go with him if he wins. IF.
    Bernie you only see scowling and finger pointing in the media.
    I put success in quotes because I think the Biden success was engineered by the Democratic “powers that be” (Kerry so disappointed the other day with his red-baiting of Sanders) the MSM punditry. The “moderates” could not deal with progressive movement even though we are urgent for one.

    What with all the fear mongering the votes swung to Biden like a virus spreading.

    Warren did herself in. Warren’s stubborn attack while complaining of being attacked was off track. Against Sanders , it was about some silly thing he says he did not say, she says he did, about women etc etc. obviously playing to women’s resentment. So for show she was burning her bridge to Sanders.Yes it could have been repaired; I wished for that.But her ineptness started with her Pocohantas response, showing toughness where it’s silly. She was great on the stump it seemed, with some, especially educated women but she did not resonate broadly. She’s a great Senator and she would make a better president than Biden. It may be just too hard to run. I’d like to think we can elect a woman president.Is she bitter now?

    But I am woe now too, maybe bitter. Democrats owe a debt of gratitude to Sanders. He is being swept aside like unwanted trash. I have grown increasingly admiring of him this last round too. He’s amazing. I am even further left than I was.

    About Israel… I’m giving up. It’s hopeless.

  9. Mr. Richard
    i read you’re heartbroken and all, YET , you are also breaking me. VOTING IS NOT A CHOICE, I WAS INDOCTRINATED THAT VOTING WAS AN “OBLIGATION” , it does not matter what may BE matters WHAT YOU DO. if you scream loud enough maybe you may convince those in THE STATES THAT DO MATTER to vote, THEN THEY WILL BRING THE RESULT. if you give up you start the domino effect. not only must you vote you must lead by example. you want change, change starts with the first step, which is you voting.
    biden might suck to high heaven and back, no disagreement here, but no matter how much he sucks he’ll never suck as much as the current idiot. so you want to undo this, then lead,
    do not hide behind the electoral chamber, do not waste your vote/voice.

    1. @ nessim dayan: First I didn’t say I wasn’t going to vote. I will vote. But I will not vote for Biden.

      I voted for McGovern: loved him but he lost. I didn’t vote for Carter (voted instead for Barry Commoner), but he disappointed politically. For Mondale, he lost and disappointed. For Clinton, won and was disappointed. For Kerry, he lost and I was disappointed. For Gore, he lost and I was disappointed. For Obama: initially enthusiastic, but afterward disappointed. The ones I loved, lost. The ones who won, disappointed. I’m done with that.

  10. One more comment on Sanders and Warren and then I will not mention this again: I think it was a mistake for Sanders to insist on running again after the mess in 2016. Clinton stepped down, and Sanders should have too, giving Warren a real shot. She wasn’t part of that mess, but a new, positive force who would have unified progressives of all ages and kinds. After his heart attack, had he given over the reins to her, all of this would have ended very differently. Biden is an incredibly weak candidate, who inspires no-one and is easy prey for Trump type bullying. I think there is a very real chance that Trump will win again.

  11. Something I think needs to be stressed, and unfortunately it never is, is that elections are not the be all and end all of making change in America. A lot of older Democrats like to harp on about the civil rights movement, but forget that it was demonized in its day by the vast majority of Americans, spied on by the intelligence community and repressed in the seventies and eighties by the same politicians who wax poetic about it now. What they implicitly admit, even if accidentally, is that change comes from the grassroots and away from political institutions.

    Think about what the goals of most Americans are. Single payer health care, cancelling massive student loan debt, ending useless wars, affordable housing. Bernie’s supporters gave his campaign a huge war chest in the tens, possibly even hundreds, of millions of dollars. If they were to give even a quarter of that amount of money to organizations that aren’t beholden to the establishment and are willing to use unauthorized and potentially even illegal actions to advance their cause, it would be a much more effective use of resources that will actually force change.

    People outside of politics have the right idea. Students just flat out refusing to pay their student loan debts in mass will trigger an economic collapse and either force a brutal repression, leading to an admission by the establishment that we truly live in a fascist police state where elections mean nothing anyway, or force institutions to cancel the debt in order to re-spur the economy.

    Those who want single payer should expose the horrible ways that private health insurance denies treatment and compare it to the lifestyles of their CEO’s who make tens of millions each year off of denying care to those who need it. If the heads of AETNA or Blue Cross or United Healthcare had the universal name recognition of the Kardashians, it would help to place faces to important issues and make private health insurance companies politically toxic enough, like big tobacco, to push through medicare for all with little powerful opposition.

    In terms of endless wars, most Americans want to end them, but they aren’t as active as the anti-war movement in the 60’s against the invasion of Vietnam. That’s evident in the establishment’s attempts to stop Trump from pulling troops out of Afghanistan. I’ll link to the article below, but this passage exemplifies the argument that the neo liberals and war hawks are going to use as the Taliban agreement starts to take shape:

    “The American presence in Afghanistan is not large. It is not expensive. It is no longer costing hundreds or even dozens of casualties each year (just 22 were killed there in 2019, compared to nearly 500 in 2010). There is no mass anti-war movement. The American people are not sick of the war: They are hardly even paying attention to it. Just two weeks ago Secretary of Defense Mark Esper claimed that “[n]obody right now is calling for the complete removal of U.S. and coalition forces” from Afghanistan. No one, that is, except the Taliban—and now the Trump administration has joined them.”

    https://www.lawfareblog.com/bad-deal-afghanistan

    All of this is horrendous logic, but it’s the argument of the establishment. Because not enough troops are dying and it’s supposedly (but not really) not that costly and because there’s no open anti war movement, we shouldn’t stop occupying Afghanistan. Americans are too passive in their opposition to these wars. If they want to force them to end, then they have to become more active and willing to take on both Republicans and Democrats in demanding that the troops come home.

    When we have costly endeavors like this, the establishment has no valid right to complain about the cost of single payer or any other government program the public demands. In exit poll after exit poll this election season, a majority (sometimes as high as 70% or 80%) of Democrats want the things that Bernie and his campaign have fought for, even in states Biden won. Bernie may not be the right commander to lead the charge (he’s too pacifist and doesn’t have the fighter spirit one needs to win a decisive blow against someone as propped up as Biden), but that doesn’t mean his supporters should stop fighting when he loses. They just need to take to the streets and make it so the system can’t function until it bends the knee. At the end of the day, the people have all the power. They just have to build the confidence to use it.

  12. Why do progressive Americans always go on about single payer healthcare as if that is the only thing that works?!! In Europe only the UK and Spain have such systems and they are certainly not the most cost effective or good at reducing waiting lists. All other European countries with universal healthcare have strictly regulated systems that are a combination of a public option and private insurance. (In the Netherlands there is not even a public option, yet the system is supposedly very cost effective and functional according to international comparisons.) Yet Warren was totally demonized when she backed off of single payer in favor of such a system.

    Single payer is NOT going to be implemented in the US. Ever. Get over it and choose (like Warren) one of the many other options that work just as well, and are achievable. Inform yourself.

  13. No. The difference between us, is that I said that I would support a Socialist in order to defeat Trump, and you said that you would not support a ‘corporate shill’ in order to defeat Trump.

    A big difference.

    I’m moving on.

    1. @ Lemontree: No. You’re disingenuous because you know you won’t have to vote for the Democratic Socialist. So it’s easy for you to claim you will do something you will not have to do, and would never do even if Bernie was the candidate. I am honest. You are not.

  14. You called the Joint List the “Palestinian Joint List”. Don’t you realize that you are a hypocrite ? You yourself criticize Israeli Jews for not being inclusive of Arab Israelis but then you yourself also exclude the Arab Israeli party from Israel by calling it Palestinian . What a hypocrite and moron you are Richard

    1. @ Sam: Israeli Palestinians do not call themselves “Arab” and do not want to be called “Arab.” So stop being racist and calling them by terms used by Bibi and his Judeo-fascists.

      I used the term “Palestinian Joint List” because in the context of the sentence in which I used it, I was referring to the fact that Benny Gantz faced fierce opposition to including the Joint List in his ruling coalition. Why did he face such resistance? Because the Joint List is Israeli Jewish? Or because it is Palestinian? You know the answer. Use of the term “Palestinian” in that context was meant to point out the reason the Party was being shunned in forming the coalition.

      Nor is there anything wrong with pointing out that the Joint List and the Israeli minority population it represents is Palestinian. Palestinians live in Israel. You can call them Israeli Palestinians or whatever you wish. But they are Palestinian and related to those Palestinians living outside the Green Line in that many of the latter are directly descended from Israeli Palestinians expelled during Nakba.

      What a…moron you are

      I only approved this comment because the first part was reasonable. But your last sentence has earned you an outright ban for violating the comment rules, which you clearly didn’t bother to read despite the explicit warning to do so before commenting.

  15. Thank you Oui. This sums it up for me : “Her loss is very personal, especially for older women. It gins up all those feelings we have that, in the end, we are viewed as inadequate. No wonder so many of us are mad as hell.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *