DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Son of Democratic Candidates

I didn't call Clem a racist. I said that all hell would break loose if a white man made that comment about a black man.

As far as the rest of your post goes......it's just a plethora of insults. I'm not going to trade them w/you. Think what you will, but I will not allow your insults to stop me from doing what I think is right.

You shouldn't feel insulted by the truth Vers.

By YOUR definition.... not mine.

I think Neanderthal/Cro Magnon. By your own admission, you associate that with racist, because a racist White person you knew used it to describe a Black person. Well guess what? I'm not that guy, although in one fell swoop, you've placed me in the same camp as he. After 15 years worth of posting history, you could make this assumption after one post.


You never even considered asking me for clarification or explanation. No benefit of the doubt, after years of posting equity that contradicts such an assumption. After years of us both watching people misreading/misinterpreting posts and needing half a page of explanation to clear things up, you were so clear about my motives as to presume to "set me down with a stern correction." No regard whatsoever am I allowed by you. And this, after you've repeatedly said in public posts and PM's that you respect me. After years of being held out by you as some model of behavior to follow, I'm getting preached to from on high.

This is not an example of respect, as far as I'm concerned.
It's not even basic common courtesy.

No... you imperiously assigned racism to my statement and judged me on your terms and your terms alone. In other words, your opinion is the only one that counts.

I've seen you do this repeatedly over the past several months in virtually every DT forum, so I guess it was only a matter of time until you got around to me. I never once called you on it, even though I found it to be a bit- unbecoming. Now that you've placed me in your crosshairs, I'll be as honest as I can be with you: if you find yourself knee-deep in beef with no fewer than a dozen different posters with as many different personalities from all walks of life... perhaps the one problem we all have in common can be easily seen the next time you need a shave.

I find this all unfortunate, but not totally unexpected. Dawg, you've been doing this A LOT lately.

And I know your first and most natural reaction is to immediately push back, but I will respectfully ask that you at least take a moment to consider what I've said. This goes beyond me making a post that didn't meet your standards. This is about a pattern of behavior I've seen for at least 4-6 months.

Thanks for your time and camaraderie for the past 15 years. It was really good- until it wasn't.

I hope you feel better about yourself after that comment. Have a nice life.

Yep.
Didn't even take a moment for thought or reflection.

It was nice before Vers; it will be nice postVers.

i mean good lord this was dank. so much smoke in one paragraph, i cant breathe and this wasnt even aimed at me lolololol

j/c:

Moving on from the drama queens...

In the original Democratic Candidates thread, Clem made a comment that went something like that he hasn't fully embraced any of the candidates. That triggered a thought that has been eating at me for awhile. Many Americans echoed the thought of "how could we end up w/Trump and Hillary as our choices in the last presidential election?"

I tried to start a conversation about why that might be. I received a couple of good replies, but then the discussion was derailed by more of the personal attack crap.

The two good answers I received dealt w/just how tough the office of the presidency is. I think it goes beyond that, though.

Here is the point I am trying to make. There is so much divisiveness in our mainstream and social media. Extreme takes rule the day. We are always pointing fingers at one another. "You are this..." "You are that..." Sides are taken. Hurtful arrows fly freely and safely across the internet. We are a country that is divided at least in the throes of the mainstream media and especially social media venues.

Where does that leave our politicians? They rely on their constituents/supporters to further their careers and understandably so.

That was long-winded, but I felt I had to paint the background scene in order to introduce the theme of the painting. Politicians have long been somewhat corrupt and certainly fickle. They don't act out of a sense of what is right or wrong. They act because they need votes. Thus, the narrow-minded thinking, hate, bias, and blame-gaming mindset of their supporters actually paint each candidate into tight corners. Of course, because so many folks focus on tearing down their opponents instead of championing their own causes, those policies fall under a very critical microscope and we continually focus on the negatives of each candidate and we don't ask for the candidates to champion what they can do to actually help our country.

I get that isn't a "Damn Son" post on this board, but I think it is pretty important. I know my post won't draw much attention other than ridicule from those who post a lot on this forum, but perhaps silent readers will get something out of it? I hope so, because it is my contention that we stop being so contentious towards one another and instead try to bridge the divide rather than furthering it w/cruel and insulting statements about those who don't agree w/us.

I agree to the extent that all the back and forth does nothing productive and just deteriorates the conversations. But you can not have one sided conversations and expect anything to come of it.

As for the name calling and insults you accuse (me) others of, I hardly ever think of you, especially in an aggressive way, until you drop my name in random comments condemning the things I believe. You pretty much do exactly what you are saying you dislike others doing... just saying.

And I think there are many types of politicians. Take Moscow Mitch for instance, he absolutely doesn't care what his constituents think but acts like it's his personal mission to do whatever it takes to keep the GOP in power and his donors happy. Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, jilts his constituents as well in favor of libertarian conservatism. Joe Manchin from neighboring WV, does what he thinks his constituents (majority republican) want all the time against his party's best interest. So I think lumping them into a group with a label of corrupt and fickle would need factful fleshing out to be anything than more than opinion, even though it's a popular opinion.

I can if I have multiple personalities.

That's more irony than one person can possibly digest on a Sunday.

"I think, therefore we are-"

Elegy for Bernie? Not quite yet: Sanders 2020 poses a conundrum Democrats must solve

ernie Sanders’ 2020 trajectory doesn’t make much sense. That is, it doesn’t make sense to those people who still believe they know “how things work” in American politics — the people who haven’t absorbed the central lesson of the last three or four years, which is that nobody knows how anything works.

According to the “I’ve got this figured out” crowd, Sanders was a semi-irrelevant figure in the 2020 race. He was too old and too weird. He had bitterly divided the Democratic Party in 2016 and had — in some obscure way — helped elect Donald Trump. His supporters were entirely bearded young white men in Brooklyn, Portland and Ann Arbor, not-so-subtly contaminated by racism, misogyny and various kinds of unexamined privilege. Both his personality and his policies were well outside the acceptable range, and would send “suburban moderates” and “Obama-Trump voters” — those objects of bottomless Democratic lust — screaming back into the toxic cult of You Know Who.

Bits of that may be true. Some of the rest of it is understandable. I won’t dispute that the obnoxious online behavior of a fair number of Sanders supporters has alienated many mainstream Democrats, especially older feminist women who were all-in for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In fact, in historical terms that feels like a fatal flaw running through the entire Bernie enterprise: No Democrat can possibly be elected president without the enthusiastic support of middle-class, middle-aged, college-educated white women, a group that would probably agree with Sanders on policy about 90 percent. (Yes, Bernie-stanners, there has been plenty of bile and vitriol coming back in the other direction. But I see no point in airing that out, do you?)

But a lot of that analysis is also flat-out false, including the overarching conclusion that Bernie Sanders is not an important factor in the 2020 race. He is older than either Joe Biden or Trump, but appears far more vigorous and alert than either of them. He remains second to Biden in most Democratic primary polls, neither surging nor declining much while other candidates go through their exceedingly minor boom-and-bust cycles. Remember when your friends were confidently aboard the Pete Buttigieg juggernaut, for five minutes? Remember when Kamala Harris set Biden on fire that one time, and looked like the tough-as-nails leader who would prosecute Donald Trump for everything? Those were good times. Well, neither of those people has cracked double figures in any major poll this month.

No, polls should never be treated as gospel — although after Labor Day, we can put aside the argument that it’s too early for polling to mean anything and that at this point in whatever-year Samwise Gamgee or Toad the Wet Sprocket was leading and you don’t see them on the dollar bill, do you? Anyway, the fact that Sanders appears to have around one-fifth of the Democratic vote locked down is not the important part. The important part is how he has done that and who those people are, and the fact that Democrats probably can’t win without Sanders’ issues and Sanders’ voters — and that if they try to ignore those issues and snow those voters, they will definitely pay the price sooner or later.

The important part is, honestly, really obvious part and we don’t say it enough: Bernie Sanders and his supporters have driven the Democratic Party to confront issues and policies and internal conflicts it had deliberately avoided for an entire generation. He may never become the Democratic nominee or the president — indeed, both of those outcomes remain unlikely. But his legacy will go beyond the inevitable renaming of the Burlington airport and whatever federal building exists in Vermont. He has dragged universal health insurance and a living wage and the crushing unfairness of student debt and the Green New Deal and the general rapaciousness of late-stage vulture capitalism into mainstream political discourse, against the vigorous pushback of nearly the entire elite class — and has made clear that most Americans agree with him, and not with them.

Furthermore, the always-dubious premise that Sanders’ supporters are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male has been exposed as a blatant falsehood. A recent Pew Research survey suggests, in fact, that Sanders has the most diverse supporter mix of any 2020 candidate: Slightly more than half are people of color and slightly more than half are women, which is a combination no other candidate can claim.

His supporters are not just disproportionately young (which we all understood) but disproportionately working-class and disproportionately non-college-educated. According to the Sanders campaign, the No. 1 occupation among his 750,000 or so individual donors is teacher. The No. 1 employer among his donors is Walmart, with Amazon, Target and UPS not far behind. (No other candidate comes within 300,000 of that donor number.) The early-campaign assumption that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were competing for the same left-progressive voters also appears untrue: In general terms, Warren dominates among affluent, educated, middle-aged white people who identify as “very liberal,” while Sanders dominates among left-leaning people of color, lower-income white folks and younger voters.

To say this again even more clearly, I’m not arguing that Sanders is likely to win the Democratic nomination. Whether his negatives are “perceived” or not, they exist. Despite his shambling campaign and erratic public statements, Joe Biden retains a significant lead in most primary polls, as well as in head-to-head, swing-state polls against Donald Trump. Which should definitely not be viewed as significant 14 months ahead of the general election — but the entire Democratic electorate is driven by Trump-centric fear and PTSD, and there’s not much you or I can do about that.

In terms of primary-season arithmetic, Biden’s advantage among African-American voters — a core Democratic constituency whose support is essential to victory, and who dominate the Democratic electorate in several crucial Southern states — is even more important. Bernie Sanders is in fact well-liked and well-respected in the black community, according to favorability surveys, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to win their votes in large numbers. (Salon’s Chauncey DeVega wrote an excellent primer on this question earlier this year.)

For either Sanders or Warren — who have different but aligned hypothetical paths to being the last non-Biden candidate in the race — that’s an extremely steep hill to climb. (It might be steeper for Sanders, because of the aforementioned “white women problem.”) A Bernie victory might require the primary-season equivalent of drawing an inside straight in one of Donald Trump’s casinos, although you’d have to say — in a bit of a 2016 flashback — that the prospect doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it did even a few weeks ago. Recent polls show a tightening three-way race overall, and suggest that Sanders may be leading Biden in New Hampshire (which he won convincingly in 2016).

So I’m not, like, “Watch out for Bernie, y’all,” because it’s not as if anyone even remotely associated with left-liberal politics doesn’t know he’s there. People are completely freaking obsessed with Bernie Sanders, sometimes to the level of batshit-craziness — people who love him, people who can’t stand him, people who are kind of whatever-neutral about him … except, wait, there are no such people.

I’m also not claiming that there’s an anti-Bernie conspiracy in the mainstream media, designed to drive down his poll numbers and crush his chances. It’s unquestionably true that Sanders’ 2020 campaign has been subjected to an almost hilarious series of slights, oversights and distortions: Polls that list him third when he finished second, headlines that omit his name and focus on candidates with far less popularity, news stories and analyses and panel discussions that lean hard into the argument that he is fading or failing or no longer relevant.

None of that requires a conspiracy theory, because the anti-Sanders bias in the media is baked into the pie, and has a more or less “innocent” explanation. There was no need for a nefarious conference call in which the corporate overlords at CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times agreed to order their minions to take out the dangerous socialist.

First of all, many people in the mainstream media just don’t like Bernie Sanders, for personal, professional and political reasons. He is undeniably a gruff, irascible person who doesn’t kiss up to reporters in off-the-record conversations, and who generally views the large media corporations as his adversaries. You can argue that’s not good strategy, and that it has permanently alienated a significant number of mainstream liberals who might otherwise be willing to consider him. But I don’t think you can argue that Bernie’s view of the media is categorically false.

Sanders also represents a wide range of policy positions that remain outside what many or most commentators and reporters view as responsible, mainstream politics — despite mounting evidence that actual voters do not share that view. It’s funny how the head-to-head polls that show Biden defeating Trump are seen as evidence of electability, while similar polls that show Sanders defeating Trump are seen as something else — snowflake-driven flukes that fail to anticipate how badly the Trump war machine will eviscerate the socialist, or whatever. (Whereas bumbling, grasping, terminally vague Joe Biden is somehow considered a fearsome opponent.)

More to the point, mainstream journalists are like magpies, easily distracted by shiny objects and ever-eager to disobey Joan Didion’s famous dictum to “observe the observable.” Bernie Sanders wasn’t supposed to be the story of 2020: This was the Year of the Woman or the Year of Generational Change or the Year of Getting Back to Normal or the Year of Some Other Narrative That Explains Everything. At various moments, Buttigieg and Harris and Biden and Beto O’Rourke and whoever the hell else — there have been longing glances cast at Howard Schultz and Amy Klobuchar and John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock — have appeared to supply “news hooks” for such narratives.

In that context, it was easy to sideline Sanders and his supposed “bros” to the margins, not quite out of malice — although, OK, there was some of that — but because, ha ha, we did “socialism is back” already and that didn’t happen, so that’s boring and let’s move on. Laziness and Trump-trauma took over and a whole lot of people in the political and media class neglected to observe the observable facts.

Those facts are that Bernie Sanders has built and nourished an important, likely transformative, political movement. He stands for critically important policies that the Democratic Party must engage, even though it conspicuously doesn’t want to. He represents a rising progressive generation that it desperately needs — but that also threatens the party’s governing assumptions and institutions on a fundamental level. Democrats almost certainly won’t nominate him, but they can’t possibly win without him. Leading Democrats and their supporters in the media — guardians of a regular-order politics that no longer exists — keep hoping that if they close their eyes Bernie Sanders will go away. It’s not working.


https://www.salon.com/2019/08/25/elegy-f...ats-must-solve/

Bernie 2020!

Because Mayor Pete is too sane and logical to ever be elected.

If Pete wins the nomination, I'm voting for him. You going to do the same if Bernie wins?

Not that I would be happy about it, but yes. I can't watch a lying lunatic run this nation for another four years without doing whatever is within my power to help stop him.

If The Dems select someone like Bernie, it’s likely we get another four years of this, I’m afraid.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced Wednesday that she is quitting the 2020 Democrat presidential primary after failing to qualify for a third debate in September.

No surprise.

She isn't the first; she won't be the last.
KGilly needs to place her efforts where it will actually help her crew. Running for POTUS isn't that.

She needs to solidify her current position in the Senate, and lock down her role within the Powerflow.

Dems live to 'fall in love.'
Pubs live by 'falling in line.'

The moment Dems learn to play the game like Pubbies have, they'll sweep elections for the next 30-50 years.

For the foreseeable future, Pubbies have nothing to fear, because pragmatism isn't hardwired into Dems' DNA. The instant that Dems start playing The Game as Pubbies have played it for the past 50 years- raw numbers, public sentient, and common sense will compel the public to take up brooms and dustpans.

If Dems ever tap someone who thinks like me to help them run their game, it's "checkmate- in three moves."

This is the part I really don't get. Look at Kentucky, they are in horrible shape,, horrible. But they keep staying red.. I don't get it. Their own representative let them flounder and they keep voting for them.. Look at Mississippi and Louisanna? Same thing.. And someone please explain Florida to me.

If you go to places like the Villages or other retirement (over 55) type communities where people live (partially) on Social Security and they receive the benefits of Medicare, they vote republican..

If you listen to Mitch McConnell he is constantly talking about how we need to cut those programs. Programs I might add are paid for by us and our employers and has to direct effect on the Debt.

I just don't get it.. Are they that worried about Guns and Abortion?

I am not voting for any of the great great grandpas.

Bernie is in training to challenge President Trump:

https://twitter.com/w_terrence/status/1166823527229661184/video/1

I feel the exact same way. The Yutes, ( Joe Pesci/My Cousin Vinny reference ) are screaming the loudest, but in the end it seems Biden is walking away with it to this point. Hopefully some moderation will prevail to pull in the voters needed to win the election.

My reasoning is that even if a guy like Bernie gets elected, by the time all is said and done, most know that his most liberal policies will never get through the senate without being torn to pieces or getting torn apart via the pen.

Even four years of nothing would be an improvement.

I'd take a Bernie who can't hit a bag over a draft dodging coward that played 'bad feet'. But you guys on the right can back the coward all you want.

Biden's eye appears to fill with blood during climate change town hall
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-eye-blood-during-town-hall-event

great interview

He makes far too much sense and is far too intelligent to ever be elected president.

I’m still holding out hope my fellow liberals wise up to mayor Pete and warren.

I'm liking Warren and Bernie about the same. Pete is my third choice followed by a group of Ryan, Steyer, and Harris. Biden gets my vote if he's the nominee, but I'm hoping one of my top three win the nomination.

I don't mind Pete's more centrist stance on most things mostly because I think he is one of the smartest running. Close between him and Liz for that title.

Mayor Pete Has a Race Problem

Buttigieg has even less black support than the president he calls a racist.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mayor-pete-has-a-race-problem-11564441144

We’ve already discussed his issue months ago, as in July when it dropped.

Please keep up

Funny thing. This is one of the sources you accuse of being fake news unless and until it suits your purpose.

Mayor Pete’s Evangelical Brother-In-Law Deconstructs Buttigieg’s ‘Absurd And Outlandish’ Abortion Position

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s evangelical brother-in-law, Pastor Ryan Glezman, appeared on Tuesday night’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to discuss the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate’s use of Scripture to justify third-trimester abortions.

Glezman had earlier called on his brother-in-law to “repent” for claiming that the Bible teaches that life begins when an infant takes it first breath.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/10/pete-buttigieg-ryan-glezman-abortion/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/pete-buttigieg-brother-in-law-tucker-carlson-abortion-bible

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/...-abortion-views

Wow! Where are you when Trump is actually doing real damage? You know, like rolling back the clean air and clean water acts?

Imagine that. An evangelical attacking a gay person. Whoda thunk it?

You miss the point.

No Black support,
No Evangelical support,
No Hispanic support,
No Chance to win anything.

I think you had better focus on Warren.
She has some pluses.

Like I said, he's too smart. I mean look at the Republicans. They had a field of almost 20 candidates to choose from in 2016. Some very intelligent people that actually followed the parties platform. Instead of nominating a qualified person to be president that had at least an ounce of moral fiber, they nominated Trump.

I expect the Democrats to follow a similar path and nominate someone whose platform won't sell to middle America.

Both parties seem to favor stupidity over substance.

Too Smart?

Not smart enough to line up Blacks, Hispanics and Evangelicals to support him.

He is blowing it.

All of Hollywood's money can't even save him.