Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Spare me the outrage from the press, when the press is the entity that helped create this mess.
All this could have been avoided some 6 years ago if these clowns in the press did their goddamn jobs. Trump had a history of corruption going back decades. Between sexual assault cases, crooked business dealings,connections to the Russians as well as connections to the mafia, and everything in between. Rarely any of that came to light or was taken as seriously as it should have been. It was one free pass after another. They gave him endless air time because they loved those sweet, sweet ad-dollars. They considered him a joke candidate and never dove deep into his past finances or connections.
…And then it happened. He was actually elected. And that’s when it became serious.
Fuck every last one of these journalists who just sat back, let him slide, and just let it happened. Now they have the gall to talk about authoritarian-this, and fascism-that.
Yep. They did next to nothing to really vet him in any way. And so many had a vendetta against the Clintons that they just could not help but try to get their digs in on Hillary and Bill as much as possible, too.
Yup. Republicans had been building a case against Hillary for some 2 decades. So much so, in fact, that even seasoned Democrats were falling for those attacks against her were ingrained into our pop culture.
Such a shame because she would have made a perfect president. She was a pitbull that was willing to call Republicans on their shit.
The same seasoned Democrats that stacked the primaries in her favor? The 2016 election was the first time I had a real voice in an election and it felt like it was just vacuumed away. The candidate who seemed the most appropriate and the most qualified got swept under the rug in favor of the shit-throwers. She wasn’t perfect, she was a better terrible than Trump.
In 2020 the Democrats scrambled for a viable candidate and somehow Joe Biden was the best they could give us, and it was an absolute gamble. His victory in the 2020 election was dangerously overstated and the danger of a repeat of 2016 in 2024 was ignored.
Bernie Sanders lost the primary by 3 million votes.
Get your goddamn stories straight because I’m absolutely sick and tired of hearing Bernie bot dipshits who continue this myth that the primaries were somehow stolen from him… And yet he lost one primary after another after another after another. Somehow losing a primary equates to the DNC holding him back.
He made the mistake of counting on the lazy youth and the apathetic Left of this country and he got exactly what he had coming to him. I was happy to vote for him in the primary and I wanted him to win, but I knew from the get-go that counting on the youth vote in the US is a fool’s game. As usual, that base never materialized, but somehow we still have dipshits who want to claim that the DNC somehow “stacked” the primaries against him. And of course that led to many of them conveniently staying home on election day for the general election in November.
In my state, Hillary got 35% of the primary votes as opposed to Sanders getting around 52% (and a protest candidate getting most of the difference). As a consequence, she only got one more delegate from the state than Sanders (19 delegates vs Sanders 18), because all 8 unpledged delegates went to Clinton.
Having unpledged delegates declaring support for Clinton before most of the primaries even happened also put a damper on any chance Sanders had because it established him as being in a losing position before votes were even cast, which demoralizes his voters and helps edge undecided voters towards not supporting the apparent loser.
During the 2020 primaries there was an organization set up by former Obama and Clinton campaign staffers for the purpose of creating voting software to be used at polling stations during the primaries. It supposedly failed multiple times and led to victories that couldn’t be properly validated. However, anyone familiar with the primaries knows that the first few states are the most important because they determine the viability of candidates. Is it much of a surprise that Buttigieg who won Iowa, has a Cabinet position? You can call it a myth, but technically primary elections aren’t protected the same way general elections are since they decide a party’s candidate instead of the candidate who wins office.
Funnily enough, I would have voted for Yang in the 2020 election, but it’s not about who is a reasonable candidate. It’s all about those connections baby. Our country is run not by the most reasonable, but the most corrupt. Our most important election process is a game of prisoner’s dilemma.
At best you’re just a dipship who doesn’t know how things work and have been blinded by he-said/she-said right-wing propaganda spread by fake liberal sources that flooded the internet 7 years ago. At worst, you’re just one of many Russian trolls who actively were part of the Russian misinformation campaigns.
I was convinced she’d be a neoliberal and would make grand bargains with the GOP like Bill did. Those grand bargains included “welfare reforms” like kicking grandmas out of public housing when their grandkids would deal drugs in their project (like grandmas have the power to control their grown-ass grandchildren). The impacts of Clinton’s actions reached FAR beyond his presidency - I was fighting such evictions at Legal Aid during the second term of Bush Jr., evictions that were the result of Clinton’s bargain with the devil.
Though you’re right, most of the right’s anti-Bill Clinton bumper stickers during his 2 terms were actually shots at Hillary Clinton.
I’d bring back the Bill Clinton days in a heartbeat.
ALL politics is about compromise. Anyone that thinks anything can get accomplished in Washington without compromise doesn’t understand how our government works. Bill made the right choices the majority of the time and our country and the economy was booming because of it.
Compromises that make grandmas homeless are bad compromises. Clinton got away with it because nobody gives a shit about the projects, poor people don’t vote, and because black folk have been saying the system is rigged for far longer than literally anyone else. D’s don’t gain credibility with their ostensible base by stabbing them in the back.
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Okay buddy. Generational poverty doesn’t have any impact on subculture, it’s all about picking yourself up by your bootstraps even if you don’t know what fucking bootstraps are or where to find them. You’re right. Fuck them all, they should die for their moral failing of generational poverty and a worldview informed by the same. Everyone should experience poverty like the middle class does, a short term setback while getting an education.
Being poor doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. Not at all, actually, so stop using the excuse that because someone is poor that they will fall into a crowd that deals drugs. How convenient. Trashy people do that and they sure as fuck had no business being essentially funded by tax payer money. Fuck them and anyone who apologizes for those pieces of garbage.
Probably right, it’s unfortunate the people that ran her campaign were idiots and she listened to them.
It was Hillary Clinton that elevated trump as a pied piper, the media discovered an advertising and viewer gold mine. Had her hubris not gotten involved he may have never become president
It was the DNC that sunk Bernie - the players in the game are a problem but so is the rules, the umpires and basically everything related to how our current political and economic systems are implemented.
“journalists”. That’s awful generous of you
Stenographers?
I remember Colbert’s session at the WH Correspondents Dinner and how the “liberal media” kept saying no one found it funny, it bombed, etc…not realizing that it was indeed funny to those not in the room. But making the “liberal media” the butt of the joke in some hard and hilarious truth-telling was more than they could bear, apparently, even if Colbert is part of the same media empire…
Co-conspirators. Is that better?
The press shit on trump like no tomorrow. It didn’t stick because they’d spent years and years eroding their own legitimacy, not because they didn’t air bad things about Trump.
Not a chance did they ever report on him in the seriousness that they should have. He was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes and the amount of investigative reportering they did was on par to someone running for city counsel.
He was on trial for sexual assault, and they gave that the same seriousness as the BS accusation against Biden who was wrongly accused to being touchy-feely. Somehow when you are the Republican candidate, multiple rape accusations are somehow the same as false touching accusations. And that’s just the free-passes they gave him on his sexual assault problems, let alone countless other things they could have dug into.
The media absolutely has lots a ton of legitimacy over the years and them giving him one free pass after another only made it worse.
The problem is 1/3 of Americans want to re-elect a serial rapist.
1/3 doesn’t win elections.
Getting the other 1/3 to stay home helps.
Getting some of them to switch sides does as well.
Getting the independent 1/3 to simply want a fresh face in there helps a whole hell of a lot as well.
During 2016 election The New York Times published thousands of stories about Clinton email/Benghazi, not one on Trumps lifelong ties to NY/Russian mob. As if The New York Times wasn’t in a particularly knowledgeable position to report on 70 years of NYC construction & mob history
I mean - you’re just wrong https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/trump-russia
this came out may 2017, after trump was sworn in dipshit
I think they mean before he was president. NYT is surprising when it seems to be neutral, they haven’t been great for awhile.
They have been highly problematic for a long, long time. It didn’t start with donnie.
I guess I wasn’t paying attention until donnie.
Might technically been wrong since you linked that one article, but the disparity is 100% real
Um, no, they played the bothsiderist game during his run, all through his presidency, and even now. They keep pretending as if he’s a normal candidate and a normal president and his rabid base are just normal voters.