I originally wrote the following as a comment…a sort of “P.S.”…on my recent post Neocentrist Hostility to Bernie Sanders-Just In Case You Have Any Doubts. [I initially screwed up the links and fixed them both on that thread and here as well.] There were simply too many suspect “Awwww shucks…you don’t really think the media would do something like that to good ol’ Bernie, do ya!!!???” responses to the original post, so I added links that would tell the tale. It grew, so now I am posting it as a standalone here.)
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For those who think that the leftiness (read “neocentrist”) media aren’t busily constructing a new anti-Sanders narrative several years before it might be needed…and also for those who are just making believe that they don’t see what’s happening because of their own political and/or profit-making ends:
Action Alert: With Sleazy Innuendo, NYT Lays Virginia Attack at Bernie Sanders’ Feet
Smearing Sanders: From the NYT to MSDNC
The New York Times Shamefully Smears Bernie Sanders in Its Latest Lurch Right
And a pretty good look at what Sanders and Corbyn have in common in relation to their failed, corrupt political parties:
Lessons for the left, courtesy of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders
Looking political reality right in the face: it’s true Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn lost. But their vanquishers — Hillary Clinton, Theresa May — seem far more hangdog. One of Canada’s great left-wing figures, Madeleine Parent, said, If we learn something from defeat, we never really lose. In that vein…
- Truisms of the past have vapourized. Socialism is no longer a term to avoid. Bernie didn’t shrink from it and it seems to have intrigued voters, especially the young, rather than alienating them. Corbyn stuck with his antiwar position, even as terror burst out in Manchester and London, and it appears to have hurt May more than him. What’s typical of clueless left-wing parties, like our NDP, is that they ditched the term socialism at the very moment — 2013 — when it no longer would damage and would probably benefit them.
- Age isn’t relevant. The two old guys got the biggest youth boost. They didn’t get it because they’re old. Age just didn’t matter.
- This is my favourite: the chasm between hard-headed, pragmatic party officials and short-sighted idealistic members. The New York Times said: “The base wants it all, the party wants to win.” That’s exactly wrong. If the party (elected members and paid staff) wanted to win, they’d have backed Sanders over Clinton: he’d have creamed Trump and they knew it. In the U.K., they’d have stopped ceaselessly undermining Corbyn, and he’d almost surely have beaten May.
What the pros actually value over winning elections is keeping their jobs. The “base” wants it all only in the sense of reversing the deterioration in their lives and in the prospects of their children. They’re not into storming heaven.
- The dread mainstream media aren’t so dread. Tony Blair won for “the left” by cravenly courting Rupert Murdoch’s editorial support. Corbyn didn’t bother and got about the same vote percentage as Blair at his best. The tussle between social and mass media seems to be tipping toward the former. Clinton was brazenly backed by all the mainstream media (MSM) and it didn’t help her against Trump. In fact, Trump may be the only politician still obsessed by what the MSM say.
- Being yourself works, if you really are yourself and not some tortuous result of reverse political engineering. This appealing state is known as authenticity. Sanders and Corbyn have been themselves for so long they no longer have to pause and recall who they’re supposed to be. Clinton never did work it out. This relates to the much discussed theme of populism.
- This is a populist moment, but neither Sanders nor Corbyn are seizing it as populists. They haven’t changed in order to jump on board; they’re socialists and this equips them for the populist mood, which exists because of the widening gulf between most people and the arrogant rich.
—snip—
Read the rest of it. It’s quite perceptive.
This is all about the money, really. Sanders and Corbyn threaten the corporate controllers; said controllers control the centrist media all the way to the outside of the bloated part of my diagram above…where papers like the NY Times and WAPO live in a fictional leftiness, farm-to-table paradise for their desired audience (middle and upper-middle class, mostly white, college-misedumacated, millennial to retirable, all supposedly “reliable” DemRat voters), and the theory is (Which actually remains in place, even after HRC’s overestimation fiasco!!!) that this group of people combined with minority voters and ongoing massive media attacks on the Trump administration will sleepwalk the Dems into a recovery after 2016’s terrible beating.
I am here to tell you that it’s not going to happen. It didn’t work this time, and it is going to work even less well as time passes. There is clearly another force gathering out there in voter-land, and it ain’t Trumpism. If the DemRat Party does not reform…and soon…that force will completely walk away from the party (either not voting at all and/or voting for splinter parties) and it will doom the Dems to another, even worse loss than their last one.
This scenario has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Trump and whatever other Trumpist helpers are forced out of office or simply stymied in all of their efforts by the neocentrist DemRat/RatPub Congressional coalition and its media, thus becoming the country’s longest reigning lame duck preznit.
The only way it will not happen…and I think this is quite possible…is if Trump manages to wag the dog in DC with either a war and/or some huge anti-Congress/anti-media scandal and then takes the fuck over any which way he can.
Which he is quite capable of trying to do.
Bet on it.
Watch.
AG