I commented a number of times on Booman’s recent “Jeanine Pirro’s Fascist Television” article, asking various questions and making various points. Among other things I equated Jeanine Pirro with Rachel Maddow…and by extension, Fox News and MSNBC…as two sides of the same counterfeit media coin. Go read the thread if you want more info. (<http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2018/9/2/123315/8321>)
Finally, Parallax posted this gem:
This is where you reveal your biases, Arthur. Most of us would agree that the left is not perfect, but the false equivalencies get tiring. There is a huge difference between Rachel and Jeanine. A huge difference between Clinton and Trump. The Democratic party needs reform but the Republicans have become a fifth column, completely disloyal and out for themselves at any cost. Martin is correct that just a small handful of Senators, perhaps just two, perhaps less (or even none at all when it comes time to vote) stand between autocracy and democracy.
Is our democracy less than ideal? Absolutely. Is the solution to throw up one’s hand or treat both parties as equally mendacious? Only if you’re an anarchist.
I answered, but I kept thinking about the idiocy of all of this current newsblather and started another reply. Rather than deal with any more of the current Neocentrist Gang of Four’s ratings shenanigans on this site, I am posting it as a standalone.
Read on if you are interested.
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Parallax…I got yer “democracy.”
Right here!!!
President Trump likes to complain about “Fake News.”
So, here’s some very real news for him:
Republican control of Capitol Hill and the White House is based on a “fake majority.”
“A majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population,” David Wasserman, an editor for The Cook Political Report, wrote in a recent New York Times column.
He added that the crucial Senate seats this November would be “much whiter, more rural and pro-Trump than the nation as a whole. In effect, geography could again be Mr. Trump’s greatest protector: After all, the Senate — not the House — would have the final say on any impeachment proceedings,” Wasserman argued.
Think about this — America’s politics are being run by a cabal in the Senate that fails to represent 82 percent of the American people.
—snip—
And then think about this.
The Dems are at the moment the designated patsy in this system.
The “good” losers.
The (somewhat) loyal opposition.
WWF-style blown up real good!!!
Real big.
When the DNC played Bernie Sanders for a loser…and bet on it, that is precisely what they did, and there are emails to prove it…how was that any different (except for happening on a smaller scale) than the Ratpublican shenanigans described above and in the rest of the linked article?
Why do you think that the DemRats would do anything different if they became…as appears to be happening, judging from the corporate-owned news coverage…the designated winners in this obviously fixed wrasslin’ match.
It’s politics as usual.
If this is a “democracy,” how come it’s not a one citizen/one vote system?
Oh.
I can hear the answer now.
It’s…more complicated than that!!!
Yes, it is.
If it really became a “one citizen/one vote system,” then the .01% would have to find other ways to jigger the system.
Which they would, of course.
Until they jigger it right down the drain.
Trump is evidence enough that the drainhole is fast approaching, while the leftinesses whine about whatever the fuck it is that their media tell them to whine.
Like this. (From the same thread.):
Most of us would agree that the left is not perfect, but the false equivalencies get tiring.
“False equivalencies get tiring.”
Yes.
They do.
As do false differentiations.
And false democracies as well.
You remember…when the DemRats were the designated winner for a while?
In the November 4, 2008, elections, the Democratic Party increased its majorities in both chambers, giving President Obama a Democratic majority in the legislature for the first two years of his presidency.
Have you learned nothing from the misinformation/disinformation spewed during the Obama administration? Misinformation/disinformation about mass surveillance, about the various wars being fought by our troops and other U.S.-supported parties, about the real stranglehold of multinational corporate interests on both parties!!!???
WTFU.
You been had.
AG
False equivalencies? Like this one?
False equivalency?
No.
Wikipedia
That one in your link is a true equivalency.
From the AGipedia:
The Hillary Dems were as stupid as the Rat Trumps.
Both a bunch of amateurs being hacked and used by pros.
Russian pros.
Chinese pros.
And…bet on it..
U.S. pros as well.
AG
Oh Arthur. Seriously, give it a rest!
As soon as it collapses of its own contradictions?
Sure.
Happy to do so, no matter what dues we must all pay.
Until then?
Prepare to pay the necessary dues.
Are you ready do so?
Doesn’t sound like it to me…
You?
I been paying those dues since about 1965.
You?
AG
Was meant as tongue in cheek. Should have used an emoticon.
Attached to wring response. Sorry, middle of a sleepless night.
BTW, Good News! Rahm Emanuel is not going to run for a third term as Mayor.
Possible bad news, he maybe intends to run for Senator? Or President?
Rahm Emanuel.
Nasty!!!
I think…I hope, anyway…that Emanuel and the whole rest of the Clinton/Obama crew are about to find out that they are no longer the bosses of the Democratic Party. What’s happening now is the gradual appearance of small fissures in the party’s neocentrist/neoliberal edifice.
Beto, Ocasio-Lopez, Pressley, Gillum, Randy Bryce…the list is going to grow over the next two years. Bet on it. These people are talking to voters instead of lecturing them. I was very impressed with a vid I saw recently of Beto making a campaign stop in a small Texas town. I’ve spent some time in Texas…around Dallas and Houston…and have several really good friends who are salt-of-the-earth Texans. Country folk. They have always reminded me of the Maine people I came to know so well when my family moved there in the mid-60s. No bullshit, practical working people who are quite proud of their own independence.
These were the people I saw in that Beto vid. A small town…about 2000 population, I believe,…somewhere far enough from a major city to qualify as “country.” The enthusiasm and relief of the people who spoke on that vid regarding Beto’s no nonsense campaign was palpable!!! I never understood Cruz’s success in Texas. Most of the Texans I know would walk into a store with Cruz behind the counter, take about 30 seconds to figure him out and never come back.
Sure, there are the “other” Texans. 15 years ago…driving a borrowed Texas-plated V8 Mustang, a real “Texas” car…I made the mistake of stopping in a small town to get something to eat. A hot, barren day somewhere on the tree-leaning plains. (The trees all lean in the same way because the direction of the plains wind never changes. Never stops, either.) I got looks from the hangers-out as I was driving in that said quite plainly “Who’s this stranger!!!???” I felt like I was in some sort of modernized Hollywood ’50s western.
The food sucked, too.
But…they are a dying breed.
The myth has changed.
Right now, Houston is the most multi-ethnic city in the United States.
May it continue.
Later…
AG
P.S. Next?
Pelosi out.
Watch.
May that continue as well.
If a Beto-like character appeared as a challenger to Schumer in NY state?
I’d love to see it.
Let us pray it so.
His e-mails to me (I mean general fund raising e-mails that came to my in box) touted the usual democratic talking points. Then I got one chortling that Hillary Clinton had endorsed him. Now everything from him and his team is automatically marked as SPAM.
Possibly.
But…as we well know, a campaign of this magnitude cannot be ridden and controlled by one person. Too big. It is inevitable that old-liners will be in the mix.
We’ll see…
AG
Yes, let’s sit on our hands and allow Senator Ted Cruz to win re-election. Yes, let’s indulge your political vanity.
Ted Cruz, the real progressive choice.
. . . something there that’s key to what’s so destructively regressive about what both ag and voice do here.
Both pose as the “true” “progressives” here, pretending they are the only valid arbiters of what that entails, and lecturing the rest of us on all the ways we fall short of that purity standard.
Both routinely, by their words and by their actions (e.g., voting for Stein, voice’s post above), make clear that a Trump or a Cruz in power is preferable to an insufficiently pure (e.g., tainted by any association with Killary Klinton) Dem. Making clear that — in their world — agreeing with them on this is the valid defining test of a “true progressive”.
It’s fucked-up.
Riiiiight…
So:
The DNC’s buggering of Bernie Sanders and support of the neocentrist HRC (You remember, don’t you? The one that brought us Donald Trump?) wasn’t “fucked up?”
I could use your own logic to accuse people like you and centristfield…serial supporters of the neocentrist DNC line…of being secret agents for Trump, just as you accuse people like Oui and myself of similar things.
But I won’t.
Why?
Because it is an infantile and inaccurate view of things, that’s why.
You…and pretty much the entire mainstream Democratic Party…”fucked up” by backing the rotted-out, totally corrupt DNC machine against the Sanders movement, and you are still running the same act here. Of course, you did it because you believed that you were “doing the right thing,” and I believe that this is still true now. Your only problem is a learning-curve problem, probably exacerbated in our case by a truly nasty, schoolmarm-picky spirit.
Your position brought us Trump!!!
Good work, neocentrists.
“Reality-based” like a motherfucker!!!
Win or lose, I believe that a Sanders candidacy would have lit a morality-based fire in the Democratic Party…one that would now be burning hard and bright instead of just beginning to smolder.
Thanks a ton for Trump!!!
You didn’t do it on purpose.
You did it out of cowardice and moral stupidity.
And now you repeat that same act.
Cowardice, moral stupidity and now a refusal to learn from the past.
Political stupidity.
Your only real excuse?
You are certainly not alone.
Security in the sheeple herd.
Sigh…
Have a lovely day!!!
AG
. . . you’d know if you didn’t idiotically filter everything through the confirmation bias of your preconceptions, but instead paid attention to what others actually say.
Which is one reason (among many) why your idiotically wrong “centrist/DNC-lover” blather is so, well, idiotic (in addition to being droningly, tediously, repetitively, stupidly tiresome ad nauseum; not to mention deeply dishonest diversion).
And why do you keep talking to me about “centristfield”? Repeating:
You got a beef with cfdj, take it up with him/her. Talking to me about it is just more running away via diversionary blather.
*the conclusive evidence, i.e., proof beyond a reasonable doubt
We are all known by our allies, oaguabonita.
The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
AG
P.S. You lie…and conflate admitted errors with lies…about my own statements.
Why would I trust your claim of voting for Sanders?
And…after witnessing your continuing, truly vicious ways here…not just with me but with people who make minor errors of all kinds.
Why would I give a flying fuck for whom you voted?
Go pick your nits.
AG
If that were true, you would, of course, link to examples (or even just one!) of me doing either of those things. You know, kinda like I do when I document your lies and the factually documented refutation of them. See how that works?
Which it’s obvious you don’t do because you can’t, because what you falsely claimed there doesn’t happen and hasn’t happened.
The “conflate admitted errors” nonsense is hilarious! The thing is, you don’t “admit” your “errors” even after they’ve been thoroughly, definitively, dispositively refuted with linked, factual documentation. You let them sit there, unretracted/uncorrected, right up to this very instant. Which is why it is utterly fair, valid, responsible, and accurate to label them lies! If you’d acknowledged them as “errors” and retracted/corrected them when refuted, I’d never have labeled them lies!!! As I’ve explained multiple times! Has anything ever merited a bigger “DUH!”?
So, no, you don’t get to skip the “admitted” part, then claim, preposterously, that I “conflate admitted errors with lies”.
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A group…or perhaps better, a cadre…of people on this site have tried everything in their power to discourage criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today. They automatically downrate such posts and have endlessly attacked several posters as liars, fools, pro-Trump trolls and/or spreaders of Russian propaganda. When effectively rebutted, they simply ignore the rebuttal and repeat the same attacks. These McCarthyite tactics are intended to exhaust the patience of the attacked posters and discourage others from reading or posting similar material. It has worked on a few posters, who have simply given up. It has not worked on me. I initially answered their attacks with attempts at reason. After realizing that this was a total waste of time, I have pretty much stopped replying to them. My comments and articles on this site are my replies. Read what I have to say; consider what they have to say and how it is said, and then make up your own minds. Thank you-AG
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I will give oaguabonita this:
It is by far the most gifted of these entities.
And…it spends a lot of time running its game.
I am not going to match its time spent on useless meta.
As I said above:
Like I said…make up your own minds.
Read oauguabonita’s many frenzied attacks on various people; then read what those people have had to say in their posts and comments.
I find it…interesting…that this entity’s last recorded original post happened almost two years ago. But it has been busy, busy, busy with comments on other people’s posts since then. 130 since 08/13/2018…which is as far back as Booman’s comments records seem to be available.
About 4.4 per day, many of them really snide, especially over the last year or so.
What happened, oaguabonita?
Sump’n bad?
I hope not. Seriously.
But…sump’n bad, sump’n good, or all the possibilities in between…do not attempt to take it out on me.
I won’t have it.
AG
. . . any examples of me “conflat[ing] admitted errors with lies”, because that has never happened, because you don’t admit your errors that I’ve refuted with linked, factual documentation are even errors, much less retract/correct them as any decent, honest person would.
You running away instead as usual by shitting out a dumptruck-load of irrelevant, diversionary blather duly noted, and the most predictable, least surprising event in the history of humanity.
*P.S. I am going to add the following statement to many of my replies to your “standalone articles” (LOL!) and comments…for the benefit of new readers here. It applies to the comment this replies to as well:
*[ref.]
Your entire argument.
Nice.
Retire.
AG
I voted for Bernie in the primary election as well.
But then I understood the vast, vast difference between the two viable general election candidates and I buckled down to campaign for Hillary and other Democratic Party candidates and issues.
You, on the other hand, took action after action on this blog to support Trump’s candidacy by trying to organize progressives against Clinton’s campaign.
You did so because you’re a histrionic right wing asshole who thinks the United States should dissolve. The hell with you and your New Confederacy.
Very obviously, that is not my entire argument, nor even a significant part of it. As you already know very well.
But of course, you can’t let yourself actually address the actual argument because it’s already won. Has been for a very long time now. You lost the actual argument when you repeatedly lied, then ran away from factual refutation of your lies, either by not addressing the actual argument at all or by trying to bury it in completely unresponsive, irrelevant, diversionary blather. Again and again and again and again and . . . just as you’re doing here in this thread yet again.
So you attempt every diversion (regardless how pathetic . . . and man are they pathetic!) that you can come up with from the actual argument to try and cover up your constant running away.
And your attempted diversions always fail. Just like this one failed.
And your lies just keep piling up and getting more desperate, as this newest one demonstrates powerfully.