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Doug Porter's avatar

Smiling while stabbing somebody in the back doesn't absolve the fact of assault/injury/murder. Thank you for this piece.

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Carol Payne's avatar

His advice is the exact opposite of what voters say they want. Voters want authenticity and his advice is tantamount to stick your finger in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. What is so frustrating is that Republicans have always twisted any Democratic messaging around fairness into "they want special rights for this group of people". That was true with marriage equality, black lives matter, defund the police, equal pay, DEI, and yes, trans rights. It doesn't matter who the group is, there will always be a group. Democrats get bogged down in very specific issues and can never seem to pivot back to a broader foundational issue of fairness. Republicans choose a "figurehead" to demonize - Reagan's welfare queen, Trump's immigrant who committed murder, a trans athlete who tied fifth for a swimming trophy. Voters want someone who can dismiss the sensationalizing and authentically speak to fundamental fairness.

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SteveB's avatar

For guys like Rahm Emmanuel, the real enemy isn't the Republicans, it's progressive Democrats like Zohran Mamdani. And he doesn't have the guts to slug it out on the basic economic issues, so this is what he's going for instead, the fucking coward. It won't work. If anti-trans lies can't get the Republicans a win in a Mayors race in freakin' Omaha, it's not gonna win any Democratic primaries. Expect Rahm 2028 to be a replay of Bloomberg 2024: Squander about a billion dollars on ads and consultants, get approximately no votes.

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SteveB's avatar

Let's be fair, Rahm can't run against Progressive Democrats by saying he'd have better ideas for education or healthcare or the affordability crisis, so hyping up this culture war bullshit is all he's got left. That's funny, it's exactly what the Republicans do, isn't it?

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Loren Bliss's avatar

I have argued since the debate revealed the criminally concealed severity of Biden's dementia that the "Democratic" (sic) Party was deliberately throwing the election to Trump in the most plausible deniable way -- this in fulfillment of its post-JFK role as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

The Democrats' de facto unconditional surrender to the MAGATs makes that betrayal undeniable. Indeed -- looking at their history since 22 November 1963 -- the party ever-more-obviously hopelessly compromised by collaboration in that coup and its cover-up -- I now suspect the ultimate (clandestine) purpose of Barack the Betrayer's presidency was the resurrection of the irremediable race hatred that Trump parlayed into the death of the Republic and his election as Führer.

As to Zoharan Mamdani, unless the Democrats who support him forcefully divorce themselves from the national party -- which as a (gentrification exiled) New Yorker I surely know can happen -- his courageously revolutionary platform will be reduced to merely another example of the party's post-JFK policy of "change-we-can-believe-in" deception and betrayal. In the long term, the "Democratic" (sic) Party cannot be redeemed. It is as much an enemy of the people as the "Republican" (sic) Party because the same plutocrats own both organizations. Thus both parties express their masters' absolute terror of socialist revolution. Thus too the only escape from MAGAT treachery is the formation of a new working-peoples' party, a true party of the 99.9 Percent, through which Mamdani could well emerge as a national leader.

Apropos Rahm Emmanuel, given the extent to which the MAGATs have resurrected and re-legitimized the nation's defining malignancy of bigoted hatefulness, there will undoubtedly be many white Democrats who support him as the more socially acceptable (but equally genocidal) alternative to Trump. (MAGAT is the acronym for MAGA Terrorists or MAGA Trumpites, properly pronounced as "maggot.")

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SteveB's avatar

I think there's a fight within the Democratic party about what it will be in the future, and I don't want to give up the fight too soon.

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Loren Bliss's avatar

The suppression of Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign -- that is, the first instance in which the Democrats, with maximum plausible deniability, unquestionably threw the election to Trump -- proves the "Democratic" (sic) Party cannot ever be returned to its New Deal roots, or even be minimally reformed. Its core ideology of neoliberalism, the legacy of Ayn Rand, Carter and the Clintons, is as eternal as the Republican core ideology of Christian white male supremacist theocracy, the legacy of Hitler, Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan.

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Chris Oster's avatar

Excellent piece, Parker.

Third Wayism needs to be eradicated from the public discourse. I can support someone I may disagree with on the finer points of tax policy or health care reform, but when you show such a blatant lack of respect for human rights in the service of policy goals, well, that's a no from me, dawg.

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Janelle's avatar

This is what happens when you have a two party system where one party is extreme right and the other is center right, and constantly painted as radical communists by the extreme right.

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Moe Strausberg's avatar

I lived in Chicago from 1992-2003 when I moved back to Montreal Quebec Canada which I left in 1970. My wife and I lived south of the home of neoliberal insanity called incorrectly the University of Chicago. The nearest book stores were in Hyde Park the bastion of neoliberal medieval economics and human hubris. I am neither a scholar nor a business maven but neoliberalism is neither new nor liberal. It is feudalism pretending at enlightenment just like the rest of the New Roman Empire. I think Gibbon wrote the script 1776-1788. Rahm Emmanuel is as my father used call over educated buffoons a poootz (putz). POOOTZ isn't the equivalent of a prick. Emmanuel is overeducated and inexperienced in living in the real world. I love Chicago and anything Emmanuel may say is treated with the same resolve we give all neoliberal parrots and poltroons.

Simple minds with simple solutions in a complex exciting Brave New World.

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SteveB's avatar

Rahm Emmanuel couldn't win election as Mayor of Chicago today, and yet somehow he thinks he's going to win the Democratic nomination for President? The guy's nuts.

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Moe Strausberg's avatar

Thanks Steve,

Liberal: 1776 Samuel Johnson was the Classical Conservative who wrote this address to the Continental Congress in 1775

https://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=liberal

I lived in Emmanuel's Chicago. I lived South of neoliberal Hyde Park. Barrack and Michelle are neoliberals. In Woodlawn Barrack could not win a primary against a real liberal who did not have a University of Chicago or Harvard education while Michelle ran the rather profitable University of Chicago Health System and I spent two months at Michael Reese because my Blue Cross Blue Shield wouldn't pay Milton Friedman prices for healthcare. The University of Sherbrooke is responsible for my healthcare, education and welfare and they are a Godsend. Healthcare , education and welfare are Human Rights in Canada not Hyde Park and Roger's Park Privileges.I was treated like Royalty at Fleurimont Hospital and Magog's Hotel Dieu just like at University of Illinois at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital where I was treated like a King not a piece of dog excrement. It is criminal to build the shrine to neoliberalism in Woodlawn when Hyde Park is so fucking illiberal and the capital of NIMBY. I grew up a short walk from Kamala Harris in Cotes des Neiges and Westmount High School beats Whitney Young's (which our grandson attended) gaslighting all to Hell. They teach citizenship not Pavlovian responses to bells and sticks.

https://westmount.emsb.qc.ca/whs

This is Quebec and I may be old senile, demented, autistic and stoned but I loved America and it is not a Phoenix and ashes remain ashes and dust returns to dust. The chickens have come home to roost. Jeremiah was as correct in the 21st century as he was in 627 years before Jesus was conceived.

Evolution is science and Noah is religion and Bill 21 is the law in Quebec.

Noah is myth and allegory and Noah is literature not history or prophecy.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/noah/

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David Yarusso's avatar

Very well said, Parker.

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Stephen Robinson's avatar

Great points here. Democrats seem to think they can run and hide on the issue, when Andy Beshear -- governor of Kentucky -- has stood up against this bigotry.

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Charlotte LeMay's avatar

For a guy that says not to talk about bathrooms all the time...

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M. Louisa Locke's avatar

This was so powerful!!!

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Michael Borum's avatar

The sooner folks like him retire from politics, the better.

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SteveB's avatar

I'm excited to play a role in his retirement when we deliver the ass-kicking he deserves in the 2028 Democratic primaries.

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Loren Bliss's avatar

You're making the mistake of assuming der neu Führer won't keep his oft-repeated promise to make 5 November 2024 our last-ever election.

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TooLateToBeBad's avatar

The alternative to making that mistake is doomerism or fedposting, so I say make it.

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SteveB's avatar
2hEdited

When we're all in the prison camp, I'll have to hear over and over again how I was wrong. My oh my, won't that hurt.

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Loren Bliss's avatar

Actually, the alternative to making that mistake is adequate contingency planning -- one plan if Trump does as promised, the other if he allows elections. Trouble is, that sort of planning is impossible without the disciplined solidarity, formalized structure and accepted leadership most resistors suicidally reject. Thus it will never happen.

That said, I repeat my question: what is "fedposting"? Please do me the courtesy of answering it. Thank you.

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TooLateToBeBad's avatar

Since it will never happen, what would you like to do?

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SteveB's avatar

Maybe you can help me understand how this "Trump cancels elections" thing is supposed to work. Since federal elections are administered by the states, why would New York and California and all the other blue states go along? Seems like the key thing is who controls Congress in Jan. 2026, you'd need a Republican majority to buy the bullshit argument that because Texas and Florida sat it out, we didn't have a real election. That what you have in mind?

OTOH if you're saying he just orders the military to jail Gavin Newsom and every other Democratic Governor and Secretary of State, then we're just doing a straight military coup, and I don't see a "contingency plan" for that except a go-bag and a Canadian passport.

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Loren Bliss's avatar

And what, pray tell, is "fedposting"?

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TooLateToBeBad's avatar

No officer, I will not be discussing any actions I may take in the event that elections are suspended.

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SteveB's avatar

No questions about doomerism?

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