In the UK Gamergaters and assorted alt righters joined UKIP and Farage had to quit because they are so toxic. Their faction has a lot of money coming in from the far right GOP too, Bannons people are funding them.
Give it a rest. You’re a party man who supported Clinton out of the gate. That doesn’t make every progressive that votes with the party out of pragmatism a fringe lunatic. It’s possible for reasonable leftists to have qualms with the modern incarnation of the Democratic party without being Jill Stein supporting kooks. Your ill-concealed disdain for anyone who doesn’t toe the party line gets tiresome after a while.
Huh.
No one questions Gabbard’s right to believe as he chooses. Some may even applaud him for his religious beliefs. However, some voters may worry about his former ties to a Krishna sect. Especially when members and associates of that group have mounted repeated attempts at high public office.
When HONOLULU asked Gabbard in an e-mail to clarify his former relationship with Butler’s Krishna group, Gabbard’s daughter, state Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Tamayo, sent us an angry e-mail in response. “I smell a skunk,” Tamayo wrote. “It’s clear to me that you’re acting as a conduit for The Honolulu Weekly and other homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.”
That sounds like a thing a normal person would say.
Yeah, Gabbard’s way on the Left. Other than, you know, applying to be a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and having a foreign policy that embraces dictatorships like Assad’s --including openly doubting that Syria used chemical weapons on his own people – and a general foreign policy that lines up well with Steve Bannon and Rand Paul and the alt-right, she’s a progressive!
Like Joe Stalin was progressive.
In this case, Gabbard is unfortunately a bit of a nut job.
Yeah, but the left wing of the Democratic party <> right wing of the Republican party (which is in effect all of them) and maybe I’m guilty of putting too much thought into the “vocal far left” and “too far left” labels used liberally here and especially in the media … but nonetheless it really bugs me.
To me, the established Democratic party platform is like a machine-generated sketch on tracing paper. I can take that sketch and lay it over another politician, to see where they fall outside the tracing. (And to be VERY CLEAR: it’s probably a good thing for a politician to fall outside that tracing; the three most recent failed Democratic presidential candidates – Gore, Kerry, and Clinton likely matched up with that tracing too perfectly.) (And to be clear again, there’s a lot in that tracing that I may not agree with, or think the tracing goes far enough on; maybe thinking of it as a minimum benchmark is also analogous?)
But anyway, it’s a decent enough framework to see a relief of how a politician differs from that mainstream. In the case of an Ocasio-Cortez, a Warren, a Sanders, I can look and see things like “Oh, they’re for a $15 minimum wage. That’s outside the lines, but it’s where I want the lines to be. Cool.” Or, “70% marginal tax on the top bracket? Yes, I’m for that, even if it’s outside the current party platform orthodoxy.” And so being outside that tracing totally works for me. But I’m glad to have that tracing to compare to, to benchmark with.
Basically, I can see the differences, and decide whether those differences are a good thing, a bad thing or an indifferent thing, and how much they matter to me in any event. And it’s useful, because when I superimpose that over someone like Gabbard, or someone like Kucinich or Jill Stein, I see things that for me and my own beliefs make me think: “Yeah, that’s a game breaker.”
A $15 minimum wage is literally the first policy item in the 2016 Democratic party platform. Not quite outside the lines.
Also this:
Not 70%, but the idea is there.
Right, but it wasn’t at the start of 2016 when Bernie Sanders was in favor of it, and Mrs.Clinton was…coy.
So Julian Castro just announced his candidacy.
I thought he did that a few weeks ago. He was all over MSNBC.
That’s a useful simile. But we all know the sketch itself is changing, perhaps at a pace we’re not used to. It will be fascinating to see what it looks like by the time we get to 2020.
The traditional base of the party (for example, black women) gets a lot less press coverage than the charismatic progressives, but they’re still the real base in much of the country. Defeating Trump is the top priority for nearly everyone, though, so it’s not disarray so much as diversity. It’s exciting to watch it all happen.
Right, but it prevents me from getting too badly Milkshake Ducked on someone like Kucinich or Stein, for instance, when you read about a candidate and only get a partial, perhaps overly favorable view. Not foolproof, but avoids some of the “Oh. OH. Ohhhhhh. Lord. Eesh” down the line a bit. ;)
Russia will try to provoke disarray among Dems. Perhaps they also like Tulsi because of her stance on Syria, but I wouldn’t take RT statements into account when forming an opinion on any candidate.
Gabbard is an out an out Duginist and Assadist. Definetely one of Putins people in Washington. The analogue of George Galloway/Chris Williamson/Seumas Milne over here.
This article explains why these Red-Brown syncretic “anti-Imperialist” networks exist, albeit looking at a slightly different slice.
If you want the link between that and Gabbard, then Max Blumenthal is the one to focus on.
Honestly, w/r/t Gabbard, for me it’s this simple–as noted by frequent anti-progressive (that’s sarcasm, btw) Charlie Pierce, earlier this week before any declarations of candidacy:
She’s an “also ran” at best.
Most Democrats are calling themselves “liberal”. First time since 1994.
If you put “socialist” on there it would be at record highs.
Turns out if you call everything liberal/socialist eventually people are like, “Well shit, liberalism/socialism sounds pretty good if that’s what it is.”