Petrol posted:

The first is that i don't think sanders has said anything that puts him substantially at odds with imperial priorities.

I'm most definitely overstretching here but as an idle speculation on one scenario: Trump has said that with Brexit more or less done with any future trade deal made between the American and British empires will require that the NHS be on the table. I could see how that might be difficult to pull off if the American health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are facing a serious domestic or existential challenge to their political and economic power with a Sanders presidency. In fact it seems like it might even be one of those contradictions the spooks at the CIA would be at pains to resolve. This is not to say Sanders or the Democrats in the best of all possible worlds would be able (they're not) or willing (they're not) to destroy the health insurance companies or even slightly mitigate or diminish their power and influence, but Sanders is betting the farm on universal healthcare taking him to the White House and his constituency might actually be taking him seriously on this point and, if he fails to live up to expectations, take up the fight on their own. So Sanders can promise to nuke Russia and North Korea if it came to it, assassinate every leftist politician, union leader or environmental activist in Latin America, increase troop counts and drone strikes in the middle east or Africa and give the CIA everything on its wishlist in making the world safe for American imperialism, but as you said in another thread the empire's dyin cloud and in a period of increasing and openly declared great power competition the alphabet boys and the pentagon don't seem to keen to let any opportunity for entrenching American dominance everywhere go to waste or up for chance.

MAYOR BUTTIGIEG: The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it's a consequence of a withdrawal

cars posted:

I would have thought they'd go for that 99 out of 100, a Biden or Warren

glad i got this in by deadline, my handler's taking me to Golden Corral!!

a potential Biden/Trump debate would be the best cultural product of the last 15 years. it would be the only art anyone actually remembers. Trump talking about hot guys he’s met. Biden saying he was the first black senator. stretches that are just transcribed as “unintelligible”

— avunclar baller 🍻🚗 (@ByYourLogic) March 3, 2020

sovnarkoman posted:

Nearly 1 million refugees—nearly half of them children—are under threat as Syrian troops advance on Idlib.

The United States must work urgently with the UN to achieve a ceasefire and ensure full access for humanitarian assistance. https://t.co/yx5vIxRnDz

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 26, 2020

in case bernie panders doesnt win the elections:

who must go??

Apparently, there was a drop in young voter turnout yesterday, when compared with 2016. Young Americans: please vote in the general. It matters. Save your cynicism for another time. Without your vote, Pumpkin wins again, and that’s bad for the whole planet. That’s a rock fact. pic.twitter.com/Qtpm6bA9tl

— Kyle T Webster (@kyletwebster) March 4, 2020

cars posted:

like okay there’s arguments Bernard will help build a post-DSA socialist movement that will overwhelm and surpass him, I think the history of social democracy in Europe provides overwhelming evidence it won’t, maybe I’m wrong.

but like.... please don’t try to snow me about how United States Senator Bernard Sanders spent the last four years shouting about how Trump is a Russian agent commie-lover, and certainly not how when the CIA “briefed” him on their line against him as the least ideal facilitator of their agenda, he did it again for like the hundredth time.

I am trying hard to meet people halfway here, i really am but these years of statements by him are a matter of public record and they should probably matter to socialists for reasons I know I don’t have to go over

It's really fascinating to watch all this unravel.

It's essentially an east coast / west coast rapper feud, only all of the feudees are either white or Cenk Uygur. It's also a testament to the ineptitude of the DNC that such an amateur bag of surrogates as the ones working for Bernie is this close to a presidential nomination.

The people who tried to scrape up what was left of Bernie's 2016 campaign (Cenk and his New Atheism bro Kyle Kulinski) got ran off from the PAC they founded by radfems complaining about Cenk's early-aught blog posts about girls in bars or some such similar nonsense, and the whole thing got taken over by idpol activists who later ran AOC, Tlaib, and Omar for congress. But the idpol activists are always going to be tenuously (at best) tolerated by the NYC satire magazine / podcast crowd who are either Occupy refugees or more traditional disaffected NYC publishing layoffs. These are the only two media surrogate crowds Bernie has at his disposal, since anyone on TV or in a newspaper that said anything positive about Bernie would instantly be drawn, castrated, disemboweled, and quartered by Hillary Clinton.

Bernie has done a poor job of corralling his underlings, just as Cenk did a poor job of the same. The above mentioned PAC lists 7 incumbents and 2 of them are endorsing Elizabeth Warren. Another who built an org by selling out a Sanders surrogate in NJ (the guy who ran the bridge conspiracy investigation against Chris Christie) to endorse a Goldman Sachs exec in a governor's race is a 6 figure staffer on Bernie's campaign. And her org was in turn splintered from another NYC labor union advocacy org that endorsed Warren rather than Bernie as well, after a big check from Warren's daughter the pharma consultant, of course. Bernie's campaign manager this time around is a former ACLU and Pelosi/Reid digital comms and social media guy, who has made some progress as a face-to-face pundit warrior but started out very shaky and unsure of what their message was last summer, as one would expect a digital media guy who got shoved in front of a camera and microphone to be.

All of these idpols Bernie has hired for 2020 seem to have assumed that they would command a certain amount of the vote from their particular demographic because... tweets? I don't think most of them understand that the black vote in the south is commanded by local NAACP, Urban League, etc offices and DNC affiliated pastors. The ones that do understand this have sold Bernie out for DNC money, of course. He is getting a lot of Latino vote because the DNC doesn't have a 50 year machine built around controlling that demographic like they do with southern black voters, but that'll only get them California, and it didn't get them Texas. An anti-Christian Turk with a new atheist sidekick couldn't get a southern black voter to pull a lever if their life depended on it, so they were never going to accomplish much electorally, they should've just stuck to youtube. Cenk ran for the house seat vacated by the horny blonde girl who had to resign after she was caught nailing her assistant while trying to divorce her husband, and finished dead last in the primary encompassing LA county on Tuesday with 5% of the vote.

With friends like these who needs enemies?

While Bernie was not doing a good job of getting his story straight and people together in 2017 and 2018, Hillary ran a 1-2 combo pharma CEO and daughter of a health insurance CEO against the Michigan governor candidate that Bernie's org was backing in 2018. Predictably, Bernie's idpols shot for "first Muslim governor of Michigan" which was only good for about 30% of the vote. The insurance heiress governor is now so deep in Biden's pocket that she can smell his dingleberries, so Bernie can probably kiss Michigan goodbye. Bernie won Minnesota in 2016 as well, but lost it this time around after the DNC promoted Amy Klobuchar all the way to the NY Times endorsement, and then had her drop out and endorse Biden the day before the primary.

The only path remaining is for Bernie to win the small western states he won in 2016 and New York, so the Chapo boys have gotten themselves awfully deep into Bernies chances here. All of this is shaping up to be a hard lesson for people who stuck too much of their neck out this time around if Bernie loses another primary. Cenk/Kulinski have already taken their knockout blow, and in the process have a DNC adjacent bunch of union bosses coming after them. It seems that a media union got Cenk's staffers to take a union vote during the primary campaign so they could call him a union buster. Of course the union had already endorsed Cenk's DNC-chosen opponent so it doesn't pass a smell test and looks like a setup, but Twitter doesn't care about details. I'd guess Cenk has learned his lesson and will never run for office or endorse a candidate ever again, after getting burned twice.

AOC is the wild card going forward, I think she's the only one smart enough to keep all of this going. She hasn't betrayed Bernie but is staying at arm's length to insulate herself from the failure if/when it happens, I think. She has the ace up her sleeve because the DNC thinks they can save their sinking ship by getting their hooks into Latino voters and commanding their loyalty in the same way they do black voters, and she is presenting herself as that standard-bearer. I think that's a pipe dream that the DNC can't pull off, but I can't fault her for using their delusion to entrench herself, since she's the only really promising electoral star of the bunch.

tl;dr: Trump will make a Sloppy Joe joke and right on cue Biden will have an eye and his teeth fall out. Maybe every Caleb in Kansas will finally get his Iran war. Hopefully they sink a couple of aircraft carriers.

Edited by Over9000ft (March 6, 2020 13:00:00)

filler posted:

I'm happy about this because all those Sanders activists will see the light and join communist organizations. I hope the PSL has the capacity to onboard several hundred-thousand new members!