It was inevitable. Humanity has long been doing just about everything possible to pave the way for such a thing: gathering into ever-larger cities, doing virtually nothing to address the inequality that condemns multitudes to lives of filth and squalor, and aggressively globalizing the economy and thus enabling disease to spread faster.
Any reassurances from the dictatorship in China should be taken with not just a grain, but a block of salt. Dictatorships lie and conceal. China’s first response to the outbreak was to hush it up, engaging in reprisals against the doctor who first reported it, who has now perished from the disease.
The disease is known to have an incubation period of up to 14 days, during which people are both infected and highly contagious and furthermore entirely symptom-free. Cases have already popped up worldwide. How many more people are running around right now infecting others and not even knowing about it? Who knows, but the number has to be significant.
It was understandable. Despite how the Establishment pundits have universally proclaimed him as likable and easily-electable, he’s neither. He’s a gaffe machine. He’s one of the rubes who voted for the Iraq War. He’s a clueless old fool who still entertains decades-dead notions of bipartisanship, so he’d be an ineffectual president. He’s basically the Hillary v.2.0 candidate, and we all know how well Hillary v.1.0 failed against Trump. As such, he’s a far riskier candidate than the conventional wisdom proclaims.
These are all valid reasons to be concerned about the possibility of a Biden nomination. They are all valid points to be brought up by the other primary candidates.
Then I noticed something curious: with only a few rare exceptions, the attacks were not coming from the Sanders campaign, the Warren campaign, or the campaign of any other Democratic candidate. Most of them were coming from no easily-identifiable source whatsoever. The ones that had a source attribution tended to come either from obscure sources, or from right-wing sources allied with Trump. And the attacks were often really vicious, the sort of things that would be difficult to recover from later should the attacked candidate be the eventual nominee.
Then the attacks on Warren began. Those were even stranger. Why was the No. 3 candidate, one who also had strong progressive credentials, suddenly getting so much hate in progressive circles? Wouldn’t Harris or Klobuchar have been more logical targets, given their past as tough-on-crime attorneys general? It just didn’t make sense. Why be so divisive against someone ideologically close to you, someone whose people you will probably have to kiss and make up with later on? And again, the attacks weren’t coming from any of the other campaigns. They were coming from the same sketchy sources as the anti-Biden attacks.
Well, consider Exhibits A and B.
Exhibit A. Polls over time.Exhibit B. Party loyalty.
Put those together and what does it mean? First, like it or not, Biden is probably going to be the Democratic nominee, for the simple reason that he’s consistently been the leading candidate. Second, every nominee needs a running mate. Third, nominees frequently choose their running mates to broaden their appeal. Fourth, of the votes he has a chance of attracting, Biden’s biggest appeal problems are on the left (he already appeals to moderates and to disaffected Republicans, and he doesn’t have a ghost of a chance of appealing to hardcore Trumpers).
So, if he is smart, Biden is likely to choose a running mate that will help him appeal to left-leaning voters. Who is he most likely to choose?
First of all, not Sanders. Sorry, Bernie Bros. Sanders isn’t even really a Democrat. That is, of course, one of the things that makes him appealing to those of us on the left, but get real: party loyalty is a thing, and Biden will use it as a reason to punish Sanders. It’s harsh, but it’s the truth.
That leaves Warren as the most obvious choice. Unlike Sanders, Warren did run as a Democrat for her political career, so she has the party loyalty checkbox ticked. Plus, she will be a help from the identity politics standpoint, carrying appeal as only the third female vice-presidential candidate in US history. Another box ticked.
Well, look at that. Those mysterious attacks, mostly coming from identifiably pro-Trump sources, or coming from no identifiable source at all, are being targeted precisely at both the most likely candidates and the Democratic voters most likely to sit the election out as a result of those most likely candidates getting the nomination. How convenient. Convenient for Trump, that is.
Remember, whatever their warts, having Biden and Warren in the White House is vastly preferable to having Trump and Pence there for four more years. If you can’t realize that, you’re not my ally. You’re a fool and a rube, and approximately as much a danger to the continued existence of an open and free society as the gang in the red hats.
Or rather, he should be, because Bloomberg is a far weaker candidate than either Sanders or Biden.
Whether or not Bloomberg actually is Trump’s dream opponent depends on how well the Trump campaign understands that the centrists in the DNC have their thumb on the scale in favor of a pro-Establishment candidate. My guess is that they understand that pretty well, given that they are working for someone who was himself a party outsider and therefore had to contend with the Republican version of the very same thing.
That means I was wrong when I answered my question about Sanders being Trump’s dream opponent in an earlier post.
Trump’s main goal when attacking Biden is to elevate not Sanders but Bloomberg, because Trump is fully aware that this will prompt the Democratic Party elite to do everything within their power to elevate Bloomberg.
(Even if Sanders doesn’t concern you, and you consider Sanders to be the most viable candidate, you should oppose Bloomberg. But that really doesn’t need to be said; most of us on the left already oppose Bloomberg, for ideological reasons. This post is directed to centrists who claim to be opposing Sanders for what they perceive, and with some justification, as the practical reason of his electability.)
Centrists should oppose Bloomberg because Bloomburg is basically a centrist version of what centrists claim to be the most concerning about Sanders.
You dislike Sanders because he’s never run for office as a Democrat. Quite the contrary: he’s run as an independent or a socialist, and never been shy about why he cannot consider himself a Democrat. You worry about that past history alienating centrists and career Democrats.
Well, Bloomburg never ran for office as a Democrat: he ran twice as a Republican and once as an independent. Start worrying about that past history alienating leftists, liberals, and even quite a few plain old career Democrats.
If you worry about Sanders’ lack of appeal because he is too far left, you should worry about Bloomberg’s lack of appeal because he’s too far right.
If you worry about Sanders’ past history of branding himself as “socialist,” you should worry about Bloomberg’s past history of branding himself as “Republican.”
In one candidate — Bloomberg — we have additively combined the significant risk levels of both Sanders and Biden, two candidates that are already troublingly risky.
Bloomberg is thus an exceptionally risky candidate choice. It takes the standard (and very plausible) risk of running a centrist (remember, Democrats, you ran a centrist against Trump in 2016 and she lost), and raises that to the Nth power.
Of all the candidates that have even a ghost of a chance, nominating Bloomberg is probably the surest-fire way to get four more years of Trump.
Never Trump conservatives are fond of repeating it as if it were a mantra, but it is unwise to take such assertions at face value. It can be very difficult to distinguish what one firmly wants (a moderate and not a leftist in the White House, in the case of Never Trumpers) from what one actually believes.
This does appear to be a testable claim, however. There is some evidence that Trump is in fact salivating at the opportunity of running against Sanders. One merely has to consider who he has evidently trained most of his efforts at tearing down: Sanders’ chief rival in the polls, Biden. The whole Ukraine scandal was, after all, prompted by a desire on Trump’s part to smear Biden.
This theory that Trump actually wants to run against Sanders is bolstered by the fact (recently discussed here) of Bernie’s branding issues.
It is important to point out that Biden is hardly the slam-dunk candidate many centrist pundits seem to think he is, however. Rachael Bitecofer (one of the few analysts to correctly predict both the Trump win in 2016 and the size of the 2018 Democratic wave) has pointed out that Biden has some real risks, risks completely related to his political centrism, that are being overlooked by centrists. (I’ve pointed those risks out, too, but most people are likely to take a professional like Bitecofer more seriously.)
What to do about it all? It depends on who leads in the primary. If Biden is the clear leader, it’s worth supporting Bernie as a foil to Biden’s risky pro-Establishment proclivities. That probably won’t make Biden want to nominate Sanders as his VP,* but it will motivate Biden to tack left and embrace a few populist points, and hopefully nominate Warren to be his running mate.
Thankfully, given his front-runner status, Biden seems as if he might finally be getting it. That ad I just linked only mentions Trump in passing, talking mostly about what Biden says he will do if elected. That’s the sort of campaigning it took for the oppositions in Venezuela and Italy to finally have some measure of success against Chávez and Berlusconi, respectively.
* He’s never in a million years going to nominate Sanders to be his running mate. No Democrat would. After all, Sanders isn’t even a real Democrat. He’s always run as an independent or a socialist, and never been short on words with which to disrespect the Democratic Party. Yes, this is all for good reason (the Democrats have earned every bit of disrespect they receive from the left), but it’s also not precisely going to endear him to those whom he disrespected. Trust me, he won’t be nominated to be veep.
Some never Trump conservatives are having a field day playing concern troll, using this to back their assertions up.
I’ve debunked such things before, and I’ll do it again. That poll does not show the public’s ideological proclivities. It shows their ideological labeling proclivities; it is asking people what ideological label they prefer to see attached to themselves.
Most people are not strongly ideological, yet most political pundits are strongly ideological (it tends to be a big part of what motivated them to become political pundits in the first place). Pundits, like everyone else, tend to often make the blunder of projecting their own circumstances onto others. In other words, they tend to conclude that the average American is more of a political animal than he or she actually is.
Interesting things happen if you dig a bit deeper: many of those self-professed “moderates” and “conservatives” are actually sympathetic to many distinctly leftist ideas about inequality and economic justice. There’s plenty of self-professed “conservatives” who seriously distrust the wealthy and powerful.
So there is actually plenty of space for leftist success in electoral politics. But (and this is an important), labeling matters. Many of these same quite-open-to-leftist-ideas people aren’t even aware that they are potential leftists; their idea of what the political left consists of has been shaped by omnipresent anti-left propaganda in the media and education systems to the point that they see the so-called “left” mainly in negative terms.
Who wants to attach a negative label to themselves? Nobody, that’s who. So those people instead label themselves “moderate” or even “conservative.”
And it is here that Sanders has an Achilles heel. He has chosen to embrace a political label (“socialist”) that is toxic to many voters. Yes, it’s rapidly becoming less toxic. But it’s still toxic to many. It’s an exercise in labeling that creates an unfair battleground for Bernie.
Bernie will be able to cope with that self-imposed handicap to a remarkable degree (he’s repeatedly won the votes of many self-professed “conservatives” in rural Vermont for decades). But don’t kid yourself that it’s not a liability at all. It very much is.
Let’s dispense with humanitarian concerns and just talk about cold, hard, military strategy here.
It doesn’t matter that Trump commands what is clearly the world’s most powerful military. Well, that does matter, but it won’t matter from the point of winning any war against Iran: despite its military strength, the USA would clearly lose. This a function of a number of factors:
Iran’s size and capability. Iran has 80 million people and one of the most capable militaries in the region. That’s way more people than Iraq has. Unlike Iraq on the eve of the US invasion, Iran hasn’t been weakened by decades of crippling sanctions. (And the USA came closer than many realize to losing the war in Iraq.)
Distance, motivation, and local knowledge. Any war would be fought primarily in Iran. The USA would have to badly extend itself with long supply lines. Iran’s forces would be right there. In the USA, it would be a war fought half a world away, for questionable purposes, by an unpopular leader, and with significant domestic opposition. In Iran, it would be fought right there, for national survival. The Iranians would know their local terrain far better than the USA does.
Goal asymmetry. In order to win, the USA must defeat and conquer Iran. In order for Iran to win, it must prevent the USA from defeating and conquering it; it is not necessary for Iran to defeat and conquer the USA in order to win.
It would be far harder for the USA to subdue and conquer Iran than it was for the British to subdue and conquer their 13 rebellious colonies in North America, and we all know how that attempt on Britain’s part went.
I may be wrong (and I hope I am), but I see absolutely no evidence that Labour will prevail in the coming general election in the UK. The polls show that Labour has lost ground compared to how they polled prior to the previous election.
Yes, the pollsters botched the prediction of that one, and badly. It is, however, reasonable to assume that they have learned from their mistakes and adjusted their techniques. Remember, Labour is polling slightly worse than in the previous election, and Labour still lost that previous election. (The surprise in 2017 was that Labour barely lost an election that it was expected to lose by a landslide.)
All in all, it really doesn’t look like Jeremy Corbyn will manage to pull a rabbit out of his hat this time.
Mind you, the original ouster of Evo Morales was a popular uprising, not a coup. The problem is, what’s happened since then is sounding more and more coup-like with each passing day. Particularly this (source here):
The IACHR decried as “grave” a decree from the Anez government exempting the armed forces from criminal responsibility as they preserve public order.
The rights group, an autonomous arm of the Organization of American States, said the effect of the decree could be to “stimulate violent repression.”
Just like I can think of no plausible excuse for Morales (or anyone else) to cling to power for term after term, I can think of no plausible excuse for a government placing parts of itself above the law when it comes to committing acts of violence against the people.
In fact, it’s even harder to think of any excuse for the latter. Clinging to power is merely the sort of egoism on the part of a leader that smooths the way to becoming a tyrant in the future. Giving the military a blank check to kill and maim basically is tyranny.
This is an amusing liberal fantasy, but is it really practical? Probably not.
If Bloomberg or Steyer (or Bloomberg and Steyer as a partnership) buy Fox News, and tell their employees to run a real news outlet instead of a right-wing propaganda mill, what will Fox News’ talent do? Some of them might comply with the new boss’s orders, but many wouldn’t.
Murdoch would be flush with cash thanks to the transaction, and use it to start a brand new right-wing propaganda mill. (The market viability of such things has already been proven by today’s Fox News, of course.) The disgruntled talent from the old Fox News would jump ship to the new network, as would the audience for that talent.
It would all amount to nothing more than a very expensive game of Whack-a-Mole.
Mind you, there is a problem with Steyer and Bloomberg using their money to run as primary candidates, and there are much better ways that both could be spending their money, but buying Fox News is not one of those ways.
