Being mean-girl bitchy behind Sanders' back in e-mails and even setting up rules that disfavored Sanders is not the same thing as preventing Sanders from winning. There's nothing that the DNC did that stopped Sanders from getting enough voters to the polls to win himself the primary.
I agree. Bernie threatened the corporate cash box. He threatened the bottom line because he was going to divert some of that wealth to the people who desperately needed it. A corporation will literally use child slaves, but you threaten to take away some of their money to feed children? You're a threat and you have to be disqualified lest you get the chance. Bernie wanted to stop the child crushing machine. Trump wanted to make the child crushing machine larger and faster, and Hillary wanted to keep the child crushing machine we had, but with rounder edges so it seemed friendlier. That is where we are right now. Both parties are owned by corporations that would let a million of us die to keep business running. I can say this with confidence because that's what they did in 2019.
Well, you're free to your opinion and, using that logic, clearly America wanted Trump so we deserve what we get.
People thinking a third party is viable on a national level without another party essentially dying (see: The Federalist Party, The Whigs, etc.) have a fundamental misunderstanding of math.
Well, it is, in a vast number of other democracies around the world. You'd have to be willing to adjust the way you choose your representatives of course... i.e. how you want to balance proportional representation vs majority vote etc., state vs federal etc. But it can be done... it's always a compromise, and the one your founding fathers came up with is by no means inescapable. It's of course a different question how you change that when change would have to be mediated through one of two parties who both profit enormously from the current sorry state of affairs.
Not saying it is overall impossible, but the system we have right now in the US has always made a third party unviable because of game theory. If anyone wants a real third party in the US, they need to be working on such things as ranked choice voting so that there is not a systemic bias for two parties. It isn't as simple as "ALL PARTIES ARE THE SAME" - our current structure rewards parties being more similar but also I would also say this is probably the first time in a very long time that the two parties were this divergent. If you think the Dems and GOP are the same, then you are either being contrarian for the sake of it or a complete moron.
I'd be interested in hearing a realistic path to escaping the two party system in America as it exists here and now. Between the money advantage that the Republican and Democratic parties would have over any insurgent party, the cultural advantage that they have (i.e. how much individual people link their identity to the two parties), the institutional advantage they have (enough to block such things as ranked choice voting, the Electoral College largely needing a constitutional amendment to change or shenanigans that are unlikely to happen like all states agreeing to shift their EC votes to the overall winner of the popular vote), what might lead to a viable third-party candidate at the national level? Let alone enough of them to give the Republicans and Democrats serious pause?
The "opportunity" is that he checked into that hotel a couple of days ahead of time, brought weapons he bought back home, released a fucking manifesto, took a train across country and made a play for it through security that has been demonstrably inefficient in the past. You're hinging your argument on Trump being there. He specifically said he wanted to target members of the administration, and several were there... not just The Donald. The scenario that he planned this out on his own and goddamned near got lucky is an order of magnitude more plausible than "it was a psy-op." What are you, Alex Jones' kid brother or something?
The Democrat establishment expected Hillary to win the nomination in 2008, but she was so unpopular that Obama was able to win it, even though he didn't expect to win when he started. The Republican establishment expected someone like Jeb to win the nomination in 2016, but Trump managed to win it after failing pretty spectacularly in 2012. If a candidate can get enough people behind them during the primaries, the establishment can't really stop them. Bernie couldn't get enough people behind him during the primaries. Simple as.
They do have that "bitch got pumped and dumped" energy going on, don't they? Hell hath no fury and all that...
Michael Glantz who is apparently Wolf Blitzer's agent, calmly kept eating his salad in the aftermath.
Well what happened to all of that lobster and the food they were going to serve? Do you think people got to go boxes?
I mean, honestly, they all had to know they weren't the ones in any danger. "Oh no, someone's trying to shoot the president. Stop. Don't. Somebody stop...Oops, almost spilled my drink."
That is a huge stretch from what I said, and it's not what I mean. All I said was that the NYT story or anything I am familiar with really only shows that the DNC shit-talk Sanders behind his back, possibly gossiped with journalists, and the biggest thing that I am familiar with, leaked topics to the Clinton campaign in advance of a debate. To me, that is a far cry from supporting for any opinion suggesting that Sanders would or should have won the primaries but for DNC rigging. What they are documented to have done was being "mean-girl bitchy" about Sanders. What they have not been documented to have done (as far as I know) is to have done anything that could meaningfully be argued to have cost Sanders a single primary, let alone the nomination. From the NYT story and the Wikileaks, there is not one thing that shows that the DNC actually did anything meaningful to harm Sanders' candidacy. The story talks about: DNC people e-mailing each other privately reacting to news stories about Sanders 1. DNC people thinking about trying to report that the Sanders campaign is "a mess" with the end result being someone saying the DNC chair Wasserman Schultz told them to leave it alone. 2. DNC people reacting to a news story in which Sanders said he'd fire Wasserman Schultz if he became president, with the DNC people saying that Wasserman automatically would be done anyway and then saying that Sanders wasn't going to be president. 3. A DNC person musing about trying to get someone to directly ask an unnamed person, presumably Sanders, about his religious beliefs on the assumption that he's an atheist and that it would cost him votes in places like KY and West Virginia. (The story doesn't say that the DNC actually got the press to ask Sanders if he was an atheist.) None of the 20,000 e-mails apparently stated anything about the DNC people stiffing money or resources to the Sanders campaign that they were rightfully due, or giving undue assistance to the Clinton campaign, or about DNC people actually doing anything that could be reasonably credited for Sanders losing a single primary, let alone the overall delegate race. That's my opinion. Like you say, you are entitled to yours, whether or not there is factual support for yours.
