What does unifying the party even mean?
A perfect 1:1 balance between anger and melancholy
My only thought about the impeachment debacle is that it’s been sad watching all of the indignant weenies going on the TV to shout impotently that This will not do! knowing all the while that it will in fact do and it already has.
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In order to write this newsletter at peak performance I have to maintain a perfect 1:1 balance between anger and melancholy like when you’ve had too much coke and need to guzzle a beer to even out but I feel like I’ve lost a portion of my melancholy lately maybe due to being happy to be alive and I worry it’s affecting my work so sorry about that. People get mad when you say shit like that so sorry about that too. People don’t like it when people say they need to be depressed or miserable to be creative because it sets a bad example for other people and that is true you don’t need to be like that at all it’s great to not be miserable but I’m also not your therapist and you should not take advice from me on mental health or anything else for that matter except for who to support in the Democratic primary.
My anger levels are firmly in the red lately so that is throwing things off too and what I have spent the majority of this weekend angry about is the fake outrage over Rashida Tlaib lightly booing Hillary Clinton and I’m sorry in advance most of this newsletter is going to be about that general topic and the idea of bring the party together.
There’s a common scene in a lot of films and novels where a person is about to be executed perhaps for political reasons perhaps in a war and naturally they are bereft at the thought but then they steel themselves at the last minute and put on a stiff upper lip and go to face the firing squad or whatever with dignity because mewling and crying and pissing would be unseemly and undignified and so they die in the gentlemanly way and I think that is how the Democratic establishment honestly expects the rest of us to behave in a primary election despite the actual life or death consequences at stake for millions of us. Be a good chap and go out with your head held high and don’t say anything untoward that would upset How Things Are Done.
People and by people I mean the corporate wing of the Democratic party who think the dreaded Bernie Bros saying pee pee to them online is an affront to order seem to be very concerned about the cause of uniting the party and not being divisive but I don’t know what they mean by that except shut the fuck up and take what you get.
I asked people what “unifying the party even means” and here are some of the answers I got:
It means everyone who suffers under the status quo must shut up and thank those who do immaterial lip service to social justice so affluent liberals never have to feel uncomfortable about their privilege.
Seems to roughly translate to “shut up.”
Forfeiting your values to vote for a conservative DINO.
Giving up on the idea that better things are possible.
It means bowing down and kissing the feet of people who don’t care about us.
It means the left capitulating to appease the center and its benefactors, always.
“Stop yelling at the rich people in the party.”
Same as “compromising” with the enemy. It means having no values, and not much else.
You’ll find a lot of people tone policing political discussions lately in the year 2016 which it currently is and always will be which is a way of delegitimizing any sense of fury you might be feeling. “We all have to work together” they say “We all want the same thing” they say meaning to beat Trump above all else. Why fight amongst ourselves when we want the same thing? they say and the answer is because we don't. We don't want the same thing is why.
We all want to beat Trump yes yes of course. But we can do that and then......on top of that!!! start to work on making life better for the people we grind into mud regularly as a matter of policy at the same time. Who told people we could only aspire to do one thing which is beat Trump and then we have to stop there? Why not do that and also start on all the other shit? Democrats have been so fully demoralized and neutered that the concept of hoping for everything we justly deserve is framed as dangerous gluttonous overreach.
A lot of libs don't want to risk that extra step after beating Trump because it doesn't apply to their life and they will be comfortable no matter what happens even if it makes them personally sad sometimes to see Trump doing racism all the time on their nice TV. Yes yes we’ll get to all the ponies and ice cream stuff later after we get things back to normal they say but it’s a lie.
A lot of my old normie friends are like I just want to beat Trump and Biden is the most electable we can’t risk it and shit like that but what's going to happen with four years of Biden choking on brain pretzels and doing nothing much to make our lives better? What happens when the next Trump down the line isn’t also by sheer luck the dumbest man alive?
Comfortable people can punt. Desperate people have to go for it.
So no we are not being divisive the divide is already here. We’re divided. We’ve long since been.
“The Democratic Party is inherently disunified,” I just read Meagan Day of Jacobin post on Twitter. “It represents Blue Cross and people whose medical claims are denied by Blue Cross. It represents Blackstone and people evicted by Blackstone. It represents welfare recipients and people whose tax breaks are aided by welfare cuts.”
“You can scold people all you want for booing and being rude or whatever, but all you're really mad at them for is noticing that you built a tenuous and contradictory coalition, and that the side with more money is winning, and that when it wins it hurts the other side.”
To be clear I do not hate Elizabeth Warren or think she would be as bad as a lot of Bernie supporters might. On the contrary I think she — hopefully if she is true to her word fingers crossed! — would be the leftmost president we’ve had in a very long time certainly more so than Obama the president which is a different thing than Obama the candidate. I just don’t think she is furious enough at shit like this stuff below as she should be and I wish she and everyone else was.
Not really sure how it's possible but I still keep getting more and more disgusted every day at the predatory healthcare cartel we have in this country. Imagine a natural disaster and the closest open store was selling bottled water to desperate people. You ask the clerk how much for the water you need to live and they say they don't know. Does the manager know? No he doesn’t either. Give me a ballpark? Sorry but no. Drink the water and we'll tell you in a couple months how much it costs. If you would prefer to go looking elsewhere for water you can do so and that’s called exercising choice.
Check out this newspaper clipping from the Bennington Banner in 1972. That’s fifty years ago. That’s before I was even born and I’m old as hell.
Look at this motherfucker Dean Baquet what a fucking piece of shit. The New York Times executive editor went on the very popular podcast The Daily which I would like to assure you I did not listen to lol but I read about here in a piece on Press Watch.
“Baquet refused to in any way condemn a recent Times article that was widely and appropriately cited as a canonical example of bothesideism,” Dan Froomkin writes. “The article lamented that ‘the lawmakers from the two parties could not even agree on the basic set of facts in front of them.’”
Baquet instead endorsed something he called “sophisticated true objectivity.”
“The easy version of what I call ‘sophisticated true objectivity’… is: ‘I’m writing my story on deadline. OK. This guy said this, this guy said that, I’m going to gather, you decide,’” he said. “That’s not what I mean when I say sophisticated, true objectivity is a goal. True objectivity is you listen, you’re empathetic, if you hear stuff you disagree with, but it’s factual, and it’s worth people hearing, you write about it.”
I agree that’s a wonderful goal.
But what do you do when what they say it not factual? Do you call it out?
In some cases, you engage in “deep reporting,” Baquet said. But you don’t do “labeling and cheap analysis.” You don’t call it a lie, he said.
“Let somebody else call it a lie.”
“In my mind, I think of the reader, who just wants to pick up his paper in the morning and know what the hell happened — I’m beholden to that reader, and I feel obligated to tell that reader what happened.”
Speaking of The Daily I guess like two million people listen to it a day and that is very good for the Times and Mike Barbaro. It’s also pretty funny that so many liberals get their news from a guy who posted this a couple years ago. Maybe he has changed and is a lot different and me always remembering this is a deficiency of mine and not his but maybe not.
In case you were unaware the old cast of Deadspin have been running a pop-up site over at Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog Dot Com this weekend. Getting the gang back together for one last job: To blog the Super Bowl.
It’s been fun as you might expect but I particularly liked this post about Sports Business Reporting’s Biggest Dink Darren Rovell who has been on one this week it seems.
If you missed it last year you’ll want to read this old Hell World it’s a doozy lol.
Ok I’m going to shut the fuck up for now and listen to some nice soothing music to relax. I know I just posted a video of hers on here the other day but man it only took me about thirty seconds from laughing about her name on the Boston Calling lineup poster to having a new favorite band.
:(
I think you are missing some of why people were mad at Tlaib, and why they talk about “party unity.” Which I think is a stupid term, I think what they are mostly thinking are “Jesus Christ just stop fighting with each other and get something fucking done.”
I respect the hell out of your support for Bernie and will enthusiastically vote for him if he’s the nominee but come the primary, I’m probably gonna vote for Warren, because it’s more than issues. It’s also being able to get shit done, and my expectation with Bernie (hopefully I’m wrong if he becomes president) is that not a whole lot will happen. Picture it: Bernie’s president, Congress is somewhat more progressive than it was, but he still has to get a whole bunch of people who are being lobbied by insurance companies and are in less progressive districts (like here in Texas) to vote for it.
Which is the problem with M4A as a litmus test, because I think it’s a great idea, but if wound up with say, what Germany has - which works great, our family in Germany tells us all about it - that would be pretty fantastic and it’s not a centralized M4A deal. It is universal, high quality health care that doesn’t make people bankrupt though.
My issue with Tlaib wasn’t tone policing or anything like that, and I don’t like Warren because Bernie people yelled at me on Twitter. I just think she will be better and getting shit done, and it will be some good shit, although some it will probably not be what I really wanted. It’ll just be a whole lot better than what we’ve seen in the past.
My issue with Tlaib was why the fuck were they even talking about this? The country’s burning down and Hillary being a shit is the topic of the day? how about talking about how you’re gonna get this giant paralysis machine called Congress to do anything worthwhile? I’d like to hear everybody’s thoughts on that.