@janis b @janis b

is that, in situations like this one, you could think somebody is a trustworthy person and yet still think that, with the right "leverage," they could be bullied into doing something.

What I'm about to say next doesn't apply to Bernie.

It's also true that people who look trustworthy are sometimes plants. Markos Moulitsas looked eminently trustworthy from 2002-2010. The enemy loves its long cons.

This results in a lot of people keeping one eye even on those that they (mostly) trust. Before Jimmy Dore got fired from The Young Turks and his videos started dropping off YouTube's recommended lists (even for me, and I watch him all the time), I thought he might be a plant. Jake Tapper coming out on the right side of Hillary's attack on Tulsi makes me suspicious that I'm getting played there too.

It's extremely difficult to navigate these waters, to remain as skeptical as the conditions warrant without succumbing to utter paranoia.

If people suspect that a public figure might be acting on behalf of the goons, that is not cause to attack the people who are suspicious, nor to resent them. I can't speak for all of us, but I'm doing the best I can to stay grounded in the truth, and I bet other skeptics are doing the best they can as well. Framing this in terms of personal betrayal or outrageous slander is not appropriate to the situation. I bet that if I could talk to Bernie one-on-one, while he might not like my position, he would not condemn me for it. He knows that lies, betrayals, and manipulation have become the currency of our politics. They ARE our politics now. I don't think he'd condemn me for holding back total trust.

As far as Bernie goes, what I'm seeing is a man whose independence is hampered but not destroyed. In other words, as Podesta said to Robbie Mook, they've got "leverage," but it seems the leverage only goes so far. At least that exchange between Podesta and Mook essentially proves that, in 2016, Bernie was definitely NOT working for the establishment. How much they've dragged him back into line is debatable, but it's likely that Bernie isn't just one more case of controlled opposition.

But there are limits to his independence. I notice he rarely tussles with the MIC.

#1

and patience, too little of what many have.

@JtC

. . . by putting deplorable in quotes, not skewering Bernie. Either way, whichever way, I understand your concern and as I noted earlier will abide.

#1
if by "deplorable" you are referencing this exchange that you had with another user then I need to set something straight here. There are no political sacred cows here at c99, none, they are all open to criticism, including Bernie. This site itself does not back any candidates in particular and users here are free to promote whomever they want.

We ask folks to be civil with one another here, that does not extend to politicians and public figures.

@on the cusp Will do, thank you!

#3 Check out snoopydawg's essay on this subject posted earlier!

@gjohnsit I thought Gabbard went easy on her, but expending too much energy on the Dem's useless idiot—losing to the mentally deranged dotard argues that one— is not prudent.

Someone in North Korea was spot-on in their assessment of our accidental president and was smart enough to realize that manipulating him rather than insulting would be very effective though not nearly as much fun.

I am amazed at the number of folks who went along with her-sociopathic-clintonness. I probably shouldn't have been since they are probably the same folks running around anointing her as the most-qualified-ever; irrationality like that is probably congenital.

#3
I thought she came on too hot, but it appears that a) the Hillary people didn't care, and b) everyone else thought that it was great.
My bad.

@gjohnsit

You think Tulsi's response was too hot? I thought it was spot on because she was absolutely right about Hillary being a warmonger and responsible for the rot in the DP. The Clintons decided to get in bed with the banks and big corporations and the party went downhill from there. Trump is Obama's legacy, but Obama is Bill's. His taking so much money from the banks and then putting them in his cabinet and many of them Clinton retreads that were mainly responsible for the economic crisis. Yeah..the Clintons brought the rot.

Here's Tulsi's new tweet.

If you're sick of the new McCarthyism and warmongering by Hillary and her cohorts, then join our campaign. We need your support. Democrat, Republican, Independent — it doesn't matter. We need to unite to usher in a govt which is of, by, and for the people! https://t.co/rzEE9eqDSR pic.twitter.com/Jsq9EWxGDM

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 21, 2019

#3
I thought she came on too hot, but it appears that a) the Hillary people didn't care, and b) everyone else thought that it was great.
My bad.

@gjohnsit

Somebody who isn't on the right.

#3
I thought she came on too hot, but it appears that a) the Hillary people didn't care, and b) everyone else thought that it was great.
My bad.

@snoopydawg

"Stupid" doesn't make someone giggle at the sight of a man being raped to death with a bayonet.

#5

And in an age of near universal literacy and information access in the developed world, stupid is an evil all its own. Perhaps the greatest of all evils. This is now abundantly clear with the poorly disguised attempt to smear a veteran and sitting congresswoman as a traitorous Manchurian candidate and its hilarious response.

Gets better..

As fun as it is to joke about these people being reptillian baby eaters, the truth of the matter is that while indeed the Clintons (just like the Bushes and Trumps) are monstrously corrupt, they are also remarkably stupid. Hillary in particular, who lacks the charisma and trend-reading ability to her husband, is a living embodiment not of evil but of incompetence. The network she can call out to speak on her behalf is more a patronage network of fellow incompetents than it is anything else, though that network surely does exist as we can see clearly this week,

Did Hillary work with Trump on the birtherism? Remember how close they were to him during those years...

-She then ran her first presidential campaign in 2008. Her record specifically on Iraq doomed both her and her Republican analog, John McCain, both of whom lost to a previously unknown upstart senator who ran against that war and the people who made it. During this campaign, Hillary Clinton engaged in endless race-baiting attacks on her opponent implying something nebulously foreign about him in a precursor to Trump’s birtherism and insisting that ‘the real America’ of the midwest and south would never vote for him….for *some* reason. She then refused to concede her clear loss in the primary and hung around for a strangely long period of time. Far longer than, say, Bernie Sanders did against her in 2016. She did this, most likely, as a negotiating tactic to be Obama’s declared successor and Secretary of State.

Damn right her emails!

-Upon becoming Secretary of State she quickly went on to show what a mistake the first of Obama’s corrupt bargains would end up being for any hopes of reversing Bush’s ruinous administration. She was the decisive force for convincing an undecided Obama to intervene in Libya. Now, Libya is a failed state fought over warlords that incubates terrorism, Islamic extremism, and has a burgeoning chattel slavery industry. Despite this enormous failure, Hillary pushed again for greater levels of intervention in Syria, this time on the side of outright and undisguised jihadists. Her very own emails, which her fans often deride as ‘but her emails’ to deflect from their actual contents, show that she was aware of this and still supported ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ (which you can look up yourself as the documentation is truly enormous) anyway

"Pokemon Go (to the polls".... good lord..

-In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton then went on to run the most well-funded campaign in history into the ground. Everyone save Matt Taibbi preemptively called the election for Clinton. Her staff’s one original idea aside from riding celebrity accolades was to signal boost Trump over his republican challengers using their media contacts in something called ‘The Pied Piper Strategy‘, thinking he would be the easiest candidate to beat. Most likely, Hillary would have beaten nonentities like Rubio and Jeb!, but someone like Trump was always going to be more of a challenge to the ultimate insiders of the Clintons. Then, in the general election, Hillary Clinton ran what could only be described as a Romney-style campaign based on insulting voters who weren’t already in her camp, failing to campaign in the right locations, and generally ignoring the strong ground game. Plus, she had a close run with a previously little known self-described socialist from Vermont. A challenger that, despite all the post-election rhetoric from all sides, went on to deliver a greater percentage of his base to Hillary than Hillary ever did for Obama after losing to him 8 years before. Hillary then went on to promise her priorities after her inevitable coronation as ‘the removal of Assad from power’ (mentioned in literally every 2016 presidential debate in the general) and even more of the same policies of offshoring and deindustrialization that everyone outside of finance hates. Oh but don’t worry, she had some great one-liners.

McCarthyite hysteria...

-In the post-election hellscape of her failure, Hillary Clinton and her fans who treat her like she is their mother, have greatly exaggerated Russian cyber interference in American discourse in order to absolve themselves and their entire overpaid consultant class from the blame they deserve for blowing the most winnable election in history. This has unleashed a McCarthyite hysteria that has hijacked the Democratic Party, public discourse, and the media and created an opposition to Trump that looks like the republican loyalists to Bush from 2001-2008, where accusations of disloyalty and secret sympathies dog the discourse as a cover for avoiding substantive debate. This is a big reason why the Democrats of this decade became like the Republicans of last decade. Reflexively in support of military intervention, in love with intelligence agencies, and using the same model of going all out religious revival in social issues to distract their supporters from the fact that very few policies they support actually help their base in any real material way.

Sticks the landing...

The fact of the matter is, Hillary Clinton is nothing but an attention-seeking and uncharismatic sociopath with no self-reflection or ability to learn. Everything she has ever touched has turned to ashes and manure. Her ability to create spectacular backfires is a welcome addition to the message-driven Gabbard campaign, as few in this country are loathed as much as Hillary Clinton is-especially by independent and anti-establishment voters. By giving her un-endorsement she has already served an unintentionally useful purpose for those who wish to bring about change. By inspiring all her servile op-ed ghouls to come out in her defense she shows who is willing to make the death rattles on behalf of a dying order and who isn’t. She is not showing her power, but her weakness. A head of a cabal she may be, but rather than pulling the levers of power this cabal spends its time sitting and sulking at a world waking up to their many failures and rank incompetence.

I would say ‘Go away Hillary,’ but I know after crawling back into her spider hole of bitter resentment and abject failure that she will only give us a few months more at most before reappearing yet again with more rot and decay than ever before.

Every other presidential candidate that lost has faded away into the history books, but not Her. Oh no. We have been subjected to her constant whining and excuses for why she lost the easiest election in history to the worst candidate ever. And now here she is again trying to make herself relevant.

@snoopydawg This sums her character up as I see her.

The fact of the matter is, Hillary Clinton is nothing but an attention-seeking and uncharismatic sociopath with no self-reflection or ability to learn. Everything she has ever touched has turned to ashes and manure. Her ability to create spectacular backfires is a welcome addition to the message-driven Gabbard campaign, as few in this country are loathed as much as Hillary Clinton is-especially by independent and anti-establishment voters.

Hillary still sees herself as entitled to be the first woman President. She has a band of sycophants who flatter her ego. But in reality, Hillary is very much hated,not only on the right, but also by a large number of people on the left. She will never be President.

#5

And in an age of near universal literacy and information access in the developed world, stupid is an evil all its own. Perhaps the greatest of all evils. This is now abundantly clear with the poorly disguised attempt to smear a veteran and sitting congresswoman as a traitorous Manchurian candidate and its hilarious response.

Gets better..

As fun as it is to joke about these people being reptillian baby eaters, the truth of the matter is that while indeed the Clintons (just like the Bushes and Trumps) are monstrously corrupt, they are also remarkably stupid. Hillary in particular, who lacks the charisma and trend-reading ability to her husband, is a living embodiment not of evil but of incompetence. The network she can call out to speak on her behalf is more a patronage network of fellow incompetents than it is anything else, though that network surely does exist as we can see clearly this week,

Did Hillary work with Trump on the birtherism? Remember how close they were to him during those years...

-She then ran her first presidential campaign in 2008. Her record specifically on Iraq doomed both her and her Republican analog, John McCain, both of whom lost to a previously unknown upstart senator who ran against that war and the people who made it. During this campaign, Hillary Clinton engaged in endless race-baiting attacks on her opponent implying something nebulously foreign about him in a precursor to Trump’s birtherism and insisting that ‘the real America’ of the midwest and south would never vote for him….for *some* reason. She then refused to concede her clear loss in the primary and hung around for a strangely long period of time. Far longer than, say, Bernie Sanders did against her in 2016. She did this, most likely, as a negotiating tactic to be Obama’s declared successor and Secretary of State.

Damn right her emails!

-Upon becoming Secretary of State she quickly went on to show what a mistake the first of Obama’s corrupt bargains would end up being for any hopes of reversing Bush’s ruinous administration. She was the decisive force for convincing an undecided Obama to intervene in Libya. Now, Libya is a failed state fought over warlords that incubates terrorism, Islamic extremism, and has a burgeoning chattel slavery industry. Despite this enormous failure, Hillary pushed again for greater levels of intervention in Syria, this time on the side of outright and undisguised jihadists. Her very own emails, which her fans often deride as ‘but her emails’ to deflect from their actual contents, show that she was aware of this and still supported ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ (which you can look up yourself as the documentation is truly enormous) anyway

"Pokemon Go (to the polls".... good lord..

-In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton then went on to run the most well-funded campaign in history into the ground. Everyone save Matt Taibbi preemptively called the election for Clinton. Her staff’s one original idea aside from riding celebrity accolades was to signal boost Trump over his republican challengers using their media contacts in something called ‘The Pied Piper Strategy‘, thinking he would be the easiest candidate to beat. Most likely, Hillary would have beaten nonentities like Rubio and Jeb!, but someone like Trump was always going to be more of a challenge to the ultimate insiders of the Clintons. Then, in the general election, Hillary Clinton ran what could only be described as a Romney-style campaign based on insulting voters who weren’t already in her camp, failing to campaign in the right locations, and generally ignoring the strong ground game. Plus, she had a close run with a previously little known self-described socialist from Vermont. A challenger that, despite all the post-election rhetoric from all sides, went on to deliver a greater percentage of his base to Hillary than Hillary ever did for Obama after losing to him 8 years before. Hillary then went on to promise her priorities after her inevitable coronation as ‘the removal of Assad from power’ (mentioned in literally every 2016 presidential debate in the general) and even more of the same policies of offshoring and deindustrialization that everyone outside of finance hates. Oh but don’t worry, she had some great one-liners.

McCarthyite hysteria...

-In the post-election hellscape of her failure, Hillary Clinton and her fans who treat her like she is their mother, have greatly exaggerated Russian cyber interference in American discourse in order to absolve themselves and their entire overpaid consultant class from the blame they deserve for blowing the most winnable election in history. This has unleashed a McCarthyite hysteria that has hijacked the Democratic Party, public discourse, and the media and created an opposition to Trump that looks like the republican loyalists to Bush from 2001-2008, where accusations of disloyalty and secret sympathies dog the discourse as a cover for avoiding substantive debate. This is a big reason why the Democrats of this decade became like the Republicans of last decade. Reflexively in support of military intervention, in love with intelligence agencies, and using the same model of going all out religious revival in social issues to distract their supporters from the fact that very few policies they support actually help their base in any real material way.

Sticks the landing...

The fact of the matter is, Hillary Clinton is nothing but an attention-seeking and uncharismatic sociopath with no self-reflection or ability to learn. Everything she has ever touched has turned to ashes and manure. Her ability to create spectacular backfires is a welcome addition to the message-driven Gabbard campaign, as few in this country are loathed as much as Hillary Clinton is-especially by independent and anti-establishment voters. By giving her un-endorsement she has already served an unintentionally useful purpose for those who wish to bring about change. By inspiring all her servile op-ed ghouls to come out in her defense she shows who is willing to make the death rattles on behalf of a dying order and who isn’t. She is not showing her power, but her weakness. A head of a cabal she may be, but rather than pulling the levers of power this cabal spends its time sitting and sulking at a world waking up to their many failures and rank incompetence.

I would say ‘Go away Hillary,’ but I know after crawling back into her spider hole of bitter resentment and abject failure that she will only give us a few months more at most before reappearing yet again with more rot and decay than ever before.

Every other presidential candidate that lost has faded away into the history books, but not Her. Oh no. We have been subjected to her constant whining and excuses for why she lost the easiest election in history to the worst candidate ever. And now here she is again trying to make herself relevant.

@snoopydawg

But then no one ever talks about the hold Israel has over our government at all levels. Why is that?

....because it would take very little time for people to see all the demographic anomalies. And even less time to see how badly the American people have been used without their consent.

Which reminds me of something else I've noticed. When brittle people with low evolutionary potential are cornered by their own arguments that people should not receive benefits from their government, and why Americans should not be given the most basic human rights conferred on people in all developed and emergent nations, for example affordable housing or clean drinking water — they always stand their ground with the same answer. When it is pointed out that these rights were ratified unanimously by all nations in 1948 — and all other affluent and emergent nations immediately conferred these rights irrevocably upon their people, they say:

"It's different in America. Those other nations are not 'melting pots'. You can't just give people 'rights' or material things when you have a 'diversified' population like the US does. Here's why we have the highest infant mortality rate and the highest maternal-death rate among developed nations: We're 'diversified' with types of people who are biologically weak and die easily at childbirth. The US is 'diversified' with culturally inferior people who don't know how to use health care services properly, so that there's enough to go around. We're 'diversified' with types of people who don't care if their children go to bed hungry. If we help them, it will just create a moral hazard that breeds more of them. And, their children will still go to bed hungry. Next, they will start demanding better food. Some act like they are entitled to share our food. It never stops. We're forced to share this continent with people who are essentially sub-human, and they drag our social wellbeing numbers down whenever the US is compared to other, 'more demographically homogenized' nations. You don't see to be able to grasp the reality that surrounds you."

.
The brainwashing program wins again. Diversification is the reason that the American people cannot have nice things. (Or, why only 'some' of them can.)

#6

This goes for Moscow Mitch and every one else people say are Vlad's puppet. The stupidity of people actually believing that anyone in government could be under a foreign government's influence is just mind boggling isn't it? But then no one ever talks about the hold Israel has over our government at all levels. Why is that?

@The Voice In the Wilderness

#10