Progressives fold like a cheap suit

Lesson learned: Progressives in Congress have no red lines.

After having most of the good stuff stripped from the budget, the progressives are the ones trying hardest to pass it.

After months of refusing to pass an infrastructure bill without first finalizing the companion social spending bill, House progressives pressured their leadership on Wednesday to hold votes on both bills this week.

Pathetic. Progressives, after running on lowering drug prices since 2006, have proposed to allow Medicare to negotiate lowering drug prices on just 10 DRUGS, starting in 2025.
This is where the Squad is supposed to stand up for what is right and vote against this piece of shit. I seriously doubt that will happen.

So who/what was to blame for the Dems losing yesterday?

If you go back and look at past results, it's corporate Dems, not progressives, that got killed in 2010, 2014, 2016, and 2020.
Corporate Dems are about to get killed again.

On the flip side, what inspired Republicans to go out and vote?
Why something that the average Republican can't even properly identify and is hardly even a thing - critical race theory.

The survey, which polled more than 2,500 Virginia voters, found that 25% of them viewed the CRT debate as the single most important factor they considered when deciding who to support for governor.
Of the quarter of voters who labeled CRT the most important issue, 70% supported Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin and 29% supported the former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

Overall, 72% of Virginia voters said CRT was an "important" factor in their vote while 28% said it was not important.

CRT, which promotes the idea that the U.S. is fundamentally racist, has been adopted by corporations and schools across the country, including in Virginia where parents have flocked to local school board meetings to express their opposition to the teaching.

This is all true, except for the last sentence, which is total bullsh*t. There isn't a single public school that has adopted CRT, plus the definition listed isn't correct.
Now where would Republicans get the idea that CRT was important?

In June, the term was mentioned 993 times during Fox News programming, including overnight rebroadcasts of daytime and prime-time shows. In July, it was mentioned 921 times. That was after being mentioned only 132 times in all of 2020.

I guess Fox News propaganda is still extremely effective. So who is best at it?

One evening earlier this month, a White rage-filled man sat behind a desk, looked into a camera, and began to rant about how something must be done to "save" the United States before "we become Rwanda," a not-so-subtle reference to the horrific genocide that occurred in the African country decades ago.
That rage-filled man, who delivered his diatribe while positioned adjacent to an "ANTI WHITE MANIA" graphic, was not a Neo-Nazi filming a video for an underground network of like-minded extremists.
He was Tucker Carlson of Fox News, the most-watched host on one of the most-watched networks in all of America.

Carlson occupies the space furthest on the fringe at Fox. His show has become defined by bald-faced race-baiting. Earlier this year, Carlson even endorsed the racist "great replacement" theory on his prime time show.

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I haven't trusted her since she ran away with Hillary at the earliest opportunity in 2016. I will be voting against her at every opportunity, I don't care who it is. With friends like her...

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@BORG_US_BORG People want to call it "purity" and all this stuff, but every one of these so called progressives has some major red flags that people just handwave away. Then, they seem so surprised when they get inline for the Dems. I understand that people can change and evolove, but I never see evidence of change, just rebranding.

It also seems to me that for all the talk of the so call progressives not coordinating, they do coordinate on one thing. They seem to have their own version of rotating villain. This time, it was Jayapal's turn to be the face of the pretend opposition and then lead the charge to take the crumbs and like it. Every time something like this happens, a different member becomes the face and the others kind of hang back.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

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@humphrey
They are throwing whistleblowers into prison now. This live stream of the negotiations in the video above is dangerous to broadcast.

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ggersh's picture

Progressives fold like a cheap suit

Why in the world would anyone vote for a D party candidate is above
my pay grade.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

just about everyone here was predicting this would be Obama 2, and they were right. Dem leadership managed the primaries to make sure the left didn't win unless there was no other choice. Still, they blame the left for these losses and wail about the need to move to the center.

Of course, the dems, having never tried to run on a progressive platform wouldn't know if it would be a winner. They put in enough planks from the left to win the election, but so sorry, had to jettison them or whittle them down to practically nothing. So, after that inspiring charade they still feel they deserve to win, just like 2010. On top of that the dems will be insulted if you criticize the minuscule gains passed in their legislation.

Really though, you know what the democrats drill will be. The voters are stupid. The voters are racist. The voters were selfish. The voters were lazy and didn't turn out. While the republicans are the party of Trump, deep down the democrats are still the party of the Clintons.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

There isn't a single public school that has adopted CRT, plus the definition listed isn't correct.

...but other sources, including Matt Taibbi and (to a lesser extent) Chris Hedges, say otherwise. You've written about its malignant influence yourself, at times.

In other news, I have personally seen what this does to people; it is a cult, it is real, it has waging cyber-blitzkrieg at least since 2014, and not only have most of us seen what it did to DailyKos, I have already seen it turn borderline-friends into unrecognizable monsters, and ruin entire websites that weren't even supposed to be "political" in nature.

Here's the deal: I would like to ignore all this - and if this is all just FOX News fearmongering, then I SHOULD be able to and go about my life without seeing it threatening anything I value or causing me problems, right? Well, I tried that...and damn it if it hasn't indeed dragged its fugly carcass across my path and invalidated nearly my whole life.

If your existence contradicts The NewTruth Narrative, does it collapse when it sees you, as it should? No; if there's no place for you in its microcosm, it simply annihilates you. This is Constantine 2.0. Blasphemous Lives DO NOT Matter.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat

..but other sources, including Matt Taibbi and (to a lesser extent) Chris Hedges, say otherwise.

I see one public school teacher after another say CRT isn't being taught in the schools.
I see one article after another STRICTLY from right-wing sources that say otherwise. For instance:

Liberal media is 'brazenly' lying saying CRT isn't taught in Virginia schools: NewsBusters
Liberal pundits are focusing on an 'incredibly limited definition' of CRT, NewsBusters argue

Considering the record of right-wing media in this country for defining words like "socialism", I'll give teachers credibility over the right-wing for the correct definition.

But these pundits are relying on an "incredibly limited definition" of CRT, NewsBusters argued, one that focuses on "a high-level study examining the intersection between race and other cultural forces."

"So yes, fifth graders aren’t hearing graduate-level seminars on racial identity and intersectionality, but all of the same concepts are still there — deconstructing "whiteness," institutional racism, white privilege, and all of the other concepts that everyone (except the media) commonly associates with CRT," the outlet noted.

So if they are teaching that millions of blacks were enslaved during the first century of this country, then its CRT according to the right-wing.
If they are taught we committed genocide against the native population, or discriminated against Chinese immigrants, then it's CRT according to the right-wing.
To you and me, it's simply "history".

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit If "CRT" is being marketed as "we're just teaching what Howard Zinn [among others] covered", they are LYING; I believe that's what's called "motte-and-bailey fallacy".

I was exposed to Howard Zinn as a freshman IN HIGH SCHOOL; I read Farewell to Manzanar and MAUS in middle-school. This is NOT the same.

It's a 'packaging' issue, one might say. We're being sold a fascist binary that I KNOW FIRSTHAND is a lie of omission - and the worst part of all is that it closes minds; those subjected to this CANNOT grow.

It's Evangelicals VS the Taliban all over again; Far-Right VS Far-Fight of a different group.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat I looked up what Matt Taibbi wrote and found this:

Getting back to CNN’s story about the “panic” that “has White people afraid”: Republican politicians, mostly at the state level, are in the midst of an all-out, hair-on-fire campaign against “Critical Race Theory,” with legislators in 24 states attempting to introduce bans of its teaching. It’s become the main front in the culture war, and the Republican Party — which for decades now hasn’t yet met a political opportunity it can’t find a way to fuck up — is losing. Even a perfunctory glance at laws passed in Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, Idaho and Texas reveal they’re making a mess of a response to a phenomenon they don’t understand.

Take the Texas law. In what’s supposedly an effort to fight a movement hostile to speech rights and rife with irrational orthodoxies, the Lone Star State is responding with dumber versions of the same thing. Their law includes broad mandates against “being compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy,” while also requiring teachers to present controversies “without giving deference to any one perspective.” Nearly all the Republican laws share this quality of imposing draconian bans on what they perceive to be elements of CRT, without really defining what CRT is. They don’t know what they’re fighting, so their solutions look like insane overreactions — like smashing at a water bug with a hammer and missing over and over.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit Taibbi's saying just what I'm saying (in his own way).

The war over “Critical Race Theory” in this sense has become a political marketing campaign that’s uniquely double-edged in its cynicism. Democrats are pretending they don’t know what the fuss is all about. Republicans are pretending there isn’t a dog whistle in their backlash campaign. At the center of it all is the concept itself, which does exist but is much broader, and both more interesting and more frightening, than the narrow race theory that has Republican politicians in maximum wig-out mode.

Two years ago, writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.” The author of The Souls of Yellow Folk created an umbrella term to explain everything from whatever the hideous moniker “cancel culture” means to purges of classics and STEM disciplines in universities, to the new move toward segregated “affinity spaces,” to “intent doesn’t matter,” to the spread of workforce training sessions that ask white employees in both the public and private sectors to focus on things like “undoing your own whiteness,” to a dozen other things...

...The movement Yang describes is strategically brilliant and substantively moronic, a perfect intellectual killing machine. The Successor Ideology has blown through institutional America with great speed, coming to dominate everything from academia to the news media to Silicon Valley almost overnight.

The fact that GOP adversaries are totally missing the mark is sad, but hardly surprising.

If they really wanted to take the wind out of its sails, they should try vocally supporting it, like that South Park episode where Uncle Jimbo talks the KKK into supporting Chef's bid to change the city flag (couldn't find a good YouTube clip, somehow - this site really needs to start being made compatible with more/other video platforms).

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
The thing that I was focusing on was the fact that Republicans can't even define CRT.
Forget the Dems for a second. Forget everything else for a moment.

Just consider the insanity of tens of millions of voters totally freaked out over something that they can't even define.
They are angry and afraid over a term, for no other reason than because they were told to be angry and afraid of that term. Echoes of "socialism". That's similar to a cult.

Also, strictly speaking, CRT is not being taught in public schools. Period.
What Republicans are actually raging about is something different.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit

I'd say I was reminded of the "Shariah Law" panic, but sadly, this is (literally?) infinitely more real.

Like I said, the cult of Critical Theory NEEDS to be put down - but nobody is more poorly-suited to do that than the GOP, who'll just wind up burnishing their image.

If they wanted to approach this intelligently, they could - but no, they'd rather stir the pot and literally create a new monster; of course, the folks on the ground are sincere, and they KNOW there's something despicable there. If we could just reach out to them and make putting down the Rainbow-Brownshirts a transpartisan effort...well, the Robber's Cave Experiments said it all from start to finish.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

With regard to the VA election and CRT. Astroturf/Koch bros at it again? Probably. See what you think:

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@peachcreek First we hear they were buying up colleges as one of the last lucid bits of news to show up on DailyKos, next thing you know there's a definitively non-collegial Cultural Devolution on college campuses all across the Anglophone world, and the previously-ascendant "Left" is abruptly shattered, scattered and lobotomized???

"The Woke Brothers" has a certain ring to it, don't you think?

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3 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!