I just remembered something funny that someone told me. The trouble with
being blind is that I didn't realize that Sanders was doing this.
Remember when the Donald and Hillary were debating and Don the trump
came over to her side of the stage to hover over her menacingly? I was
told that he would never be able to do that with Sanders because with
the way Sanders waves his arms around every time he talks Trump just
might get knocked out if he gets too close.
___
Sam Harris
“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen
yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence
as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell
him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who
will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every
incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what
so ever.”
― Sam Harris,
On 3/2/2020 12:35 PM, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The Sanders Coalition Is Set to Shock the World on Super Tuesday
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., signs autographs for supporters in Santa Ana,
Calif., last month. (Damian Dovarganes / AP)
For many years, corporate media outlets said it couldn’t be done. Now, they
say it must not be. To the nation’s punditocracy — tacitly or overtly
aligned with the nation’s oligarchy — nominating Bernie Sanders as the
Democratic presidential candidate would be catastrophic.
But the 17,000 people who jammed into the Los Angeles Convention Center to
hear Sanders speak on Sunday night are part of a progressive populist
upsurge that shows no sign of abating. What I saw at the rally was a
multiracial, multigenerational coalition with dimensions that no other
candidate can come near matching.
With scant support from people of color, the media-pumped campaign of Pete
Buttigieg has ended and Amy Klobuchar’s candidacy is about to collapse. Tom
Steyer’s self-financed escapade has folded. Despite his win in South
Carolina, Joe Biden’s campaign is hollow with “back to the future” rhetoric.
Mike Bloomberg — the quintessential “Not Us. Me.” candidate — might soon
discover that he can’t buy elections no matter how much money he plows into
advertisements, endorsements and consultants.
As for Elizabeth Warren: after impressive seasons of articulating a
challenge to corporate power last year, she has recently diluted her appeal
with murky messages of “unity” while gratuitously sniping at Sanders.
Looking ahead, it’s unclear whether Warren will renew her focus on
denouncing the political leverage of wealth. Top Democratic Party power
brokers don’t want her to. Before the end of spring, we’ll know whether
“nevertheless, she persisted.”
Meanwhile, media coverage remains saturated by the Sanders-can’t-beat-Trump
mantra, but that claim is eroding. The New York Times — which, like other
major outlets, has racked up a long record of thinly veiled hostility toward
Sanders and has been amplifying the panicked alarms from top Democrats —
recently published two cogent opinion pieces, “The Case for Bernie Sanders”
and “Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here’s the Math.”
Even the Times news department, a bastion of hidebound corporate centrism,
acknowledged days ago that Sanders “appeared to be making headway in
persuading Democratic voters that he can win the general election. A Fox
News poll released on Thursday showed about two-thirds of Democrats believe
that Mr. Sanders could beat President Trump, the highest share of any
candidate in the field.”
But make no mistake about it: The bulk of powerful corporate media and
entrenched corporate Democrats will do all they can to prevent the nominee
from being Sanders. (I actively support him, while not affiliated with the
official campaign.) More than ever, the current historic moment calls for a
commensurate response: All left hands on deck.
A chant that filled the big hall in Los Angeles where Sanders spoke on
Sunday night — “Sí, se puede” — came from a crowd that was perhaps half
Latino. A coalition has emerged on the ground to topple longstanding
political barriers of race, ethnicity, language and culture, with shared
enthusiasm for the Bernie 2020 campaign that is stunning, deep and
transcendent.
“Look around,” said Marisa Franco, co-founder of the Latinx and Chicanx
activist hub Mijente, during her powerful speech that introduced Sanders at
the LA rally. “We are perched at the edge of history. There is so much at
stake in the 2020 election. The world around us is bursting with problems
and bursting with possibilities. And that’s making some people very very
nervous. You know why? Because we’re winning.”
Franco added: “Bernie Sanders presents the clearest alternative to Trump. He
is willing to name the problems, what’s causing them, and proposes the bold
solutions that we need to solve them. . . . We want — and we demand —
elected officials who are going to fight like hell for us.”
Norman Solomon
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group
RootsAction.org...
