I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did.<\/p>\n
It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor<\/a>.<\/p>\n In any case, the result has seen Tabbi at his best:<\/p>\n Bernie Sanders has accomplished something no one in American politics has managed for decades: He\u2019s uniting Democrats and Republicans.<\/span> Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n It is a truly trenchant indictment of the whole “Socialism” hysteria that the pundits are trying to convince the rest of us means something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did. It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor. In any case, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[464,504,405],"class_list":["post-177885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-good-writing","tag-philosophy","tag-presidential-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>It\u2019s early yet, but talking points for the 2020 campaign season are emerging on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats both have been trying to sell the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others as stalking horses for the overthrow of capitalism.<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>This is absurd to the point of being funny: First of all, the press has been dumping on Sanders<\/a> almost recreationally<\/a> for years now. Meanwhile, fear of litigation has kept the press away from business expos\u00e9s for decades. Whole genres of corruption go uncovered, from child labor that makes your consumer goods (enjoy that child-mined cobalt ore<\/a> in your cellphone!) to war profiteering to pollution to industrial accidents. Few news organizations have even one labor reporter anymore. The last collective bargaining session that made a front page probably involved the NFL. <\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Colorado-governor-turned-presidential-candidate John Hickenlooper \u2014 who sells himself as a \u201cpragmatic progressive\u201d \u2014 went after Sanders<\/a> in New Hampshire, though not by name. <\/span>
<\/span>\u201cYou have to hand it to the GOP for achieving the near-impossible,\u201d Hickenlooper said in early May. \u201cJust years after the collapse of the Soviet Union\u2026who would have imagined the Koch brothers and Donald Trump could help resuscitate the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin?\u201d <\/span>
<\/span>Of course, Hickenlooper went on to say, he wasn\u2019t trying to cast aspersions on Sanders as a human being by comparing him to Stalin, who murdered 20 million people<\/a>. \u201cDo I respect him?\u201d Hickenlooper said. \u201cAbsolutely. Do I respect his supporters? Absolutely.\u201d However, he said, he thinks Sanders is wrongly \u201cdemonizing the private sector\u201d with ideas that will \u201churt working people.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>The irony of all of this is that Sanders, who is painted as a sort of extremist<\/a> menace<\/a> and El <\/i>Coco-style monster from whom we should hide the children, would have been considered a tepid Republican back in the Fifties, when the original red scare was at its peak. <\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Bernie Sanders may not be the answer, but he isn\u2019t Stalin, and voter attitudes aren\u2019t changing because people are romanticizing the Great Terror. We\u2019ve just had awful leadership for so long that demanding fairness and competence from politicians has started to seem like a radical idea. It isn\u2019t, but get used to being told it is, until the next election at least.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n