Good kos, bad kos?
The March 15 transition [when Daily Kos moderators will consider the Democratic primaries to be effectively over and will no longer tolerate antagonism toward Hillary Clinton and re-fighting the primaries] isn’t about giving Clinton supporters a chance to celebrate, spike the football, rub the faces of their opponents in the mud. It’s about uniting toward a common purpose.
Hmm, let’s see. Newly minted Democrat Bernie Sanders seeks to disqualify the first openly gay congressman...
Meanwhile, in what is apparently not a joke, Sanders named Cornel West to the platform committee, who is not an “aggressive attack surrogate” at all… Sanders was supposedly the antithesis of a politician, yet here he is challenging the worst of them in the hypocrisy game.
This is all part of Sanders’ pretensions of a contested primary. Ha ha, as if. Except it’s hard to laugh when it’s clear that Sanders seeks to divide the party heading into its face-off with Donald Trump. Ironic, huh? We thought it’d be the GOP divided and in civil war. Little did we know that Sanders’ kamikaze mission would wreak that on the Democrats instead.
“Ha ha, as if.” Well, which is it? Is a civil war going to break out at the Democratic Convention, or not? Of course not. Sanders has worked side-by-side with Democrats for over 25 years. His relationship with the party has been mutually beneficial and will continue to be. Markos’s idle, incendiary talk of “civil war” just feeds into the primary season discord of his readership.
By the way, Cornel West happens to have been the first African American to have received a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton. Is that relevant? Or Frank being among the first openly gay men to earn a seat in Congress? Neither race nor sexual orientation is really the issue here — but if we toss out such facts, with furrowed brow, we’ll certainly get a reaction.
Another recent example of Markos playing this game was his diary: ”A Sanders superdelegate coup doesn’t need to be motivated by racism to be white privilege.”
Markos knows very well there’s going to be no superdelegate “coup.” Indeed, he has written often — and at length, such as this article — that superdelegates will not flip. I agree.
There won’t be a coup, so there won’t be any fallout from a coup, either. The electorate will suffer no injury, no injustice. Nonetheless, Markos eggs on a pie fight about white male privilege.
Is that a way to inspire unity and to focus on what really matters, on his website?
Chill, kos.
Sanders would like to have platform committee members tossed who, as he sees it, were biased from the outset against his populist-progressive views — while he’ll gladly pick committee members who are friendly toward his views. This is what Markos says is comparable to the “worst hypocrisy” of politicians. Seriously? How about — just to take one recently-in-the-news example — former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a “family values” politician who purported to have the moral standing to disparage and legislate against people in loving relationships, while he had a history of molesting teenagers. That’s on a par with Bernie Sanders trying to stack a platform committee to shift it more to the left?
At first, I was going to suggest to Markos: moderate yourself. But I’ve been reading his blog since the Movable Type version. I know Markos can be stubborn and cocksure. It’s not like him to moderate himself, to be reticent to express his strong opinions. Just like Bernie Sanders. And that’s OK! When decent people express their strong opinions, it doesn’t cause the sky to fall.
So I won’t say moderate yourself. I’ll just say: Chill. Bernie Sanders will not cause the Democratic Sky to fall. Indeed, Sanders, with his phenomenal appeal to so many people — especially young people— whom he’s encouraging and exhorting to be active participants in our democracy — will very likely boost Democratic prospects in the general election.