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the democrats puppet debates...

punch and judy

Michael Bloomberg: The Democrat’s Billionaire Strawman

Does the ex-NYC Mayor serve an important function for the other Democratic hopefuls?

By Kit Knightly


...

 

“The foil Warren needed”. Quite.


Funny how that works out.

So was this a real debate? Is putting Michael Bloomberg in the stocks for an evening a real political discussion? Was there any genuine progress of rational argument and philosophical debate last night?

I didn’t see any. I saw a live action puppet show. 

Accepting the surface level narrative of this campaign is naive in the extreme. Remember how contrived politics is – most especially American politics. Remember that the DNC fixed the primaries last time around, and fed the debate questions to Clinton early. 

There’s no reason to think that kind of manipulation isn’t still going on. We should assume it is as a baseline. 

In fact, we’ve seen signs of it already. They went out of their way to exclude Tulsi Gabbard, and then changed the rules at the last minute to include Bloomberg. Why did they do that? 

Because the DNC want a billionaire with accusations of sexual harassment and tax avoidance to run against Trump? Of course not.

No, what happened on that stage was, fittingly enough, a piece of theatre. Bloomberg is cast as the villain, and we all boo and hiss as he ties a pretty damsel to the railway lines, and then cheer when Uncle Joe and Aunt Liz turn up in the wokemobile, bonk him on the nose, and save the day.


Bloomberg [is] definitely there to serve a function. It couldn’t be more obvious if they’d put an actual straw-man on the stage, hung a sign that says “the elite” around its neck, and had Warren & Biden run at it with bayonets.


Bloomberg boosts everyone else on the poll, he is “exactly the foil they need”. Like everything else in the media, it’s about narrative management.


Firstly, his presence counter-balances the Sanders storyline.


Bernie Sanders isn’t going to change anything, he’s demonstrated with his foreign policy speeches that he’s too timid to truly challenge establishment orthodoxy (that’s why people like Jonathan Freedland prefer him to Corbyn). But he’s at least slightly genuine. Slightly.


Sanders is winning this race, but more importantly he’s controlling the narrative – elevating dangerous ideas in the public mind, ideas that might live on in the minds and speeches of braver, more honest politicians. All this off the back of casting himself as a leftist outsider up against the right of the Democratic party. Bloomberg changes that conversation by putting another extreme on the right side.


Now Biden, Buttigieg and Warren are the sensible candidates in the middle, far more “leftist” than mean old Mike, but far more “electable” than crazy commie Bernie. The rational compromise.


(Sidenote – I haven’t totally ruled out that the DNC end up letting Sanders win the nomination – I think the endgame here might be to have Sanders run against Trump, get his ass kicked, and declare that “Americans don’t want socialism” and all leftists are “unelectable”. Here in the UK we call that “being Corbyned”).


Secondly, there’s the total undermining of the idea of “debate”, which is becoming more childish every cycle. Bloomberg’s presence on that stage guaranteed no real issues were ever discussed. Instead we had supposedly adult politicians exchanging cheap jibes and “sick burns” in the hopes of pleasing their cheerleaders on twitter. Reality was barely touched upon, and that’s just the way they like it.


Politics is becoming just Big Brother or Love Island only with better suits and bigger budgets. No thought, no rational argument, just pick a team, tweet a hashtag, cheer your side. Last night was as real as a WWE bout, and couldn’t have been more obviously stage-managed if Mike Bloomberg had entered to the sound of breaking glass and Lester Holt declaring “By gawd, that’s Bloomberg’s music!”


Bloomberg has already benefited the field simply by providing a distraction from the Iowa chaos. As an even richer member of the “elite” than the rest of the ballot he acts as an anger heat-sink, with many so happy to see the corrupt billionaire taken down a peg they don’t realise they’re cheering for Joe Biden, or Liz Warren or Pete Buttigieg or even that other brunette whose name no one remembers.


Further, with his frequent attacks on Sanders he can torpedo the favourite (and only even vaguely genuine threat) by using smear tactics, whilst the real DNC picks keep their hands clean (they may even halfheartedly defend Bernie, acting outraged whilst reaping the benefits).

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/02/20/michael-bloomberg-the-democrats-bill...

the counter-revolution from above...

With Michael Bloomberg, Capital Won’t Quit So Easily


The billionaires in the Democratic Party aren't going to just let Bernie walk away with the nomination.


Capital, woke or not, has woken up.  Woken up, in fact, inside the Democratic Party, once the House of Labor.  And the lead Woke Capitalist, of course, is Michael Bloomberg. So will this “awokening”—this capitalist counter-revolution—prove to be a tragedy for labor, and the left?  Or will it be a farce for Capital, and for Bloomberg?  As we shall see, this sort of question has been asked before.

Bloomberg had a rocky time in the Las Vegas debate last night—some say he crapped out—and yet Bloomberg, and his money, won’t give up so easily. After all, one doesn’t build a $62 billion fortune by being a quitter. So if Bloomberg spends another $10 million, or $100 million today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—and works a little harder at pretending to be a good Democrat—he still has a good chance; the next debate, after all, is on February 25, and many more debates after that. So there’s plenty of chance for the Bloomberg Campaign, LLC, to stage a triumph for the Comeback Plutocrat.

Because, without a doubt, the surge of Bernie Sanders has provoked the plutocracy—mostly clustered these days in the Democratic Party—to take up arms against the democratic socialist. So now it’s Michael Bloomberg, his money, his fans—and his hired guns—in league against the hard left. Why, it’s a veritable counter-revolution from above, aimed at crushing revolution from below.


Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/with-michael-bloomberg-...

the battle, as seen by the NYP...

bloom


the brilliant loosing strategy...

"I'm sorry to have to be the buzzkill here … but I think Trump is going to win."

Those were the words of Oscar-winning documentary maker Michael Moore on Real Time with Bill Maher in July 2016. His prediction was met with loud boos from the audience.

Four months later, he would be proved right.

The reason this moment is so memorable is because it was rare. Virtually nobody, including Donald Trump himself, thought he could win in 2016.

By the day of the election, the general view among political commentators was that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win, but by less than she should.

"Donald Trump has given everyone a tremendous fright, but he cannot pull off victory from here," wrote The Australian's Greg Sheridan on the day of the election.

He noted that an aggregate of polls showed Clinton 1.8 per cent ahead, and that "it is impossible to win the national popular vote by that much and lose the presidency".

I agreed with him — simply because I couldn't fathom the idea that so many experts could be wrong.

Predicting the future

Of course, we now know they were. Once votes were counted, Clinton led by 2.1 per cent nationally, but 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump victory in the Electoral College.

This came only five months after the first result, which shocked the world — when Britons went to sleep confident the Brexit referendum would fail, and woke up to three years of complete political pandemonium.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-25/donald-trump-predicting-the-futur...

 

Yes, we knew Donald was going to win... I was chastised in this family for saying that Trump could not loose... I slept in the doghouse. But it was worth it to be right. The US Presidential elections were between bullshit and madness. Madness won mostly because it was supported by Mr Rupert Murdoch... Murdoch had been beaten by a woman before — Australia's Julia Gillard, an atheist red-haired woman "who was living in sin", "had a bad sense of fashion and a fat arse (according to the media)" and had made a deal with the GREENS (horror) to tackle climate change — and Rupert wasn't going to let history repeat itself. The woman Clinton and her supporter invented the Russian story in order to make sense of their loss... AND THE SAME THING IS HAPPENING AGAIN!... would you believe...

 

Am I stupid?... Probably...

 

Read from top.

democrats in a socialist pickle...

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, hear constant warnings from allies about congressional losses in November if the party nominates Bernie Sanders for president. Democratic House members share their Sanders fears on text-messaging chains. Bill Clinton, in calls with old friends, vents about the party getting wiped out in the general election.


And officials in the national and state parties are increasingly anxious about splintered primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond, where the liberal Mr. Sanders edges out moderate candidates who collectively win more votes.


Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.

“We’re way, way, way past the day where party leaders can determine an outcome here, but I think there’s a vibrant conversation about whether there is anything that can be done,” said Jim Himes, a Connecticut congressman and superdelegate, who believed the nominee should have a majority of delegates.


From California to the Carolinas, and North Dakota to Ohio, the party leaders say they worry that Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist with passionate but limited support so far, will lose to President Trump, and drag down moderate House and Senate candidates in swing states with his left-wing agenda of “Medicare for all” and free four-year public college.


Mr. Sanders and his advisers insist that the opposite is true — that his ideas will generate huge excitement among young and working-class voters, and lead to record turnout. Such hopes have yet to be borne out in nominating contests so far.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.


“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”


This article is based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders. A vast majority of those superdelegates — whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and D.N.C. members — predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee.

 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/democratic-superdelegates...

 

 

Read from top. Choose Bittigieg...

now that pete's out, choose bloomberg...

Washington, D.C. — In a surprise announcement this morning, Barak Obama has endorsed former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg for Democrat candidate for President. The surprise announcement follows a rather public meeting in New York over the weekend between the political powerhouses.

Political observers have been expecting Obama to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden. Still, insiders close to him suggest that he’s become concerned with Biden’s viability following poor showing in the initial caucuses and primaries. Others indicated that Obama trusts Bloomberg more, having turned to him several times for advice during his presidency.

“Biden likes to talk about how Obama let him make all of the decisions, but when you look behind the curtain, Mike Bloomberg was there showing Obama how to govern,” said Gary “Hefty” Carrol a pool reporter for the Bloomberg 2020 campaign. “And Biden seems to be a goner with his temperament and inability to connect his compassion with his public policy achievements. Bloomberg does both more effectively.”

 

Read more:

https://www.gishgallop.com/obama-backs-mike-bloomberg-for-president/

 

Read from top.