U.S. Electile Dementia paralytica 2020

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by xilman

<snip>
I can´t comment on Sanders (well, I can but I shouldn´t because I am thoroughly incompetent in that regard) but Corbyn appears not to have had any successes outside a small coterie of the far left, his Momentum fan club and, elsewhere, a relatively small number of young voters. A significant fraction of his own MPs have stated in public that they despair of his economic policies, his anti-semitism and his approbation of avowedly terrorist organizations (sorry: freedom fighters who believe that the armed struggle is the only way to overthrow their oppressors).
<snip>

Jeremy Corbyn has written an op-ed in the Guardian:

I am proud that on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate. But I regret that we did not succeed in converting that into a parliamentary majority for change.

There is no doubt that our policies are popular, from public ownership of rail and key utilities to a massive house-building programme and a pay rise for millions. The question is, how can we succeed in future where we didn’t this time?

"We won the arguments?" "There is no doubt that our policies are popular?" I fear that that boy's cheese done slid off his cracker.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Jeremy Corbyn has written an op-ed in the Guardian:

"We won the arguments?" "There is no doubt that our policies are popular?" I fear that that boy's cheese done slid off his cracker.

Remember the war against Franco
That's the kind where each of us belongs
Though he may have won all the battles
We had all the good songs!
Folk Song Army -Tom Lehrer

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

<snip>

It was my best recollection of an expression I heard in the movie The Green Mile. It is in reference to the sadistic guard Percy Wetmore, who has murdered an inmate and totally lost his mind and become catatonic, courtesy of the condemned prisoner John Coffey. The quote is variously rendered and variously attributed on line. The most common attribution is to the guard Bill Dodge, rendered as

I think this boy's cheese has done slid off his cracker.

It seems that Mr. Corbyn is also incapable of accepting responsibility for the electoral wipeout resulting from his brilliant campaign strategy. In the same op-ed, he blames the press, along the lines you have posted. Amusingly, he writes "The party needs a more robust strategy to meet this billionaire-owned and influenced hostility head-on," apparently totally oblivious to the obvious fact that it was his strategy that was an utter failure, and that a better strategy requires a different architect. He says he will oversee a "process of reflection" before stepping down as head of the party. If he doesn't understand that the only "reflection" that is pertinent is that the debacle resulting from his campaign strategy reflects primarily on him, and that the only way he can truly accept responsibility is by resigning forthwith, the man is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by xilman

A significant fraction of his own MPs have stated in public that they despair of his economic policies, his anti-semitism and his approbation of avowedly terrorist organizations (sorry: freedom fighters who believe that the armed struggle is the only way to overthrow their oppressors).

That was wrong of me and I apologize unreservedly.

I should have written: "his association with people who have espoused anti-semitism and his signal failure to denounce such views unambiguously".

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by xilman

That was wrong of me and I apologize unreservedly.

I should have written: "his association with people who have espoused anti-semitism and his signal failure to denounce such views unambiguously".

So, you're apologizing for saying his own MP's stated in public that they despaired of "his anti-semitism," when they merely despaired of his turning a blind eye to anti-semitism in those he associates with. I'm sure they must have been very upset at you.

Before the election, the Chief Rabbi of the UK wrote in The Times denouncing Corbyn's failure in this regard.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

So, you're apologizing for saying his own MP's stated in public that they despaired of "his anti-semitism," when they merely despaired of his turning a blind eye to anti-semitism in those he associates with. I'm sure they must have been very upset at you.

Before the election, the Chief Rabbi of the UK wrote in The Times denouncing Corbyn's failure in this regard.

No. I am apologizing for using a phrasing which might suggest that I accuse him personally of antisemitism.


Others need take their own statements into account,

[ewmayer]

I'm always wary of the poltical weaponization of "anti-semitism", because its deployers often have less-than-savory motives: for instance, to shout down any criticism of Israel. In the US, Bernie Sanders has been repeatedly so smeared when he dares point out the latter state's dismal treatment of its Palestinian population, for example. Turning to the UK, the establishment media there have no problem with anti-semitism when it suits their purposes:

Don’t Blame Corbyn or Brexit: Labour Failed To Rage Against the Hated Political System | naked capitalism

Any Labour leader running against the powerful institutions of the country would be pilloried by the media. The outlets that mocked the Jewish Ed Milliband for looking weird (read ‘foreign’) when eating a bacon sandwich, and smeared his refugee father as hating the country, didn’t skip a beat when they smelt a whiff of an anti-Semitism scandal around his successor.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Turning to the UK, the establishment media there have no problem with anti-semitism when it suits their purposes:

Don’t Blame Corbyn or Brexit: Labour Failed To Rage Against the Hated Political System | naked capitalism

It certainly sounds weird. If you're a Jew, pork is off the menu...

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

It certainly sounds weird. If you're a Jew, pork is off the menu...

That depends on how observant they are, and which brand of Observant^® they observe.

[S485122]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

It certainly sounds weird. If you're a Jew, pork is off the menu...

You mean ; "If you observe Judaism, ...". A cultural origin doesn't imply a religion.

Jacob

[ewmayer]

o Trumpian Rhetoric: The Case of His Letter to Pelosi (and Foreshadowing 2020). | naked capitalism -- See original piece for embedded links, which are numerous.

One tip to make reading Trump more tolerable is to hear him as a borscht belt comedian like Rodney Dangerfield or Henny Youngman. Clifford A. Rieders, who grew up with enduring memories of the borscht belt, commented in 2016:

The humorists spanned the spectrum from Yiddish-speaking Brooklynites to Midwestern Protestants. Each comedian had a shtick. What exactly is a shtick? A “shtick” was an approach, an act, a way of relating to people that could be funny, serious, entertaining or crass, but always memorable in some way. Donald Trump is surging in the polls because he has a shtick. He is very much like a borscht belt entertainer, memorable because of how he speaks and the way he presents himself, rather than his content. The experts will have to parse the substance of Trump’s message, if any, but his entertainment value should not be underestimated. He is making people sit up and take notice, whether he is hated, loved, or whether he just makes people shrug their shoulders and giggle.

The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2017:

You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere, from the Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” routine to the gleeful insult-comic slams of Don Rickles (for “hockey puck,” substitute “Pocahontas”)… Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked as he tested catchphrases (“Lock her up!”; “Build the wall!”) for crowd response. On TV and on Twitter, his jokes let him say the unspeakable and get away with it. “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening—I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” he told reporters in July, at the last press conference he gave before he was elected. Then he swept his fat palm back and forth, adding a kicker: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

I date those quotations because the main line of liberal reaction has gotten a lot less creative and, I dare say, less insightful. Here is a sampling of reactions to Trump’s letter:

o “It is hard to capture how bizarre and frightening Trump’s letter to Pelosi is” (WaPo)
o “Trump Pens Deranged Six-Page Impeachment Letter, Mails It to Nancy Pelosi” (Vanity Fair)
o “Mental health professionals read Trump’s letter: A study in “the psychotic mind” at work” (Salon)
o “I’m a forensic psychiatrist at Yale. I took a look at Trump’s letter to Nancy Pelosi — and it left me very worried” (Independent).

I don’t take all this medicalizing seriously, since I don’t accept armchair analysis of Donald Trump by liberal Democrats any more seriously than I took armchair analysis of Terry Schiavo by conservative Republicans. Anyhow, the Democrats have been calling their opponents crazy and stupid since at least the Bush era, and it hasn’t really gotten them anywhere, so who’s crazy and stupid, anyhow?
...
I’m not going to make an armchair diagnosis of Trump’s mental state, or shoot fish in a barrel with factchecking. Rather, I’m going to look at Trump’s letter through the lens of his schtick, or, using the seventy five-cent word, his rhetoric. (I will be the first to say that Trump is not a superb technician; for an analysis of an orator who is, see NC here on Julia Gillard.) First, I will show that Trump’s letter falls naturally into two parts: His defense against the indictment, and his 2020 case against the fitness of Democrats to govern). Given that the text has such a structure, it’s simply not tenable to call it an “unhinged rant,” which disposes of the first mainstream response. Nor it is especially useful to fact-check it, especially when the facts are so disputed[1], which disposes of the second.

The Oxford Dictionary of American English attributes the origin of the Yiddishism shtick to the 1960s, "from German Stück ‘piece.’"

o The Insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future | Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state’s permanent bureaucracy…

On the presidential campaign trail, “Mayor Pete” has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America’s longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.
...
His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisors and strategists. Among his closest friends from school is today the senior advisor of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad. That friend, Nathaniel “Nat” Myers, was Buttigieg’s traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two buddies claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for The New York Times. Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government’s call for recognition from the US government.

o Mike Bloomberg Exploited Prison Labor to Make 2020 Presidential Campaign Phone Calls | The Intercept

Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign…. The campaign then ended the relationship on Monday and said it has asked vendors to do a better job of vetting subcontractors in the future.

Yeah, that's a good look there, Mikey.