Tag Archives: circular firing squads

Signs, Signs, Every Where a Sign

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Yesterday I had the bad misfortune of going over to TOP to watch the purity trolls. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment.

As reported at the Wing, Bernie Sanders eeked out a win on the Straw Poll. Not that the Straw Poll means a lot, but it does give some idea of where the energy is as far as the Democratic bloggers are in organizing for their candidates in the 2020 cycle. Unfortunately, Beat the Press thinks TOP is a progressive blog, but they don’t know because they live in the Beltway and Markos in tight with the DCCC consultants because well, they are one of many consultants for the Dem Party in general.

Markos, in the space of 3 days, penned four diaries to say about the recent poll at TOP and other polls. As you may recall, Kos has his own polling services, called Civiqs. I don’t know which candidates are using his service, but based on these headlines, I’m guessing it’s not Bernie Sanders.

Bernie wins Daily Kos Straw Poll by razor-thin margin, Warren nips at his heels

It was our highest-vote total poll yet, with 59,999 votes tallied. After trailing Elizabeth Warren most of the day, a late surge from supporters pushed Bernie over the top, barely. But those trendlines don’t bode well for him.

Let’s see what Kos means.

Oh, so Warren did a lot better and Bernie’s lot shrunk. But the problem is that Kos completely discounted this date when recalling the time-series:

That was when the most votes casted. But of course, Kos was too embarrassed to admit to Chuck Todd on MSNBC that Bernie still has a lot of support.

Each time Bernie wins now, it’s because Berners “freeped” the poll. The good denizens at TOP are just as dismissive as the blog owner because they haven’t quite figured out that purge in 2016 made a lot of folks (hence TPW, C99, r/Kossacks for Sanders, r/WoTB, etc) go and form their own communities. And they aren’t too welcoming in having the progressives disrupt their group think.

All of that was pretty small potatoes for “an analysis”. Within the next 24 hours, 3 more diaries were penned by GOS, using a poison font keyboard. I’m only going to mention 2 of the most odious ones.
If Bernie loses support among youth, what’s left?

Kos digs in and uses polling data from the Morning Consult, comparing March to April polling.

However, what happens if he can’t hold that core? This isn’t 2016, with a binary choice between Bernie and a demonized establishment Democrat. This is a rich field, with credible candidates representing just about every key party constituency. There are candidates just as liberal as Bernie, yet not as polarizing. So would Bernie’s core supporters stick with him as they became better aware of this amazing field? Apparently not, according to the latest Morning Consult primary poll.

“Sanders on the decline with 18-29 year-olds,” reads the polling memo. ”Throughout March, Bernie Sanders had 45% of the first choice vote share among America’s youngest voters. That support has steadily declined and currently sits at 33%.”

Overall, the poll pegs the race at Joe Biden 39, Sanders 19, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris at 8, Pete Buttigieg at 6, and Beto O’Rourke at 5.

snip

He can’t grow, and if he can’t hold his most important supporters? His path to the nomination, already near-zero, becomes effectively zero.

What’s funny is that Sanders isn’t even losing his supporters to some of the new, dynamic, exciting Democrats. Rather, they’re mostly going to Joe Biden. That feels a little sad. (My conjecture? Biden is a low-information-voter proxy for Barack Obama, and who doesn’t miss Obama?)

Now the question begs, what’s left if the millennials finally wake up and realize Bernie (as well as Biden) is an old man? They’ll leave him, of course.

Will Biden hold that youth vote? I’m on that limb that says “no way,” but who knows. What is clear at this point is that if Sanders can’t even stop a significant portion of his youth support from defecting to Biden, what happens when more of them become aware of other alternatives?

Kos doubles down to a new low in his next diary, which is within a couple of hours of the above one, but hey, he’s on a roll to smear Bernie and give you some alternatives better than Bernie and why.

Harris and Warren dis Fox News, because they’re the smart ones

Why of course! Bernie went on a Fox News TH a month ago and he owned it.

Kos deems it a “an asshole move”.

Moreover, Mayor Pete, Castro (not named) and Klobuchar are desperate to garner eyeballs and would also go to a Klan rally.

The Sanders appearance has its own internal logic: He likes to thumb his nose at Democrats, including those fighting the war against Fox News. And he delighted his supporters by doing battle with Fox News hosts. It wasn’t helpful to the broader movement, and reinforced the fact that he’ll never be a team player, but it definitely gave him a nice promotional boost at the time. Ratings were legit great. I’ll call it a smart move. An asshole move, for sure! But smart.

But the rest of these Democrats? Going on Fox is a desperate cry for attention, from a crew so desperate for relevance that they would apparently attend a Klan rally if it gave them a shred of a spotlight.

If GOS wasn’t bad enough with his offensive missives, the Berners got slammed when defending their candidate. Some of the comments were vile. Here’s an ice cream scoop for you, mixed with manure:

Kossack Centrist: Well, are white men threatened under Trump? Nope. He’s creating a white patriarchal utopia.

White men can see going on Fox as a political move, instead of the legitimatization of the state sanctioned terrorism against marginalized people that it is.

Any candidate, that wants to appeal to Fox News viewers, doesn’t care enough about my safety for me to consider voting for them.


Berner: Jews have been persecuted for centuries. Sanders was brave to face the enemy instead of cowering.


Kossack Centrist: Yeah, Bernie sure is under direct physical threat due to his appearance on Fox (sarcasm).

Give me a fucking break.

Rolling my eyes forever, over the new forced narrative, that somehow, an old white man from Vermont, experiences the same threats to his personhood as women, black men, black women, Muslims, Latinx, the LGBTQA community, and practicing Jews (an no, Sanders isn’t one of those).

Right now in this country, women are losing their right to bodily autonomy. Black men are murdered at will by agents of the state. Latino children are living in cages. Trans Americans are being erased from society. People are being shot in their houses of worship.

Don’t you dare try and claim, that the old white man from the whitest white state in the nation is somehow in the same amount of danger as those marginalized groups.

The martyrdom syndrome and cosplaying victimhood of Sanders supporters is sickening.

My comment:

Markos is already getting critical comments on twitter about this diary, and perhaps that is what he wants. If I were Harris and Warren, I would be disgusted by the commentary. They made their points implicitly that they differ from Bernie Sanders and others on FC appearances. But they didn’t pay someone to batter the candidates and throw insults at their supporters.

A lot of hypocrisy. Calling Bernie Sanders’ FC appearance an asshole move is not too different from the comments one makes on The Blaze. Red meat to stir up the place.

Holocaust deniers maybe? Purity indeed. That what was said about Bernie Sanders. But nope, they are purifying for a slightly center left political lot. Which is bad. Most of the American people are not where Biden or even Harris is today. They support MfA, GND, 15% cap on credit card interest, and that excessive capitalism isn’t working too well for them.

The hypocrisy is amazing. It’s a blog for Identitarians, yet, it’s OK to use borderline anti-semitic comments to smear Bernie Sanders, a Jewish candidate whose paternal family was killed by the Nazis in WWII, and grew up in a neighborhood in which people wore identification numbers on their arms.

ow

Hence, the Something Cheery Diary posted last night. I was glad to be home.

Today the Jedi came back to defend Bernie Obi Wan with this diary among others:

What are some ways Daily Kos can gin up infighting among Democrats?

1: Publish caustic conjecture on the front page about one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination
Once they’re at the convention with his 30 percent, they presumably figure they can threaten and bully the party to nominate him. This way, he doesn’t have to work to expand support beyond his core group of supporters.

#2: Instead of following Elizabeth Warren’s model and simply presenting a reasonable case for not participating in Fox News townhalls, publish a front page article casting Democratic candidates who have a difference of opinion on this subject as being either an “asshole” or…
so desperate for relevance that they would apparently attend a Klan rally if it gave them a shred of a spotlight

#3: In that same front page article, state — without any sense of the irony of your statement — that a leading contender for the Democratic nomination (the one pictured above pitching in to save the ACA) “will never be a team player.”

No doubt there are additional examples of how Daily Kos can gin up infighting among Democrats, but I’ll stop at those two articles, which were published on the same day (May 15, 2019) on the front page, by the same author.

Of course, it goes without saying that this author has every right to publish whatever he wants here, since he’s the founder of the blog. He is of course not subject to warnings or “time outs” or whatever slaps on the wrist might apply to regular users.

I hope you will go recommend that diary.

Kos is looking into the mirror of desperation in my view. Why does he continue a circular firing squad on Democrats, yet his moderators have told Berners to quit criticizing other Dems and just support our candidate? Like the tv corporate media, DK Alexa ranking has sunk like a stone.

What I don’t know is if Elizabeth Warren’s and Kamala Harris’ campaign are feeling the bern (and Biden) because these circular attacks seemed planned, especially if Bernie had lost the straw poll and Kos didn’t get his contributing spot on MTP as a result. I hope it’s not a conspiracy.

I’m reminded of a song from the early 70’s by the 5 Man Electrical Band in which a hippy constantly has to deal with the Establishment (the Man). TOP continues to hippy punch Bernie Sanders because his democratic socialist practices are “not team” player methods. Bernie wants to create mass politics, something Kos was successful when George Bush put us into a war through lies. But now, Daily Kos, is well, withering away, just like Hillary Clinton. And Bernie threatens his neoliberal politics. If Bernie wins it all, Kos’s blog likely won’t survive.