30/ Obama didn't even nominate a liberal justice the left could get excited about, he chose a bland corporate nobody supported in the past by Republicans, and now they want us to cry over impending supreme court losses! Before he announced the nomination, the Republicans had already declared opposition for the rest of his term, so he knew it would be a live issue until the end, possibly one that could have swung the election. Yet he chose not to exploit it.
31/ The electorate wisely rejected 44 years of a Bush or a Clinton at or near the top, which it would have been by 2024.
32/ We also come full circle in confronting the total decimation of the Democratic party in congress and at the state level under Clinton and Obama. The Democrats had a lock on the House since the New Deal, which they lost permanently in 1994, making any legislative advance impossible. This was a direct result of the Clinton neoliberal cave-in, it's what happens when you end opposition and turn your own party into a replica of the other side. Essentially, we've had one-party rule since the end of the Cold War. And this has created the philosophical vacuum in which Trump has stepped in.
33/ In his first television appearance since the election, Bernie Sanders showed tremendous statesmanship, by repeatedly telling Wolf Blitzer that we would not tolerate assaults on Muslims and immigrants. Any political leader who does not adopt the same level of opposition at this moment of reckoning is irrelevant to the future.
34/ The entire Democratic party leadership should resign in shame. How does Howard Dean have the nerve to want to run for DNC chair after having opposed Sanders and having thrown in his lot with the Clinton machine for more than a decade? Sanders has the moral authority to have his choice, Keith Ellison, go forward. A new leadership and new philosophy of resistance needs to mobilize before Trump's inauguration, and before his anticipated dire first actions, particularly against immigrants. Can the party move that fast?
35/ The ongoing street protests are exactly what's needed. They are the only thing that could stall Trump's intent toward immigrants and Muslims. Who will take up their cause? That's your future leadership right there.
36/ Trump is coming after undocumented immigrants and Muslims in a big way. Mobilize now, be ready to fight. Every liberal institution rolled over in the first two years after 9/11, as registration of Muslims, illegal incarceration, mass deportations, and torture and rendition became the new order. Nothing happened in those first years as a token of liberal resistance. We will soon find out if this has changed.
37/ Why didn't Tim Kaine debate Mike Pence on his radical policies? What if Trump's policies had been fully exposed instead of going after him as a sexual predator? Everything he plans to do in his first days was already out in public, why was this not the main focus? Kaine, another neoliberal Clinton acolyte, a former DNC chair during yet another decline, should be nowhere near the leadership.
38/ Here come Fareed Zakaria and Jill Abramson and all the rest of the liberal prognosticators, blaming themselves for their failure to understand the agony of people in the rural areas. They are sorry they didn't go to the South. The South? They're right under your nose, in the urban areas, do you need to travel thousands of miles to find poor people?
39/ Blaming poor white people for taking advantage of white privilege is another part of runaway political correctness. The poor white person is as subject to police and surveillance authority, as subject to arbitrary employer exploitation, as the poor person of any color. Can that meme end now?
40/ A forceful seizure of the Democratic party is necessary, and at the moment only Bernie has the moral authority to do it. In the longer term, there must be electoral reform, campaign finance reform, space for third parties and viewpoints beyond the two centrist parties. But in the short-term, Bernie is the youngest 75-year-old in the land, so take it away!
Anis Shivani's books in the last year include Soraya: Sonnets, Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, and Karachi Raj: A Novel. Literary Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Conversations and A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less: A Novel come out in early 2017.
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