How do we hate thee? Let me count the ways.

When I got the link to that article about Tucker Carlson in The Atlantic, I stuck around to see what other gems of insight this publication has to offer. I found this one.

Why Young Progressives Hate Pete Buttigieg - The Atlantic

Okay, I can hardly be considered a young progressive, but I'll take a whack at it.

Let's start with the incredible ammount of arrogance, the nerve, the utter chutzpah of a mediocre mayor of a small college town deciding that he should be President of the United States like how hard could it be? And then the major media, instead of ignoring him like a John Delaney or a Micheal Bennet, or rolling their eyes at him like a Marianne Williamson or a Joe Walsh, decides to not only take him seriously, but to shove him down our throats at every opportunity.

IDEAS

Why Is the Young Left Out to Get Buttigieg? 

Here Are Four Theories.

The candidate represents a new age of Democrats without representing its politics.

Okay, you just answered your own question. He "represents a new age of Democrats without representing its politics." So, in other words, he represents nothing. He stands for nothing, he believes nothing. That's why he was able to switch from trying to position himself as the young Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren candidate to casting himself as the young Kamala Harris/Joe Biden centrist with such ease. Because he doesn't actually believe in anything, he can cast around trying to find an unoccupied lane into which he can fit himself.

Young progressives on the internet don’t seem to like Pete Buttigieg very much. They’ve called him “the most obnoxious type of Millennial” and “a Boomer wrapped up in a Millennial’s clothing”; a “Build-a-Bear for middling Democrats” and “a candidate seemingly dreamed up by some Democratic National Committee algorithm”; a “baggie full of uncut special interest talking points” and a “grab bag of gifted-and-talented party tricks.”

Okay, so they're telling you why they don't like him. How are you pretending that there's some mystery around their dislike of this man?

What’s more, Buttigieg receives the sort of scrutiny one might expect from a front-runner despite being way behind in national polls. Joe Biden represents the far greater threat to the young left’s favored candidate, Bernie Sanders. But Biden seems to avoid much of the highly personal animosity heaped on his co-runner in the competitive lane of B-Surnamed Moderates.

Well, for a start, Joe Biden is, how you say. . .QUALIFIED to run for President.
He's a long-time senator and spent 8 years as President Obama's right-hand man. I don't like his politics, but I have no quibble with his resume'. Whereas "Mayor Pete" has about as much qualification to be POTUS as I do. (And I have exactly zero.)

What’s going on here? Let’s begin with the most straightforward explanation.

1. Don’t overthink it: They hate him because he’s not a socialist—and his early-state poll numbers are rising.

Yeahhh, I don't think so. There are lots of candidates who aren't socialists. Even Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a "Democratic Socialist" isn't really a socialist. He's not calling for the nationalization of industries or resources. He's not talking about seizing the means of production. He's honestly more of a New Deal/Great Society Democrat than a socialist. But anyway, if not being a socialist was reason enough for the "young left" to hate a candidate, seems like they would hate Biden, Beto, Booker and de Blasio just as much as Buttiegieg.

This is the obvious answer and, frankly, it might be the only answer. In the past two months, no candidate has gained more than Buttigieg in the early states. If he wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, he could block Bernie Sanders’s path to the nomination.

Okay, but he's not going to win Iowa or New Hampshire.and - oh geez. I just googled the latest polls and he actually could win both! I don't think he will, but he could. Especially not Iowa. Iowa is a caucus state where voters lobby each other to join their candidates' side and make their cases to the crowds. And I gotta think that when it comes time for the Buttigieg crowd to make their case for why people should vote for their guy, they're not going to be able to come up with much of a reason to support this unqualified empty suit.

And this deeply concerns young progressive activists, who rightly see the Democratic primary as a zero-sum competition to lead the party in a winnable election that has the potential to redefine the Democratic platform for a decade or longer. Buttigieg, far more than Biden, has the youth and vigor to command the party for the next generation. And this makes him the graver threat to those arguing for a socialist revolution.



Youth and vigor? Youth and vigor? No one gives a shit about youth and vigor.
You know who has a lot of youth and vigor? Justin Bieber.




Rob Gronkowski





Tom Cruise



Is any of these guys someone you'd want to lead the party for the next decade?

I mean,Gronk could probably lead a party for the next decade

just not a political party.

2. Keep not overthinking it: 

They also hate him because they think he’s a liar.

Well. . . yeah.  They "think" he's a liar.

He initially seemed to support Medicare For All, and now he openly criticizes the effect it would have on private-insurance employment. He initially proposed radical government reforms such as packing the Supreme Court and removing the filibuster, but now he’s recast himself as a moderate unifier. 

So. . . either he's a liar or he's just incredibly indecisive.



And we all know how well that plays in a general election!



3. Overthink it a little bit: Young people hate him because he’s a traitor to his generation.


Generational identity is arguably the most important dividing line in the Democratic Party—more than class, race, or education






Do you think that just because young progressives sometimes use "Okay, Boomer" as a mild insult that means that generational identity is actually super important to them?


 

As I’ve written, the young left has become a kind of third party awkwardly domiciled within the Democratic Party.

Not really. I spent a fair ammount of time volunteering for the Sanders campaign in 2016. I'm 52. I was about the average age of the volunteers in our group. Yes, there were fiery young lefties, there were also aging hippies and middle-aged people like me still clinging to our idealism.
There are lefties in every age group, just as there are young and old righties. and young and old centrists. The only real generational factors are that the young folks a) aren't afraid to publicly identify as "leftists" or "socialists." My generation came of age in a time when "liberal" was a dirty word (sometimes referred to in media as the 'L-word). We grew up with a Democratic Party eager to convince the voters that they weren't really left of center, certainly not "liberals" or "leftists." This generation embraces those labels. And b) The younger generation has seen the utter failure of the politics of compromise and they know that they are going to have to live with the brunt of the consequences.

Buttigieg, however, is a traitor to his generation; he is a 30-something Millennial who appeals mostly to middle-aged and older white voters. In this way, his candidacy violates a certain unwritten law of U.S. electoral politics. American voters have historically appreciated candidates who, from a socioeconomic perspective, identify “down”: Franklin D. Roosevelt was a traitor to the upper class

Yeah, that's not the same thing at all.
FDR was a traitor to his class. They hated him because he sided with ordinary people against the wealthy elites. Lefties don't hate Buttigieg because he sides with older white people, they don't like him siding with tepid centrist incrementalists against progressives.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a traitor to the upper class; Trump is the real-estate billionaire who speaks for coal miners; 

Oh my God! No he fucking is not. Trump speaks for Trump. Yes, he speaks TO coal miners. Yes, he condescendingly lies to them about bringing back the beautiful clean coal jobs or whatever. But you're seriously going to sit there and say that this narcissistic solipsist is speaking for them? And if you ever, EVER use that name in the same sentence with FDR again, I will - well, I probably won't do anything, I don't even know where to find you, but I will be ever so cross!

Bernie Sanders is the septuagenarian senator who rallies the young left. 

So, again, it's not a generational thing. I know this is hard for a member of the mainstream media to grasp, but . . . It's.     About.     Policy!

But there’s not a deep history of successful candidates who appeared to identify “up,” like a young, nonmillionaire, small-town mayor who aligns himself with cosmopolitan capital.

Well, yeah. Why would there be?
No one likes Waylon Smithers. Mr Burns is more likable than Smithers. At least you understand Mr. Burns. Everyone hates the co-worker who sides with the boss. Are you still conmfused about why people don't like Buttigeig?

4. Overthink it more: Young people project an extreme hostility toward Buttigieg on the internet in part to exorcise their own anxieties about success and increase their in-group status.

Wait, are you still writing? You've answered your own question a dozen times by now. People hate Buttiegig because he's perfectly hatable. I don't know what kind of gibberish psychobabble this last "point" is, but you don't actually need to have four theories. You could just scroll back up and change the "four theories" headline to "three" or "two" or maybe "zero."

This week, I tweeted that the stark age gap of Buttigieg’s support suggests that he performs a specific archetype in this race: “your polite, hyper-achieving high school friend, who delighted the parents at that Christmas party with his piano rendition of Silent Night, which made your friends roll their eyes so hard their retinas detached.”

Okay, seriously, you need to stop citing yourself. It just gives you even less credibility that you would otherwise have.
Also, the "guy who delights parents at Christmas. . ." is not an archetype. I doubt that person exists. Now, there definitely is the "polite, hyper-acheiving high-school" person. That guy exists. But he's not your friend. Everyone hates that guy. The guy that everyone's parents like has no friends. Unless he's Eddie Haskell and he's just conning the parents.

side note: I recently saw part of an episode of Leave It To Beaver in the breakroom at work and is it just me or was Eddie Haskell trying to bang Mrs Cleaver? As a kid, I always just thought he was ingratiating himself so that she wouldn't forbid Wally from hanging out with this bad influence, but I'm pretty sure he was hot for her. (Can't blame him.)




Although, truth be told, I'm pretty sure he wanted to bang Wally too.



Still can't blame him!


Well now I've lost my train of thought entirely. So. . . The End?

Weekend Playlist

Today's playlist consists of songs that singers or bands did about other singers and bands.


























I know I'm forgetting some.
Feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments.

Is White Supremacist Tucker Carlson Really a White Supremacist?

Saw a link to this article come across my Twitter:

I was dumb enough to click on it.

POLITICS

What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?

ELAINA PLOTT

DECEMBER 15, 2019

Why?
Why the hell would a respectable publication like the Atlantic feel the need to fluff a scumbag like Tucker Carlson? What does he believe? Who Cares? Let's say he really secretly believes good things and he's just putting on a show of being a racist asshole. Who cares? The damage he's doing is real either way.

Tucker Carlson does not think he is an “especially” good person. He knows he can “get mad” and “make a mistake,” that he can “overstate” things as a result of getting “caught up” in his own rhetoric.

No. No, you're not going to depict him as a basically decent man who is aware of his own flaws. You are not going to pretend that he is essentially an okay guy who sometimes gets a little carried away. You're not going to do that, are you?

 He also knows he can sometimes get “self-righteous,” and this, as we speak on the set of his Fox News show on a recent Friday, seems to bother him the most. 

Of course.
God forbid you write an article about how Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist scumbag who should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail and that rail would actually be Laura Ingraham.

“Our leadership class is narcissistic,” Carlson tells me. “And like all narcissists, they’re incredibly shortsighted. The moral preening is a symptom of something deeper, which is narcissism.”

Narcissistic.
The man who goes on television every night to tell people what he thinks about things finds the leadership class narcissistic.

On that recent Friday night, I watch from behind the cameras as Carlson, toggling between his signature expressions of deep concern and manic delight, berates the conservative establishment. . . 

. . . Such segments seem to fulfill the initial promise of Tucker Carlson Tonight, a show that once looked primed to thoughtfully channel the anti-elite sentiment sweeping the right, and perhaps disentangle it from the racial appeals long used to buoy it.

WHAT?
Seriously?
Tucker Carlson was going to disentangle right-wing populism from the racial. . .you mean this Tucker Carlson?

Tucker Carlson said immigration makes America ‘dirtier.’

That's the Tucker Carlson for whom you had high hopes of seperating conservative populism from "racial appeals?"

At the time of the show’s launch, six days after Trump’s election, it didn’t seem insane to think that Carlson might fashion himself as the voice of a new right-wing populism: Here was someone who even pre-Trump had spoken out against the corporatist, globalist tropes captivating the leadership of both parties, 

Ooh, thinly-veiled anti-Semitism? Now that's a new flavor of right-wing populism!

who before focusing on TV was a widely respected writer for the likes of Weekly Standard, 

A "respected writer!"






For the Weekly Standard!


Oh my God. There has never been a respected writer for the Weekly Standard. That's an oxymoron. It's like saying "the respected fashion designer for Sears Roebuck" or "the respected biology lecturer at Liberty University."

 If there was anyone who could articulate a meaningful iteration of Trumpism, one with the intellectual heft to persist beyond the Trump era, maybe it was Carlson.

Intellectual heft? Where in the hell are you seeing "Intellectual heft" in Tucker Carlson?
Also, there is no such thing as "Trumpism."  This is just what the Republican Party is now. Blithely nihilistic, gleefully sadistic wantonly destructive, driven by hate fear and greed. There would be virtually no difference in policy had it been President Cruz or President Santorum or President Walker except that any other Republican administration would probably be less buffoonishly incompetent.

Ask someone who knows Carlson about the past three years, and you’ll likely hear a lamentation. It’s one of the trendier virtue signals among political and media types: saying you believe that Tucker Carlson is so smart, that it really is such a shame, because he of all people should know better, and what, pray tell, happened to him?

So the people that know him are either disingenuous hypocrites or have such little intuitive ability that they never realized that the man they thought they knew was really just a stupid racist asshole who wore a bow tie to appear erudite and urbane.These are the kind of people that wouldn't recognize that Clark Kent is really Superman because Superman doesn't wear glasses

Also, if that's true, you should really be able to quote at least one of Carlson's acquaintances voicing that lament.  Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you made that part up.

The subtext of these conversations is the question of whether Carlson is, as Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed, a “white supremacist sympathizer.” For a time, the question could be written off as unserious,

NO!
No, it could not be. Not by anyone paying attention.
Only in the pressrooms of august publications where it is considered beyond the pale to point out that a racist is a racist (or that a liar is a liar) could the question of whether Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist be written off as unserious.

 But in recent years, Carlson and some of his guests have lent more and more plausibility to the label. On August 6, for example, days after a white gunman killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, motivated by a fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Carlson took to his program to argue that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America,” but rather a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats.

Oh, well good thing you're giving him a friendly profile in a major magazine then!

The question, then, is whether this larger worldview Carlson is espousing each night, encompassing restrictionism, protectionism, and anti-interventionism, has currency with GOP voters absent a race-based appeal—in other words, whether an economics of meaning alone can sustain a populist revolution on the right. Carlson says it does, and it can.

Oh does he? Does he say that? Does the white nationalist teevee guy say that his populism is purely economic and not racially-based at all? Is that what he says? Oh, well I guess I had him all wrong then! Oh, and hey, Ted Bundy said that he didn't murder all those women. Guess we owe him an apology!

Look, there is no way for an "economics of meaning" can resonate with any significant portion of the right without at least implied racism. Pretty much everything on the right is based on the fear and loathing of some "other," whether it be people of different races, or LGBT people or people with uteruses or whoever they can find to be afraid of. You know, rural white foilks used to love New Deal programs. LOVED them. So-called "welfare" problems were very popular with rural white folks until black people became eligible for them. Then, suddenly these programs became "handouts" for lazy people who don't want to work and won't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and they just take money from decent hard-working people and give it to these moochers. Oddly, this attitude does not apply to, say, farm subsidies or ethanol subsidies, or the nutrition assistance that my family gets, not like those lazy leeches on food stamps!

His programming tells another story. On his December 6 broadcast, one day after our interview, Carlson featured Pete D’Abrosca, a North Carolina congressional candidate campaigning on an end to immigration. D’Abrosca’s plan appears rooted in his belief that white Americans are “being replaced by third world peasants who share neither their ethnicity nor their culture.” He’s been lauded by the white-nationalist website VDare and is strongly supported by the so-called Groyper movement, an offshoot of the alt-right led by Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old who has, among other things, denied the extent of the Holocaust and argued that the First Amendment was “not written for Muslims.” D’Abrosca went on Carlson’s show to advertise his proposed 10-year moratorium on immigration. “I think that there’s a new Republican Party in town,” D’Abrosca said.

You know, does it not occur to you at all that you could have led with this? That the question of "What does Tucker Carlson believe" could have been answered with this one short paragraph? And then you could have clicked "publish" and saved you and me both a lot of fucking time.

Random Thoughts

Random thought #1:


Okay, fill in the blank.


First Lady Melania tRump: The woman who _________ too much.



No peeking at the answer!


What did you come up with?

 Did anyone, ANYONE come up with "Knows?" Melania tRump KNOWS too much?


No of course not, who would?




Oh.
Way to go, Life & Style Magazine!

Oh, and that sub-headline: "No one can understand the pressure?"




That so perfectly encapsulates the whiny solipsism of the modern Republican.
A: What pressure? You're first fucking lady. It's a purely ceremonial role! And you didn't even have to bother to show up for the first year, you stayed in New York!

and B: whatever pressure there is on you, I can think of at least 4 people off the top of my head who would understand it completely.






But yeah, no one has ever had it as tough as you!


Random thought #2:


I see North Carolina has changed its license plates. They used to say "First in Flight." I guess they finally realized that it wasn't impressing anyone that two brothers from Indian and Ohio happened invented the airplane and found that North Carolina had a good windy spot to test it in. So they had to come up with some other claim to fame. And I guess they couldn't fit "Hey, remember when Micheal Jordan played here? That was awesome" on a license plate So now they're "First in Freedom!"






I don't know what that's based on. Was their representative the first to sign the Declaration of Independence? No, John Hancock was from Massachusetts. I don't know. I don't know how they make this claim, but I do know one thing. The title "First in Freedom" should absolutely not be given to a slave state.


Random thought #3:

This impeachment process is probably telling us more about the Democrats than it is about the Republicans.
We already knew the Republicans were absolutely shameless, cravem, spineless hypocrites with no sense of decency. So no surprise that at least one GOP congressman has already compared Trump to Jesus Christ being tried by Pontius Pilate.


But what have we learned about the Dems? First of all, why have they decided to focus exclusively on the Ukraine thing instead of prosecuting tRump for his much more obvious blatant daily violations of the Emoluments Clause? It's almost as if no one in Washington has any interest in pointing out that bribery is illegal. They will never go after him for any financial crimes, even though it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. They won't go after him for war crimes or crimes against humanity like tearing children from their mothers' arms and locking them in cages. No, they waited until they found the one thing that he did that they could be reasonably sure they themselves would never be guilty of.

Also, as soon as the impeachment process started, the GOP immediately began whining and wailing that following the process as laid out by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution was somehow "illegitimate" and "Unconstitutional." So the Dems, instead of doing the eye roll and this motion

They spent two days taking testimony from Constitutional scholars as if this was some sort of a legitimate dispute. As if you could bring out experts to explain why Congress fulfilling its Constitutional obligation is not, in fact, unconstitutional and the Republicans were going to go "oh, I get it now! Sorry for the confusion. Please proceed."
I don't understand why they always feel like they have to play along with Republican bullshit.

How is this guy still getting published?

Glancing through some old newspapers today, I chanced to see this headline from Friday 12/13:

Top six Dems in presidential field lacking racial diversity

And I thought "Hmm, I wonder which liberal syndicated columnist is making this point."  Well, I guess I should've known, it was that well-known champion of racial diversity, Pat Buchan --  wait, seriously?

Yeah, Pat Buchanan is not only still alive but is still being published in formerly respectable newspapers.

So, all right. I'll bite. What does racist Dracula's problem with the Democratic field?

The “Our diversity is our strength!” Party is starting to look rather monochromatic in its upper echelons these days. The four leading candidates for its presidential nomination — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — are all white.

Okay, that's true. Of course, one is Jewish, one is a woman and one is gay, but sure. By pure chance we just happen to be focusing only on the issue of RACIAL diversity.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are both white, as are Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Whip Dick Durbin.

Okay. And, honestly, the sooner these four are all replaced the better, but you might want to conside that the chair of the Democratic Financial Services Committee is one Ms Maxine Waters.

And the chair of the Democratic House Committee on Natural Resources is Raul Grijalva.

And the Veterans' Affairs Committee is headed up by California's own Mark Takano

Or that the Committee on Science, Space and Technology is chaired by Ms Eddie Bernice Johnson.

And I'm not sure who is chairing the House Oversight Committee right now, but up until his untimely death, it was led by Mr Elijah Cummings.

But that wouldn't fit into you completely not-at-all-disingenuous narrative, so we'll just skip that, I guess.

Absent affirmative action by the DNC, neither Cory Booker, the leading black candidate for the nomination, nor Julian Castro, the leading Hispanic, will be on the stage Dec. 19.

"Affirmative Action" -- oh, fuck you. How are you still riding that hobby horse?

Yet the lack of racial diversity across the party hierarchy is going to put immense pressure on Joe Biden, should he win the nomination. If he hopes to reunite the Obama coalition, a woman and/or person of color as his running mate would seem an absolute imperative.

Yeahhhh, that's not "immense pressure." Not for a decent human being. If Biden's advisers say "Joe, I think you should probably select a female running mate," Biden would probably just go "sure. Who'd you have in mind?"
Actually, this being Joe Biden, he would probably tell a 20-minute story about being a lifeguard then say "let's get Geraldine Ferraro!" (plagiarism joke. Google it, under-40's!)

And before Biden gets there, he has other problems.

Yeah, he ain't getting there. It's Biden. The human gaffe machine. The guy who's known for siding with the credit card companies in the Bankruptcy Bill, being a strong proponent of the 1994 Crime Bill, and being super shitty to Anita Hill. There's a reason he has run for president twice and made nary a ripple.

His “No Malarkey” bus tour across Iowa is all about his fear that, if he loses Iowa on Feb. 3 and New Hampshire on Feb. 11, he may not survive to reach his South Carolina firewall on Feb. 25.

Though he leads in the national polls, Iowa and New Hampshire polls have Biden running as low as fourth. Never has a candidate contested and lost both those states and then gone on to win the nomination.
Nor are these Joe’s only problems.

Oh, we know. Be-LEIVE me, we know!

Call them what you will — gaffes, mental lapses — his repeated verbal miscues, some of which have caused debate rivals to laugh out loud at Joe, are a cause of alarm among Democrats who fear a Biden-Trump TV debate could produce a debacle for their man.

Ah, yes. What a one-sided debacle that would be. A senile Joe Biden against the alert, aware, keen-witted Donald Trump! It would be not at all like two dementia patients babbling over each other. NO, that would obviously only be a "debacle" for Biden!

Nor are the other front-runners without racial-ethnic problems.
African Americans are a bedrock constituency of the Democratic Party. In recent presidential elections, they have voted 90% for the party’s nominee, and even higher for Barack Obama.
How is Mayor Pete doing with this constituency?

Yeah, you're not going to need to worry about "Mayor Pete" either. His 15 minutes were rightly up about 2 months ago and he's running out of extensions.

Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist who went to the Soviet Union, Reagan’s “Evil Empire,” for his honeymoon, is holding on to half of the loyal base from his impressive 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. The other half of Bernie’s base, however, has been captured by Warren. 

Where are you getting these numbers?

I don't think that you'll find many people who supported Sanders in 2016 who are now supporting Warren.

And, like Bernie, she is weak with black Democrats, who will decide South Carolina one week before Super Tuesday, when 40% of all the Democratic delegates will be chosen.

Yeahhhhh, you're thinking of last time. Last time around, Sanders had trouble attracting non-white voters. This time around, well  I'll let  the headline speak for itself.

Bernie Sanders Has Highest Approval Among Nonwhite Voters in Recent CNN PolHome | Politics

Tags: 2020 Elections | Polls | 2020 | election | bernie sanders | joe biden | african american women

VoterLabs Poll: Black Women Support Sanders Over Biden 

How did Democrats arrive at this pass?
As the 2019-2020 campaign began, the party divided into two camps.
There is first the moderate-centrist-pragmatic wing, whose goal is the removal of Trump, and who will go with the Democrat who is the most certain to deliver that. Biden, who spent four decades in the Senate and as vice president, was liked by many and offended few, and was first in the polls, was their natural choice.

Yeahhh, Biden offends a lot of people. Whenever he opens his mouth and says shit like

"We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background — will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there"

or

or

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said and then, imitating a Southern accent, added that the senator “never called me ‘boy,’” a racial epithet used against black men.

Or does shit like

Then there is the ideological left of the party that wants not only to win but also to remake America. It was to this huge slice of the party that Warren and Bernie have made their radical appeals.
The promise of victory offered by Biden and the ideological agenda offered by Sanders and Warren trumped the ethnic appeal of Booker, Castro and Kamala Harris.

Wow, it's almost as if Democratic voters care more about a candidate's stand on the issues than they do the candidate's skin color. How very racist of them!

My view: Super Tuesday will cut the field to two or three. And the nominee will be one of the six palefaces on the stage Dec. 19.

Wow! The nominee will be one of the top six remaining candidates? What a bold prediction! No wonder people still seek out the insight and wisdom of this worn out racist crank!

Why We Can't Have Nice Things - Episode One Million

Forbes Magazine decided to weigh in on the issue of student debt.

It may surprise you to find out that it was nauseating!

If $1.6 Trillion Of Student Loan Debt Is Forgiven, This Is What Happens

Ooh, ooh, I know!


Would it be something like this?




Oh no, wait. This is Forbes. So, let me guess.
Hmmmm, ordinary folks getting some kind of a break. . . I'm going to go ahead and guess "some kind of disaster?" Financial collapse. frogs. locusts - am I on the right track?

Here’s what you need to know.

Student Loan Forgiveness

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a 2020 presidential candidate, wants to forgive all $1.6 trillion of outstanding student loans, including both federal and private student loan debt. Sanders’ student loan forgiveness plan has no eligibility requirements; all 45 million student loan borrowers are eligible for student loan discharge.

Oh my GOD! No eligibility requirements? Like just any commoner could get bailed out? You don't even have to be a bank executive whose recklessness destroyed the economy? This program is just to help EVERYBODY? But how will we determine who is worthy?

Similarly, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), also a 2020 presidential candidate, introduced legislation earlier this year to cancel student loan debt for more than 95% of borrowers, and would entirely cancel student loan debt for more than 75% of Americans with student loan debt. Principally, Warren would cancel $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with household income under $100,000 and cancel substantial debt for every person with household income between $100,000 and $250,000. Like Sanders, Warren would fund student loan forgiveness through new taxes. 

T-t-t-taxes???

So, what would happen if all - or even most - of the $1.6 trillion of student loan debt is cancelled?

You mean besides this?

Sanders and Warren believe that among other benefits, universal student loan forgiveness would reduce the wealth gap in America, provide an economic stimulus to the middle class, increase home purchases, help start small businesses, and enable young people to start a family without a significant debt burden.

Oh NO!

Moody’s assessed the economic impact and found that student loan debt cancellation would result in:

• A modest increase in household consumption and investment;
• An improvement in small business and household formation; and
• Increased home ownership in the long-term.

So. . . pretty much what Warren and Sanders say would happen. Except you're trying to minimize the benefits.

However, Moody’s also found the economic impact would be relatively minimal, similar to a “tax-cut-like stimulus to economic activity” in the near-term.

And God knows Forbes is always quick to warn us of the pitfalls of reckless tax cuts!

Also, what are they basing this on?  The thing with tax cuts is that they primarily go to the rich who don't need them and aren't going to spend any more money because they were already able to spend as much as they want. Forgiving student debt is going to benefit working and middle class Americans. It will actually impacxt their lives. It will actually free up money that they can spend on consumer goods which does actually stimulate the economy. Now, I'm no fancy big-city economist, but it just seems like common sense that these two things would have very different effects.

 The report also found, among other impacts, the potential for:

• Increased moral hazard:

Oh for the love of. . . Moral Hazard? What kind of 19th Century bluenose wrote this article? Why surely, if the poor are not made to suffer the consequences of their poor decisions, one could hardly expect them to learn their moral lesson! To the workhouses with them!"

Weird how I don't remember hearing a single peep about "moral hazards" when we bailed out Wall Street. None of these puritan scolds had any worry about creating a moral hazard by bailing out farmers. No one said "if we bail them out, they'll never learn that they were foolish to vote for a dimwit like tRump. We must let them suffer the fallout of his idiotic tariff pissing war with China."

Increased moral hazard: For example, future student borrowers could be incentivized to borrow more student loan debt knowing that their debt will be forgiven.

Oh my God, it just got even dumber.

Part of Sanders' and Warren's plans is to make public universities tuition-free So there would be no need to go into debt unless you wanted to go to some fancy prestigious private institution.

Or a shitty one.

More student loan debt: Future student loan borrowers may borrow more student loan debt, but their student loan debt may not be forgiven, leaving them with potentially higher leverage.

Oh for fuck sake.

We can't forgive the student debt of those who owe it now because some future students might needlessly take out loans and then the debt forgiveness turns out to be like an Old Testament jubilee and then they will be stuck with their loans which is - - -  how is that worse than the current situation? At worst, these future students will be in the same boat as the current ones.

What else you got?

Lost Revenue: Since about 90% of student loan debt is federal student loans, the federal government would lose about $85 billion, or 0.4% of GDP, in forfeited student loan principal, interest and fees.

$85 billion. So. . . the Air Force maybe doesn't get a couple of those jets that don't work? Maybe we're only able to drone-bomb like 5 or 6 countries at any given time.
Also, I'm trying to remember - were these same objections raised about, say, the $700 billion TARP program? Or the one and a half TRILLION dollar tax cut that Trump pushed through?
Haha, no. Just kidding. Those sums were mere drops in the bucket. Pocket change. But $85 billion to help ordinary working stiffs? $85 billion that would be recouped in taxation of the financial industries?  * That is just too profligate to consider! We're not made of money, you know!

Muted Impact Due To Borrower Base: The majority of beneficiaries of universal student loan cancellation are high income earners, which could limit the economic benefit.

Yeah. . . I don't think that's true. Of course there are people who have student loans from Medical school or Law school, but I would wager the majority of the people struggling to pay off their student debt are ordinary desk jockeys, pencil pushers, office drones worker bees. Plus plenty of blue-collar, retail and service sector workers. I would almost say that I want to see your statistics for this claim, but I know I would die of boredom if I tried to plow through that shit.

* Your own article, just a couple paragraphs above, clearly stated "Sanders will fund his student loan forgiveness plan through a new tax on financial transactions, which he expects could raise more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years. The tax plan will include a 0.5% fee on all stock trades, a 0.1% fee on all bond trades and a 0.005% fee on all derivatives trades."  So let's not get all hand-wringy about supposed "lost revenue."