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Sammy Leonard
Freelance Film/TV Production in NYC
yesterday
The Nihilistic Purity of the Far Left Will Kill Us All
I’ve been angry and disgusted about a lot of things since Election Day. But over the past few days I’ve been angrier than Jack Nicholson’s character from The Shining to see all these so-called “progressives” come out of the fukking woodwork to crucify Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for voting against one amendment to a budget reconciliation bill that could have allowed Americans to buy cheaper imported prescription drugs from Canada — even though the amendment wasn’t going to become law. It just so happened that Booker’s vote took place on the same day he took the UNPRECEDENTED step in testifying against Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) during the latter’s confirmation hearing for Attorney General.
For three months now I’ve been hearing people talk about resistance against Donald Trump. Time and again I’ve seen and heard people say that we should not normalize Trump or the putrid cabinet he’s assembling. I keep hearing that resistance would take bold and assertive action and I’ve heard people demand that the Democrats in Congress be at the forefront of the resistance.
Yet when Booker does just that in order to stop Sessions from having the power to set legal policy that will severely harm everyone who isn’t a white, heterosexual, Christian man he gets shat on for voting against a separate amendment that a) wasn’t going to pass b) was non-binding and c) would have undermined some of the drug provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that the Republicans are hell bent on destroying anyway. I’ve seen several people say that his vote on this one amendment completely invalidated his effort to stop Sessions and by extension resist Trump.
A lot of people have framed it as Booker rejecting Bernie Sanders (I-VT) amendment. Only the amendment was actually the work of Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) — Sanders was only a co-sponsor. Surprise, an old white man is taking all the credit for the work done by a woman. Not to mention that Booker and the other 12 Democratic Senators that voted against Klobuchar’s amendment voted in favor of a very similar amendment proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Wyden’s amendment covered the same ground as Klobuchar’s, only there were greater safety provisions and fewer strings attached in his amendment than hers, and his amendment was also co-sponsored by Sanders (Wyden’s amendment was not passed either and the 51–47 vote was a direct partisan split). Speaking of Sanders, the man exposes himself as fraud and an absolute hypocrite every time he opens his mouth these days, and his large cult of rabid worshippers are the slimiest and most deceitful pieces of shyt on this earth (and the ones most deserving of getting their heads bashed in). Notice that I wrote “cult of rabid worshippers” and NOT “supporters” because his supporters were at least willing to accept that Hillary Clinton won the Dem nomination, support her in the general election, and in many cases did the work necessary to make sure she would be elected.
But the large Bernie Bro/Zealot/Never Hillary cult made it clear that anyone who didn’t worship at the altar of Saint Bernie Sanders wasn’t a “real progressive” and therefore wasn’t worthy of their support unless they cleared an impossibly high bar. And they joined forces with an already established wing of far left purists for whom any Dem politician who rates less than 100% in their purity scale of select issues is a “neoliberal” and therefore justifies them to throw away their votes on crackpot third-party candidates so they can preen to everyone how “radical” or “revolutionary” they supposedly are and to try and shame people who consistently vote Democrat as ignorant and brainwashed sheeple. Yeah, I’m brainwashed for realizing that a system that often requires some level of compromise to move things forward renders 100% ideological purity useless and subsequently voting for whichever candidate in best positioned to effectively advance the issues I care about in a given election is the most prudent option. Yeah, I’m ignorant for realizing that this is a two-party system, no third party is going to magically rise overnight to save us, and the Democratic party is presently the only viable electoral vehicle for effective progressive action in America. Both parties ARE NOT THE SAME. Every politician takes corporate money because that’s the cost of doing business in American politics — even Bernie does — but only ONE Senator stood up to confront his colleague for the rights and safety of all Americans this week, and it WASN’T BERNIE SANDERS, IT WAS COREY BOOKER.
You Bernie Bros aren’t fooling anybody by having one set of standards for Sanders and those who pledge complete allegiance to him (like Tulsi Gabbard and Keith Ellison) and a completely different set of standards for every other Democratic politician — and it’s very clear by now that Sanders himself knows this and loves every bit of it. It’s obvious that it’s just fine for Bernie to have shytty votes on his record (like voting against immigration reform, against closing Gitmo, siding with the Republicans on gun control multiple times, and actively pushed a bill to dump nuclear waste from Vermont and Maine to Sierra Blanca, TX which severely impacted a poor Latinx community) because he’s just “looking out for his constituents in Vermont” but any other Dem who has ONE shytty vote on their record is a “neoliberal corporate shill” who’s “doing the bidding of the 1%”. And I just love how you motherfukkers are happily tearing down Booker for accepting Big Pharma money to fund his 2014 Senate campaign but don’t say jack shyt about Sanders taking more than $300,000 from the pharmaceutical industry in 2016 — only two senators accepted more (and neither one was Booker). You don’t say a damn thing about Sanders OWNING STOCK in Pfizer and investing in Novartis. Or the fact that he’s still profiting from the Sierra Blanca toxic waste site and his wife Jane remains part of the commission that oversaw the site. Imagine how much more we would know about Bernie Sanders financial ties if he actually disclosed his personal finances during his 2016 presidential campaign?
And don’t think it hasn’t been noticed that the people who have been most savagely attacked for failing your purity tests and not worshipping at the altar of Lord Sanders have been people of color and women. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “betrayed the progressive movement” because she endorsed Hillary Clinton after the primaries were over. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was an “obstructionist pig” because she literally bumped into Bill Clinton at an airport (I actually saw someone call her that on a former friend’s Facebook post about the Justice Department suing Georgia for segregating disabled students, simply because Lynch was pictured). Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) “sold out to the establishment” because he didn’t see Bernie amongst the 250,000 that went to the March on Washington. And then there was the spectacle of Sanders Zealots repeatedly booing, heckling, and shouting over Black, Brown, and women speakers during the first day of the Democratic National Convention — including Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) as he spoke about civil rights, a living wage, voting rights, and equity in education. All because the Democratic party platform did not explicitly oppose the TPP.
Bernie and his cult tried to win Black voters by relentlessly trying to sell them that he “marched with MLK” in the early ’60’s to the point where damn near every photo posted on social media that had a white man with dark hair and glasses within the vicinity of Dr. King was circled as being Bernie Sanders himself. Of course all of them turned out to be fake. Most Black voters were justifiably insulted by the methods his campaign used to get their support, were very turned off by his rabid cult of worshippers, and made Sanders pay dearly for it in losing the Dem nomination by nearly 4 million votes (and 359 pledged delegates) because 75% of Black voters nationwide chose Hillary Clinton over Sanders and 65% of Latinx voters did the same. That really angered his cult, who made it clear that if Sanders didn’t get the nomination then fukk civil rights, fukk gender equality, fukk all of that — it’s all “identity politics” that only the “elites” care about and they don’t matter anyway; only the “economic anxiety” of “real working-class Americans” matters (read: white males easily baited by racist and sexist dog whistles) and the Democrats have to get with the program and win them over in order to start their “progressive revolution”.
So the “Great Progressive Fighter” Bernie Sanders goes on a CNN Town Hall and tell a Democratic party that he refuses to join — unless he runs for president — that they shouldn’t obstruct Donald Trump or his cabinet picks, insists he can find common ground with Trump and won’t commit to voting against Jeff Sessions because he has to “hear what (Sessions) has to say”. The next day, a letter from Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions 1986 nomination of a federal judgeship in Alabama emerged, where she writes:
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Who really do you think you are fooling?
You are a bleeding heart corporatist and interventionalist.