This post is not for Republicans. This is for those who are Democratic Party members or on the left side of the usual political equation.
I don't think I've seen Cenk so angry in awhile, and rightfully so. Joy Reid is definitely an embarrassment. It is such a shame she is so prominent on MSNBC. I guess it is why I am glad I no longer have cable and do not have to watch stupidness. I just get the snippets, and that is more than enough. Just watch. Cenk makes a great point that those, like Reid, who worried about a divisive primary in 2016 are aching for one in 2020 because they fear Bernie may run, and win.
Cenk focuses on the portion of Reid's tweet about body language, and again rightfully so. But some should comment on Reid's reference to Bernie's "early writings" as being disingenuous too. Reid lied first off about "early writings." There is one, and only one, article Bernie wrote for an "underground" early 1970s mag where he cited porn mags and then asked why it is that more people, especially women, were not standing up against sexual stereotypes that demean women. The fact that the citations in his article did not carry quotation marks, and were paraphrases and summaries, threw off Chuck Todd at the time, and now Joy Reid, and others in the media, who thought Bernie was endorsing what was said in the paraphrases and summaries. That is why they said the article was incoherent at best because of where he immediately went next in the article, which was to be supportive of women's rights and dignity as human beings. He then ended with a fictional dialogue that occurred in a lot of people's households in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was also a bow to Mark Twain's essays on men and women in "Letters from Earth" and "Diary of Adam" and "Diary of Eve." Bernie's article, however, is not a long article. One can now find it on the Internet, though I cited it above from a longer article in Mother Jones at the time it became a short lived issue.
I read the article when the issue first arose, and was amazed at how twisted the interpretation was, and how ignorant people in the media are now of what passed for creative writing in early 1970s radical journals, and the way in which people wrote in those journals. But I was not surprised because these media elite people, when not lying cynics, are really, really dumb, and would fail Comprehension 101. They are also the type of folks who think Johnny Mercer's song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is about sexual assault. They fail to understand cultural history and what the woman's side of the conversation in that song had to be about as part of courting in the 1940s.* And news flash to Joy Reid: Bernie's stance from the time he was mayor of Burlington through the present has been and continues to be one of consistent endorsement of women's rights across the board, from reproductive rights to rights in the workplace and dignity as human beings. Consistent. And Bernie opposed the anti-gay marriage act of 1996 that Bill Clinton signed and Hillary Clinton clung to until 2013.
As I say, Joy Reid is an embarrassment. But I have also said that about Chuck Todd, Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper and the like. FoxNews? It is not even worthy of mention. The anger one has against the WaPo, NYT, MSNBC is they should know better--and their limitations speak precisely to the Empire and to international corporate capitalism, from whom these people receive their paychecks. They know which marks they are supposed to stand on when they speak. They know what is said, and not said, in polite, elite circles. They are the proverbial person who Upton Sinclair referred to when he said a century ago, and I paraphrase, "It is difficult to change a man's mind when his job depends upon his not changing his mind."
An even older saying from about 110 years ago was that it was not necessary for the British elite to bribe the then-mainstream capitalist owned newspaper men of the time. For they already stood for the Empire. That is how they got their jobs. That is how they held their jobs.
I did not say it before as I think it is too early. As I watch Bernie go around the middle west and speak out against the tax bill, and promote a consistent agenda for people, I think he has to be considered a front runner for 2020. Damn it whether he is 78 in 2020. Just have him pick Nina Turner, Rose DeMoro or Nick Hannauer as VP. That will scare the elite shitless, and Sanders and Turner, DeMoro or Hannauer will barnstorm the nation.
* Margaret Whiting, who sang the song with Johnny Mercer, was the daughter of Richard Whiting, a famous songwriter in the first three decades of the 20th Century. She was a very forward woman for the time, and was fearless.
