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just shows how many air head blonds they are in america
Anderson Cooper: Opposing Illegal CIA Wars Is "Unelectable"
A key reason that the US has so many wars is that big US media have a strong pro-war, pro-empire bias. You rarely see big US media badgering a politician for supporting a war that turned out to be a catastrophe. But it's commonplace for big US media to badger politicians for opposing wars, even catastrophic ones.
CNN journalist Anderson Cooper is a perfect example of this phenomenon.
Here's Anderson Cooper, badgering Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate for opposing the CIA's illegal war on Nicaragua in the 1980s:http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...is-unelectable
The question is really about electability here, and that's what I'm trying to get at. You - the - the Republican attack ad against you in a general election - it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you're not a capitalist. Doesn't - doesn't that ad write itself?
amazing, AC is 0.1%, inherited wealth, and pure establishment. On national TV, he's saying blatantly, simply that Bernie is unelectable.
just shows how many air head blonds they are in america
Have you seen Congress lately? They can't even pick their own leader. The obsession with wedge issues like Barrycare, abortion, etc simply preempts them from getting anything done.
You need leadership to get the ball rolling, and there's none of that in Congress right now. On top of that, none of the frontrunning candidates from either party look presidential or the kind of leader that will dwindle down the polarization.
"I just don't think Obama does a good enough job of working with them"
holy . He was so stupidly naive when he came into office that he believed he could work with Repugs. They absolutely refused, even on bills THEY proposed, Obama said he supported the bill, then the proposing Repugs quit supporting their own bills BECAUSE Obama supported it.
So you disagree with Bill Clinton?"I just don't think Obama does a good enough job of working with them"
That's what happens when there is a transition and they're trying to cling onto to their power. People give the Freedom Caucus but it's not like they're pushing an extremist to be speaker, he just happens to not be part of the establishment so it's a no-go.
I mean people hate Congress but then at the people who try to change things. Whether it's a good change or a bad change at least it'll be something different.
You can't be serious. They've tried to repeal Obama care like 50 times now. They're just there for show at this point.
What does that have to do with Obama's willingness or capability of dealing with the current congress? Why is it shocking that one side pushes their agenda when both sides do it? The key is working on the stuff that both sides agree on or are willing to negotiate on and there is plenty of it, build the trust with the opposition so they don't feel like it's a trick/trap etc. and get it done instead of trying to leverage it to push that won't happen. A good leader is capable of doing that, Bill Clinton didn't have an easy road but he got things done.
I mean look at how things were handled when Obama had a super majority. If he can't work well with moderate Dems then how in the world is he gonna get done with Republicans?
BTW I say this as someone who voted for Obama his first go around. Didn't his second because he was a massive disappointment (no, I didn't vote for Romney).
" both sides agree on or are willing to negotiate on"
Killing ACA, privatizing Medicare and SS, the budget, not raising the debt limit, are not negotiable by either side
The problem is that they're holding the House hostage with their votes. It's akin to taking the ball home if I don't get what I want. That's not governing. Governing includes sitting down, compromising, being aware that you will not get all you want.
It's even more embarrassing since they're the majority and they can't even get their in order. Governing means governing for all your cons uents, not just pandering to your base.
People are right to hate Congress, the partisanship and deadlock that followed means nothing gets done. It's ridiculous, these guys appear to work like 6 weeks a year whenever there's some "crisis" they created themselves due to their inaction or to score political points.
Name me one "Freedom" Caucus member that is not a bat crazy extremist.
This has to be the stupidest thing I've read today. "I cut my off. It's a bad change, but at least it is something different!"I mean people hate Congress but then at the people who try to change things. Whether it's a good change or a bad change at least it'll be something different.
Justin Amash, Thomas Massie. Also like Sanford before his affair issue, not sure how he's been since being elected in the house. Also the person they're supporting for Speaker is not part of the Freedom Caucus (Daniel Webster). Daniel Webster is probably one of the more moderate members in the House, he had a lower conservative score than McCarthy.
Last edited by rasuo214; 10-16-2015 at 05:23 PM.
If they were a different party would it even be a complaint? No one blames the Dems for holding the house hostage if they disagree with Republicans or vice versa. This is a taste of what it would be like to have more than 2 parties, it forces the Republican establishment to either work with Dems or work with the Freedom Caucus.
Then again I am biased since I enjoy the deadlock because congress usually passes awful legislation so the less they pass the better for the country imo. I hate the vote with the party BS, I elect my congress person to represent my district, not to represent their party. Stand up for what you believe in. Don't get me wrong though I certainly understand why people are frustrated but I'm a lot more frustrated at legislation than them not getting along, I don't give a if they get along.
The crisis is all the establishment. They wait until the very end to pressure a vote instead of working on improving legislation or doing something good for the country. The Patriot Act renewal is a good example, McConnell thought if he waited until the last second the opposition would buckle under the pressure and renew it but he was wrong and it backfired for once. They constantly do it with spending issues.
Then that's a problem with both sides because a few of those issues need to be negotiated (notably the budget, which includes Medicare and SS).
I've called Pelosi awful, terrible and corrupt plenty of times here, tbh. At least the Dems largely kept the infighting to themselves...
I don't understand this "fight" against the "establishment". The "establishment" is the one you lauded in a prior post during the Clinton era... It's ok to reach out, compromise, to give something to the "bad" guys so the "good" guys can get something too. Yeah, it means you have to be more moderate, and that might not be perfect, but what's the non-establishment? The Tea Party? The obsession with abortion, gays, guns and christianity? bunch of old guys looking for a stupid purity test (no personal offense to you if you're a Tea Potty, just my opinion of the group as a whole). It's a pipe dream, demographically they're already on the losing end. Look at that clown Trump taking over because the "pure" ones are unelectable.
tbh, I'll also have to disagree with the rationale that this deadlock is "good" because it prevents Congress from passing awful legislation. IMO, the deadlock actually ensures only awful laws can pass. Instead of a budget we get never-ending CRs, instead of a serious discussion about surveillance, trade bills, etc, we get 11th hour rushed votes (if at all)... I despise the Patriot Act, but it's hard to say McConnell "lost", when it took 3 days to pass legislation basically moving the surveillance from the government to a private company (where the surveillance will go unfettered as usual and the government will likely pay 3x as much to access the same data).
Those are the little infightings that might elicit a fist pump from certain sectors of the party, but it does absolutely nothing for your average citizen.
I was just pointing out the Clinton did a good job of cooperating with people who didn't like him. It really isn't an establishment vs anti-establishment thing for me. There's just good legislation and bad legislation. I just don't see much good coming out of current leadership from either party, but hey if they prove me wrong then great. Clearly the American public is tired of the same ole same ole, that's why we see the rise of the Tea Party a few years back or why candidates like Trump, Carson and Sanders do well. It isn't so much a purity test (there is plenty of that going on) but I think people are fed up with the typical politician. I can't really fault purity tests because ultimately I think everyone has an issue that they aren't really willing to compromise on (maybe not but I know there are some for me), whether it be war, privacy, taxes, healthcare etc. Abortion, gays, guns and Christianity may not be the most important issues for you but they clearly are for some and I doubt that'll change anytime soon.
It was a loss for McConnell because he did not want the Freedom Act, they had a chance to pass the Freedom Act before the Patriot Act expired and McConnell refused so he could try and force a renewal of the Patriot Act. I do agree with you that the Freedom Act isn't much better but it was just a recent example of how leadership loves to use deadlines to force bad legislation through and that's completely bipartisan.
With the budget, they will never have a serious discussion on reform or cuts until leadership changes because they will always wait until the last second and say everything needs to be passed or we get a shutdown and the world burns. Why do those have to be the 2 options? That's part of why I like the Freedom Caucus because they aren't afraid to force the shutdown, yea a shutdown isn't a good option and it isn't smart politically (makes them the extremist bad guys) but it's the only thing they can do to call the bluff until we finally get politicians who are serious about improving this country into leadership roles. I wish there were a group of Dems who would be willing to do the same thing so we don't end up with like the Patriot Act or the Iraq war.
Just my opinion though, I know it isn't the most popular.
Last edited by rasuo214; 10-16-2015 at 08:39 PM.
The only thing Billy did was ride a surging bubble economy, tbh. If the economy would've been in the ter, there's no way that GOP Congress works with him. That's the same Congress with Newt that went for the shutdown, a completely shortsighted strategy that still hurts the GOP today. Political calculation was always on the table back then, politicos simply didn't have a problem sitting down and cooperating because the economy was rolling (even though it was a bubble). "Compromise" wasn't a forbidden word like it is today. You listen to Cruz, and it absolutely is a purity test. The scorecards from outside groups are a purity test. The Norquist pledge is a purity test. The "squishy" or "RINO" demotions are purity tests. Reagan today would've been labeled a "squishy" and a "RINO", tbh, with his deficit spending and tax hikes... whoever was a relative moderate on the GOP has been largely cast away, and it's a damn shame.
The democrats are not without their problems as far as their candidates (terrible), IMO. But what the GOP is doing to itself is terrible. I'm a big believer in pendulum swings to avoid entrenched power, and I don't get how they're planning to win a presidential election again without going towards the middle at least a bit. I suppose Trump can pull it off, since he can basically be anywhere on the spectrum on any issue at any time, but that's basically the "impure", the dreaded "establishment". Demographically, neither party can really win anymore with their own base, and you know the bases will largely hold their noses and vote for the party anyways... so I don't get the masterplan there.
I didn't grow up in this country, so the blue/red rah rah bull is largely of no interest to me. Like I said above, I'm interested in pendulum swings just on the basis of avoiding power-creep, and so I was hoping the GOP wouldn't screw up another prez election, but now I'm not even sure if they will manage. Time will tell, I suppose.
Good talking to you.
solid read
Sanders populous strategy gets his supports motivated...but just like the supporters for all GOP candidates...they are a nitch...
Anderson Cooper Offers No Apology for Slandering Bernie Sanders
ho was the richest person in CNN’s Democratic presidential debate?
The richest person in the Democratic presidential candidate debate on October 10 was not a candidate. The richest person on that Las Vegas stage was CNN moderator and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper, whose $100 million net worth ($100,000,000) is greater than all the candidates’ worth combined (about $84,000,000).
In a very real, if unspoken sense, this “debate” was more like an exclusive club interview with Cooper vetting the applicants for their class credentials.
These class aspects of the debate went unmentioned. In American politics, class issues have traditionally gone unmentioned. The tacit understanding is that if you have the bad taste to ask, then you have no class. If you have class, you will have the right opinions. This year is different because of Bernie Sanders, part of whose popular appeal is that he is so clearly the scion of no great wealth and even less pretension. Sanders is calling for a social revolution against the ruling class of millionaires and billionaires, yet even he did not publicly object to having multi-millionaire Anderson Cooper of the One Per Cent running the show. Sanders likely understands that his best chance to win is not to confront the rich, but to surround them with everyone else whose net worth is more like his ($700,000) or less.
Net worth is notoriously hard to pin down with any accuracy, but ballpark figures are good enough at the highest levels, even if the numbers usually come from the candidates themselves. In a candidates’net worth listing published October 13, the Democrats were evaluated as follows (with an alternative set of estimates in parenthesis):
- Hillary Clinton: $45 million ($31.2 herself, with Bill $111 million)
- Lincoln Chaffee: $32 million ($31.9 million, mostly his wife’s trust)
- Jim Webb: $6 million ($4.6 million)
- Bernie Sanders: $700,000 ($528,014)
- Martin O’Malley: $-0- ($256,000)
By one recent measure, it takes a net worth of $1.2 million, minimum, to make it into the top One Per Cent of richest Americans (usually accompanied by pre-tax income of more than $300,000 annually). A US senator’s salary is $192,600, which is amplified significantly by perks and benefits.
Cooper’s life of wealth illuminates his gift as a glib carnival barker
Like most debate moderators, Anderson Cooper seemed most interested in promoting a food fight among the candidates. While he had snark for everyone, his most provocative and least conscionable jibes were saved for Sanders, served up with class-based relish.
What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like? Cooper started with the lurking horror of every unjustifiably rich person:
“Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
How could such a horror happen in America? That’s the question he seems to be asking. But to ask it that way, Cooper has to be deceitful and spin the Gallup poll to fit his meaning (Cooper’s spin reflects the conventional coverage of the poll at the time). The real news from the June 2015 poll was that 47% of Americans were OK with electing a “socialist” (not further defined by pollsters).
That 47% is more than past polls, and those opposed to a “socialist” make up only 50%, a difference close to the margin of error. In other words, more than a year from the presidential election, Gallup finds America more or less neutral on the question of whether or not a candidate is “any kind of socialist.” For a Bernie kind of socialist, the simple answer to getting elected is to make the kind of progress in the next year that he’s made in the past six months.
Cooper’s approach uses “socialism” as something that is by definition pejorative and comes out of a deep, common bias in the US. The American ruling class has cultivated fear of “socialism” for close to two centuries, not because it’s a threat to people’s freedom but because it’s a threat to the wealth and power of people like the 158 families funding most of the 2016 race for the presidency.
Anderson Coopers class roots: Vanderbilt, Dalton, Yale, CIA
Anderson Cooper was not only born into wealth and power, he has lived the life of that class, as even his official CNN bio affirms. After attending New York’s Dalton School, Cooper graduated fromYale College in 1989 with a BA in political science and two summer internships at the CIA. He also studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
Cooper kept his CIA experience in the closet until September 2006, when an unnamed web site reported that Cooper had worked for the CIA. Cooper responded on his CNN blog in minimizing, dismissive fashion. He said the website didn’t have its facts straight, but cited no errors. His own facts are well fudged – “for a couple of months over two summers I worked at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia…. It was pretty bureaucratic and mundane.” Cooper doesn’t say what he did (of course) or even what years he was there (1987 and 1988, in the aftermath of William J. Casey’s directorship).
Whatever Cooper did at the CIA, he was there when the CIA was running an illegal war in Nicaragua (and another in El Salvador) and the agency’s activities were subject to serious congressional efforts to curb them (the Boland Amendment).
When Sanders offered no direct answer to the question of how a “socialist” could win a general election, Cooper followed up more vituperatively and dishonestly:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general election — it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist. Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?”
Cooper’s first dishonesty here is asking the “electability” question here only of Sanders. Yes, everyone assumes Hillary Clinton is “electable,” *but O’Malley, Chaffee, or Webb? They’re not even as close to getting nominated as Sanders. Why would anyone assume they’re electable in anything but a flip-of-the-coin sense? Cooper’s addressing the electability question only to Sanders may actually be a measure of how strong Cooper believes Sanders is or may be.
Then Cooper stated: “You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.” He said it as if there were no question that supporting the Sandinistas was a really bad thing. That’s the talking point on Breitbart, National Review, and other right-wing sites for whom Cooper was carrying water. On Just Foreign Policy, Robert Naiman posted a prompt denunciation of Cooper for playing the knee-jerk, pro-war media honcho.
Cooper on record in support of illegal war supported by drug traffic
Supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s was, and is, a principled position. The Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza government, one of the most vicious of the US-backed dictatorships in Central America. President Reagan decided to wage an illegal covert war against the Sandinistas, using the CIA to recruit the Contra army to fight in Nicaragua, supported by CIA-supported drug traffic to the US. Cooper refers to none of this, which was all taking place while he was doing summer internships at the CIA. Is Cooper a CIA asset? Hard to know, but he plays one pretty well on TV. A Cooper-CIA tie is perfectly credible – there’s means, motive, and opportunity all round. And in 1988, Bob Woodward wasn’t getting any younger.
Supporting the illegal Contra war, run on drug money, is an unprincipled position, but Cooper clearly implies that it’s still his position. Like the US government, Cooper showed no respect for the International Court of Justice, which issued a 1986 ruling strongly supporting Nicaragua’s claims against the US, including the US mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The ruling awarded reparations to Nicaragua that the US never paid. The lone dissent in the decision came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, an American judge. The US defended its position in the UN Security Council in soviet-style, blocking any action with numerous vetoes. The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of Nicaragua, with only the US, El Salvador, and Israel opposed.
For Cooper to say that Sanders supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would be high praise in most of the world. Only in the boxed-in, unilluminated world of American media can it pass for a criticism without bring the house down in laughter. That’s another of the US government successes brought on by secret agencies like the CIS and fellow-travelers like multi-millionaire Anderson Cooper.
Bernie Sanders challenged the yellow journalist on the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails. His was an act of generosity and presidential stature. None of his fellow candidates had the courage or character to repudiate Cooper’s shameless red-baiting, not on Nicaragua, and not on his next slander, “You honeymooned in the Soviet Union.”
Integrity is not a quality Cooper showed much interest in
Almost surely Cooper knew that statement was a dishonest low blow, a neat way to brutalize the truth without actually lying. Again Cooper was irresponsibly peddling another right wing trope, used with similar hypocrisy by George Will and others.
As a Daily Kos blog details, the Sanders honeymoon was also part of a 1956 sister-cities program initiated by the Eisenhower administration. In 1988, Sanders and his wife Jane were married, marched in a Memorial Day parade, then headed off to the Russian city of Yaroslavl on their “honeymoon.” Somehow that doesn’t have the same impact as when Anderson Cooper lies about it.
Cooper’s last dishonesty was: “And just this weekend you said you’re not a capitalist.” Once again Cooper acted as if that was an undeniable evil, case closed.
But the instance he referred to on NBC was not so simple, and Cooper provided no context. On NBC, Sanders bristled when his interviewer asked if Sanders was a “socialist,” since Sanders has referred to himself a “democratic socialist” for decades. Sanders asked the NBC toady parrot if he ever asked others if they were “capitalists” and the guy cowered out. He asked Sanders if he was a capitalist. And Sanders said, yet again, that he’s a democratic socialist.
Returning to his distorted framing bias, a “Republican attack ad,” Cooper asked, “Doesn’t that ad write itself?” Well, so what if it does? That just means Republican ad writers have as little integrity as Cooper, and maybe that’s what they’re all paid for.
As Sanders put in on CNN at the end of his opening statement:
“What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant democracy we know we can and should have.”
We are at the beginning of what might be a long learning curve as we find out what our country is truly about. Bernie Sanders offers an opportunity to look at realities in broad daylight and make up our minds about them.
Anderson Cooper is but one of a legion of self-serving, self-preserving One Per Cent propagandists who will do all they can to keep the Sanders message in the dark.
http://readersupportednews.org/opini...bernie-sanders
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