This morning’s e-mail included this message from Paco Fabian: “The corporate media would love nothing more than for us to forget that Bernie’s policy vision is being copied by almost every other candidate in the race. Ideally, they want us to vote for Joe Biden, a man who refuses to apologize for working with segregationists and just this week publicly lied about what Medicare for All means.”
“Our movement is a threat to the establishment. Unlike the candidates performing uninspired cover versions of Bernie’s 2016 campaign platform, we are doing the actual grassroots organizing work to advance a progressive agenda and transform our country.”
Paco Fabian speaks for “Our Revolution,” a PAC that grew out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for the presidency. His message was a fund-raising appeal. It included the standard drivel about how Trump and the Republicans are motivated by hate and racism, but its primary target is Joe Biden, the tool of corporate interests.
It did not call Good Ol’ Joe a racist, but reminds us that he worked with racists.
We are already deep in the Democratic Party primary season, and have been getting deeper since the year began. People who support the Our Revolution PAC and “Justice Democrats” are unimpressed by the argument that Biden has the best chance of defeating the Trump Tower Gargoyle. They come from the Democratic Party’s Enraged wing. The Enraged aren’t interested in the most electable party nominee. They are committed to the most revolutionary candidate. They hated Hillary as a servant of the corporations and see Biden as her successor.
Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, all of whom displaced “mainstream” Democrats with Justice Democrat support, have provoked Nancy Pelosi into dismissing them as insignificant pests, with legions of face-book buddies but no support in Washington. They struck back, with broad hints that Nancy has racist inclinations.
They hate Nancy Pelosi more than Donald Trump. Nancy doesn’t want a revolution. She just wants the government to grow, a Democratic majority in the House under the gavel of a woman named Nancy, and a friendly occupant of the Oval Office. She fears that millions of voters would be alienated by revolutionary hot air.
Tom Friedman, the New York Times’s designated Admiral of the Mainstream recently wrote an column expressing shock at the folly of the radical noises coming Democratic presidential candidates. It’s a shock, as he makes clear, because he had planned to vote Democrat.
With all these promising signs of Democratic fracturing, President Trump ignores Napoleon’s axiom, when your enemy is in the act of destroying himself, don’t interfere. He launches a twitter-storm attacking the Justice Democratic ladies. Result: the story is now about his “racist” tweets and the Pelosians unite with the Enraged in concentrating their fire on Trump.
The simplest explanation for this intervention is stupidity. More complicated explanations might involve a narcissistic urge for attention, a kind of addiction to twitterbabble, or a subtle brilliant strategy. The truly committed Trumpophiles favor brilliance. I’m not one of them.
John Frary of Farmington is a former candidate for U.S. Congress, a retired history professor, an emeritus Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United, a Maine Citizen’s Coalition Board member, and publisher of FraryHomeCompanion.com. He can be reached at jfrary8070
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