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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Is the Russians helping Sanders is a reference to the DNC leaks, which I know helped Trump and led to fighting among the Democrats, or have they helped Bernie in other ways?
I was also aware that the Green Party had some connection to Putin.
(I was actually unaware before this thread that Russia helped leftists - I assumed they mostly backed far-right candidates like Trump and Le Pen.)
edited 26th Apr '18 2:53:39 PM by Raptorslash
The claim it's oversold would be a lot more convincing if Sanders had not made repeat public statements about how the American people don't care about the Russia investigation, and then voted against sanctioning Russia for its interference in the election.
At best, he's repeatedly put his foot in his mouth on the subject of Russia, and thus made a minor thing into a much bigger deal. At worst, he's deliberately trying to steer talk away from Russia in order to conceal something (whether that something is actually in and of itself a big deal being another conversation altogether).
Sanders is relevant to the superdelegate thing because he's the one who keeps bringing it up.
When you set aside Sanders, there's not a lot of reason for it to even be a talking point. Who else is looking at the 2016 election and going, "Do you know what we really need? Something more like the system that the Republicans used. That got some amazing results. Why can't our primary be like theirs?"
I was also aware that the Green Party had some connection to Putin.
(I was actually unaware before this thread that Russia helped leftists - I assumed they mostly backed far-right candidates like Trump and Le Pen.)
One of the things that the Mueller probe has uncovered is that Russia's fake news propaganda campaigns in 2016 were not solely limited to Trump. Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein were the three key beneficiaries of Russia's propaganda campaign. Trump v. Sanders with Stein as third party was Putin's ideal for the 2016 electoral race.
He got what he wanted on the right, helping Trump beat out all of his more qualified rivals, but Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton. So Russia's efforts doubled down on Trump while also helping to push the idea on the left that Clinton "stole" the nomination from Sanders through crooked dealing and election fraud.
That does not, in and of itself, mean that Sanders is as much a Russian stooge as Trump is. But it raises all sorts of questions about why he opposes Russian sanctions, and occasionally tries to end the national conversation about Russia.
edited 26th Apr '18 3:10:19 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.They'll pretty much back anyone, if they think there's a potential for that group to widen some divide or cause chaos. In practice that usually means the far ends of the political spectrum on both sides.
The far left also has a historic relationship with Russia, many Communist and Socialist groups received support from the Soviet Union.
They should have sent a poet.![]()
Also, and this is crucial, he wanted that because none of those people were Hillary Clinton.
This is from the DNI report
He blames her for inciting the mass protests against his reelection in 2011, as well as her previous statements urging Obama to be harder on Russia.
It's logical for him to oppose her, she was the only candidate likely to be hard on Russia. Trump was either his puppet or useful idiot and Sanders doesn't care about anything that isn't one of his pet hobby horses.
edited 26th Apr '18 3:47:18 PM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
Which then makes me think that the reason they were pushing Bernie, was to divide the Democratic base.
If Putin's number one goal was to make sure that Hillary didn't win, it's only natural to push content involving an already divisive candidate on the left, to try to turn the people who favored him, against her.
edited 26th Apr '18 3:51:49 PM by megaeliz
I'm not going to listen to/watch that Fox & Friends "interview", because I don't like hearing the sound of Trump's voice, but I read some of the comments in various articles and wow, even from the text you can tell he is totally unhinged.
Speaking of cable news, this opinion piece
from Mediaite (in light of Hannity refusing to interview Stormy's lawyer) raises some very good points. Refusing to interview someone from the opposite side is only reinforcing the info bubble.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:00:46 PM by speedyboris
If Bernie wasn't opposed to the sanctions, investigation, etc., I might be inclined to agree. As it is:
- Russia supports Sanders.
- Sanders supports Russia.
The conclusion that can be drawn from that seems pretty straightforward.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I’m not awere of Sanders doing anything to oppose the investigation, the sanctions yes, but I’d bet money that that was just political grandstanding and ego-stupidity on his part and not an actual opposition to the sanctions.
Sanders likes being controversial and contrarian, he likes making the news and an easy way to do that is to oppose something he knows will pass anyway, he does it on lots of issues.
Also I’d say that going by the sheer hatred for Sanders in this thread the Russian tactic of using Sanders to try and divide democrats has succeeded, we can’t even discuss reforming the primary system because it might make Sanders look good if we do any reforms.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:31:57 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
You're saying that it hasn't succeeded as a divisionary tactic because the proposals get stalled by who proposes them? That works best if the audience is split. If there are people arguing against it because it's Sanders saying it, then Silas has got it right.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:42:43 PM by RainehDaze
What? No.
I'm saying the claim that the thread hates Sanders so much that they would knee-jerk oppose anything he suggests may be true for some of its members but it's blatantly not true about everyone (or even most of us).
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangTrump vs. Sanders wouldn't have gone any better than Trump vs. Hillary, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Sanders lost even harder than Hillary did.
Sanders had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth and is at best tone deaf on social issues. The skeletons in his closet probably would have come out, too, even if his scandals aren't as well-known as Hillary's.
So the people who act like Sanders would have curbstomped Trump effortlessly confuse me a bit.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:50:10 PM by Raptorslash
I didn’t intent to imply that everyone in this thread hates Sanders and everything he says, some people hate Sanders but only specifically the stupid things he says, other don’t particularly hate Sanders but just regard him as an idiot who does a lot of unhelpful things, we do still have a few Sanders supporters in the thread.
I wasn’t talking about the thread collectively, just the impact that the very loud Sanders haters have on the collective.
They confuse you because they’re not basing what they say on facts, just on their gut feeling.
I think that Sanders might have won, but it’s a big maybe, we’d have had a very real risk of a centrist third party run that would have throw everything into chaos.
I suspect that that was the real Russian holy grail, a Sander-Trump-Bloomberg election so ends with nobody getting 270 electoral votes and the election being decided by the House.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:54:05 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranAnd even if Sanders had won he'd have to deal with a Republican-controlled Congress (although we'd at least have gotten a liberal justice on the Supreme Court) and wouldn't be able po push his policies through.
The same goes for Hillary, though, and I'd rather have had her because she's more experienced and is more likely to have tried to take action on the Cambridge Analytica stuff.
edited 26th Apr '18 5:00:22 PM by Raptorslash
I wasn’t talking about the thread collectively, just the impact that the very loud Sanders haters have on the collective.
Ok that's fair, my initial objection is withdrawn.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:59:32 PM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWith Sanders I would actually compare him less to Trump and more to Rand Paul, there’s the same love of political grandstanding over weird issues, the same weird desire to vote against their party but only when it doesn’t actully change the outcome, the same general ideological lineup that’s just a bit out of whack because of a hyper focus on some weirdly specific issues, hell the same isolationism that’s not so much pro-Russia as it is beneficial to Russia due to its stupidity.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

I must have missed the part where left-wingers were the ones who voted against sanctions on South Africa. Oh, wait, most left-wing governments did move to sanction South Africa.
Left and right-wingers have both regularly voted for sanctioning regimes when it suits them. Why it did not suit Sanders to sanction Russia is therefore a question worth asking.