{"id":381869,"date":"2018-10-21T12:55:05","date_gmt":"2018-10-21T11:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/democrats-ahead-progressives-beware\/"},"modified":"2018-10-21T12:55:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-21T11:55:05","slug":"democrats-ahead-progressives-beware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/democrats-ahead-progressives-beware\/","title":{"rendered":"Democrats Ahead: Progressives Beware"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p>Any minimally plausible Democrat, perhaps even one as hapless as Joe Biden, would have easily trounced Donald Trump in 2016.\u00a0 Hillary Clinton had to outdo herself to lose.<\/p>\n<p>It is almost an article of faith in progressive circles that had Bernie Sanders been the nominee, as he might have been had the Clintons and the DNC not put the fix in, he too would have kept the Trumpian menace at bay.<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, for as long as he was in the House and then the Senate, Sanders was a Democrat in practice, but an \u201cindependent,\u201d indeed a \u201csocialist,\u201d in theory.<\/p>\n<p>One would have thought that this would be an issue in a campaign to become the Democratic Party\u2019s standard-bearer.\u00a0 As it turned out, though, hardly anyone cared.\u00a0 Why would they?\u00a0 The Democratic Party is too feckless either to elicit or to deserve loyalty.<\/p>\n<p>With an election looming, its flacks on cable news networks and in print and digital media are talking up a storm, as only they can, about how wonderful the Democratic Party \u2014 or at least its \u201cdemocratic wing,\u201d as Paul Wellstone called it \u2013 is.\u00a0 They praise it for siding with the people against the special interests, and for standing up, Superman-style, for \u201ctruth, justice, and the American way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Students of political discourse can debate whether these contentions are best described as \u201ccrap,\u201d \u201cbunk,\u201d \u201cbalderdash,\u201d\u00a0 \u201chokum,\u201d \u201cmalarkey,\u201d \u201cpoppycock,\u201d or plain old fashioned \u201cbullshit.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0I\u2019d say that any and all of those&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/10\/19\/democrats-ahead-progressives-beware\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Any minimally plausible Democrat, perhaps even one as hapless as Joe Biden, would have easily trounced Donald Trump in 2016.\u00a0 Hillary Clinton had to outdo herself to lose. It is almost an article of faith in progressive circles that had Bernie Sanders been the nominee, as he might have been had the Clintons and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-381869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}