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Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 05:39 PM Apr 2016

What a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like: "When did you stop being a Communist?"

[font size="3"]Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like - David Roberts, VOX.com[/font]



Most attacks on Sanders so far are relatively mild

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When Sanders supporters discuss these attacks, though, they do so in tones of barely contained outrage, as though it is simply disgusting what they have to put up with. Questioning the practical achievability of single-payer health care. Impugning the broad electoral appeal of socialism. Is nothing sacred?

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But c'mon. This stuff is patty-cakes compared with the brutalization he would face at the hands of the right in a general election.

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In a sense, this seems so obvious to me that it feels peculiar to argue for it. But Sanders supporters do not give the impression that they are cognizant of Sander's vulnerabilities.

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Partly this is because the GOP has been very careful so far not to go after Sanders. They show every indication of preferring him as an opponent, so they have no reason to hurt his chances in the primary.

But if he wins, they will rain down fire.

And the organs of the right will feel absolutely no obligation to be fair. They're not going to be saying, like Sanders's Democratic critics, "Aw, Bernie, you dreamer."

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They're going to ask when he stopped being a communist, and when he objects that he was never a communist they're going to ask why he's so defensive about his communist past, why he's so eager to avoid the questions that have been raised, the questions that people are talking about.



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Sanders fans say "it's not 1954"... It's hard for me to imagine that anybody would be so out-of-touch with the political realities in the past couple of decades to not know that the current, post Gingrich, Republican party is much more doctrinaire and extreme than the Republican party of the '50s was. In the decades of the 1950s and 1960s there actually were people in the Republican party who were called 'Moderates'. These were people who, in order to get things done, were capable of reaching compromises with Democrats to get laws passed. In the '90s through to today, the Extreme Right-wingers in the GOP have purged just about anybody in the GOP who showed the slightest willingness to compromise with any Democrat.

[font size="3"]
Rise of the New McCarthyism - People for the American Way[/font]


McCarthy tactics then and now

From 1953 to 1955, McCarthy held 117 hearings and even more closed-door interrogations, witch hunts for subversives that thrived on guilt by association: someone had worked for a union, dates a communist, been in a book club that read a book by Marx. Author Johnson writes that reviewing the transcripts of those sessions made it clear that McCarthy, in addition to guilt by association and character assassination, was engaged in an “obsessive hunt for homosexuals,” hounded writers, artists, and composers, attacked the reputations of military leaders.

Today’s McCarthyism has many faces and voices, including the household names of right-wing cable television, a plethora of radio hosts, Religious Right leaders, right-wing organizations and the bogus “grassroots” campaigns they generate – and Members of Congress and other Republican Party officials. Together they engage in character assassination and challenge the loyalty and patriotism of their targets.


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Communism, Socialism, “Obamunism”

McCarthy frightened many Americans with charges that the government was infested with communist sympathizers. His current-day acolytes have made charges long considered beyond the pale of political discourse – comparisons of President Obama and other administration officials with tyrannical figures like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Chairman Mao – so frequently that they are losing their shock value. Former and likely future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is among many who have called Obama a socialist, and said of the Obama budget, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

The same is true of charges that the Obama administration and congressional democratic leaders are communists, socialists, and/or fascists bent on destroying capitalism and the market economy and imposing a socialist dictatorship in America. Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia has compared Obama to Hitler, called Obama and Democratic congressional leaders a “socialistic elite” and warned that they’re planning to create a pretext to declaring martial law. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) warned of 17 socialists in Congress. Rep. Michele Bachmann has called the health care reform bill “the crown jewel of socialism.” The Traditional Values Coalition has warned that “Obamunism must be stopped.”

Van Jones, founder of Color of Change and a leading advocate of using “green” technologies to bring jobs to de-industrialized American cities, resigned from his position as a White House advisor after a fierce campaign against him by right-wing pundits who denounced him as a communist.Jones’ resignation was like blood in the water to Glenn Beck and others who have launched a series of smear campaigns against Obama administration officials and nominees.
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apcalc

(4,461 posts)
1. Republicans against Sanders
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 05:43 PM
Apr 2016

It would be relentless and brutal.
A guy I golf with ( Republican) calls him the "commissar".
Landslide.

Autumn

(44,743 posts)
2. We know republicans will handle Hillary with kids gloves because we know
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 05:43 PM
Apr 2016

how much they love her and are just on pins and needles waiting to work with her.

Response to Autumn (Reply #2)

Response to Autumn (Reply #7)

Autumn

(44,743 posts)
11. No he has not. I don't need to be informed by you, everything he has said about her is the truth
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 05:59 PM
Apr 2016

her surrogates have lied and smeared him from day one.

grasswire

(50,130 posts)
3. nobody cares any more
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 05:44 PM
Apr 2016

Americans largely don't take that bait any more. And demographics are increasingly cancelling out that argument.

Young people see what democratic socialism does for other first world countries, and they want it, too. It's the future.

zalinda

(5,621 posts)
12. Nothing new, another Hillary supporter trying to smear Bernie.
Mon Apr 18, 2016, 06:39 PM
Apr 2016

The Republicans against Hillary? An all out war that most people couldn't even say was a lie. She has said so much, that she has painted herself in the corner.

But then every body knew she was going to run as soon as she left the White House. They have more than 25 years of crap to throw at her and a lot of it will stick.

Z

concreteblue

(626 posts)
14. And yet...
Tue Apr 19, 2016, 01:03 AM
Apr 2016

Polling of every stripe indicates lower and lower approval numbers for the Republican pParty, lower and lower numbers for FOX viewership, lower and lower numbers of support for Hillary. People are not buying that shit anymore. Period.
"They're going to be digging through his trash, investigating known associates, rifling through legal records."
And the Clinton Campaign has not? And yet they are still relegated to outright lying and making up shit out of whole cloth....
I would be willing to bet money the Clinton campaign is behind the switching registrations in AZ, PA, and NY, and that there was outright fraud in many of the primaries, which would have made Bernie the nom in a landslide by now. And yet, he still has a shot.
Sorry.....

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