I agree 100% and am at a complete loss of comprehension. What even is a "true progressive?" It makes no difference in policy whether they used to be for or against an issue 30 years ago. Whichever candidate gets in is going to attempt to pass the same shit. Even in 2016, Clinton and Sanders had near identical voting records in their tenure in Congress.
But Clinton was against free public college tuition, medicare for all, a carbon tax, and was for every regime change war and the wall street bailout. You disingenuously try to paint them as being ideologically similar just based on a metric that has little meaning as this small list of issues alone has such a dramatic impact on people's lives. My own standards for a progressive are at minimum someone who refuses to take corporate money, is committed to getting money out of politics, and broadly supports policies that are mainstream in the rest of the developed world that will finally offer some relief to the working class (ie medicare for all). Just because we have become used to most of our elected officials being crooked does not mean we should have absolutely no standards.
Look no further than the craven Republicans to see that politicians are just there to do a job. We don't know what they actually believe or who they are friends with in private, nor should we care.
Politicians have a direct impact on your daily life. Their actions determine whether people will continue to struggle paying their bills, dying to medical debt, or continue to be terrorized by the police. The fact that not enough people care is why we as a country have failed to solve these fundamental problems, let alone have a standard of living for the middle and working class that is comparable with the rest of the developed world.
The "unfair attacks" are politics. Politics is a contact sport. Was it fair that the media spent a year talking about Clinton emails? Is it fair that Republicans use blatant racism to hustle votes? Was it fair that Bill Clinton was impeached over a blow job? That's politics.
Why do people take criticisms of Bernie so personally?
Well then you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to why people actually like Bernie Sanders. That's because he wants to put an end to politics as usual, and make sure that our elections are honest debates on policy, not a contest of who has the most believable unsubstantiated smear. It's more jarring in the case of Sanders vs Warren because they had a non aggression pact. Then Warren tries to play the victim card and claim that pointing out her supporters are more likely to be educated and affluent is a horrible unfair attack that must be apologized for (even though it is undeniably a fact that is supported by ALL of the polling data). All of the legitimate POLICY differences I pointed out in my last post are things Sanders could have easily used to attack Warren in the debates, yet he staunchly refused to. Then when she starts to drop in the polls, Warren drops an outrageous attempt to smear him as a sexist in an act of desperation. No matter who you believe, both candidates were supposed to be working together to make sure that either one of them would emerge as the progressive nominee. If Warren was truly committed to this cause, then why would she decide to drop this bomb when she did?
Your argument seemingly boils down to "if the media blasts Bernie over stupid stuff, we should be able to blast the other candidates over stupid stuff too." I am not arguing with you on the point that Bernie has had a very poor image construed of him by the great majority of major media sources. And that is not fair. But why can't you take it out on the media? What does calling Warren a snake over a conversation you never heard accomplish? What does discrediting her strong indigenous rights agenda do, other than erase the place for indigenous rights in our country's political system?
That is not at all what I said, don't put words in my mouth. I said that Warren and her supporters have no right to act like one sided victims in this situation when (1) Bernie has been attacked relentlessly by the media with mostly unsubstantiated smears and (2) Warren is undoubtedly lying or being extremely disingenuous at best, on purpose, in an attempt to undermine Sanders and put the progressive movement at a huge risk by burning a bridge between Sanders and his supporters. Furthermore, Warren's campaign is the one that directly leaked the story to CNN, so they are just as culpable in this incident as the media outlets.
Warren progressives are not blind to the unfairness that Bernie has had to endure in media coverage, we see it, we know it exists. That really doesn't excuse people to stoop to that level to fill literally every youtube livestream of Warren over the past 2 months with snake emojis, or for them to unite with Trump supporters and call her Pocahontas across every youtube video or online newspaper article mentioning her in the past year. This is stuff I've been seeing this whole cycle.
Well get over it. She has chosen to double down on her actions, probably at the behest of her horrible advisors who previously worked for the Clinton campaign who tried to paint Bernie Sanders as a misogynist last time. She must own up to that. As I have pointed out multiple times already, every single candidate has suffered from attacks from aggressive supporters from every campaign. But you know what? Even though many Sanders supporters have also been victim of unreasonable attacks from supporters of other candidates including Warren, you don't see us making huge hissyfits whining about them. At least our aggression has been directed at the other candidates and not their supporters. If you are going to try to act like Sanders supporters are uniquely vicious, then at least have the decency to acknowledge some of the horrible things Warren supporters have said about Sanders, especially at the moment of his heart attack. And given all of that, my support for Sanders over Warren is based entirely on her own policies and actions, not those of her supporters. Not supporting a candidate based on the actions or beliefs of their supporters is just playing the guilt by association card and a bad excuse.
I really don't think Bernie beating Clinton in this area is anything noteworthy, and if Bernie can't even mention Native Americans in any of his debates, then that kind of matters to me.
I mean, candidates mention lots of things during debates to score brownie points. Clinton repeatedly mentioned the Flint water crisis in a debate while she was campaigning in Michigan, but after that primary was over she never brought it up or even acknowledged it again. What's important to me is whether or not I can trust them to actually keep their promises. What attracts me to Sanders are not simply his words, but the fact that he is the one candidate who isn't taking money from billionaires, so I am far more likely to trust that he will fight for the things he is promising. You conveniently chose not to respond to all the legitimate issues I had with Warren on policy in my previous post including her decision to take corporate PAC money, which is a major reason I have little faith that she would fight hard on progressive issues.
And don't be so dismissive of Bernie's platform for Native Americans. I will acknowledge that Warren has the most detailed plan on her website, but that does not mean that Bernie isn't making significant efforts on indigenous rights. There's lots of videos on youtube where he discusses this in detail, so I'll just leave one such example from this campaign. There are also several from his 2016 campaign out there.
I will admit that I am not the most knowledgeable person in this area as I am not a Native American, but I did ask you to clearly explain in what ways Warren's plan is superior to Bernie's. You still haven't answered that question, but odds are that even if it is, I would think that Bernie's plan is still quite good given that he has the most support from Native American voters out of every candidate both now and in 2016.
You basically act like Warren is evil for acknowledging that Klobuchar had a proven record of beating men in red districts as if she supports Klobuchar's policies. I hate to tell this to you, but one woman telling another woman a compliment does NOT mean that those women are conspiring against Bernie or the male candidates.
I didn't say that she's "evil", but the simple fact that she is saying in this race even though she no longer has any chance of winning along with her increasing amounts of attacks towards Bernie and his supporters is leading me and many others to question where her real priorities lie as a candidate. Regarding Klobuchar, she hasn't been complimenting her in just that one debate (where Sanders also pointed out that he has in fact beaten an incumbent Republican in the past 30 years despite her claims to the contrary). After getting trounced in the NH primary, she congratulated Klobuchar (who finished in third) and attacked Bernie for being a divisive candidate (even though she had just recently committed the single most divisive attack of any candidate against Sanders). That's not excusable when she has previously advertised herself as being more closely aligned with Sanders ideologically than a centrist like Klobuchar.
Literally your best argument is that the media doesn't like Bernie (though you fail to mention that these same media outlets have portrayed Warren as fading or dead since December), but this is very very far from saying Warren doesn't like him or that she's "viciously" out to get him (seriously, that language bugs the shit out of me) and it doesn't in my opinion excuse many of the attacks leveled against Warren.
But the media has been extremely nice to her and hasn't really acknowledged that her campaign was fading until after her losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. The same media outlets have quite literally refused to acknowledge that Sanders was frontrunner until his landslide victory last night, even though he had already won the popular vote in the first two states.
And you still haven't answered my question. If she is supposed to be someone who purportedly cares about having a progressive candidate win the nomination, then why hasn't she dropped out when she obviously knows by now that she has no chance? Although Sanders is now the undisputed frontrunner in the race, it is still uncertain if he will actually be able to get a majority of pledged delegates. Current polling data says that about 42% of Warren's remaining supporters have Sanders as their second choice. That's a 4-5% boost in the national polling which could possibly be enough to make the difference between a progressive getting the nomination or the party insiders undemocratically handing it over to Biden/Bloomberg/Buttigieg as they are more committed to stopping a progressive from winning than Trump. I mean, I am glad that she did a fantastic job knocking Bloomberg down in that last debate, but that does not necessarily mean she is staying in at this point to help benefit the progressive movement.
Finally, I have no reason to apologize for calling her attacks on Bernie as vicious, because it's undeniably the case. Biden, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg have also attacked Bernie many times but none of them sting nearly as hard because everyone of us knows that they are the establishment. She flat out accused him of being something she is not in a selfishly calculated political move, plain and simple. And she has not stopped since then, whether it is calling him divisive, claiming he is responsible for his supporters (yet somehow not responsible for hers), and now trying to pretend that the grassroot PACs supporting Sanders are equivalent to dark money SuperPACs (which she is now taking money from anyway). I could go on but I am not going to keep trying to convince you to change your mind, and I know there are many former Warren supporters who have switched over to Sanders that still like her. But I am not going to ignore the serious flaws in her record or her attempts to undermine the candidate who she is supposedly a good friend with, and I'll no longer acknowledge her as a progressive candidate. Plain and simple.
