Chamblee54

Matthew Colin Taibbi talked to Joe Rogan for three hours the other day. At one point, MCT recalled the time when Bernie Sanders was gaining ground against Hillary Clinton. All of a sudden, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a story in The Atlantic, Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?
“Unfortunately, Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy. What he proposes in lieu of reparations—job creation, investment in cities, and free higher education—is well within the Overton window, and his platform on race echoes Democratic orthodoxy. The calls for community policing, body cameras, and a voting-rights bill with pre-clearance restored— all are things that Hillary Clinton agrees with. And those positions with which she might not agree address black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.”
As we all know, the Bernie campaign ran out of steam, and HRC bulldozed her way to the nomination. Democrats saw how well crying racist worked against Bernie, and made a major issue out of Donald Trump’s racial attitudes. Soon, well meaning people were saying that if you vote for Donald, then you are a racist. Swing state voters were offended, and Donald won the electoral college. Did shouting racist lose the election for Hillary? We will never know for sure.
Woke and Unwoke – Robert Wright & Norman Finkelstein also turned up this week. Dr. Finkelstein is, to put it mildly, a piece of work. Dr. F has opinions about Mr. Coates: “then Along Came Ta-Nehisi Coates and he started to say Bernie has a problem with race Bernie has a problem with race because he won’t come out robustly for black reparations so as a political reality the black reparations was being used as a weapon to derail the Bernie campaign.”
Before long, Dr. F had to leave. “I have to run to the hospital because I have to have a colonoscopy.” Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.