She Said He Said: Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren Take Off The Gloves

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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33 Responses

  1. Aaron David says:

    Warren has had a… problem… with truth this campaign season. Between her brother disputing her claims about their father’s profession (maintenance, not janitor), doubling down on her supposed native ancestry, using said ancestry to get into Havard while claiming to have never used it, and so on, I am not feeling that she is particularly truthful, but rather more truthy. She might not be lying per se, but she has a tendency to push facts into knots. Poorly, I might add.

    But, I have no dog in this fight, as I am not voting D this election.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    I am not sure what to make of this story except that it probably only helps Biden. It is unsurprising I suppose. Warren and Sanders have slightly different but overlapping bases that are solid but not quite growing.* They need to peel votes off from somewhere to get ahead. It does not quite help that Warren and Sanders voters both seem to put Biden as choice 2.

    *My anecdotal and rough view is that Sanders voters are generally under-40, usually fairly well-educated but got royally fucked over by the recession and are underemployed or unemployed. Warren voters tend to be equally educated but survived the recession with some hits but not fatal blows. They also tend to be more in their 30s-50s. There are also some weird aesthetic issues because Warren styles herself as a reformist and capitalist (I believe her) and Sanders markets himself as a “democratic socialist.” I think both largely advocate for the same things but some people on the left are really rubbed the wrong way by how Warren speaks of her views as reform instead of burn it all down and start again. One reason I think Sanders supporters can’t stand Warren or Buttgigeg is because those candidates remind them of their more successful friends.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I see this as analogous to the way the American left hated FDR for being a reformer instead of a revolutionary.

      There’s nothing revolutionaries hate more than the ones who suck the wind out of their sails.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Erstwhile sister Elizabeth Picciuto had this take:

    Her pointing this out makes me realize that there are two ways to read Bernie saying that he didn’t believe a woman could become president.

    The first is a snarling “WOMAN! YOU WILL NEVER BECOME PRESIDENT! I DESTROYED HITLERY AND WILL DESTROY YOU TOO!”

    The second is that he was dropping lines like Tupac in “That’s Just The Way It Is” when he spat “We aint ready to see a black presidant, unh”. Was what Tupac said a racist thing? Would it be racist if someone else agreed with him? Would it have been racist if someone else, more in sadness than in anger, repeated his words?

    So if he was doing the latter, to what extent ought we be upset with the Bernster?

    That said, if he said the latter, to what extent is it bad if Warren leaked that he had said the former?

    Because I think we can all agree that it would be significantly out of character for Bernie to have said the former (but it would not be out of character for him to have said the latter).

    And now we’re dealing with whether it’d be out of character for Warren to sell what Bernie said as the former when, really, he said the latter.Report

  4. North says:

    Dear ol’ Uncle Bernie, dear ol’ Uncle Joe is lucky he’s around.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to North says:

      I don’t know how many “Oh, no! Bernie said something sexist! Better vote for Biden!” folks are out there.

      I’m sure it’s non-zero (as “NOBODY IS SAYING X!” is always false anymore) but I’m not sure it’s significantly non-zero.Report

      • North in reply to Jaybird says:

        Oh I’m not talking about things Bernie does, just what Bernie is. He’s got a pretty hard ceiling for support and also a pretty high floor. He’s a stubborn ol’ coot and he’s likely to run his campaign out to the convention. If Bernie wasn’t around that sizable fragment of the left he’s tying up could be making a more feasible leftist a real contender. If us moderates have any strategic sense then we should say a quick prayer for Bernies health every night to those impersonal gods of electoral politics.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to North says:

      At this point, any of the top five candidates can win Iowa. I would not be surprised if it is Klobuchar winning but that would be the most surprising. The three candidates surprising me with a win would be Bloomberg, Steyer, and Yang. The real question is whether winning Iowa and New Hampshire could create momentum in other states. For this, I suspect, Warren, Klobuchar, Steyer, and Bloomberg get more from wins that any other candidate.

      FWIW, I suspect but cannot prove that a heart attack would have forced Biden out of the primary campaign.Report

      • North in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        A Klobuchar win or at least a much stronger than expected performance is pretty much necessary to keep her campaign afloat and I say this regretfully as a supporter since she’s my #1 pick.
        I actually think a Biden win would yield a LOT of oomph for him if he can pull it off. The rest of the states after NH and IA are kind of teed up for him; if Biden wins in Iowa then you could see some serious snowballing to him in later states where he’s stronger.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    Uh-oh:

    (Last year, we had a couple of threads about Warren releasing her DNA test. Might be worth boning up on the nothingburger before the debates. Then again, might not.)Report

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    In a normal world all of this should be damning but we do not live in a normal world: https://www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21066219/impeachment-lev-parnas-evidence-ambassadorReport

    • Aaron David in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      OK, I just wasted fifteen minutes of my life reading that drivel. Talk about a nothing burger, it’s all out of context messages, notes on paper that could have been written at any time, about any person, all bundled up with VOX(tm) explainerations.

      Seriously, the piss hookers were more believable.Report

      • I should think a President conspiring with a foreign govt to oust his own ambassador and kill anti-corruption efforts in exchange for political dirt is a bit of a somethingburger.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Michael Siegel says:

          I keep saying that fascism feels normal to that majority of the populace.

          Even in the Soviet Bloc countries like Albania or Bulgaria, or those miserable 3rd World banana republics, most people just got up and went to work and watched tv like everything was normal.

          People are like children in abusive homes, where they accept whatever reality they experience as normal.

          We are seeing this play out in real time, where a plurality of American citizens shrug and accept stuff that is lifted right out of our grade school civics books of “what life is like in other countries”.Report

        • Aaron David in reply to Michael Siegel says:

          If anything in that mess of jackassery told that story, I would agree with you.

          Alas.

          Piss. Hookers.Report

  7. Aaron David says:

    Apparently Senor Bloombergs Twitter has gone loco:

    Report

  8. Jaybird says:

    Apparently, twitter has this thing going on now where people are sending snake emojis to Elizabeth Warren and her prominent defenders in an attempt, they say, to call her a “snake”.

    One of the interpretations of this is that it is not only sexist due to the phallic nature of the snake, but because the snake is also a sexist symbol of the Jewish/Christian myth of how “the woman” supposedly brought sin into the world.

    Apparently, Putin is behind it.Report

  9. Jaybird says:

    It’s been a few days.

    Report