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Thursday, January 21, 2016

The Real Problem With Bernie's Planned Parenthood Comments

After the dustup over Bernie's comments on Planned Parenthood, a lot of people are missing the problem with them. His reply is that he has an 100 voting record with NARAL.

But the trouble is that in dismissing PP as just part of the Establishment he suggests that while he checks the right boxes on women's choice and health, it is not a priority for him.

We know what Bernie sounds like when something is a priority for him. He shouts a lot and keeps redirecting every other question back to it.

He is a hedgehog-Hillary is an incrementalist fox-and for him ever problem is a nail and his hammer is campaign finance and money in politics.

Yet when the subject turns to something that he nominally supports he has less to say. With gun control he actually says we should stop shouting as that won't solve anything. So why will it solve campaign finance reform?

His main response on the matter is to say 'I have a D- from the NRA.'

All I can say that if this is true, they are a very tough grader. After all, he has voted four times against the Brady bill, he gave them their white whale in 2005 by shielding gun manufacturers from lawsuits he voted in 2007 yet again with George W. Bush to make it harder for the FBI to keep track of unscrupulous gun dealers.

In 1990 he was elected in part from NRA support for him not supporting an assault weapons ban.

Now on women's choice and health, he has had little to say at all. Again, it's not just that you check the pro choice box as this is the Democratic party you're trying to run it. It's a question of how much you prioritize the issue..

"This fight speaks to other issues the Sanders campaign has had with identity politics"

"Whenever Sanders is criticized on an identity issue like race or gender, he and his supporters are quick to defend him by pointing to his record. He's always voted the "right way," he marched with Martin Luther King, etc."

"But arguments like that ring hollow to some progressives. Witness the Black Lives Matter movement, which has pushed Sanders to speak out more about racial justice. For these activists, it wasn't enough for Sanders to have the right voting record or policy positions. He had to talk about racial justice, a lot, with a comprehensive analysis of why police violence happens and how to fix it. He had to show that he would actively prioritize these issues and work to fix them, not just passively support them if they happened to come up."

"Sanders has changed his tune on racial justice significantly since those protests, but he still stumbles occasionally. Ta-Nehisi Coates took Sanders to task for dismissing reparations as politically infeasible when none of his economic justice proposals could make it through the current Congress either. And in an awkward moment during the last Democratic debate, Sanders seemed to mentally separate blacks and Latinos from the "general population"

"The pushback against Sanders from some reproductive justice activists is similar to the pushback from Black Lives Matter and other racial justice activists. In the current political climate, with its unprecedented wave of anti-abortion lawmaking, advocates say that fighting for reproductive rights is about more than having the right policy positions or voting the right way."

"Sanders has a strong voting record on race and gender justice issues, and he's shown a willingness to listen to criticism and adapt. He also has a point about how the Democratic "establishment" has favored Clinton from the beginning. But gaffes like these reveal that he thinks identity issues are unimportant when compared with class struggle, and indeed that they get in the way of it. That could be a problem if he wants to keep expanding his nonwhite-male voter base."

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/20/10801412/bernie-sanders-planned-parenthood-human-rights-campaign-establishment

The trouble is his tendency to marginalize issues 'identity politics.' In his mind they are a distraction from class issues. This is rather Marxist of him actually.

And Bernie supporters tend to dismiss Hillary's discussion of women's issues as 'identity politics.'

Again I note that at the Black and Brown Forum last week, he suggested that racial progress lags behind gender progress. This again shows in his mind women's issues are smaller fry.

Meanwhile many argue the war on women is over and they lost.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/planned-parenthood-abortion-the-war-is-over

1 comment:

  1. Mike, your title: "Real" needs an L.

    O/T: Sumner gets political again. I especially liked this bit:

    “2. To a libertarian like me, conservatism that discards the “small government” component represents 100% pure unadulterated evil. But it would make life much simpler. I could simply go with the liberal tribe, and no more lame explanations that “I’m conservative on economics and liberal on other issues.” In my view, Trump is running on a platform of pure evil.”

    Lol!

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