by Chris
It’s entirely laughable that the NYTimes is beating the Russia-gate story still, and it’s actually deplorable how badly they have mangled the statistics. No excuse whatsoever for being so misleading except that it’s intentional and derelict.
The result?
It’s another unpredictable squeaker of an election when it should be a landslide. Caitlin Johnstone explains it best:
[O]n paper the outcome of the 2018 midterms is still uncertain. The slight lead Democrats held in polls has narrowed further today, with some analysts going so far as to predict Republicans retaining control of both houses.
Which is, on its surface, bizarre. It is bizarre not only because a new president almost always takes congressional losses at this point in their administration (the only exceptions being the historically significant years of 1934 and 2002), but also because the Republican Party is under the leadership of the most despised presidential candidate of all time.
If US politics were real, this would not be happening. If the Democratic Party were a real political party, a party which advances popular agendas in order to get its members elected to the government the way kids are taught in school, it would be on the cusp of a massive landslide of victories in both the House and the Senate, instead praying Hail Marys that they at least gain a slight advantage in the House. The last two years would have been spent promoting the virally popular agendas of the Bernie Sanders movement like single payer healthcare and getting money out of politics, after a thorough and radically honest autopsy of everything that went so catastrophically wrong in 2016.
Instead, what did Democrats do? They spent the last two years babbling about Russiagate conspiracy theories, and then in a tacit admission that they’ve never believed a word of that nonsense suddenly went completely silent on the issue before midterms and switched to the “We’re not Trump” platform. Oh yeah, and they’re telling Green Party candidates to drop out.
(…)
Instead of advancing popular positions to win the votes of the majority as kids are taught happens in school, all Democrats are doing currently is attacking the Republicans over Trump’s obnoxious tweets and generally successful anti-immigrant fearmongering.
Since both parties support all oligarchic agendas in essentially the same ways, the only wiggle room Democrats have left is on issues the billionaire class doesn’t care about, like racism and other forms of bigotry.
Plutocrats don’t care if gay people get married or if the president says racist things, they only care about power and profit, so civil rights and opposition to racism are the only means by which Democrats can significantly distinguish themselves from Republicans in a way that helps them get elected. The fact that both parties support the same oligarchic agendas which hurt disadvantaged groups first and worst goes unmentioned by either side.
I love that part in bold above. It’s so blindingly obvious to everyone except the syncophants in the Lamestream media.