Bernie is burning in his own private hell. This is the face of a man who is significantly responsible for an outcome that is a disaster for everything he believes in, and he knows it.
Originally shared by Chris Phenomenal
Bernie always look constipated.
while private hells can be arbitrarily quirky, I find your assessment unfair and over the top, Kent Crispin
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic I think it is to his credit if he is suffering in the private hell I describe -- it would be very much smaller of him if his pained expression was the result of him regretting that it wasn't him on the stage, for example.
ReplyDeleteIt's clearly true that the outcome is a disaster for what he believes in. It is also clearly true that he is at least partially responsible -- if he had not run, or even if he had graciously conceded when it was clear he wasn't going to win the primary, or if he hadn't fallen into the trap of allowing the constant vilification of HRC and the DNC that so many of his followers fell into, the outcome could have been very different.
Recall that early in the campaign he was a marvel of magnanimity -- "sick of hearing about her emails", and "on her worst day she was better than the best republican candidate on his best day". But he lost that perspective entirely,and he is experiencing in full the bitter results of that failure -- at least I hope he has the sensitivity and self reflection to experience it. What more flattering explanation of his expression could you come up with?
Kent Crispin > "It is also clearly true that he is at least partially responsible -- if he had not run, or even if he had graciously conceded when it was clear he wasn't going to win the primary, or if he hadn't fallen into the trap of allowing the constant vilification of HRC and the DNC that so many of his followers fell into, the outcome could have been very different".
ReplyDelete// Don't you perceive the clear contradiction between your use of "clearly true" in the beginning of this long sentence, and your use of "could have been" rather than "would have been" at the end of it?
In Swiss insurance law (and I suppose elsewhere) there's a distinction made between "natural causation" and "adequate causation"; the former refers to anecdotal proximal causes that can hardly be anticipated and don't permit their generalization to form policies, the latter refers in contrast to causation that fits common sense and should be anticipated upstream of an accident.
You only get to accuse Sanders for the outcome by cherry-picking among details of the scenario that's led to the outcome while keeping other details arbitrarily fixed, meanwhile discounting wholesale his (clearly stated) intentions. Further, by doing that, you pedestal an approach to electoral campaigning that disdains what's arguably its function (the construction of cohesion in the constituency with the policy decisions ultimately taken) in favor of an inherently machiavellian "end justifies means" approach that actually favors the ultimate bullshitter that Trump is. Not to speak of gerrymandering.