Swordsmyth
04-11-2019, 04:23 PM
California Representative Eric Swalwell announced his candidacy for president (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/eric-swalwell-2020-presidential-run-819465/) on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, bringing the total number of Americans demanding that Eric Swalwell run for president to exactly one.
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/1_EfehDn79PQK0_xx0kjv3ig.png
It also brings the total number of candidates officially running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination to a whopping 18.
If you don’t remember Swalwell from his controversial tweet (https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1063527635114852352) last year claiming that the US government could use nuclear weapons on Americans who revolted if their guns were outlawed, you may remember him from his relentless promotion of demented Russiagate conspiracy theories (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/russian-collusion-devotees-hell-yeah-we-still-believe), or from his general foaming-at-the-mouth hawkishness toward Russia. Swalwell has openly admitted (https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/russiagate-isnt-about-trump-and-it-isn-t-even-ultimately-about-russia-3d9021ba3d8c) that he supports an agenda to “isolate Russia from the rest of the world” using economic warfare, and that he sees the alleged 2016 Russian election interference as “an act of war”.
Swalwell joins another recent addition to the presidential race, Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, as a generic white guy with no redeeming features and nothing distinctive about himself as a politician besides virulent hatred of Russians. Ryan’s official campaign launch speech (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ohio-rep-tim-ryans-2020-bid-set-begin/story?id=62209454) included a completely gratuitous Red Scare diatribe in which he blamed Russians for the divisiveness which has overtaken political discourse in America.
“Our enemies come into our social media, and they intentionally try to divide us”: Rep. Tim Ryan warns about Russian interference in national news coverage while launching his 2020 campaign https://t.co/DVSQKyrxfZ pic.twitter.com/PEBfWjKZJq (https://t.co/PEBfWjKZJq)
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 6, 2019 (https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1114598720958550017?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
“We have broken systems in our country that we’ve failed to fix because we’re divided,” Ryan said during his campaign announcement (https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1114598720958550017). “And I want you to know that our enemies come into our social media, and they intentionally try to divide us. If there is an incident in America that’s controversial — about kneeling for the National Anthem or there’s a school shooting or there’s an incident between a cop and a kid — you know who comes on to our social media? The Russians. OK? I want you to hear this. The Russians. They come into our social media and they spin things to get us into these divided camps so that we’re fighting with each other. That’s what they want. And meanwhile, we can’t get our economy going. Meanwhile, we can’t get a healthcare system that works.”
Nobody anywhere actually wants either of these people to run for president. From the hemp-wearingest, Phish-listeningest lefty to the pussyhat-wearingest, Maddow-worshippingest centrist in America, nobody wants to see that shit. But it’s happening anyway. For some reason, we’re seeing candidates continually piling onto the Democratic primary race, and piling and piling and piling, even if nobody wants them to.
Why is this? In the last primary there was Hillary, Bernie, and three whatever guys who were only there to make Clinton’s coronation look less like a coronation. Now it’s likely that there will be more than twenty candidates when all the hats are thrown in. What’s going on here?
Well, a big part of it is surely because there are a lot of politicians eager to score political points by taking swings at a despised US president on the national stage. But there is also another factor at play here, and I’d like to lend my voice to the task of drawing more attention to it.
US progressives should be acutely aware of this, FYI. The new restrictions placed on superdelegates only excludes them from the first ballot; if there are too many candidates to establish a clear winner, superdelegates get to come in and pick Biden or Kamala. https://t.co/4Lk87vKhSd
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 9, 2019 (https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1115473627296571392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Superdelegates are an elite group of insiders within the Democratic Party whose votes during the primary count way more than those of rank-and-file primary voters, comprising a fifth of total delegates won during the election despite there only being 764 of them. Until the rules were changed last year, candidates have had to vie for both the pledged delegates awarded to them when they win contests in each state, and the unpledged superdelegates who are free to go to whomever they please at the time of the Democratic National Convention. This system was put in place to ensure that Democratic Party insiders would have the ability to keep the riff raff from nominating an unauthorized candidate. As Debbie Wasserman Schultz explained to Jake Tapper (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/12/we-need-more-questions-like-this-one-from-jake-tapper-to-debbie-wasserman-schultz-video/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7c3a121eb298) back in 2016, “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.”
Progressives were elated last August when they were able to push the DNC to make changes to its rules for superdelegates (http://web.archive.org/web/20190405042916/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/democrats-rules-superdelegates-sanders), barring them from voting in the first ballot and only allowing them to come into the process if a candidate fails to secure a clear majority of delegates (meaning more than half of all delegates, not just having more than any other candidate). This was seen as a major victory, because in the last primary superdelegates were used to dishonestly sell the narrative to Democratic voters that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate who could win in the generals by creating the illusion that Clinton had a far greater lead than she actually did, from the very beginning of the primary. Despite being admonished not to (https://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/king-clinton-media-counting-superdelegates-dnc-pleas-article-1.2655752) by the DNC itself, Clinton-friendly media outlets infuriated progressives by counting in the total delegate count the votes of superdelegates who’d said they planned to vote for Clinton in at the Democratic National Convention, despite their not yet having voted, thus creating the illusion that Clinton was winning the primary by a very wide margin and making Sanders look unelectable.
But it turns out that superdelegates may end up being far more influential during this primary than ever before, because of the large number of primary candidates. A packed primary will make it very difficult for any candidate to secure a clear majority, thus enabling party insiders to come in after the first ballot and crown a candidate whose platform reflects the interests of the Democratic establishment, like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke.
More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-11/bernie-beware-packed-primary-may-let-superdelegates-screw-progressives-again
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/1_EfehDn79PQK0_xx0kjv3ig.png
It also brings the total number of candidates officially running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination to a whopping 18.
If you don’t remember Swalwell from his controversial tweet (https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1063527635114852352) last year claiming that the US government could use nuclear weapons on Americans who revolted if their guns were outlawed, you may remember him from his relentless promotion of demented Russiagate conspiracy theories (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/russian-collusion-devotees-hell-yeah-we-still-believe), or from his general foaming-at-the-mouth hawkishness toward Russia. Swalwell has openly admitted (https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/russiagate-isnt-about-trump-and-it-isn-t-even-ultimately-about-russia-3d9021ba3d8c) that he supports an agenda to “isolate Russia from the rest of the world” using economic warfare, and that he sees the alleged 2016 Russian election interference as “an act of war”.
Swalwell joins another recent addition to the presidential race, Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, as a generic white guy with no redeeming features and nothing distinctive about himself as a politician besides virulent hatred of Russians. Ryan’s official campaign launch speech (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ohio-rep-tim-ryans-2020-bid-set-begin/story?id=62209454) included a completely gratuitous Red Scare diatribe in which he blamed Russians for the divisiveness which has overtaken political discourse in America.
“Our enemies come into our social media, and they intentionally try to divide us”: Rep. Tim Ryan warns about Russian interference in national news coverage while launching his 2020 campaign https://t.co/DVSQKyrxfZ pic.twitter.com/PEBfWjKZJq (https://t.co/PEBfWjKZJq)
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 6, 2019 (https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1114598720958550017?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
“We have broken systems in our country that we’ve failed to fix because we’re divided,” Ryan said during his campaign announcement (https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1114598720958550017). “And I want you to know that our enemies come into our social media, and they intentionally try to divide us. If there is an incident in America that’s controversial — about kneeling for the National Anthem or there’s a school shooting or there’s an incident between a cop and a kid — you know who comes on to our social media? The Russians. OK? I want you to hear this. The Russians. They come into our social media and they spin things to get us into these divided camps so that we’re fighting with each other. That’s what they want. And meanwhile, we can’t get our economy going. Meanwhile, we can’t get a healthcare system that works.”
Nobody anywhere actually wants either of these people to run for president. From the hemp-wearingest, Phish-listeningest lefty to the pussyhat-wearingest, Maddow-worshippingest centrist in America, nobody wants to see that shit. But it’s happening anyway. For some reason, we’re seeing candidates continually piling onto the Democratic primary race, and piling and piling and piling, even if nobody wants them to.
Why is this? In the last primary there was Hillary, Bernie, and three whatever guys who were only there to make Clinton’s coronation look less like a coronation. Now it’s likely that there will be more than twenty candidates when all the hats are thrown in. What’s going on here?
Well, a big part of it is surely because there are a lot of politicians eager to score political points by taking swings at a despised US president on the national stage. But there is also another factor at play here, and I’d like to lend my voice to the task of drawing more attention to it.
US progressives should be acutely aware of this, FYI. The new restrictions placed on superdelegates only excludes them from the first ballot; if there are too many candidates to establish a clear winner, superdelegates get to come in and pick Biden or Kamala. https://t.co/4Lk87vKhSd
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 9, 2019 (https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1115473627296571392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Superdelegates are an elite group of insiders within the Democratic Party whose votes during the primary count way more than those of rank-and-file primary voters, comprising a fifth of total delegates won during the election despite there only being 764 of them. Until the rules were changed last year, candidates have had to vie for both the pledged delegates awarded to them when they win contests in each state, and the unpledged superdelegates who are free to go to whomever they please at the time of the Democratic National Convention. This system was put in place to ensure that Democratic Party insiders would have the ability to keep the riff raff from nominating an unauthorized candidate. As Debbie Wasserman Schultz explained to Jake Tapper (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/12/we-need-more-questions-like-this-one-from-jake-tapper-to-debbie-wasserman-schultz-video/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7c3a121eb298) back in 2016, “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.”
Progressives were elated last August when they were able to push the DNC to make changes to its rules for superdelegates (http://web.archive.org/web/20190405042916/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/democrats-rules-superdelegates-sanders), barring them from voting in the first ballot and only allowing them to come into the process if a candidate fails to secure a clear majority of delegates (meaning more than half of all delegates, not just having more than any other candidate). This was seen as a major victory, because in the last primary superdelegates were used to dishonestly sell the narrative to Democratic voters that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate who could win in the generals by creating the illusion that Clinton had a far greater lead than she actually did, from the very beginning of the primary. Despite being admonished not to (https://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/king-clinton-media-counting-superdelegates-dnc-pleas-article-1.2655752) by the DNC itself, Clinton-friendly media outlets infuriated progressives by counting in the total delegate count the votes of superdelegates who’d said they planned to vote for Clinton in at the Democratic National Convention, despite their not yet having voted, thus creating the illusion that Clinton was winning the primary by a very wide margin and making Sanders look unelectable.
But it turns out that superdelegates may end up being far more influential during this primary than ever before, because of the large number of primary candidates. A packed primary will make it very difficult for any candidate to secure a clear majority, thus enabling party insiders to come in after the first ballot and crown a candidate whose platform reflects the interests of the Democratic establishment, like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke.
More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-11/bernie-beware-packed-primary-may-let-superdelegates-screw-progressives-again