The audience was stacked against Bernie at last night's debate in Charleston, South Carolina. There were full-throat cheers for billionaire Mike Bloomberg, as well as boos and hisses for deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his erstwhile acolyte, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
It was not a good night for Sanders. But, that being said, it wasn't a good night for anyone else. After the lively, incendiary debate last week in Las Vegas, the show in Charleston returned to "normalcy"; meaning, it returned to an exhausted, ritualistic, soulless display before a live audience of the well-heeled. I imagine many tuned out halfway through.
Bernie was repeatedly attacked by the other candidates, and he was cross-examined by the CBS moderators, but, with the exception for a brief moment when he beat a retreat from the crossfire bogeymanning of the Sandinistas and Fidelistas by Buttigieg and Biden, Sanders did well enough. This seems to be the assessment found in the pages of the mainstream media this morning.
Tom Steyer, after investing so much in South Carolina, was marginalized. Amy Klobuchar, fed question after question and allowed camera time far beyond the electoral heft of her presidential campaign, is truly horrible. I'm looking forward to the time when she drops out of the race.
Joe Biden is an abomination. There is no other way to say it. He shouts; he spouts gibberish; he claims credit for any and all good legislation written in the last 30 years. Who could vote for this reanimated corpse? No one in her or his or their right mind.
Pete Buttigieg is a vicious, amoral egomaniac; a completely typical personality, but one now more perverse since we're in the end times of peak neoliberalism. If Buttigieg is the best and the brightest our society can vomit up, we're truly in trouble.
Mike Bloomberg came off much better last night than last week. He spoke confidently, and I found it refreshing to hear an opinion on China that wasn't 1950s boilerplate red-baiting. But it is apparent that Bloomberg is not suited for the presidency. He is a billionaire executive best left to handing out instructions from a skyscraper in Manhattan.
Elizabeth Warren's high point was invoking Matthew 25. For a hyper-power careening toward a crackup, I thought it was a timely, down-home reminder.
It is still Bernie Sanders' race to lose. Max Blumenthal is right. The Sanders campaign is going to be in constant retreat until it finds its footing and goes on the attack. Rather than running away when the bots bogeyman Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, the Sanders campaign needs to ask, "Do you even know who Anastasio Somoza is? Fulgencio Batista? These U.S.-backed dictators killed far more of their own people than the leftists leader of Nicaragua and Cuba." I would also mention that at the time Fidel Castro was consolidating power in Cuba, establishing his populist programs of literacy and public health, the United States was backing a coup in Indonesia and had a key role in the slaughter of 1,000,000 Indonesians. So who loves a bloodthirsty dictator?
As one US State Department official said about the mass slaughter in Indonesia, "We just wrote the list."
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