Liberal culture watch: Sanders drops R-bomb on rival's head!

FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2016

Regas lectures the world: In last night's debate, it finally happened.

One of our tribe's most treasured bombs was dropped within our own tents.

We've always loved to drop our bombs on The Others. Inevitably, we're now dropping our bombs on ourselves. This is the official transcript, including audience reaction:

LOUIS (4/14/16): Senator Sanders, earlier this week at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, you called out President Clinton for defending Secretary Clinton's use of the term "super-predator" back in the '90s when she supported the crime bill. Why did you call him out?

SANDERS: Because it was a racist term, and everybody knew it was a racist term.

(APPLAUSE)

For the record, Hillary Clinton used the term in question exactly once, back in 1996.

Twenty years later, it finally happened. Candidate Sanders dropped a bomb in response to that troubling act. "Everybody knew it was a racist term," the all-knowing bomb-dropper said.

Did everyone know, or even think, that it was "a racist term?" Not to judge by the evidence!

As we noted yesterday, the term was in fairly widespread use in the mid-1990s. It was used by an array of players arguing an array of viewpoints. There was no sign that these various players thought or knew that they were using a racist term.

Luckily, we now have Sanders to let us know that they did!

How should we evaluate this first dropping of an internal bomb? Let's start with our tribe's sheer stupidity. It's really hard to get dumber than this—to be trashing people over a single use of a widely-used term twenty years in the past.

That said, it's what we've been telling you for the past several years. Increasingly, this seems to be the only play our pitiful tribe seems to know.

We know how to drop our bombs. We seem to know nothing else.

Last night, the all-knowing Sanders decided to drop that first bomb within our own tents. And just like that, Paul Krugman's new column almost comes close to dropping a bomb on him!

Krugman doesn't drop an actual bomb on Candidate Sanders today. He does note a bit of oddness in some of the Sanders campaign's recent statements, including statements by Sanders himself, in which the importance of Southern Democrats' votes has seemed to be denigrated.

What Krugman said, we've often thought—obviously, those denigrations are being aimed at the votes of Southern black Democrats. Krugman made that point explicit today, provoking outraged squeals.

Inevitably, "first responder" Rima Regas was the first to respond. In her first post, she rejected the notion that Sanders' remarks about Southern voters carried a racial intent.

We have no problem with that.

Our first responder was indignant about that suggestion by Krugman. But in her rapid response to her own first response, she quickly played these cards:

REGAS (4/15/16): It is rather cynical of Professor Krugman to play the race card right on the heels of more than a dozen racial faux-pas between both Clintons over the past two years leading up to the Democratic primary. After their 2008 3:00 am phone call fiasco, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson and quit using racial dog-whistling as a campaign strategy... Oh, and Clinton threw her friend Mayor de Blasio under the bus when she blamed the skit idea she fully participated in, on him.

But that is only one instance of bad judgment and bad behavior. Senator Sanders is right about "superpredator" and its meaning: everyone involved indeed knew it was racist then, as they do now. It is interesting to note that Clinton didn't try to defend herself and merely said Bill Clinton apologized to Black Lives Matter. He didn't. He used the words "I almost have to apologize." As the old saying goes, almost doesn't count.

It's been proven. People like Regas always know what everyone else "knew" at various times in the past. They also know what everyone else "knows" today!

It doesn't seem to enter their heads that their stiff-necked assumptions could in some way be limited, uncomprehending or wrong. They themselves are moral and pure. Everyone else is wrong and impure. Most amazingly, everyone else knows it about themselves!

Increasingly, our tribe seems to know only one play—we know how to drop our bombs. We know how to say and do nothing else. We seem to have nothing else on our extremely small minds.

That said, cultural movements of this type tend to go this way. These movements start by bombing The Others—the bigoted racist xenophobe nativists we can skillfully spot Over There.

Eventually, though, that isn't enough. Inevitably, these purists start dropping their fistfuls of bombs upon their own tribe's heads.

Last night, the first such bomb was dropped. This morning, our tribe's first responder squealed.

In fairness, she knows what "everyone" knows and thinks. People like this always do!