Friday, February 12, 2016

Henry Kissinger is nobody's friend

-- Socratic Gadfly scores last night's debate.  He speaks for me (and saves me a lot of time and effort), but I'll go ahead and post what I saw anyway.



-- You'll never guess where Hillary last wore that yellow cape.

She just doesn't get it.  Since you can't really believe what she says, you have to rely solely on her actions.  And those betray her words over and over and over.

Let's be clear: all those Tweets about Big Bird and bananas and Colonel Mustard's wife and Kim Jong Ill (as in vomit) are, in fact, sexist.  Pointing out that she wore the same thing twice in two public appearances might even be sexist.  Bernie Sanders looks like he slept in his car last night.  Is that sexist?  What is it called if women Tweet that his finger-wagging is "old man" behavior?

Meh.  Juvenile is what I'll call it.  Let's move on.

-- Here's the exchange on money in politics.  It's worth reading entirely.  And the back-and-forth on foreign policy likewise.  Your takeaway:

"I don’t know who you get your foreign policy advice from,” Clinton quipped. 
“Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger,” Sanders replied.

-- Any additional questions about American foreign policy past, present, and future should be answered here, but Juan Cole is there for you with something more even-handed.

-- While Sanders and Clinton seemed to battle to a draw on interventionism and hegemony, Bernie really got the best of the debate on immigration.  Long excerpt:

In the final debate before Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders face off in states that feature the most diverse voting electorates yet seen on the campaign trail, the candidates went on the attack to cast doubt on their opponent’s dedication to the pro-immigrant cause. 
Clinton was cornered Thursday night into defending past calls to deport waves of Central American children, an issue that was hotly contested at the time but is now deeply unsettling for immigrant communities as fresh rounds of deportation raids sweep the country. 
The former secretary of state had taken a hard line against the thousands of unaccompanied minors that flooded the southwest border in 2014. And though Clinton has since dramatically softened her tone on how the U.S. should address the aftermath of the humanitarian crisis at the border, she was put on the defensive to explain why she supported deportation then, but opposes the raids now. 
[...] 
But the Obama administration shocked pro-immigrant organizations last month when it began carrying out deportation raids to sweep up families and deport them back to Central America. The raids have stoked fears from the immigrant community and resentment from congressional Democrats who vocally opposed the administration’s position. 
“I am against the raids. I’m against the kind of inhumane treatment that is now being visited upon families, waking them up in the middle of the night, rounding them up,” Clinton said. 
Sanders was forced to face his own vulnerabilities on immigration, namely his opposition to a 2007 bill to pass comprehensive immigration reform, a lingering problem that most Latinos agree needs to be solved. 
“I voted against it because the Southern Poverty Law Center among other groups said that the guest worker programs that were embedded in this agreement were akin to slavery,” Sanders said. “Akin to slavery. Where people came into this country to do guest work, were abused, were exploited. And if they stood up for their rights, they would be thrown out of this country.”

More from Politico, here (the conservative POV reflected here is: "horrified") and here (more blow-by-blow, underscoring the differences).  Sanders is moving farther and faster than just debating the issue.

-- Vox has five key moments, Think Progress laments there were no climate change questions, and Fusion slammed both Sanders and Clinton for not saying the word 'abortion'.  If you want to read the full transcript, here you go.

No comments: