Rachel Maddow called out the mainstream political
media for trying to turn liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi
into teabaggers.
Maddow said,
One of the main most basic reforms. One of the
most necessary things that we did to protect ourselves from another
total collapse of the financial system to insulate taxpayers so that we
didn’t have to pay for what the banks did wrong, finally. That is what
they just undid. That is why Democrats got so mad. It’s a really simple
idea. It’s called Section 716 of The Dodd-Frank Act, and the banks hate
it. Of course they do. Who wouldn’t want the United States taxpayers to
promise to come and rescue you if you lost money? You can keep all the
upside, but if it goes south, the taxpayers will pay. Who wouldn’t want
that?
But that simple thing. That’s the basis of the giant
fight in Washington that took the whole Beltway by surprise. And
because that’s what the fight was about, that’s why the headliner in the
Democratic Party leading the fight was seen to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
It’s not just that she is a liberal, and Democrats like her, and
everybody knows her name. It’s subject specific. This is her wheelhouse.
This is how she came to Washington in the first place, right? Elizabeth
Warren first became known as a public figure because she was tapped by
President Obama to oversee the bailout. I mean, her outrage over the
banks screwing the taxpayers is the whole reason why she got into
politics.
….
This is a substantive fight about a specific thing. This is not just liberals blowing off steam.
The Beltway has been saying oh, look liberals
blowing off steam. That’s not what this is. The Beltway wants the left
and right to be mirror images of each other. What’s the lefty version of
the tea party? They want the center to always be correct, and they want
the ideological edges to always be equally crazy and impractical in
just the same way. But it’s almost never what’s going on, and it’s not
what’s going on here.
….
The people who revolted inside the Beltway
were not, HEY BELTWAY, were not the Democratic equivalent of Michele
Bachmann, and Steve King, and Louie Gohmert. The people who revolted
inside the Democratic Party. It’s not a mirror image. They weren’t the
fringe of the party like the revolters on the right….This wasn’t the
Louie Gohmert fringe of the Democratic Party. This was the leadership
and most of the Democratic Party, who all said no against the wishes of
their own White House.
Maddow made two points. The liberal Democratic
pushback is based on policy, not ideology. The Democrats who revolted
aren’t a fringe movement. Beyond what Maddow said, I would add that what
is going on with the government funding bill is the physical movement
of the Democratic Party to the left.
The people who are standing up against the policy
riders in this bill are going to agree with their party probably ninety
percent or more of the time. The Democratic Party is not divided like
the Republicans, but Democrats are signaling that the party is moving to
the left. The same behavior occurred when President Obama teamed up
with congressional liberals to kill a bill that would have given
hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent tax cuts to corporations.
The mainstream press is now saying that Elizabeth
Warren is the new Ted Cruz, but this comparison is completely wrong.
Cruz is a self-serving grandstander, who is trying get elected president
by opposing everything and causing chaos. Warren and the Democrats are
fighting because they disagree with something in the government funding
bill.
Mainstream media laziness is one of the main reasons
why the public is poorly informed. When journalists who are supposed to
be political reporters insist on painting by the numbers instead of
thinking, the result is poor coverage that misses the point of the
issues of our day.
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