Thanks, Bernie.

Brava Hortensis.

Truth.

It can never be assumed that "the big lie" is too outrageous to ever be believed. When it is not strongly countered is when some people start to think "there must be some truth in it" if they can keep repeating it without being totally refuted. What Sanders is doing here is both effective and essential .

for that reason. This is a national emergency.

... are talking about this and other important issues, TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, every chance they get.

We are all a part of a joint effort to do so, and Bernie Sanders is an (not the only) important part of that "we". I applaud all who forcefully counter the lies of this administration. More attention should be paid to the content of this video (in terms of issue framing effectiveness) than on whether the OP was overly enthusiastic about the role Sanders plays in this combined effort. Likewise for the efforts of other members of Congress who confront Trump.

..and are always speaking out against him.

They'll go after the disabled first. Easy target Seniors next, could be a challenge, but many seniors are brain dead trumpers. I'm not sure what will be done with people who lose their only source of income, but I'm sure it won't be pretty.

maga

of retirement benefits. Cuts will take effect in the future, only affecting young people. This is how they'll retain the loyalty of the brain-dead Trumpers you mention. Most of them won't be bothered a bit if their children and grandchildren are harmed, as long as they get theirs.

But I think all bets are off as the deficit and debt spiral out of control. One thing for sure, the rich won't pay.

But cutting benefits of boomers is where the money is. They’ll cut boomers. The recent tax cut to the very rich is proof. They can’t reduce tax receipts by so much and continue current funding.

The Republicans know perfectly well that most of their votes come from older people. They'd like to keep it that way.

Keep fighting him at every turn.

Pisses me off when asses like Rick Scott put out commercials saying Democrats will reduce your Medicare but I will protect it.

LIAR

I scream at my tv that his company got fined hundreds of millions of dollars for cheating Medicare patients while he was still president! Also Paul Ryan's budgets have contained cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and SS every single year and were only not passed because of unified Democratic opposition. Dems need to run on healthcare and Social Security - it's critical!!

edited to remove bolding that went awry

he said he had no knowledge of this, that he was CEO and didn't set billing policies/practices. He had also sold the company before the trial and the rich judge let the rich person who ripped off Medicare & Medicare patients to the tune of $700,000,000. He absolutely should still be in jail, but this is not a fair world.

At his rallies that believe him saying it's the Democrats wanting to kill Social Security???

The stupid, it burns....

Thank you Senator Sanders. Unfortunately, you'll never see that video on the Repuke Propaganda Network.

…for Bernie.

Here are some just-for-examples since there are far too many to post:

Oh wait -- maybe no other Independent is saying this!

Jesus Christ in a Trailer Hitch, people. I know you love the old curmudgeon, but he did not invent the legislation in the Democratic Party playbook, and he is not the only person calling out Trump on his lies.

Every Democratic Party member has called out the Trumpster for his lies on SS, Medicare/Medicaid, Healthcare, you name it.

Certainly glad Senator Sanders is singing from the same songbook. But the lyrics are certainly not new.

He is not an old curmudgeon nor is he claiming to be the only one calling out Trump. We don't need your negativity smothering a positive message.

Hell, it’s simply fantastic to live in a state where one’s senator will speak up. This was about someone’s senator, right? Not about “every other democrat”.

....(NY) have spoken up, many times. Both MA Senators have spoken up, many times.

If I were to do a search, I'd probably find that all 47 Democratic Senators and the other Independent Senator have spoken up, AND even several republican Senators.

It's fantastic to live in a state where both Senators will speak up.

PS - how it that a "gaslight"?

For a certain element on DU, it's basically an ironclad rule: Anything remotely favorable about Bernie Sanders must immediately be pissed on.

Say, did you know that Bernie isn't a Democrat?

he won't endorse his son? WTF kind of a father is he?

Saw Levi Sanders on CNN the other day.

Bernie refuses to endorse him. What I heard is Levi supports all that dad does. Why won't BS endorse his own son? Weird.

why anyone cares? I am sure they have talked about it and decided for one reason or the other that this was the best way to go. I was rolling my eyes and adding in jest to the "Bernie is not a Democrat" and all those constant and idiotic disruptions not actually questioning why he did not endorse. I figure that does not matter one tiny bit, just as much as the rest of the constant cries matter, not one tiny bit.

Levi Sanders chose to run in the primary in a district where he doesn't live.

So if Bernie endorses him, it proves Bernie is evil, because his nepotism is leading him to support a carpetbagger. But if Bernie doesn't endorse him, it proves Bernie is evil, because he's a bad father.

Hulk no like Bernie! HULK SMASH!!!!

All these carefully written and worded, often times almost tomes with links to all sorts of horrors, are like waving your arm around to remove a bothering fly. Bernie is going to Bernie and thank god for Bernie being Bernie. There are too many people who appreciate him and/or support him for all the waving arms on DU to matter. He is part of the whole and trying to keep it from tipping all the way over into RW territory. He is not alone he is just willing to go out there and talk about it and it sure annoys a lot of people on DU. Not so much elsewhere and that makes it easy to just let these people go. Does not matter. Their opinions certainly do matter, they are not to be dismissed as they are as much a part of the Democrats as any of us but the angry and petulant cries when Bernie eats a hot dog or ties his shoe are pretty funny to read.

I try really hard not to engage anymore but when someone thinks I made a comment like one of the "Bernie Sanders is a horror and NOT a Democrat" group I have to correct that.

have been speaking out about Trump's plans to destroy SS and MC -- for as long as Trump himself has been a threat.

Also that the MSM have been on this all along.

What Bernie says is good and it matters. And hopefully he'll reach some who unaccountably don't know what's happening.

But you really need to understand that he's hardly the only one trying to wake America to this grave danger. Let's wish him even more success "out there," along with all the others.

You write, "But you really need to understand that [Bernie]'s hardly the only one trying to wake America to this grave danger."

OK, thanks for explaining that. (Truth be told, I already understood it, but A for effort.)

I don't know if you're right that all the Democrats in Congress have been speaking out about this, but certainly many of them have. They haven't all been true-blue; IIRC, some of them expressed willingness to consider chained CPI, a covert way to cut Social Security benefits. I don't know how many of them have supported raising or eliminating the earnings cap, an important subject that Bernie mentions in the video. Overall, though, enough of them have been vocal enough that stuff like chained CPI is probably political poison, although Trump may well get away with weakening Social Security indirectly by closing many local offices.

Now here's what you really need to understand: No one has said that Bernie is the only one. He took the trouble to prepare an effective video, so garybeck posted it. Where Bernie's "only one" status comes into play is that, among all the Democrats and all the Independents who align themselves with Democrats, there's only one who gets such incessant bashing on DU. Someone could do a laudatory OP like this about any of the others, and it wouldn't draw this (predictable) barrage of negativity.

I just accidentally erased a wonderful reply to you......sigh.

I am sure someone, sometime, somewhere said that Bernie was the only one and was incorrect. Sometimes he is the only one. Mostly I do not recall much of that except from those with the smilies who think they are actually doing something productive with their nastiness and smilies. THEY are the people who mostly say that or ask why you think he is the only one when nobody actually said that, unless he was.

Someone makes a Bernie post then gets accused of saying he is the only one with this added so we know exactly how ridiculous we really are, absolutely beyond taking seriously and the gang comes by for a look and the history is made. These people who do this are really beneath all the rest of the posters here who have the intelligence and courtesy to formulate a real reply and discuss. Usually I just ignore them and think how small they really look and move on.

Its always the same few loud Bernie bashers too. You'd think the admins could deal with these usurpers by now. Its so tiring having to wade through these dividers posts in every Sanders OP.

And even if they can't argue with anything Sanders has said or done, as this example, they insist its Sanders supporters that are.....loving him a little too much?

I swear this place is like a daycare center sometimes. Us adults have to come in and rebuke these children that insist on picking on the 'outsider' kid whenever he tries to do something good or say something good.....because....he's just trying to get attention, to be popular. Is it envy? Is it holding old grudges? Or some other childish reason? But they have to make cruel comments about him whenever they can. And then use ROTFL emoticons to dig in their attempted ridicule. And lord help you if you are one of the kids that actually LIKES him and wants to be his friend. Because if you are HIS friend, they you can't be theirs!

a liar, and said all of the things Sanders has concerning that tax bill.

The OP's intentions are very clear to anyone who has been on DU for a while.

and rejection. There are plenty of decent Sanders supporters, but strife just comes with some of the subgroups who've gravitated to him. I do try to be understanding and try to empathize as much as I can with the difficulties of any who may come here.

You can't expect his social conservative faction, for instance, to just support the economic programs they want without taking a swipe at liberals and liberal Democrats (that's me! ).

Then there are his other populists whose reason for existence is hostility against "the Democratic establishment" (by definition everyone who thinks we're rather wonderful even if we have been around for over 225 years and fully intend to keep on doing our thing, so that's me too).

The misogynistic white males among the former probably should be mentioned on their own because I'm female (those shouldn't still resent me now that I no longer take a job they'd want, but I'm still female, so here I be also). And of course his righteous zealots will always be with us under whatever label they're trying out (yeah, I'm a nonbeliever, burn me, babies, burn me!).

I often think it must be hard to be them. And I am totally serious about that.

To some it seems more important than pissing on repukes. I find it very odd, myself.

Bernie:

"And I think what Trump was able to do was pick up on the failures of the Democratic Party that did not talk about the fact that hard working decent people saw their jobs going to Mexico or China, or people cannot afford to send their kids to college or afford health care or afford housing that they desperately need."

"It wasn't that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost."

"It's not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I come from."

"The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last fifteen years or so has been a failure."

"Over the last 30 or 40 years the Democratic Party has transformed itself from the party of the working class ... to a party of significantly controlled by a liberal elite which has moved very far away from the needs of ... working families in this country."

"The Democratic Party has been dominated by wealthy campaign contributors. They gotta open the doors to people who work with their hands, people who take showers at the end of the day, not the beginning."

What is the purpose of saying these things before the primaries when Democrats might have a chance to gain back at least a little power? I find it very odd, myself.

If it is ignored. We didn't lose 1000 state legislators, 2/3 of the governorships, the House, the Senate and the WH since 2008 for no reason.

While we were losing all those other elections. Clearly.

Vermont has a REpublican Governor . Sanders hasn't done much to change that in his own state.

from someone with a lack of accomplishments of their own.

For speaking the truth.

For more than four decades they've built a network of grassroots organizations and think tanks that formulate and promote conservative ideas, a long term investment that's paying off. Built their own media of talk radio and Fox News and have promoted the careers of conservatives within the mainstream media. Built ideological alliances between industry, government and regulatory agencies. They've suppressed voter turnout in minority communities and with gerrymandering. From 1991 tp 1994, Republicans received 62 percent of the tobacco industry's political contributions, from 1995 to 2000, they received 82 percent. Agribusiness gave 56 percent to Republicans and by 2002 it was 72 percent. Other industries follow this trend. The idea that Democrats are ones in corporate pockets is silly.

Grover Norquist in 2003: "We are trying to change the tones in state capitals and turn them toward nastiness and partisanship."

It has nothing to do with Democrats. Trying to make it about "Heh, the Democrats have no message and stand for nothing" and "Heh, the Democrats have abandoned FDR policies and are liberal elites who have ignored the working and middle classes" is absurd.

Meantime Democrats have been doing what, exactly, about all that?

Those horrible meanie liberal elites!!1111 Why didn't they stop (fill in the blank). THANKS, OBAMA.

So you deflect. Buh-bye

free college?

and then discovered that they couldn't afford it because of too low a population?

Several years ago California had single-payer on the ballot. My American cousin, whose winter home was in Calif., contacted all his Canadian relatives for information on our healthcare system, and worked very hard to try to get the proposition passed (can't remember the number).

I think California should try it again. All it takes is for one very large state to show that it works, for the rest to (eventually) fall in line. I doubt anyone thinks of California as a "dreaded socialist state" the way many think of Canada, UK, Australia etc.

of explaining what happened in his state instead of blaming Democrats.

The Florida governor candidate, Gillum, was asked about this on Cuomo’s CNN show last week or so, and even he was able to answer that it was impossible financially unless there was a consortium of states pooled together. There is no reason why Bernie can’t be more honest about the failure in his state because others face the same problems. It’s a shame a new candidate like Gillum gets stuck with the hard part of answering hard questions about it while others get a pass.

He will find it is actually diverse in more ways than one. We send Dana Rohrabacher, Darrell Issa, and Duncan Hunter to Congress, for gods' sake, not just Ted Lieu, Eric Swallwell, and the quieter Salud Carbajal and Julia Brownley.

The population of California surpasses that of Canada, and it is a very complicated place.

I have not seen threads thanking so eagerly "corporatist" "establishment" Democrat for doing the same damn thing.

We've been DUers long enough to know the intent of the OP.

"For a certain element on DU, it's basically an ironclad rule: Anything remotely critical of a sacred cow must immediately be questioned as anti-progressive."

Say, did you know that six of one equals half a dozen of the other?

Bernie:

"The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last fifteen years or so has been a failure."

"It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from."

"Over the last thirty or forty years the Democratic Party has transformed itself from the party of the working class ... to a party significantly controlled by a liberal elite which has moved very far away from the needs of ... working families in this country."

"The Democratic Party has been dominated by wealthy campaign contributors. They gotta open the door to people who work with their hands, people who take showers at the end of the day, not the beginning of the day."

"And I think what Trump was able to do was pick up on the failures of the Democratic Party that did not talk about the fact that hard working decent people saw their jobs going to Mexico or China, or people cannot afford to send their kids to college or afford child care or afford housing that they desperately need."

"And what we're trying to do is reform the Democratic Party, make it a party of working people, make it a party of young people."

"It wasn't that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election. We need a Democratic Party that is not a liberal elite but of the working class of this country, we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people, not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and powerful."

One prescription for success is to think especially hard about past failures. This would entail an open and honest discussion about what went wrong, with different points of view being welcomed. The goal is to arrive at a good understanding about what the problems were, as the first step toward fixing them.

Apparently the other prescription for success is to say that any criticism constitutes disloyalty. That dismissal is augmented by focusing on the minor point of party identification among the different members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate.

I'm on board with the first approach.

First thing I did after opening this thread was look at the responses to see if they showed up. They did, of course. They're in every discussion having anything at all to do with Bernie Sanders. Same people all the time, every time. As certain as death and taxes, just not as pleasant or welcome.

Some people love it, you know they do. My husband does -- Bernie reminds him of the alta cacas of his boyhood in New York City. (Loosely translated, "old farts." Loosely translated, but exactly quoted.)

So it's Bernie's well-practised schtick -- embrace it; Bernie has.

I shall instead embrace the ignore function.

To do that lets you hear only half of the discussion on a Democratic board.

Ignore works wonders and does away with the negativity thus improving ones experience here on this Democratic message board.
If we wanted to hear "Bernie is the debil!!!!111" we'd look at at conservative websites. Hard pass.

If anything, Bernie should be educating people on Democrat’s history with Social Security. To say or imply he is the only one speaking out on Trump’s lies is just wrong and that’s why the pushback.

The conservatives like Bernie — watch the current news about how Russia helped Trump, Bernie and Stein attack our Democratic nominee.

So they haven't heard it from anyone else.

campaign 20 years ago. And he’s just one Democrat who has been saying this for decades. Actually, Bernie shouldn’t have waited so long.

not only calling trump out on his lies, but warning people what would happen

She did this out loud and in plain English (albeit with intelligent syntax and grammar) as well as in writing. Hard to see how anybody missed that.

I can Kick and Recommend posts about Clinton and Sanders. And other progressives, too!

HERE!

There were too many to dig up now two years after the fact. Anyone who followed the campaign saw them.

But I was assured many many many times here on DU that the only message of her campaign was "I'm not Trump" because Trump was so terrible (NEVER mentioning the economy and jobs or health care or inequality or the environment or education or foreign policy) and all her ads were negative ads about Trump.

I'll K&R them, too. The more the better.

But you knew that

I'll K&R them, especially if they tear Trump a new one. There is more than enough real estate on his posterior for everyone to get their kicks in.

have a progressive viewpoint and call out Trump?

Clinton (or any other progressive politician) could even make some if she chooses. that would be great. No need to throw shade on Sanders for doing it.

How is this new?