Welp, Democratic former Senator Jim Webb, who is unapologetically misogynistic and racist, and was most recently heard from defending the Confederate flag, has announced that he is running for president. Presumably as a Democrat, although as CNN [CN: video autoplays at link] notes, "he did not say specifically that he was seeking the Democratic nomination" in his announcement statement.
Which, by the way, is super terrific and you should definitely read it.
It's pretty cool how he's advising bipartisan solutions, just as President Obama's approval rating is rising with his progressive successes. You've really got your finger on the pulse, Webb!
I really dislike this guy and hope he fails miserably!
In other news, Senator Bernie Sanders is making news for raising $15 million in donations and also for [CN: video autoplays at link] drawing a huge crowd in Madison, Wisconsin. Yay for enthusiasm about progressive ideas! But also? As my friend Mary observed on Twitter, he's drawing huge crowds in very white areas. As far as I have been able to discern, with Aphra_Behn's assistance, his campaign staff is very white and male, and he still isn't including a lot of meaningful intersectional analysis in his class-centered rhetoric.
Apart from the fact that it increasingly looks like Sanders' position is essentially a trickle-down social justice narrative—give poor white men what they need and everyone will follow, or be simultaneously helped by coincidence—which is a decency problem, it's also an electability problem. Sanders won't always be running for a Democratic primary. At some point, he needs to show us what his general election campaign would look like. Then again, maybe he already is. Which is why we need to interrogate these issues now.
In other other news, Politico did a profile of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's longtime key aide Huma Abedin, and it is predictably terrible! Here is something that would simply never be written about two male colleagues: "Just a few feet away from Clinton dressed in a classic tweed navy shift, Huma Abedin, 39, moved through the crowd tracking her boss. Abedin, Clinton's longest-serving aide, chatted breezily with acquaintances. But like a mother monitoring her child on the playground, she never let Clinton drift out of her line of sight, ever vigilant and poised to act."
It's simply terrific how "like a mother monitoring her child on the playground" manages to demean both women at once.
On the other side of the aisle, Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker will reportedly announce his entry into the clown car on July 13. Can't wait!
Basically, this means Jeb Bush now has some real competition. Maybe Walker and Bush ("Walker and Bush" sounds like an off-brand whiskey) will split the white racist conservative vote (redundant) and Senator Marco Rubio will sneak through with the win. That'd be fun!
Anyway. I'm sure all the other eleventy-seven candidates are up to all kinds of good things today, too. Congratulations to all of them for continuing to be unmitigatingly horrendo.
Talk about these things! Or don't. Whatever makes you happy. Life is short.
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