Janis Kliphardt (Emery)
"Janis, dream on" ? ? ? What am I dreaming of? Only wondering "Why?" Stewart, "you’re giving up so easily?" You've been encouraging everyone to elect a woman president. Why are you ceding the Democratic nomination to Joe Biden more than 7 months before the first primary? before any of the debates?
Tonight a celebration of the summer solstice on the Village Green at Smugglers' Notch in Vermont - a bonfire & s'mores, Cirque de Fuego, and fireworks against the backdrop of the Green Mountains.
This is Joe Biden's third time running for president and (again) he's stumbling... (right, he'll be 77 before year's end, and 78 before inauguration day January 2021 -
Joe Biden was delivering remarks on the eve of Juneteenth (the day that marks the bitter end of slavery in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation) -- when he made clear his fondness for James Eastland, a Democratic Senator from Mississippi with a despicable legacy of racial hatred and incitement. Biden told assembled donors, "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland - he never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son'."
"Eastland was a giant in the Senate and an avatar of the darkest racism of the Civil Rights-era South. He was a plantation owner who championed white supremacy in language that shocks the conscience. During the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycotts of the mid-1950s, Eastland appeared at a rally of the White Citizens Council to deliver remarks that stopped just short of a call for racial genocide. As memorialized by the historian Robert Caro, Eastland said: 'In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking n*ggers ... African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots, and knives... All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead n*ggers'."
I agree with Cory Booker who said: "You don't joke about calling black men 'boys.' Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity."
I agree with Cory Booker saying that Joe Biden was "wrong" for pointing to his relationships with segregationists "as examples of how to bring our country together. I am disappointed he hasn't issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans."
Stewart, do you understand why Joe Biden finds it so difficult to reframe his remarks praising a segregationist?
Do you agree that Cory Booker has more credibility than Joe Biden to take the lead in a dialogue about race in America?
No one can be sure how the 2020 race will shake out and who will be on top in the nominating process.
The coming months will show whether Elizabeth Warren can continue to maintain her political momentum,
whether Cory Booker might get some traction, break through in the polls, and pull in new donors -
Who knows who might surge and turn the race upside down in the coming months?
As to your proposal for the 2020 Democratic presidential ticket, why settle now and foreclose the opportunity for a new candidate to emerge?
I'm not dreaming, Stewart.
I am ready for a new generation of leadership - prepared to pay attention, to listen to the presidential candidates -
the first debate is over two nights this coming week -
Wednesday, June 26th, and Thursday, June 27th
with attribution to Tim Dickinson June 19, 2019 RollingStone
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