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The B & B show - episode one

Narrator: Joe Biden had lied for years in Congress and in previous failed presidential bids. Now in 2020, he was about to find out how progressives haven’t forgotten all those lies, the credible sexual assault allegations against him (the latest one from Tara Reade) and his lies whilst ‘running’ (via the main stream media) for the Democratic Party nominee in 2020.

(Note: Bernie had to promise the DNC not to do anything that would hurt their interests in order to run as a Democratic Party candidate for the presidential nomination for 2016 and 2020. His hands were tied. This explains his endorsement of Biden despite the major disagreements with his policies which are satirized in what follows.)

Episode 1: The endorsement (summary)

Cue the Biden livestream, Monday April 13, 11.30 a.m.:

(Biden reads (badly) from a teleprompter.)

Biden: African-Americans are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. (Thinks: Because of wealth-inequality, which Bernie has been talking about for decades). Have to look to the future! Going back to how things were isn’t good enough.

Bernie: (Thinks: Thats not what you said during the primaries. You said to Wall Street that nothing would fundamentally change, just like when Hillary said she had a private stance and a public stance regarding Wall Street. Also generally, you said you just wanted to go back to pre-Trump. If we did that then everything would be ok despite the science on climate change. Obama was pro-fracking and pro the Dakota access pipeline which I protested along with Jill Stein of the Green Party.)

MSM My Corona - Virus Hypocrisy

Since 2016, all we have ever heard from the main stream media regarding progressive issues such as Medicare For All is - how are you going to pay for that? On Thursday March 12 2020, in response to stock market fears regarding the Corona Virus and its effect on the US economy, the Federal Reserve did a Jill Stein ‘magic trick’, bailing out the big banks (using quantitative easing) to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars, more than the amount needed to cancel all student debt in 2016 when Dr Stein advocated for such, and as Bernie Sanders advocates for 2020.

In the face of a global pandemic regarding the Corona Virus, the corporate MSM (who work for Wall Street interests) are now begrudgingly beginning to talk as if single payer Medicare for all is a good idea (without reminding you that they’ve been doing propaganda against this for years, and smearing / ignoring its most prominent proponent - Bernie Sanders).

Healthcare, murder (and mass shootings) - Tapper v Bernie

The issue of health care has been one of the most pressing concerns amongst voters as far as recent polls about Democratic Party candidates for President have been concerned. Following the tragic mass shootings in El Paso Texas and Dayton Ohio (August 3 and 4), the importance of an issue that Jake Tapper raised with Bernie prior to the second round of debates has increased exponentially (though the media are not talking about it).

Tapper basically asked Bernie: are the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies akin to murderers? (If they are, they produce far more death than the El Paso and Dayton murderers and ought to be condemned.)

Aren’t such CEOs and pharmaceutical companies right to think that they are helping people (Jake asked?) Bernie responded that there is a philosophical issue here that needs to be addressed. The format of the tv interview didn’t allow for a philosophical discussion but even a decent undergraduate moral philosophy student can see that Bernie is right if we reject consequentialism.

The February CNN Des Moines Register Iowa Poll Cover-Up

On Saturday afternoon, February 1st, Abby Philip (who in the January debate as a moderator pointedly ignored Bernie’s answer that he had not told Liz Warren that a woman couldn’t win the WhiteHouse) was with Pete Buttigieg in Iowa. Ana Cabrera was in the studio. Pete got around ten minutes to waffle vaguely about unity and respect for other candidates etc.

Later that evening, CNN’s David Chalian responded to Ana Cabrera’s demand (in the 9.00 p.m. slot): explain to viewers why the result of the Des Moines Register Poll is not being released?

“Ana, it was brought to CNN’s attention earlier this evening that someone who was a question for the survey raised an issue with the way that their interview was conducted - that means the results of the poll could have been compromised. We weren’t able to determine exactly what happened during this person’s interview and we don’t know if it was an isolated incident so out of an abundance of caution CNN and the Des Moines register and Selzer and company who conducts the poll decided not to release tonight’s poll.”

According to The Hill:

Thomas Friedman, Revolution and the Debt Ceiling

July 22

Anderson Cooper included a prerecorded lengthy segment on his show AC 360 in which he interviewed Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and author of ‘Thank you for being late’. The main point of discussion during the piece concerned Friedman’s recent op ed piece in the New York Times titled ‘Spare me the Revolution’.

Biden’s long record on wanting to cut social security

Joe Biden is telling LIES about his long record of being willing to cut social security. Wake up, Grand Ma!

S. E. Cupp Unfiltered - Bernie Media Bias?

‘Bernie media bias?’ was the title of a segment on the S.E. Cupp Unfiltered show, CNN Saturday July 20.

One sometimes comes across the idea online that to think that the media is biased against Bernie is a case of ‘confirmation bias’. In other words, on this view one already believes that the media is biased against Bernie and is looking for evidence which supports one’s preconception, whilst ignoring other evidence that contradicts one’s bias.

However, if one considers the following evidence one cannot rationally deny that objectively, there is widespread and systematic media bias (putting it mildly) against Bernie. For instance, in the 2016 primaries:

Hundreds of Democratic Party super-delegates in 2016 (including Donna Brazile) were portrayed by the media as already on Hillary’s side before a single primary vote was cast, giving voters the impression that Bernie faced an insurmountable task. Although Bernie’s policies were appealing many didn’t vote for him because they thought he couldn’t win - directly because of media bias (super-delegates weren’t supposed to vote until the end of the primary process).

(In 2020, skewed media polls have taken the place of super-delegates (who will become relevant if a second ballot is called for).)

David Axelrod’s Bernie Joel top 20!

20 - Everybody loves you now (anti-mainstream media blackout edit)

The Draw Thursday July 18

Anderson Cooper: “Normally the Democratic Party nominee is picked behind closed doors but still wants to give the impression of being Democratic. However, after the 2016 primaries when our panelist Donna Brazille got caught colluding with the DNC to sabotage Bernie we want to try to make the nomination process seem as transparent and unbiased as possible (even though it’s obviously not).”

Wolf Blitzer: “That’s right Anderson. Although we bias our daily political coverage in favor of Joe Biden, we often try to appear like we’re objective and neutral by covering other corporate candidates who claim to be progressive like Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. To the extent that we mention Bernie, we only do so in a negative way.”

November Democratic Debate

Some things are worse left unsaid

Moderators could have solicited much more differentiation between candidates in the November debate. Viewers were left worse off as a result of the questions that weren’t asked by Maddow etc. -

Like not asking Warren about her recent change from directly supporting single-payer Medicare for all to at first retaining private health insurance then pushing for single payer later during a Warren presidency.

Don Lemon Pelosi and AOC

Don Lemon July 11

Don Lemon’s producers included a section in his show regarding Democratic Party House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public spat with a ‘squad’ of four including ALexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The section was prefaced in terms of Pelosi being reluctant to impeach Trump or investigate Alex Acosta’s connection with the sex-trafficking of Jeff Epstein, but the broader emphasis was on the public disagreement between AOC and Pelosi regarding the direction of the Democratic Party generally. Pelosi represents the old guard establishment, whereas AOC etc. represents the progressive wing of the party. Should these two apparently inconsistent factions within the Democratic Party be reconciled in order to defeat Trump in 2020. Can they be reconciled?

Town Halls For All

On Sunday November 10 and Monday November 11, Tom Steyer and Joe Biden had CNN townhalls. Why?

No explanation was given as to why these candidates deserved their own townhalls whereas other candidates didn’t. Nor did CNN just issue disclaimers to the effect that Steyer and Biden’s new super pac had just bought the airtime. The lack of any explanation of these on the face of it strange townhalls gave the impression of media bias towards Joe Biden, with Tom Steyer providing Biden and his super pac with some billionaire company.

In fact, Biden’s townhall was an exercise in cringingly blatant obsequiousness to Biden and equally blatant unrealistically positive spin by the pundit class. Preliminary softball questions about veterans’ issues (as November 11 was Veterans Day) were followed by what looked like a pre-meditated, artificial attempt to make Biden look good (‘Presidential’), or at least better than he had looked in debates thus far. Yet even in this bogus contrived setting, deliberately set up as propaganda for Biden, he was almost as rambling and unconvincing as he usually is.

Come on man part two

July 8 - CNN aired the second installment of Chris Cuomo’s one-on-one chat with Joe Biden, except this time it was one-on-two. Biden’s wife Jill was included this time. The family man treatment served to suggest a subconscious credence to CNN’s narrative of Biden being the presumptive nominee. It was as if we had been invited round to have coffee with Joe and Jill - it would be rude of us to expect him to have to explain his policies for 2020 or his history of lies (e.g. about having marched on Washington) plagiarism (which forced him to drop out of a previous presidential race) and racism, wouldn’t it?

We didn’t have to worry though because Jill reassured us that Joe is not a racist. Chris Cuomo breathed a sigh of relief; the social tension subsided - Chris could press ahead with the propaganda that Joe’s weak performance in the first debate would not do lasting damage to his campaign.

NRA, God, Supreme Court, Trump (in that order)

(The following is a draft excerpt from a forthcoming book on the 2020 election, related to the excerpt ‘Jefferson Bernie and Biden’ on this site. This excerpt touches on the question of the objectivity of the Supreme Court’s role in American politics, with particular regard to the second amendment (guns). The preceding chapter in the book deals with the nature of the relationship between God (if such exists) and morality and Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.)

Since it is implausible to believe that Trump believes in God or acts as if God is the source of objective morality (or even that God’s commands involve evincing a divine subjective feeling), this chapter assumes that God does not exist, but that either objective moral facts exist anyway, or that morality is subjective. In which case, which of these options fits most closely with the moral nature of Donald’s and Hillary’s relationships with the NRA and their attitude towards (innocent) human-animal gun death and (innocent) non-human-animal gun death?

As implicit ethical egoists, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump can consistently claim that human-animals have natural rights of the sort alluded to in the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights though Trump can consistently claim that non-human-animals don’t have natural rights (and thus condone the actions of his sons in taking pleasure from killing wildlife in Africa). In fact, he can consistently claim that human animals don’t have moral rights. Ethical egoism, a form of consequentialism, rejects the notion of moral rights as nonsense. Moreover, there are no actions on this Trumpean egoistic view which are morally wrong because of the nature of the action (or policy) in question, contrary to the implicit views about ethics propagated by the main stream media.

Breaking news: Cuomo wastes Nina Turner’s time

Tuesday June 25 2019

Chris Cuomo began his show with the usual let’s get after it. Next was a segment billed as a precursor to the first set of Democratic Primary debates, on Wednesday 26 and Thursday 27 June on CNN. Invited guests were Nina Turner (from Bernie’s 2020 campaign, previously denied the opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016) and former Governor of Pennsylvania and ex DNC Ed Rendell.

Triangulation, Tulsi and Trolls

Friday 18 October - the mainstream media (CNN) ran segments on shows throughout the day reporting on what was portrayed as a straightforwardly controversial recent claim made by Hillary Clinton (talking to David Plouffe in a podcast) that Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein were both Russian assets. Clinton alleged that just as Jill Stein was in cahoots with Russia running as a third-party candidate in the 2016 election, now Tulsi Gabbard is being ‘groomed’ by Russia to run as a third-party candidate in 2020. In response Van Jones (with Erin Burnett) described Hillary as a ‘legend’ however she is playing a dangerous game in slandering Gabbard without evidence (ignoring Stein in his comments). He went on to suggest that Hillary is merely being the cut-throat politician that many view her as. She’s just getting retribution for Tulsi’s endorsement of Bernie in 2016 and her resigning from the DNC due to its corruption (Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Donna Brazile etc.). That sort of back-stabbing political pay-back is understandable - what is potentially politically dangerous (but not morally unacceptable in Washington) is slandering someone without evidence.

Rob Astorino Out Front July 16

Interviewed by Erin Burnett (together with April Ryan and Keith Boykin), Trump surrogate Rob Astorino made a number of false statements and fallacious inferences designed to obfuscate and subtly propagate the effects of the racist remarks Trump had made the previous day against four progressive Congress members and women of color. Unfortunately these falsities were not called out in the actual segment, which consisted of righteous indignation to Astorino’s claims rather than refuting them with reason and logic. The following attempts to do what might have been done during the segment in question.

Matt Lewis, Ron Brownstein, CNN propagandists

On Saturday October 12 2019 in the 8-00 p.m. CNN slot a hit piece about Bernie Sanders was tagged onto the end of another completely different story for which Matt Lewis, senior columnist for the Daily Beast and CNN political commentator Ron Brownstein, senior editor for The Atlantic and CNN senior political analyst were panelists.

The piece featured an interview with Bernie talking about what his response would be to voters who think he is very similar to Elizabeth Warren as far as policy is concerned but she hasn’t had a recent heart attack. In the full video clip, Bernie alludes to policy differences between himself and his friend Elizabeth but this part was not shown in the edited CNN clip (from ‘This Week’ on ABC). CNN do not allow any of their (edited for propaganda) video clips to be embedded in other websites.

Erin you sound like someone in the media

Tuesday June 18 2019

On Outfront with Erin Burnett, Erin did an interview with Bernie Sanders. The context was that Bernie was going to reply to Trump’s official launch of his re-election campaign in Florida later that evening.

Erin asked what Bernie was going to say in response to Trump’s rally (before Bernie had heard Trump’s speech). Bernie made some tongue in cheek speculative predictions that Trump would probably not talk about having wanted to throw 30 million people off their existing health insurance with no alternative plan for them, or the tax breaks he gave to billionaires etc.

Erin asked about Bernie’s view on recent attacks on commercial oil tankers in the gulf of Oman which the CIA allege are likely Iranian in origin. Bernie responded that the attacks should be investigated, but reminded viewers that the American government lied to its citizens about the pretext for the war in Vietnam and the Iraq war (also indicating that according to the constitution only congress has the power to declare war, not any president).

Climate Change And The Prisoner’s Dilemma

(The above caption is from the website of the Union Of Concerned Scientists (https://www.ucsusa.org/.) The following below is a draft excerpt from a forthcoming book, which amongst other things touches on the prisoner’s dilemma (game theory) and its application for climate change and the Green New Deal.)

Steve Kornacki HardBall June 17 2019

Several Democratic Nominee Candidates appeared at the Poor People’s Campaign on June 17, 2019. Amongst them were Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. These candidates were the focus of the 2020 race on MSM that day, in the context of an alleged boost in popularity of Elizabeth Warren in polls, suggesting a fall in Bernie’s popularity amongst progressives whilst (most importantly) doing damage limitation on the bad week Joe Biden had just had (in which he switched his position on the Hyde amendment regarding abortion). The subliminal suggestion was that Biden had previously had a bad week, but now Bernie is having one too. (The corporate media’s job is to negate any progressive candidate with a serious chance of being the democratic nominee).

Contrary to the MSM, the above claimed symmetry between Bernie and Biden does not actually exist since Biden’s bad publicity arose from his actual overnight policy change regarding the Hyde amendment, whereas Bernie was just alleged to be dropping in popularity in relation to Warren according to a poll in one particular state. (As we know, the polls that suggest that Biden is the Democratic Party front runner are skewed.)

On The Psychology Of Media Propaganda

The primacy / recency effects and how they are subverted for MSM propaganda

A strange thing often happens a few minutes prior to the end of main stream media shows about politics in the USA. Just focusing on CNN, consider the shows of Erin Burnett, Ana Cabrera, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo etc. Unwitting viewers of these shows are often presented with some seemingly light-hearted or otherwise apparently innocuous story (or cringeworthy hand-over from one anchor to another). These contrast starkly in tone with the often acrimonious previously broadcast disputes between politicians and panelists representing the corporate duopoly of the GOP or Democratic Party.

For example, on Saturday September 7, 2019, Ana Cabrera finished with a short segment about recent research on Loch Ness in Scotland and the suggestion that ‘Nessie’ may be a giant eel. Consider the frequent Jeannie Moos short segments at the end of the Erin Burnett OutFront show on CNN. Consider the cringeworthy handovers between Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo, or between Cuomo and Don Lemon (not to mention Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC). Not least, remember the day when Trump announced his tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires (to be paid for by cuts to Medicare over ten years)? That day, CNN and other corporate media outlets ran a story at the end of some of their shows about military UFO sightings.

Chris Cillizza

June 11, 2019, Chris Cillizza wrote (on CNN.com):

“Speaking to a group of donors and lobbyists in Washington on Monday night, Joe Biden said this of the Republican Party post-Donald Trump:

"With Trump gone you're going to begin to see things change. Because these folks know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."

That is, without any exaggeration, a radical view from the man who polling suggests is the front-runner to be the party's nominee against Trump in November 2020.

Why? Because the commonly held view among liberals, who compose the base of the Democratic Party, is that Trump is not an anomaly or a virus within the broader Republican Party, he is the Republican Party. That attempts, like Biden's, to say Trump is "other" than the GOP lessens the party's culpability on its capitulation to the darker forces at work in the President's message and the party he represents.

Monmouth, CNN and Warren - please don’t make me gaffe

On Monday August 26, the result of a new Monmouth University nationwide poll was revealed in the corporate media. Noticeably, CNN did the opposite of what they usually do when a poll favorable to Biden is discussed - they put the poll in at least some context. At least, that’s Wolf Blitzer’s conservative panel on ‘The Situation Room’ generally tried to seem to be doing (with the exception of Jeffrey Toobin).

The Trump/Biden voter base and the source of morality

(The following is excerpted from a draft of a forthcoming book)

As previously stated in the introduction Jefferson amended Locke’s phrase ‘life, liberty and property’ (from the latter’s 2nd Treatise on Government) to the phrase ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the former’s list of what he regarded as self-evidently inalienable rights with which all men have been endowed by their creator (though Jefferson was a deist, not a theist). This was in contrast to the notion that an English king had a divinely granted indirect moral authority to take away the right of life liberty or property (mainly property, i.e. that of the wealthy drafters of the constitution, drafted after Shay’s Rebellion which acted as somewhat of a catalyst). Despite this, the contemporary American Christian religious view is that although one has been endowed by one’s creator with certain inalienable rights, the creator (unlike the king) DOES have the moral authority to capriciously take those rights away.

Criminal Justice Reform And The Death Penalty

What is it that morally justifies legal punishment (i.e. state sanctioned punishment of criminals)? There are at least four main possible responses as far as the death penalty is concerned.

First, God commands (‘lex talionis’?) that murderers must die. Although this idea is explored briefly in what follows, it depends on the notion that God exists to begin with (which God?). Since Plato showed that even if some God does exist, morality can’t depend on any authority (even a divine one) this possibility won’t be pursued here. However it should briefly be mentioned that governments in other countries (and terrorist groups) enforce religiously motivated capital punishment. For example Saudi Arabia, an ally of the USA, sanctions the religiously motivated beheading of people for actions that would not be deemed as crimes in civilized countries.

The second option is a retributivist one, of which there is an absolute and proportional variety. On each view, the moral justification for punishment has nothing to do with punishment having any deterrence value. Punishment is just a matter of retribution, i.e of giving the offender what they morally deserve.

2016 "lesser of two evils" argument debunked again for 2020

(In the above screenshot taken from YouTube regarding video of CNN coverage of the latest cherry-picked poll (SSRS) that favors Joe Biden and the corresponding propaganda footage of Jill Biden included in the video clip, notice that dislikes outnumber likes by almost 3 to 1.)

Tuesday August 20 2019: The for-profit corporate news outlet CNN ran a segment on several of their shows throughout the day (on Tapper, Blitzer, Burnett and more) which highlighted a new SSRS poll claiming Biden to be in the lead and Kamala Harris plummeting. In each of these segments coverage of the poll was combined with new footage of Jill Biden claiming that voters may prefer another candidate on some or other policy e.g. climate change but they should vote for Joe anyway. The comedic gist was that he’s far from perfect as a politician but at least he’s not Trump. The usual conservative panelists (e.g. Bill Krystal, Kirsten Powers) basically agreed, throughout the day playing down the comedic element of Biden’s wife now taking on the gauntlet of perpetuating Biden gaffes.

The Smears Of A Clown: CNN

On Monday August 12 2019 Bernie was the top trending topic on Twitter with #myberniestory - over a thousand supporters posted a video explaining why they were supporting Bernie. This is newsworthy one might naively think - maybe not the main political topic but certainly worth a mention in one of the CNN segments that day. Wrong. Instead, CNN spent the day smearing Bernie regarding quite innocuous and obviously true comments he made about the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos etc.

Democratic Party progressive kill-switch 2020

Why are there so many democrat candidates for their party’s presidential candidate for 2020? The obvious answer is that this helps the main stream media (MSM) to continue the DNC’s long-standing policy of thwarting any genuinely progressive candidate from gaining the nomination. With so many of these candidates spuriously claiming to be progressive by paying lip service to Bernie’s 2016 agenda (not to mention Jill Stein’s Green New Deal idea in 2016 which no-one in MSM gives her credit for) the MSM can build up these corporate non-progressives to make it seem to you that they are a younger more electable Bernie. This serves to dilute the progressive message and vote (leaving the MSM to then push for any corporate candidate e.g. Joe ‘Biden his time’ Biden like they did with Hillary and Trump in 2016).

Two un-televised Biden Gaffes re El Paso TX and Dayton OH

Gaffe number 1:

Two mass shootings occurred early August 2019 in El Paso Texas and Dayton Ohio. In his initial response, Biden falsely referred to the shootings as having happened in Houston and Michigan. According to Snopes.com

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-houston-and-michigan/

(amongst many other sources):

“Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden incorrectly referred to the locations of two mass shootings in August 2019 in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, as having happened in “Houston,” Texas, and “Michigan.” The remark came during a speech Biden gave at a fundraiser in San Diego, California, on Aug. 4, the same day as the Dayton massacre.