Bernie Sanders 2.0 Attacks Cornel West and Bernie Sanders 1.0

Sabina Salvati ("Sabby Sabs Podcast"), speaking with Glenn Greenwald on System Update:

I think that what Bernie Sanders is doing to Cornel West is absolutely pathetic. I want people to understand what this is really about. Bernie Sanders is a tool of the Democratic Party. What they have done is they have taken someone who appeared to be outside the duopoly – because he's a registered independent – and they have used Bernie Sanders to basically usher people into the Democratic Party, pretending to be an outsider, pretending to be anti-establishment and rallying up a base of young people and working-class people and getting those people energized about a political revolution that Bernie Sanders knew was never going to happen through the Democratic Party. I want to be very clear about that. And then in turn, what Bernie Sanders is to do when they do not allow him to win and they won't allow him to win even in the future, is to take those supporters, that base, and to tell them to vote for the corporate establishment that he told them to fight back against.

Now you see Bernie Sanders attacking Cornel West. Cornel West has the guts to do what Bernie Sanders did not have the guts to do. Bernie Sanders says that this is to protect democracy but Bernie Sanders knows, even when it comes to his own presidential campaigns, there really wasn't a real democracy, at least one would not look through the Democratic Party because of the superdelegates. Bernie Sanders, to this day, doesn't really mention the DNC fraud lawsuit. He doesn't talk about the fact that DNC attorney Bruce Spiva argued that the DNC is a corporation. The judge ruled in that case that the DNC can select a candidate and does not owe you a fair election but Bernie Sanders doesn't mention this. Bernie Sanders is doing a press tour telling everybody how we have to protect democracy. So, you should not support Cornel West and you should support Joe Biden. Once again, he's telling you to support the corporate candidates that he told you to push back against and to fight against. So, what people have to understand is that Bernie Sanders is a tool of the Democratic Party to make you think that you are going to get progress, but to water it down and to prevent you from having any strong outside grassroots movement that is going to change the system.

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Why politicians like to keep “terrorism” vaguely defined

Why don't politicians clearly define the word "terrorism," the alleged principle on which they allegedly based so much national policy? As he does so often on so many topics, Glenn Greenwald hits the mark:

[T]he word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State -- Terrorism -- is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word. It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user's own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify . . . The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.

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Who is crazy?

The mainstream media is going after anyone who dares to stray from what they consider to be the proper boundaries of discourse. He dares to treat mainstream political discourse "as the political freak show that it is." That's why Alan Grayson, who is one of the few people in Congress who is really working hard to get to the bottom of serious problems, has a big target on his back--he is being labeled as crazy by a mainstream media that doesn't know what to do when someone asks real questions about real issues. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com explores this problem at length, pointing out the other side of the coin, that in Media-World, those who are certifiably insane are being labeled as "sane" as long as they stay within predesignated boundaries. For example:

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist . . . and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.
What honest person can argue with Greenwald's list? But he was just getting warmed up. There's a lot more, including this:
Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or the future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.
Greenwald is not suggesting that those who step out of the mainstream are always correct about everything they say. But he does give credit to Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for not buying into most of the rubbish that we are being fed by the media. We live in world painted upside-down by a media that is largely not about traditional Fourth Estate values. Rather than feed us information that will allow a democracy to thrive, the mainstream media, based on its constant miserable failures over the past ten years, is clearly more interested in destroying those who dare to ask questions that might threaten our corporate-military-prison-industrial-Complex.

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Moyers: On health care reform, the Democrats are their own biggest enemy

Bill Moyers, spoke about the problems passing health care reform on Bill Maher's show (as reported by Glenn Greenwald):

I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party. This is a party that has told its progressives -- who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform -- to sit down and shut up. That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: "no public insurance option, no health care reform."

And I think the reason for that is -- in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .

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