Chris Cuomo To Bernie Sanders: "Have some water. It's free."

[merrily]

( Cross posted from http://jackpineradicals.org/showthread.php?4908-Contact-CNN-Cuomo-to-Sanders-quot-Have-some-water-It-s-free-quot&p=26613#post26613 )

At the very best, this was a cheap, partisan shot about Bernie's allegedly giving away "free stuff."
http://jackpineradicals.org/showthread.php?4649-Dummkopfs-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch

At the next rung down, it was a shot about Bernie's allegedly being cheap, something I've heard comedians take pot shots at Bernie for before--as to tipping, no less. The man who wants to raise the minimum wage to benefit, among others, food service workers? I just don't believe it.

At the lowest rung on the ladder of crap, it was anti-Semitic. Have some water, Jewish guy. It's free. Get it? Jews are cheap! It's hilarious! And a dog whistle to boot, just in case the surname Sanders fooled anyone into thinking Sanders is a WASP. IMO, the ADL should be all over this.

First, Chris Cuomo should never have been moderating this event. His brother is a Hillary campaign surrogate who, perhaps not so coincidenially, infamously used an anti-African American dog whistle against Obama in 2008.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuckin'_and_jivin[/url]'

CNN should not have assigned Cuomo to moderate this, and he should never have accepted the assignment. Having done so, he should have bent over backwards not to mock Sanders, or worse. Instead, he seemed to have confused being a moderator at an important political event with being the emcee at a low rent roast of Sanders.

1. Anyone who watches Cuomo: (a) Why? and (b) Please pay attention to who his advertisers are and post them. I'd love to send them some feedback.

2. Contact CNN. [url]http://www.cnn.com/feedback/[/url] If you wish, link to http://jackpineradicals.org/showthread.php?4908-Contact-CNN-Cuomo-to-Sanders-quot-Have-some-water-It-s-free-quot&p=26613#post26613 Or plagiarize. You have my permission to do both. Please be polite, so that we don't add to the bs about Bernie supporters being profane and sexist. (I can't imagine how sexism would come into this, but I fee sure Brock can figure out a way, if he puts his mind to it.)

[url]http://jackpineradicals.org/content.php?110-Ignorant-Bernie-Bros-should-END-their-name-calling[/url]
[url]http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1280&pid=104497[/url]

hat tip to jillan http://www.democraticunderground.com/1280124946

[tblue37]

1. KnR (and to the greatest page) for visibility. nt

[merrily]

3. Thank you and thank you!

[jillan]

2. It's ALL over twitter too. A lot of people were taken aback by that comment.

[merrily]

4. Good. It's great to know that the tweeters pay attention and think!

I really did not expect otherwise, but confirmation is always comforting.

[SmittynMo]

5. Yeah, this was a low blow

Did you also notice the difference in intros? Hillary had many, many titles, and she just came out gleaming. It was sickening how he favored her.

[merrily]

7. You have the contact info and permission to link to my post and/or plagiarize. Go for it!

[TTUBatfan2008]

12. But...

I will give him credit for pressing her on the paid speeches.

But at some point the media needs to call out the talking points. When she says she told the banks to cut it out, it would be nice if even one media member was quick enough on their feet to fire back: "Then why are you refusing to release the transcripts?" Surely if they are squeaky clean, then she would benefit from releasing them to the public.

[merrily]

15. Pressing her about paid speeches was about the least he could do in his role as moderator.

Taking a pot shot at Bernie that helps the Hillary campaign, however, was not part of the job description of a moderator. Rather, it was antithetical to it. That's the difference.

[appalachiablue]

6. This sh*t, how ugly of Cuomo.

[merrily]

16. yep. And then, if supporters of Sanders call out this kind of thing, we're the bad ones. Catch 22.

[appalachiablue]

18. Correct, we're Ogres for responding. Sort of like the 'Poke the Bear' kids

game artislife posted about a while ago.

Did this water glass insult just surface recently or it's from the Dem. Debate a while ago?

The 'free' immediately summoned soshialism but also rancid anti-Semitism, before I saw the other posts.

[pa28]

8. He'd obviously planned that little comment in advance.

So cheap.

[Nyan]

9. Isn't it amazing that we don't even need FOX for this kind of crap?

It just goes to show all corporate media outlets are republican-lite.

[BernieforPres2016]

17. 6 companies control 90% of the media in America

versus 50 companies in 1983. This article is from 2014, before Comcast bought NBC and other media properties from GE and replaced GE as the 6th company.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6

That's what happens with basically no anti-trust in the U.S. for the last 35 years. The media executives like Bernie about as much as the banksters do.

[merrily]

20. It's been between 5 and 7 companies for as long as I have been paying attention.

[merrily]

19. Fox? This would not have surprised me at all if it had been MSNBC.

[TIME TO PANIC]

10. Well, I'm glad I didn't watch the town hall, and watched The Ring of Fire instead.

[appalachiablue]

11. Did this just surface from Dem. Debate a week+ ago, or it's smthg. newer?

[merrily]

21. Town hall tonight

[appalachiablue]

23. SC Dem. Town Hall, Feb. 23, VIDEO, *'water remark' is at *30:45 min. mark, the break

Go to *30:45 min. mark, to see the "please, have some water, it's free" comment by Cuomo to Sanders at start of break.



(Thanks, I didn't see a word about this event today).

[BernieforPres2016]

13. I didn't hear that remark by Cuomo

But what do you expect from CNN? For God's sake, they include Donna Brazile, Paul Begala and David Gergen as "analysts" when they do Democratic debates and in their primary coverage. That's not even including the pure Clinton spinners they bring on as guests.

So you flip the channel to MSNBC, and there's Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand disciple who was twice reappointed by Bill Clinton as Federal Reserve Chairman and is perhaps the single person most responsible for the 2008 market crash. You can go to YouTube and watch Bernie Sanders castigating Greenspan in multiple Congressional hearings.

[merrily]

22. AFAIK, Gergen is a Republican. In theory, he should oppose all Democrats equally.

I would bet that is not so in reality, though. Donna Brazile is DNC and therefore, in theory, has a professional obligation to be neutral when it comes to two Democrats. In practice, she is a centrist.

Paul Begala is not even theoretically neutral:

He was an adviser to President Bill Clinton. Begala was a chief strategist for the 1992 Clinton–Gore campaign, which carried 33 states and made Clinton the first Democrat to win the White House in twelve years. As counselor to the President in the Clinton White House, he coordinated policy, politics, and communications.

Begala gained national prominence as part of the political consulting team Carville and Begala, along with fellow Clinton advisor James Carville.

.........

From 2002 until its cancellation in 2005, he co-hosted the political debate show Crossfire on CNN, alternating with Carville as the left-wing host, while the position of right-wing host alternated between Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson.

He was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential primaries. However, after she dropped out of the race, he became a backer of Barack Obama.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Begala

Having someone that closely associated with the Clintons and Carville pretend to be neutral about Sanders is a bad joke. (Begala even looks like the actor from West Wing!)

Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand disciple who was twice reappointed by Bill Clinton as Federal Reserve Chairman and is perhaps the single person most responsible for the 2008 market crash.

I'd like to unpack that a bit. The two bills most responsible for the crash of 2008--a crash in several countries, I might note--were repeal of Glass Steagall (in 1993, by a Democratic Congress and newly-elected Democratic President) and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

Greenspan and the White House both lobbied Congress hard for both those bills, with the White House leaning most on Democratic Senators who were opposed to it. However, Greenspan had no vote on either bill and no power to sign either bill into law. I would say Bill Clinton was more responsible than Greenspan. Besides:

[BernieforPres2016]

25. David Gergen served in Bill Clinton's administration 1993-94

Bill Clinton wanted to get some Republicans into his administration and move to the center politically so he hired Gergen. Here is a transcript of an interview with Gergen by Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/interviews/gergen.html

As for Greenspan being perhaps the single person one could most easily pin the financial market crash on, that is certainly debatable. But he was a free market ideologue who championed every bit of financial deregulation during his terms as Fed Chairman and admitted to being shocked after the crash:

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan.

This free market ideologue couldn't imagine that individual bankers would put maximizing their own bonuses ahead of the long term health of their firms (and the U.S. economy by extension). Anybody who worked on Wall Street would have laughed in his face about that after they had a couple of drinks in them.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan

[merrily]

31. I think I will take Greenspan's description of his shock and awe at greed with a bit of salt.

Obviously, I agree with Gergen that calling Greenspan the single person most responsible is certainly debatable and my prior post did debate it.

In general, I think, if blame can be properly placed on someone we vote for, it's better to do that than to blame people over whom we have no control whatever. I'd rather blame government laws, policies and practices that reward, enable or ignore corporate crap than focus solely on corporate behavior. Only directors, officers and fairly large stockholders can affect corporate behavior. I'm none of those. Focusing on corporations, therefore, leads to learned helplessness.

At least in theory, however, I have some degree of control over politicians, especially Democratic politicians. Thinking about them leads not to learned helplessness, but to activism.

[BernieforPres2016]

37. Gergen didn't say that.

Sorry for the confusion. The part after the link to Gergen's interview with Frontline on working for Bill Clinton were a change of subject and my personal response to your comment on Greenspan, followed by a link to an article from the Guardian on some of his reaction to the financial crash.

Greenspan had enormous power in the financial markets (you may recall James Carville's quip that when he died he wanted to come back as the bond market, a justification for the Clinton administration being slaves to the financial markets). Had Greenspan ever told a President or Congress that financial deregulation was going too far I can't imagine that he would have been overridden.

And while we didn't directly elect Greenspan to his position, Ronald Reagan appointed him originally and Bill Clinton reappointed him twice even though he was a libertarian disciple of Ayn Rand.

[merrily]

40. I thought a quote preceded the link. Sorry.

Had Greenspan ever told a President or Congress that financial deregulation was going too far I can't imagine that he would have been overridden.

That's really another way of saying that Greenspan is most responsible because he and the white house both advocated for the bills I cited, even though Greenspan did not have the power to make those bills law and Bubba did. My prior post addressed that. Besides, it was Clinton who appointed Greenspan. Did Bubba mistake Al for someone who was not a Wall Streeter?

And while we didn't directly elect Greenspan to his position, Ronald Reagan appointed him originally and Bill Clinton reappointed him twice even though he was a libertarian disciple of Ayn Rand.

And people who voted for Reagan and Bubba could foresee the Greenspan appointment and re-appointments? We have the power to control our own votes. We don't have anywhere near that power over appointments.


I cannot agree that Greenspan was more responsible for this than people who had Constitutional power to create or veto laws. And Bubba also had power to appoint the Fed Head, as well as his own White House economic team. He didn't have to take Greenspan's word for a thing. And look how he used all his powers around those two bills. Then Hillary voted for the bailout.

[BernieforPres2016]

26. Donna Brazile served as an advisor to Bill Clinton's campaigns in 1992 and 1996

And she was campaign manager for Bill Clinton's VP Al Gore in the 2000 campaign. She would not say who she favored between Hillary and Obama in 2008. I can't imagine anybody who has seen her speak during this campaign would consider her anything close to neutral between Hillary and Bernie.

[merrily]

32. I know.

[BernieforPres2016]

14. Cuomo also pushed Bernie on his religious/spiritual beliefs

It was basically the same question asked and answered the last time Cuomo did a Town Hall meeting with Bernie. I wonder if Bernie being Jewish and South Carolina being overwhelmingly Protestant had anything to do with that? No questions on religion from Cuomo to Hillary.

[merrily]

27. Also disgusting, a dog whistle and totally partisan.

http://jackpineradicals.org/entry.php?209-Democratic-Primary-2016-Will-religious-bigotry-work-this-time

[DhhD]

24. The Romans pretended they were giving water to Jesus to drink when he was on the Cross. Instead

they poured it on him. The Romans had stabbed Jesus under the rib cage so to drain the water forming around his heart when his arms were raised for hours above his head. He must have been very thirsty.

Is Cuomo an Italian/Roman name?

Cuomo has a $9 hour minimum wage in his budget for New York City. That is way below the $15 that Bernie wants. Clinton has done nothing in her home state of New York to raise the federal minimum wage during all the years that she has lived there. I believe her $12 an hour minimum is just another lie.

Bernie is being punished for going against the New York queen.

[merrily]

29. Sorry. I don't find anti-Italian remarks any more palatable than I find anti-Semitic remarks.

I request that you edit your post.

Just as an aside, I don't think the Romans put a spear in Jesus's side after he died to drain water from around his heart, but that is, to say the least, a moot point.

[NowSam]

28. I haven't seen the or heard the actual quote but in print

it is pretty ugly. I agree with you on all points.

[merrily]

33. The video

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1280&pid=125091

[Fawke Em]

30. I really don't understand how any "news" organization can allow those

whose family members work for any of the campaigns or are associated with them to moderate and/or report on this race. The appearance of impropriety should be avoided at all costs!

Just look, we have Cuomo moderating this and his brother is a Clinton surrogate. We had Andrea Mitchell moderating another debate and Bernie used to verbally beat up her sorry-ass husband during budget meetings. We had Jonathan Capehart and his phony-baloney "I'm Not Rappaport" crap and his husband works for Clinton.

Really, news media? This is the digital age. We can figure out who you and your family associate with.

When I was reporting, I would have NEVER been allowed to cover a beat if my husband or sibling or parent or whatever was paid by one of the top officials on the beat (for example, if my husband worked for the police chief, I couldn't have covered the cop beat).

I cannot get over how the media allows this to even happen.

[merrily]

34. his phony-baloney "I'm Not Rappaport" crap

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116601/

Perfect! I am ashamed I never thought of that. I even saw it off-off Broadway in play form. Why can't I be that clever? Thank heaven I surround myself with other Bernie supporters who are.

[Fawke Em]

35. Ironically, it was the first Broadway play I ever saw.

It starred Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little.

[merrily]

36. I can't remember if I saw it in Boston (really, really off off Broadway) or in NYC, off off Broadway

Both our families are in the greater NY area, so we've shuttled back and forth quite a bit. I know I have no clue who the actors were, but neither of them was Hirsch or Little. Nobody I'd heard of before or since.

[Fawke Em]

38. Six degrees of Bernie, but in four steps in this case:

Bruce Rappaport and Bernie, Judd Hirsch starred in "I'm Not Rappaport," Hirsch starred with Danny Devito in "Taxi" and Devito is a Bernie fan!

[merrily]

39. I am one or two degrees of Bernie. I donate to his campaign

[valerief]

41. yeah, I thought that was a sleazy line, too