Rubin:

And for once, Democrats nominated a presidential candidate who could not be caricatured successfully as a “socialist” and whose character starkly contrasted with the amoral, un-Christian, cruel, dishonest and racist Republican nominee.

Sorry, but what I see is punditry-based failure of object permanence in which a thing didn’t happen until the pundit noticed.

Because “can’t be caricatured as a socialist” is a, bullshit measure when, as a non-pundit, one looks at the fact that (1) no Democratic candidate has ever fitted the quality “socialist” except in the lazy and ever-expanding usage deployed by right wing pundits, (2) they have, in fact, been so successfully caricatured as socialist that there’s a billion-dollar commentary industry and multiple reactionary culture movements that derive their identity from resisting “socialism.”

I’m seriously fucking sick of giving these people credit for brief moments of awareness that only happen because they have refused and still refuse to believe that any leftist critique of US politics is simply by default wrong.

I demand, at minimum, a decade of wiping their own asses before I applaud.

Barring that, admitting that Donald Trump rests atop a Ronald-Reagan-shaped throne of patted-down excrement that’s been diligently sculpted by fifty, sixty years of Republican choices.

Because what I’m seeing is a deep cynicism and narcissism in which these people were present for every. single. step. of. this. authoritarian. shitshow’s. buildup. and now they’re upset because the result isn’t pretty enough to cover up this particular charnel house…as opposed to the previous charming, picturesque charnel houses of AIDS crisis, all those coups we funded, Iraq…..