What, there were strikes in Syria recently? I didn't see anything in Current Events. What for?
They shot one or more rockets at our soldiers and killed one, so ours shot back and killed something like 15-20 of theirs who probably were mostly not the ones who'd shot at ours first. Why did they do that first? Because that's what the situation over there promotes more of at any time.
The fact that he's not a Sanders acolyte reflects the basic fact that the voting public doesn't place itself very far to the left of center: the Republicans picked up House seats in 2020, and the Senate is split 50/50, and that's largely a fluke that could easily change in 2022.
Nothing could be further from the reality of modern American politics, and the longer Democrat strategy keeps clinging to this utterly mindless, enormously counterevidenced nonsense, the longer it will keep participating in the country's erosion into even more of a Republican-controlled nightmarescape.
Yes, this latest election was a disaster for the Democrat(ic) Party, with net losses in Congress and most lower legilsatures, and even its big prominent "win" (Biden/Trump) being a dire underperformance, but that's not a rejection of leftward politics by the voters. In fact, it's exactly the opposite: a rejection of those who have failed to lean left. Not only had the DP overall just spent its last couple of years demonstrating its complete uselessness to the left in general, but also, it was the DP's leftist candidates who won their individual elections while its non-leftists did the losing. And just a couple of years ago, the last time there was much of an increase in the number of leftist candidates and much of the talk from & about the party overall was about pushing for leftward policies, was when the party had big gains in elections... especially, again, from its further-left individual candidates. And that was after years of nearly constant net loss of Federal and state seats for Democrats all over the country while the "be more like the Republicans" meme dominated the DP's "strategy" and kept out almost any leftist candidates, totaling over a thousand losses during Obama's Presidency alone.
Recently, for obvious reasons, this argument has been more about how to win the Presidency than the more numerous legislative seats, so the sample size isn't great for spotting statistical trends, but the same thing has been true in that context too: as you were warned of before the latest election, the prediction that people don't vote for leftist Democrats and do vote for Democrats who sound like Republicans failed every single time since at least before Reagan. The only two Democrats in that era who won were the ones who campaigned as lefties, no matter how much the defenders of the "lefties can't win" myth want to distract from that by pointing out how non-leftily they governed once the elections were over, as if that proved that they had
campaigned that way in the first place. (Not long ago, I watched some old Bill Clinton campaign speeches and noted every single point he made in them, and found that there was not even one single point anywhere in there at which he ever said a single solitary conservative, triangulatory, or capitulatory thing. I was actually expecting a few exceptions to the overall pattern just on the general principle that most such rules probably have exceptions, but they just weren't there. The brilliant response I got, from the only purveyor of this myth of Clinton having campaigned from a "moderate" position who responded at all, was a whine that it was a "wall of text". In other words, if the examples demonstrating that the claim is false are too numerous, they don't count just because there are too many of them to matter.
Such is the desperation to sustain the myth against all reality.)
"But wait!", I hear some purveyors of the myth of how to determine Democrat electability say, "We finally got our first Presidential example on our side just a few months ago! Surely that means what we've been claiming all along is true now, because that one exception proves that all the hundreds & hundreds of examples consistently going the other way must all be flukes!". But no, at best, Biden's pitiful excuse for a win just means the rule of how Presidential elections work is no longer the simple absolute it was before, but now just requires a tiny caveat. Instead of still being able to point out that a "moderate"/"centrist"/Republicanoid Democrat
never wins the Presidency in the modern era as we could before, now we need to add "
...unless he happens to be blessed with the most unpopular candidate ever as an opponent... during a second great depression... and a plague... which that opponent happens to deliberately make much worse... in which case it might be possible to barely squeak by with the tiniest margin in ages (43000 votes in certain places)". Well congratulations, you finally got your caveat; your myth finally gets "upgraded" from wrong absolutely every single time to wrong absolutely every single time but one under excruciatingly special circumstances which will probably never recur. I hope you manage to stay happy about that while continuing to push obviously false nonsense that only results in constantly handing everything over the RP.
