OK — to be honest, he didn’t say this. Nor did he say to “Berniacs to not become the Tea Party” — a current rec list diary.
The level of dishonesty of that diary in what it took away from “The Hill” reporting was enough to make my teeth itch.
It seemed to only get worse in the comments to the point where I read this comment:
Obama calling Sanders supporters racists.
to which someone responded:
He can go fuck himself.
If only there was a way to find out what he said!
Oh yeah … there is.
First off — the whole premise of the diary is irritating. You know what the timing of these remarks were in regards? His appointment to the Supreme Court. His response was to a question from the audience. Here is the full video. The exchange starts at 42m56s and lasts a whole 7 minutes if You bother to take the time, or You can go and read the transcript here
I am going to include the entire exchange here and bold certain points
Q So this might not go very well. (Laughter.) But I’ve written it down so hopefully I can read it. Mr. President, we are currently in the midst of a polarizing, political election cycle dividing both major parties along populist and establishment fault lines. Do you anticipate this divergence within the Democratic Party widening to the extent we saw with the tea party’s emergence within the ranks of the Republican Party? And if not, what do you worry about for the future of the Democratic Party?
THE PRESIDENT: Short answer is, no, I don't. The cleavages inside the Democratic Party are not comparable to what we're seeing in the Republican Party right now. The argument inside the Democratic Party is a little bit more about means, less about ends.
If you look at our two Democratic candidates, they believe that everybody should get health care. They believe that every child should get a good education. They believe that climate change is real and that we should do something about it. They believe in equality for the LGBT community. Right? If you go through the list, there’s not a huge divergence there.
I think that in the Democratic Party, there is a populist impulse that grows out of what I also think has happened for folks who are voting in the Republican primary, this frustration in the wake of the financial crisis and the bottom falling out for people who lost their jobs, or lost their homes, or lost their pensions; that the world is moving fast, the ground is not firm under their feet. And even before that crisis, wages and incomes were not going up at the same pace as productivity, corporate profits, and so forth. And so there is a sense the game is rigged. And we have to more fundamentally change that game, that system -- whether it’s Wall Street, or how Washington operates, or what have you.
Some of that impulse is healthy. I think you want people to be asking hard questions about injustice economically and the way that insiders in the political process may not fully represent the interest of everyone.
The danger, whether for Democrats or Republicans, is in a closed-loop system where everybody is just listening to the people who agree with them, that you start thinking the way to get to where I want to go is to simply be as uncompromising as possible, and hold the line, and not pay attention or listen to what the other side has to say. And that is sort of a tea party mentality. And that anybody who suggests, well, there’s another point of view, or there’s a whole half of the country that completely disagrees with us that we have to work with, well, then you must be a sellout, or you must be corrupted, or you must be on the take, or what have you.
And that is not, I think, useful. It’s not say that there isn’t corruption, that there isn’t compromise -- people compromising principles for less-than-noble means, et cetera. Those things happen and they should be called out.
But a lot of the reason why a lot of Democrats who supported me and still support me got frustrated is because a bunch of the country doesn't agree with me or them, and they have votes, too, and they elect members of Congress. And that's how our democracy works. It’s not a situation, if you don't get everything you want, it’s always because the person you elected sold you out. It may just be because in our system you send up taking half loaves.
I could not be prouder of the Affordable Care Act, but it was a messy process. It doesn't have a public option. It’s not single-payer. If I were designing a system from scratch, I would have designed a more elegant system and a more efficient system. But that's not what was possible in our democracy -- in the same way that Social Security when it first started was a meagerly program providing benefits to just a few people and historically cut out for purely racist reasons domestic servants or sharecroppers or what have you. And then over time you kept on improving it. That's how change generally happens.
And I think the thing that Democrats have to guard against is going in the direction that the Republicans are much further along on, and that is this sense of we are just going to get our way, and if we don't, then we'll cannibalize our own and then kick them out and try again, and we narrow our viewpoints more and more until finally we stake out positions that are so extreme that they alienate the broad public.
I don't see that being where the Democrats go. But it's always something that we have to pay attention to.
It is almost like what he said had nothing to do with what was reported and then even further removed from the subsequent comments that have been made here.
Here is my advice — when You report or comment on something — Know what the fuck You are talking about.