What's the difference between saying you will speak out against someone and actually speaking out against them?
Well, again, this whole thing is stemming from this one comment:
Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.
That's not Obama saying anything at all; that's a journalist claiming that some other person allegedly heard Obama say something that the journalist has chosen to characterize as Obama saying he would "speak up to stop him." We have no idea what Obama actually said or what he may have meant.
The
implication is that Obama meant he would speak publicly against Sanders, but speak "up" is not speak "out." Even if that were a direct quote, it could simply mean "I will become more publicly involved than I am now and put my support behind Warren"--i.e., I will speak up--in favor of my preferred candidate--to stop Sanders from becoming the front runner, or something along those lines. It does not axiomatically mean, "I will talk shit about Sanders."
Though if he did, he'd be justified. Sanders is not a Democrat and has only ever shat on the Democratic party while at the same time demanding he be allowed to play in our reindeer games--which we graciously allowed--only for him to fuck over the Democratic party in a number of different ways in 2015, causing a completely unnecessary, bitterly divisive civil war for no reason but his own ego. A
very good argument can be made that it's his fault we have Trump in the WH to begin with and had he simply bowed out with honor and integrity when it was mathematically impossible for him to win (in March), Trump would simply be doing what he thought he'd be doing all along; profiting off of being a never-win and falsely boasting how he would have been the best POTUS ever.
But more importantly, Sanders is
also someone the Trump camp would LOVE to go against, because they know they could destroy him and we'd have Trump for four more years. Which is why the context is the more important part of the piece:
all that matters to him: who can beat Donald Trump.
Sanders can't beat Trump. He's a cranky, money-grubbing jew from Jew York out to take your money so his kids can go to college. That's the end of it right there for pretty much all of the south, midwest, much of the northwest and a significant part of the northeast corridor. Unfortunately, as we have seen in stark relief, there are
tens of millions of deeply bigoted assholes in this country and the idea of a jew in the WH for the overwhelming majority of them (being all Christian white guys) is literally something they would kill to prevent.
Yes, I'm aware the same could have been said for a "nigger" in the WH (and was), but in Obama's case, blacks showed up to vote in numbers we hadn't seen since the sixties (and for good reason). But as Tom Lehrer once put it, "
everybody hates the Jews," and that includes heavily Christian Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans in both the Democratic and Independent blocs, so from a purely strategic
realpolitiks perspective, it's ironically not personal.
