View from the Left—The Democrats' very very good week

The whopping difference between the Democratic field and the Republican field came into stark relief this week as Democrats finally took the debate stage. It was a resounding win for the progressive movement as both Democratic front-runners—Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—touted their liberal credentials and gave a record-setting 15.3 million viewers a taste of their intellectual heft.

Bernie explained that the campaign was about whether "we can mobilize our people to take back our government from a handful of billionaires." And Hillary promised to do everything should could to “heal the divides—the divides economically, because there's too much inequality; the racial divides; the continuing discrimination against the LGBT community—so that we work together and, yes, finally, fathers will be able to say to their daughters, you, too, can grow up to be president.”

The pundits later swooned over Clinton though most agreed that Sanders gave a solid performance. Meanwhile, social media buzzed over Bernie, with his performance drawing 407,000 mentions online—more than the rest of the candidates combined.

But bottom line, both Clinton and Sanders soared as the Republicans continued to devolve into imbecilic behavior.

We found out that Donald Trump doesn’t do interviews that involve policy questions. Really? Um … that’s his job. This is the guy who’s still dominating the GOP field. But here’s Atlanta radio host Steve McCoy talking about the interview he landed with Trump this week (correction: this interview actually occurred years ago and was passed off as recent—good catch by one of our readers):

“They said they wouldn’t take questions about his policy because his policies, they weren’t set in stone,” McCoy told BuzzFeed News.

Head below the fold for more stark contrasts.