(By American Zen's @mikeflannigan59, on loan from Ari)
"Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that. She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States." - Bernie Sanders, July 11, 2016, New Hampshire
Come on, Bernie bros, you knew this was coming.
It was inevitable, like a 9.0 Richter-class fart after a ten course Tex Mex meal. Go ahead, it's OK to feel hurt, betrayed, bewildered. But with the political establishment's countless leaks, it can't come as any great surprise that even Bernie Sanders, the greatest Socialist champion since Eugene Debs, finally sold out to the unstoppable terrible beauty that is Hillary Clinton's new Tammany Hall.
And I'm not going to pretend that Sanders is hedging his bets and luring Clinton into some Ali-esque Rope-a-Dope maneuver that will magically pay off at the convention, as many Bernie bros are deluding themselves into believing. It's OK to be hurt since we've been hearing a consistent message from Camp Sanders that Wall Street is corrupt, wars must stop and I am not dropping out.
It certainly doesn't help any when America's biggest scumbag over the last 13 months echoes our sentiments and saying it for all of us.
It's over. And now all we're left with is an unelectable Elizabeth Warren Mini Me named Dr. Jill Stein who's hardly even known in her native state. Stein couldn't get elected dog catcher anywhere in Massachusetts and everyone knows it. Stein is like that barfly you never paid attention to the first six hours you were there but now that it's coming up on Last Call, suddenly doesn't look so bad, anymore.
It's over, I said, but I refer to the campaign, not the dream that Bernie had implanted in each of us over these past 15 months since throwing his hat in the ring. Somehow, Tammany Hall reached him. It's hard to imagine what they could have on him since not a speck of dirt on him had ever been unearthed because there simply was nothing to find. Perhaps it was when some Blue Dog representative from Obama's home state booed him last week when Sanders met with "Democrats" on Capitol Hill. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the old camel's back.
But at the very least, the optics look bad. Bernie looks like a sellout and whether or not that's true, in politics, as in everywhere in life but especially politics, optics is 90% reality. The guy who along with Trump rightly called Hillary a crook and a liar is now holding up her hand as if she already won the nomination or, God forbid, the presidency. We could have tee shirts with Hillary's laughing puss printed up and sold at Cafe Press: "I paid a quarter of a billion dollars and all I got was this lousy Wall Street oligarch."
The guy who taught us on his website how to run for public office is now teaching us how to be a sellout to a corrupt "Democratic" establishment, that it's OK to vote for a smaller monster in order to vote against a larger monster. I don't why he couldn't hold out for another two weeks until the convention. I don't know what he thought he had to gain by capitulating to the Tammany Hall wing of the so-called Democratic Party- One way or the other, he won't find many open arms and pursed lips on the Beltway waiting to greet him back the day after Election Day.
Do as We Say and Do as We Do, Or Else.
About the closest Bernie will ever get to cooperation from Tammany Hall is when Hillary steals planks from his own platform in order to temporarily amass some populist appeal. But it can't be said his platforms, always delivered with a loud and sour persona that couldn't've endeared him to many, ever truly took hold.
As proof of this, look at the plainly right wing agenda adopted by the "Democratic" Platform Drafting Committee, which has been getting its marching orders from Hillary and her flaks by text message. In fact, as far as the Drafting Committee goes (take a look at their hilarious website that boasts of its "progressive Democratic values"), while the platform is eerily similar to Clinton's, as far as the TPP goes it's even more right wing than Hillary's (current) stance on it. The Platform Committee also voted against a $15 minimum wage, proposals against fracking and, as usual, one against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Real progressive Democratic values if your sole frame of reference is 19th century Tammany Hall.
In other words, the party's shit-stained platform that will stink up Philadelphia later this month will be pretty much in spirit if not in deed indistinguishable from the GOP's own 1976 platform. The rules that were put forth after hearing from 144 witnesses are geared to protecting banks, corporations, Israel and Hillary Clinton for the simple reason they are all of a piece in some toxic symbiosis.
And Bernie's wonderful, truly progressive ideas didn't make a dent in the committee's platform adoptions. Not. One. Bit.
There are two subdivided camps in Camp Bernie: One which is being philosophical and insisting that Bernie's just hedging his bets and the other is outraged and betrayed. I am in the latter camp. We feel as if we were being led to the Promised Land by a wizened old mage we'd trusted only to be led off a cliff while he turned to the right.
It's OK to feel outraged. It's OK to be mad.
But please spare me your surprise. It was inevitable and it wasn't as if the dependable leaks weren't working this time. Sure, the dream is still alive. But it will not be for much longer as long as Hillary's Tammany Hall has its foot on the ventilator hose and its bloody hand on the plug. And Bernie just taught us hours ago that crime does pay, every damned time.