Good Night until November

[Jack Rabbit]

This is my last post before taking a hiatus from DU until after the election.

When the 2016 election began 14 months ago, I committed to support Bernie Sanders within minutes of the formation of the BSG. No one really knew what to expect. I thought it possible that Bernie would run out of money quickly and would have to fold his campaign in a short time. As we know, although as Camp Weathervane will admit it, the campaign was a great success, not in the sense that our candidate will be the next president, but in the sense that our candidate survived the process with the deck stacked against him to be the voice of disenfranchised Democrats in Philadelphia next month.

Make no mistake about it: the deck was stacked and the stacking continues as this is being written. David Brock’s lies, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s unilateral decisions on debate scheduling and the obscene ploy of unilaterally cutting the campaign’s access to its own files on the DNC database, the lies coming out of the Nevada state party convention and the clearly rigged judgments of the voice by by a party chairwoman who is apparently deaf, the corporate media’s declaring Mrs. Clinton the winner of debates by rote, even after a ridiculous performance about her support for Wall Street being about the September 11 attacks and had nothing to do with millions in campaign funds and even exorbitant speaking fees going straight into Mrs. Clinton’s purse. Of course, there was all that coverage they gave Bernie. It was journalistic malpractice.

I paid no attention to the residents of Camp Weathervane and the nonsense they produced. For example, charging that any attack on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign finance ethics being a “smear.” I’ve got some beachfront property by the Sea of Tranquility at bargain prices for anyone who believes that. I also found Camp Weathervane’s mindset of primary-campaign-as-sporting-event annoying. They actually thought all this campaign was about was who would be the Democratic nominee. We Sandernistas have known all along that it is about much, much more. And we won because Mrs. Clinton failed to stop us. We won because we will continue to fight for our vision of America, a vision in which it is hard to see crooked bankers like Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. The only place for people like them in our vision of America is Fort Leavenworth.

I can’t say with certainty that, if it were not for the underhanded Mr. Brock, the scurrilous, biased behavior of Mrs. Wasserman Schultz, the tainted money of Wall Street banksters and other corporate criminals or the lies from the corporate media that Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee instead of Hillary Clinton, but it’s a sure bet that the vote count would have been even closer than it was.

We Sandernistas stand with people made of flesh and blood, not with corporations made of legal documents. We are the true heirs of the New Deal. We will continue to fight for human rights, a clean environment, political justice and economic justice. If that last element is a code word for socialism, then let us make the most of it. The Third Way is the way Reaganomics and neoliberalism, of income inequality, rising personal debt and austerity. It is doomed, perhaps not in this election cycle, but perhaps the next one or the one after that. Neoliberalism is an unsustainable model and it will crash. Adapt to the changing times with us, or die alone.

We are the future.