I agree with most of what Will Bunch says today about a 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential run doing more harm to his legacy and, with entirely more importance, the lives of millions of people who could benefit from what he can do and has done. Bernie Sanders can, still, as a Senator start the formation of legislation that, when the Republican-fascists don't control the government, could quickly win approval and be made law*.
Bernie Sanders may have loved being a cult figure, I think he obviously enjoyed it as much as any politician who becomes one tends to. His current cult of devoted followers aren't the brightest pebbles on the left shore of American politics, they are the devotees of the unrealistic and impossible and never will be. He will never be president of the United States, his run in 2016 was damaging to the one and only candidate who had a chance to keep Trump from office. The role that his right-hand-man Jeff Weaver and, frankly, his far from above-board wife and others high up and in the mid ranks of his campaign staff played in driving down the Democratic vote in November should never be forgotten**. Apparently many of those people are involved in the push for him to run again in 2020, no doubt they'll still crank up the whiney sirens of crank conspiracy when Bernie Sanders fails to win the nomination again, LEST IT BE FORGOTTEN, FAILING TO WIN THE NOMINATION OF A PARTY HE IS NOT A MEMBER OF.
It is beyond outrageous that Bernie Sanders is even talking about AGAIN running for the nomination of a party he didn't belong to until well after he decided to run for its nomination AND WHICH HE QUIT AS SOON AS THE ELECTION WAS OVER. The Democratic Party must adopt rules to prevent even well-meaning carpetbaggers and attempted hijackers like Sanders from being eligible for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. It should adopt rules that prevent non-Democrats from running the kind of destructive, counter-productive campaigns that his was in 2016. It should, as well, learn from the disaster of having a cult figure whose cult can get turnouts for the always low-turnout caucuses BY ABOLISHING CAUCUSES! Caucuses are an anti-democratic abomination that should have ended in the 19th century with the invention of the telegraph and rail road travel. There is no good excuse to put the choice of any state's delegates in the hands of a small number of people when it is always the case that a primary will have far higher participation than caucuses.
I will be campaigning for the Democratic Party to take total control of its nominations processes by adopting such rules WITH AN EYE TO GETTING THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTERS PARTICIPATING IN THE CHOICE. A national primary done entirely by the Democratic Party with the participants being only real, declared members of the Democratic Party, by secure mail-in ballots would seem to be the best choice for having that choice be made by the largest number of people. Either the Democratic Party reforms itself in the most democratic way possible, or it should change its name. The idiots who have allowed the disgusting, disgraceful caucus ridden mish-mash that has had such bad results for us to go on this long proves they are incompetent to come up with anything that will fix it, too many of them have ulterior motives, often on behalf of some faction or other. I've been on enough boards and committees to know how that works. We should learn from the experience of states which conduct their elections by mail in designing that system, NOT ON THE MACHINATIONS OF SELF-INTERESTED IDIOTS ON SUB COMMITTEES. We should entirely ignore what the pundit class says, they're mostly such idiots, themselves.
* It is going to be necessary for Democrats to refuse to abide by Republican-fascist Supreme Court nullification of duly adopted laws, whether by radically altering the makeup of the court - which I think is a good idea, and/or by refusing to abide by court rulings that have less than unanimous agreement by the justices that the laws violate the Constitution. As my wise friend RMJ pointed out, the Supreme Court has radically altered the Constitution by 5- 4 rulings that the large majority of the people in the country would have to do through the arduous, cumbersome process of amendment. It is sheerest idiocy to allow five political hacks or 6 or even 8 to exercise that kind of power. And no one should be under any illusion that the present court, where most of the members are chosen by the Federalist-fascists and the American Enterprise Institute are anything more than ideological hacks who were put on the court to do the bidding of the billionaires that finance those engines of dainty, clean language, clean finger-nailed fascism. With Kavanaugh they've pretty well broken open the door to his kind of vulgar fascism on the court, we don't need to pretend they're anything more than they have been since the thugish voter-intimidator Rehnquist was put on it.
** I think a lot of them, including those named, have too much of a financial interest in Sanders running again. It would be sad to see him end his days as the Herman Cain or Alan Keyes of Democratic Socialism. Him running in 2020 would put him in that category, only Cain and Keyes didn't do it while they weren't Republicans and who didn't hurt the Republican Party.
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