Endorsing Bernie: Four Posts, A Video And A Short Rant

I am endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) (no, that's not a mistake; from what I've read, he's running as a 'D') for President, for as long as he's in the race. Yes, I'll switch my vote to Hillary when Sanders inevitably loses at the primary level. Why am I doing this? That's easy to demonstrate.

First, the video:



... then some articles:

• DSWright at FDL: Team Clinton Worried Sanders Will Make Hillary ‘Look Like A Corporatist’
• John Nichols at The Nation: Bernie Sanders to Billionaires: ‘You Can’t Have It All!’
• tvdude at Kos: Bernie Sanders blows Wolf Blitzer's mind with a simple idea (guess it doesn't take much)
• John Nichols at The Nation: ‘Don’t Underestimate Me’: Bernie Sanders Knows a Thing or Two About Winning

Look. This could easily be my last presidential election. When it comes to voting, I've been a dedicated Democrat all my life. What did I get for my troubles? A rightward-running party (or at least its leadership), almost as corporatist as the GOP, wholly devoted to the surveillance state, supporting secret "free trade" agreements guaranteed to damage the average working American, running presidential candidates more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower, absorbing immense "campaign contributions" (virtual bribes) from corporations, again just like the GOP. As restaurant customers sometimes say, who ordered that? Not I, and not any other rank-and-file Democrat I know!

If I am to continue as a Democrat, there are going to have to be some changes to the disappointing entity the Democratic Party has morphed into in the past few decades. If that means I have to retract my commitment to strategic voting and actually vote my conscience in this potentially last show, well, damn the whole Obama‑Rahm‑a, that's what I'll do.

And there's no one actually running in the Democratic presidential field more credible, more consistent with my own political conscience, than Bernie Sanders. So at least for the primary, I'm voting for Bernie, and I urge you to do the same. If we end up with the semi-corporatist anyway, well, at least we will have done what we could toward the creation of (to paraphrase the late great Paul Wellstone) a democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Bernie 2016... join me!