Take Your Pick

I like Bernie Sanders. It's clear that the man has his shit thoroughly together. I have no idea what took him so long to run for the office of President of these quais-United States except that maybe he had more important things to do in the Senate. He's creaky-freaky-old but I'm sure he has a few more good years left before he goes full-Reagan on us.

In my view Bernie Sanders' role in the campaign was originally to give Hillary Clinton an opponent. It was common wisdom she had the nomination wrapped up but she needed someone substantial to debate, even though Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the DNC, did her best to keep them hidden from public view.

What neither Hillary nor Schultz suspected was that Bernie's message would resonate with so many people. Thus the political now now unfolding.

But I like Hillary, too. She scares a lot of people with R's after their name, because she's a political animal, she's incredibly bright and, most of all, she's a "she", not a "he". That's a combination that people with wide stances in public restrooms simply cannot abide.

Ever since it became apparent that she had eyes on the White House the conservative powers that be have spent untold millions of public monies trying to nail her on something, anything, even if they had to invent problems. Like underfunding foreign embassies and waiting for people to die as a result, completely ignoring the fact that the same situation occurred multiple times during the Dubya years and of which no one, especially Republicans, said a goddamn word. Know why? Because everyone knew that shit happens and it's not always somebody's fault. Unless you have two X chromosomes.

Now we've got this email scandal which, unless they find pictures of Hillary sacrificing naked children over a roaring fire fueled by newborn puppies to the glory of Alan Greenspan, is just another fishing expedition. Karl Rove dumped 22 million emails from a private server in 2007 and the corporate media yawned, rolled over, and waited for another celebrity to die of a drug overdose or bare their sweater muffins in public.

I keep hearing these bullshit stories that a President Hillary would gut us all like catfish for the benefit of Wall Street and that she'd be endlessly war-mongering. I'm getting rather tired of it all, especially since it all seems  to originate from the same sources which adamantly stated that millions of American would die of Ebola, damn that Obama's black hide.

But I, personally, have no qualms about happily pulling the lever for Hillary if it comes to that. The conservative alternative is throat-slittingly awful. But you know what? Bernie may yet win California next week and that might, just might, throw the nominating process into such a tizzy that it could result in his snagging him the nomination.

Bigger picture, though, regardless of who's the candidate a Republican-majority Congress will continue to do absolutely nothing for a Democratic chief executive. You want real change in government then don't worry about Hillary or Bernie, worry about the House.

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Whether you know it or not something extraordinary is happening in this election cycle. For the first time in decades a sitting president is going to be spending significant time on the campaign trail stumping for his party's candidates.

Think about it: Dubya ran and hid, Bill Clinton still bore the stink of that blue dress, H.W. Bush didn't have the opportunity, and Reagan was non compus mentis. Carter, Ford and Nixon simply couldn't and LBJ wouldn't. JFK was CIA-ed. Eisenhower liked golf better than Nixon. Harry Truman, however, went on a whistle-stop tour for Adlai Stevenson, which breaks the string, but only briefly because the previous presidents, Roosevelt and Hoover didn't stump, either. I think I'll leave it at that.

=Lefty=