Breaking Bernie: 21st Century Rat-Fucking

Deep Throat: What's the topic for tonight?
Bob Woodward: Rat-fucking.
Deep Throat: [lights a cigarette] In my day it was called double-cross. In simple context, it means infiltration of the Democrats.


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What a difference a few months makes. When I wrote about the state of the presidential race previously, I did not anticipate two events. First, I did not foresee the Republican Party primary race being hijacked by a reality TV star. Lord knows how long Donald Trump will keep sucking up all the oxygen from the rest of the personality-challenged GOP field, but with a personal bankroll nearly eleven figures large (insert your own Spinal Tap joke), the answer appears to be: as long as he goddamn pleases, so suck it, losers! Second, it appears that I was wrong when I placed Senator Bernie Sanders "in the same camp as Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee and anyone else who wants to throw their hat in the ring: next in line in case Hillary Clinton is photographed abusing an endangered species or in bed with anyone other than Bill."

Sanders clearly is not in the same camp; clearly the man has more campaign savvy than the grassroots-left favorite single-digit polling Kucinich, which I thought he was. Though it is still very, very early, he is currently polling ahead of Clinton 44-37 in the pivotal early voting primary state of New Hampshire. He regularly draws crowds in the tens of thousands, whereas the rest of the candidates struggle to regularly draw crowds in the thousands, with the exception of The Donald, who still exaggerates the size of his crowds to try to keep up with Bernie. Momentum is clearly on Senator Sanders' side. When Bernie speaks, his popularity grows.

There's no such thing as a perfect candidate (philosophically, I think perfect is an imperfect concept), especially in the corrupt unsustainable system we're currently saddled with. Bernie's not about to address what truly ails civilization by changing the way money works so that it's no longer predicated on the debt machine of fiat currency, fractional reserves and compound interest and instead is representative of energy, both the human energy that we produce through our labor and the planet's energy that we utilize. But Bernie has multiple planks in his platform that does address changing the way money is distributed in a significant manner. Reinstating Glass-Steagall, breaking up banks that are "too big to fail," taxing Wall Street speculation, ending offshore tax havens and subsidies to Big Business, and fixing the tax code to alleviate systemic inequalities would be a monumental shake-up of the status quo, perhaps the most serious threat since Robert F. Kennedy's run in 1968.





It is for this reason that I don't believe the system will allow him to win. Not just because of what he stands for, other people have run for the White House on a similar platform, but because of how many people he is reaching. Rather than wait for Sanders to accrue a significant number of delegates so that he has bargaining power at the Democratic Convention in July at Philadelphia, I believe that powerful interests that stand the most to lose from a Sanders administration will work early to try to sabotage his campaign, which on a personal level would sadly make my vote for him in the California primary on June 7 a moot point. For those who find the possibility of such a 'conspiracy' far-fetched, I would point you to the quote at the top of the page and remind you that the movie All the President's Men was based on a true story.