Are We There Yet? The Election That Won’t Act Right.

We’re three months out, and the game has changed.

Was Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton a sign of defeat, or was it a shrewd and calculated gamble? Was it a Hail Mary pass?

Or was it some sort of power move? After all, she waited and waited, and all but begged Bernie for the endorsement.

So what could it mean that Bernie negotiated his endorsement of Hillary, yet didn’t drop out of the race?

The convention’s coming right up in Philadelphia (July 25th to 28th), and Bernie and his delegates will be there.

Bernie’s been a kink in the DNC’s plans all along. 

The news outlets have done a bang-up job portraying Bernie as nothing more than a high-minded dreamer who can’t possibly have the temperament to lead the nation—what with consistency, integrity, level-headedness, and critical thinking being highly undervalued and all.

They’ve painted Bernie as uncooperative and bitter, yet there’s actually no evidence of these things.

Since most of what we see and hear—and believe—comes to us courtesy of a corporately owned network of media that prizes profit and inside favors over objective journalism, we pretty much get what they give us.

The corporate media doles out what they want us to hear. And they decide how they want us to feel, too.

They want us afraid, paranoid, drugged, and depressed.

They want us in survival mode.

They want us desperate.

The media keeps us distracted with the Duggars and the Kardashians and good sales at Kohl’s and shit.

Because if we feel empowered, well-informed, confident, and hopeful—instead of panicky and afraid, we’ll make good decisions, which means we’ll be less likely to buy what they’re selling us.

Which in this case, is talentless reality TV stars, drugs galore, a lot of bad news, a horrible couple of Presidential candidates, and butter splashing artfully at Red Lobster.

So here we and our two-party system are with—

1. A hotheaded, temperamentally challenged, narcissistic pseudo-celebrity on one side, and

2. A fair-weather liberal with a taste for bloody conflict and a credibility problem on the other.

What the hell?

Prior to his endorsement of her, Bernie’s campaign worked for a month to get Clinton on board with his policies to the extent that he could, and I applaud him for his untold patience and determination.

I worry so bad, though, that she will, like she always does, adopt whatever is politically expedient and then water it down as soon as she’s got people hooked on her insincere left-ness.

Hillary Clinton is barely left, and she’s certainly no progressive. 

And you know what? She’s not even more qualified than Bernie Sanders. She was a Senator for less time than he’s been, remember, Obama was “only” a Senator when he took office.

Oh, and yeah, she was Secretary of State for those four war-mongering years.

(Being the First Lady isn’t political experience—it may be insider trading, so to speak, but it’s not experience.)

She’s just not the practical candidate we’re told she is.

I’ve gone over it before, how Hillary Clinton is just a really bad candidate.

I mean, Bill could smoke-and-mirrors us into liking him, but Hillary, bless her heart, has no charm.

Donald Jackass Trump has gotten where he has fair and square—which is horrid to consider—basically, as a consequence of the right’s courtship with ultra-conservatism and the media’s (and thus, America’s) thirst for the ludicrous.

(And like I’ve said before, America’s a sucker for a rich man in a suit, even a buffoon we’ve been laughing at for years.)

Clinton on the other hand, has played a dirty game, and she’s a defender of the status quo, as well, which is so terribly corrupt that I’m beginning to believe we’re no better than the underdeveloped countries we swoop in to “fix.”

As I write this, the Republican Convention is in full scary swing,

the Democratic Convention is days away, Jill Stein of the Green Party is getting all kinds of popular in the wake of Bernie’s Clinton endorsement, and there are three months left before the election.

And good lord, a lot can happen in three months.

A good number of Democrats are going around saying that not voting for Hillary is a vote for Trump, but consider this: What if the Green Party is suddenly good and on the map because no one can figure out why to vote for Hillary other than to keep Trump from winning?

What if our two-party commitment betrays us?

There’s a flaw in the same ol’ same ol’ plan.

We all know by now that voting for the lesser of two evils leaves us, as if by magic, evil.

And that’s the problem.

Not only are we now entrenched in evil from our habit of continually voting for it, but the evil we’re choosing between keeps getting more sophisticated and more difficult to fathom with each vote we cast.

We end up going backwards instead of forward.

Which is stupid.

We somehow expect these people we’ve hired by voting for them, who are, by our own admission, evil, to do their job in good conscience.

So maybe at the Democratic Convention, Bernie’ll keep talking like the revolutionary he is, and carry on with his call for more of us to get involved, run in local races, and run for state and national office. Maybe it’ll be a step in the right direction in cleaning up the party.

I don’t really know.

What I do know, is that with this election, Americans aren’t just looking for a President.

The real question is,

Do we keep going down this path toward greater and greater evil?

Or do we stop our downward spiral?

I don’t see either of the two presidential front-runners having anything better than force and corporate, bureaucratic trickery in their tool kit, neither of which will benefit regular citizens.

America currently values money, power, ego, and might, and I seriously don’t see Trump or Clinton as outside of this value system.

If Bernie by some chance goes to the Green Party, I’ll vote for the Green Party. I kind of don’t think he will, but Jill Stein and Bernie are rumored to be talking, so we’ll see. But I’m obviously not voting for the racist jackass, and I’m just not sold on Clinton.

Like I said, a lot can happen between now and November 8th.

Part of me wants the Trump crowd to get their way so we can watch the wreckage and say I told you so, but of course, once the sure disaster of a Trump presidency comes to pass, they’ll just blame Obama.

And part of me really wants to like—and trust—Hillary Clinton, but as it stands right now, I might end up voting for her for lack of a better plan, which is hella hard to swallow, but that’s a bad candidate for you.

We’re between a rock and a hard place, y’all.

So I’m putting my good old American optimism to work, and hoping for this motherfucker of an election to not be the apocalypse after all.

Anyway, who knows what Bernie’ll do next. Every time you think he’s ready to go back to Vermont and eat organic kale and stuff, nope, he’s out there peddling some more equality.

The thing is, Bernie Sanders just keeps not going away.

And that right there is a silver lining if I’ve ever seen one.

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