(response to CVille Dem) Fun aside, all this joking about Sanders & his voters living in their mom's basement is quite a bit unfair, and worse, masking a much bigger problem.

Sanders is addressing some issues that need to be addressed, and others are coming up because of his candidacy. Some I agree with, some I disagree with, some I have a different view on implementation. There are many intelligent people of all ages, genders/sexual preferences and ethnic groups attracted to his message, and we've largely been oppressed with the dour limitations of what's possible the last 15 years, vs. what we wanted to do. Yeah, if you want to lose weight, you start one workout at a time, but you also think of the thinner healthier self in 3 or 6 or 12 months. We've been pretty goal-free the last 6, aside from holding off terrorism and not expanding our wars *too* much. Gay marriage happened without the administration. Legalized marijuana's been a state experiment only. Voter restrictions and open carry are perversely on the rise, as is police abuse of civilians (especially black) even while carrying fancy "protective" tasers they use indiscriminately, while Citizens United and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act took away protections we thought were settled. Recovery from 2009 hasn't been pretty even if we can start to say it's looking pretty good. "Pretty good" after 7 years isn't much of a rallying cry. It's pretty obvious that success dripped out painfully and sparingly over time won't attract a huge ovation. Even Obama's hallmark ACA was *designed* to drip out slowly. Cautious and no-drama is partly what's brought us here, especially in face of outrageous overreach on the other side ever since Bush declared his Supreme Court-abetted squeaker a "mandate" (or ever since Gingrich, or ever since Reagan...)

The 2012 elections were a waste due to issues that didn't come up - pretty content-free. Even this one, women's issues aren't touched, aside from some that have arisen due to gaffes, insults, or different ways of viewing comments. You'd think there was no great conservative conspiracy against abortion, for example, or that it was unimportant or less important than TPP, fracking, saying "predator", no fly zones or speech transcripts.

Wage equality and countering the McJobs & UberJobs ethos is important. I probably had a gut reaction against Bernie marching with Verizon strikers, but I also remember Rahm telling an Arkansas union it "flushed its money down the toilet" getting involved in an anointed election and Obama playing hands-off with Wisconsin's union mess. So it's nice seeing someone get their hands & reputation dirty with unions.

There's a lot been unsaid for so long, like the mute Chief Broom in Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah, to succeed in these political waters involves a lot of compromise and muted expressions and careful constructions - but sometimes this polite playing-by-the-rules bit simply sucks, and someone has to say so.

Benghazi wasn't stupid, but the overthrow of Libya was a huge brainfart, especially since Qaddafi had been cooperating with us post-9/11. Didn't prepare properly for post-overthrow? where have I heard that one - oh yeah, the vindictive morons who gave us Iraq II. Imitation is the severest form of flattery.

Yeah, Hillary keeping her own email server was stupid - who in government does this kind of thing? Especially as hackers get better, China goes rogue and after Bradley Manning walked out of a facility with a flash drive.

No, it doesn't take a brainiac to realize that after Goldman Sachs kept a 2nd set of books for Greece's crooked dealings and was a big player in 2008/9's meltdown that money for big speeches from these very same assholes wouldn't go over well, however much the economy has to live with Wall Street?

I have internal debates about trade agreements and success of job growth, but obviously we haven't been "growing jobs" like we used to bloviate about, and that "engine of the world's economy" looks pretty pathetic from a worker's eyes.

Environment? we got lucky that fracking & renewables have helped, because government and global cooperation have been pretty feeble, aside from someone like Merkel pushing the limits and installing a ton of unaffordable solar & wind.

Israel? Why the fuck are we even discussing Israel in a US election, much less namedropping a leader? Those glorious half-assed Camp David days are decades ago - dead since 2000 and permanent since Arafat's demise in 2004. We've gone from defending a people's right to exist to defending their right to board and fire on protest boats or build walls through occupied territories. Seriously.

Gun violence? Why let's hold another speech and day of mourning. Who's lost their job over this? Many more deaths than over San Bernardino, but the FBI's not cracking phones of the Bundies and other gun freaks - instead they want to do Open Carry at the GOP convention. Guess we showed them with that vote years ago. Must be getting old - please remind me what it was for?

Whatever happened to the 50 state push? Even if Obama p***ied out on it, what about the rest of our liberal crowd? Where's MoveOn, TruthDig, DailyKos, HuffPost, and Netroots and whoever? And that includes Bernie and HIllary and Howard Dean and so on - how did we let ourselves sit back on our asses and find ourselves shut out of most legislatures, behind in the Senate and A DISMAL FUCKING PARODY IN THE HOUSE where the lunatics rule the roost with all sorts of freaky trickle-down/tax-cut/anti-woman/racist anti-voter madness pushed by tea partiers to a hyper-exponential scale - and WE CAN'T EVEN MAKE THEM LOOK TOO STUPID TO ELECT.

Think of this - DONALD TRUMP IS DOING OUR WORK FOR US. It took this self-inflated blowhard to expose modern "conservatism" as the most utter bullshit, vapid, content-free movement in recent memory with constantly shifting sands and hollow platitudes that never ever ever get followed through. Mitt Romney, whose claim to fame was a cheap imitation health program inspired by liberals and vulture capitalism inspired in spite of his father's ethics lost by only 4%. If the Republicans had just found a half-sane person who wasn't a Bush, they would WIN THIS ELECTION. instead they got a guy preaching grain pyramids, and another one eeryone hates who likes shutting down government again & again, and then a few other unknown brazenly incompetent and hateful fuckers, so we can go into these last primaries thinking we've got an easy road.

Except our road leads to the top of the shit heap, and there's not fuck-all we can do about it for the next 4 years because our organization and messaging is still bullshit. Obama's cabinet was filled with Wall Street fuckers who papered over the bailout and gave several sweetheart deals to the worst criminals, and now Hillary's message is "I wasn't too nice to them, but they are my homies" as she pockets a quick $1 million or so for 3 speeches - roughly 5 times a Senator's salary. We're debating single payer as if it meant something when the GOP tricked us into leaving 35 MILLION UNINSURED, 11%. WE DIDN'T ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE DESPITE ALL THIS YAPPING. Cutting it by 45% or so was great, but still way short.

The 2 Democratic candidates aren't even debating the FBI's demands on Apple or the escalated surveillance under Obama, much less what's happened since Bush rammed FISA revisions up our ass a decade and a half ago. The Panama Papers is the 3rd great leak after Manning & Snowden, but it's done 0 to bring us to address the shadow economy and what that means about all these rich bastards content to use their lobbyists to shove through unfair legislation and court rulings and stack all branches of government to make their thieving and country club living a slam dunk. Corporates like Amazon and Google and Apple and Microsoft not paying taxes? Ho-hum.

The biggest complaint about Occupy Wall Street was that it was run by a bunch of hippies with no leader or focused expression of what they want. So now they found one. And the best we can muster is, "but it's not realistic!!!" Well Bernie's not going to get elected anyway, so he doesn't have to be realistic - he has to tell people what he wants, and if he gets #OWS cubed or to the tenth power behind him, it's up to the elected to figure out how to achieve it or get their asses thrown out.

Even there, we're pathetic - we've turned America's Dream into a demand of a minimum $30K a year job, or $24K by Hillary's reckoning, ignoring the increased unemployment that goes with that, while the economy and overpaid CEO's and investors shove as many of those now piece-work jobs towards the bottom edge. That minimum's roughly 30-40 years of work to make the equivalent of 3 speeches to those thieving cretins at Goldman Sachs. What the fuck was she thinking? Her salary and husband's $90 million wasn't enough?

We've got huge issues related to the environment, jobs, survival, health, our future and the planet's, what kind of fairness and opportunity and social improvement and overall just & livable landscape we leave to our kids. And yet night after night we joke about these dismal politicians who can't even show their taxes or tell us what they talk about with bankers behind doors, but we're supposed to believe them and their proposals, even though we know they don't even understand technology except how to run a rogue email server or a crooked financial trading scheme, the way the bastards rig car emissions and the extent of oil spills (still remember BP & the never-ending Gulf spill?) and the number of drone deaths and polluted water and civil war deaths and poverty and lack of progress in dealing with issues that didn't look near this bad back in the 70's when Detroit was collapsing and on the rot.

And here we are, reminiscing about the days when the economy was so good we were able to cut welfare and give huge permanent tax breaks to the rich and set up a housing Ponzi scheme and lock up minorities instead of figuring out a sane way of offering real opportunity and integration and belonging to 1/7th our citizenry and live up to the pro-immigration words on the Statue of Liberty, put there as a roadsign in our biggest harbor almost 150 years ago. Hint: if it won't survive the next onslaught of the barbarians across the aisle, it's probably not a long-term solution, eh?

To paraphrase Ewan McGregor, "It's SHITE being Democrats! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate Republicans. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. Can't even find a decent party to be colonized by. We're ruled by effete arseholes. It's a SHITE state of affairs to be in, and all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference!"

As Jon Stewart once said, "We suck less" isn't a standard to run by. How 'bout we excel more - grow a pair and a real vision? Maybe instead of a dumbass donkey, it could be the People's Party - how novel.