Bye-Bye Bernie

The biggest rationale for Bernie Sanders staying in the race was the very real possibility that Joe Biden might collapse, either physically or mentally, before Election Day. With so many states cancelling primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden reaching the requisite majority is doubtful. The Democratic National Committee likely will still have had to change its rules to allow the loathsome "I'm the guy" guy with the most votes to become the nominee of the party.  

Forget about the dreaded second ballot. There won't even be a first ballot, whether at a public convention or in a back room on a billionaire's yacht.

Today, Bernie relinquished any remaining leverage he still had over the corrupt Democratic party. Was his heart ever really in actually winning in the first place? With sickness and misery raging all around me, I must confess that I don't much care at this point whether he was sincere or whether he was a sheepdog herding the straying-from-neoliberalism lamb chops into the Democratic fold prior to shearing if not outright slaughter.

To be fair, though, Bernie probably rushed the performance of his last bow in order to prevent any more infections among voters, who risked their very lives going to the polls in Wisconsin yesterday.

Even with the country in economic and social shambles, the corporate media propagandists are busily trying to sell the narrative that the barely-there Biden will now finally be free to forge a "unity ticket" to attract both Republicans and "progressives." The fact that he's also under pressure to name his entire cabinet right now is probably a good sign, because if he chooses a retro Obama era cabinet lousy with corporate CEOs and Citigroup and Goldman Sachs bankers and war-mongering neocons who style themselves as "liberal interventionists," then we won't have to wait till November to find out that the beatings will continue and that we'll be well and truly screwed for at least another four years. With Biden's insane vow that there will be no single payer health care system under his watch and with a thousand more Americans dying of the virus in just one day, many of us won't even be around to vote for anybody.

It'll be interesting to see whether Biden would retain torture maven "Bloody Gina" Haspell as his CIA director, or whether Russiagate troll and Kill List architect John Brennan would get his old job back.

The news that Black people are being disproportionately infected with and killed by this virus should also give Biden and the centrists some serious pause. Black voters didn't come out for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because she was such a horrible candidate. And they might not come out for Biden in 2020 - because despite Jim Clyburn's previous success at herding his South Carolina constituents into the Biden tent, the voter rolls will be purged more effectively by sickness and death than by the standard kind of suppression so beloved of Trump and the Republicans.

Depending on your perspective on probably the most important Greater Lesser Evil election theater of our lifetimes, it's also probably a relief that at least the televised debates will also be a no-go.  Trump will be deprived of the opportunity to upstage and destroy Biden before a live audience. One-on-one Face Time sessions between these two doddering dolts will just not have the excitement and drama of the unreal real thing we've already been enduring for far too long.

I have already written for far too long and far too often about the corporate media's unfair and disgusting coverage of Bernie Sanders, as well as Bernie's own self-defeating knee-jerk "Joe Biden is a good friend of mine" reactions to any and all invitations to destroy Biden's candidacy while he still had the chance. I'll leave the post mortems to others and also avoid reading all the phony ass-covering praise of Bernie Sanders popping up all over the corporate media. 

Life is, quite literally, way too short and too precious to dwell on this stuff. Because as I have also written before, revolution never comes out of a presidential election. 

I hope my readers are all safe and in good health.