I usually don’t respond to these, especially when it starts off by comparing my ideas to “East German SED.” However, you at least acknowledged the reality and implications of Bernie’s NYDN interview, so I felt like that deserved a response.

Willful misinterpretation

I don’t even really understand what you’re trying to say here. Do you think I’m criticizing Berniecrats for not signing on to every Democratic Party agenda item? I don’t sign on to every agenda item. Especially these new economic nationalism ideas Schumer has been pushing to try to create the very truce I reject. My problem is that the Berniecrats don’t even seem to properly understand what the Democratic Party’s positions are. Sanders keeps telling them the party is a failure and its ideas are terrible and corporate, and in order to justify agreeing with him they have to misinterpret the party agenda, since otherwise he’d be lying and we can’ have that can we?

Dodd-Frank

You should read this very recent article about Glass-Steagal, lots of good summaries about why the law A) had become antiquated, and B) was not primarily responsible for the financial crisis, in spite of what Bernie keeps telling you. Yes, it did create some problems (see below). But most people either didn’t anticipate those at the time, or underestimated the risk and consequences. The repeal of Glass-Steagal wasn’t a malicious, corporate act, it was cleaning up the law by getting rid of a bunch of old rules nobody was following anymore that were seen as unnecessarily restraining the companies. I find that most Berniecrats don’t even know what Glass-Steagal was supposed to do other than “stop banks from becoming too big to fail” though. Maybe I’ll write an article about it.

By the way, I have a random question. The Wiki article on Glass-Steagal reads:

During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (Democrat of Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming “too big to fail.” Dingell further argued that this would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government.

which I would think you’d strongly agree with. Dingell had his wife replace him in Congress, and they were both big supporters of Hillary Clinton; she even voted for Hillary as a superdelegate. My question is, are the Dingells heroes or villains to you?

Success is measured by successful prosecutions

This is an idea that’s been pushed by a lot of people with an agenda, most notably the movie The Big Short. The truth is that the financial crisis wasn’t the fault of any single malicious actor or group of actors engaging in illegal activity. It was a lot of people in the chain making what seemed, from their perspective, to be minor-to-moderate transgressions or risks, that in total added up to an enormous risk. Think about it. If someone knew that their behavior would cause a financial crisis, wouldn’t they have just done what the guys in The Big Short did and make bank betting against the housing market? Nobody saw this coming. They were all just going through business as usual. If you think people should obviously have been prosecuted and jailed, please list three people and the specific crimes they committed with respect to the financial crisis. At any rate, even were this true this is the fault of the DOJ, so why are you pinning blame on the Democratic Party? Warren for instance has repeatedly (and similarly without giving reasons or specific targets, which I consider dishonest) called for prosecution and imprisonment of Wall Street executives.

DWS resignation is proof of guilt

DWS got bullied out of the position because Sanders and his campaign threatened to throw the convention into chaos unless she resigned. It just wasn’t worth staying on to maintain her dignity at that point. Of course, Sanders didn’t do much to stop the chaos he’d already caused anyway.

I think your next line here is “Hillary hired her on her campaign!” Hillary gave her an honorary role so she wouldn’t be unemployed and so that she could maintain some of her dignity, instead of leaving the impression she’d been unceremoniously thrown under the bus. People always bring this up like DWS just moved from being a Hillary sleeper agent in the DNC to revealing her true form as a Hillary general. But the truth is it was just Hillary trying to be nice, and we never heard from DWS again.

There was no dirty play or anti-Sanders activity revealed in the WikiLeaks e-mails. Please read this article. Everything you have heard about them has probably been through secondary sources. For something like this, you have to go read the primary source. Go to the e-mails with an open mind and see what they actually say, in context, and make up your own mind. It’s impossible to do so and come to any conclusion other than that you’ve been lied to by malicious actors and/or lazy people in the media who want a story. WikiLeaks started it all by lying themselves:

Wikileaks didn’t just haphazardly dump the information: It used its Twitter account to highlight emails that supposedly exposed a corrupt effort by the DNC to secure the presidential nomination for Clinton… emails highlighted by Wikileaks as evidence of corruption in fact show staffers getting guidance from attorneys on how to comply with campaign finance laws and spitballing ways to respond to attacks from Sanders on the integrity of the nomination process… Wikileaks’s tweets conjured dark and menacing conspiracies, but these are not borne out by the emails themselves. Take the group’s claim that the “DNC knew of Hillary paid troll factory attacking Sanders online.” The highlighted email isn’t some secret communication laying out nefarious plots. It’s a summary of a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday.

I’m against single payer. Fully. The Social Insurance model as exemplified by the Swiss or German Krankenkassen are the way to go. I was disappointed in Sanders when the Editors in New York asked him, “How ya gonna pay for it?” and he didn’t have an answer.

The Bernie would have won for sure idea is undercut by the fact that no one saw what the Republican Party would have done with his past. They have a powerful media machine. He never faced it.

Thank God, we’ve been saying this for almost two years now, maybe it’s finally starting to catch on :)