Let’s be honest.  If I wanted to go the easy route and write a story about the utter clusterfuck that is the 2016 presidential election, I’d just write about the walking manifestation of an internet comments section that is Donald Trump and be done with it.  But there are a couple of problems with this.  See, if I were to express my true feelings about the walking Cheeto, I might get a visit from the Secret Service.  Also, I know quite literally no one at this point stupid enough to vote for Trump for any reason other than “He’s Not Hillary”.  And finally, should this blog somehow be found by Trump’s mouth-breathing, racist, sexist, redneck supporters, I really don’t want to hear from them in the comments.  So instead, I’m going to write about a guy who’s almost as big a fuckwad as Trump is.

I’m going to write about Bernie Sanders.

See, Sanders and his supporters are raising a massive stink about the Democratic primary process this year and complaining about how it’s rigged against him.  How it’s designed to push the election toward the establishment politicians who actually understand the system.  And he’s gone so far as to back the primary opponent of the DNC chairwoman in her Florida district.

(Jesus, it’s ridiculous how similar Sanders and Trump are.)

Here’s the thing: there’s a reason the Democratic standard bearers are “rigging” the election toward Hillary Clinton.  And that’s because she’s been vetted by the party elite for, conservatively – no pun intended – the last 25 years, and she’s had a connection to the party for almost 40.  She may damn well be a Republican when you look at her history – hell, she WAS a Republican until 1968 – but then, by Republican standards in 2016, so was Ronald Reagan.  The system is “rigged” toward Clinton because she’s the Democrats’ best opportunity to keep the Oval Office for the next 4 years.

And Bernie?  Well, Bernie ain’t a Democrat.

Look, I get it.  Sanders isn’t the establishment, he speaks to the disenfranchised, he says what people want to hear in an effort to boost his support.  In other words, he’s supposedly the Democratic Trump.

Except for one thing.

He’s not a Democrat.

Now, to be fair, neither am I.  Or, perhaps more accurately, I don’t consider myself a Democrat (some of my more conservative friends would certainly disagree).  I can’t really bitch about people voting for Trump as a mechanism to keep Hillary Clinton from office, because the only reason I’m voting for Clinton is to keep Trump out of office.  I’ve long said that I would’ve voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 if he could’ve come up with some semblance of a plan to fix the economy, and I hate both Republicans and Mormons.

The difference is that I don’t have to be a Democrat because, you know, I’m not running for president as a Democrat.

Bernie is.  And Bernie?  Well, Bernie’s not a Democrat.

Now, the real question is, does it matter that Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat?  Well, ideally, no, it doesn’t.  We shouldn’t be limited to the best candidate from a ridiculous two-party system that’s been in place since our nation was founded.  If the best candidate is a Socialist, we should vote for them.  If they’re a Libertarian, we should vote for them.  And if, God forbid, they’re a Republican, we should vote for them.

(At this point I should point out that the best candidate will never be either Socialist or Republican.)

But sadly, we live in a world where, if you’re not a Democrat or a Republican, you’re probably not going to become president.  It’s not an impossibility, but it’s more likely that a third-party candidate, even if they are backed by boatloads of money, is only going to fracture one of the parties and ensure the other take the White House.  And so, if you want to become president, you sure as shit better be either a Democrat or a Republican.

So Sanders became a Democrat.  In 2015.  Supposedly.

On Sanders’s Wikipedia page, there is a section entitled “Party affiliation since 2015” (true story, you can check it out here).  Now, again, it shouldn’t matter what your party affiliation is, but it does.  And when you’re trying to win the nomination of one of the two major parties in this country, there shouldn’t be any ambiguity about what party you belong to.

Now, if, by some miracle, you decide to “become” a member of one of these parties and obtain millions of votes in the primary and get your platform out to the nation, good for you.  And if those millions of votes takes you to the nomination, fantastic.  But if they don’t, and if there is no realistic possibility for you to win that election by literally any possible calculation, you do what Sanders needs to do right now.

You go the fuck away.

Ted Cruz and John Kasich are human scum, but they did one thing I’d describe as admirable if I could describe anything they did as such.  They walked away when they knew the only way to win was to have their party say, “Eh, fuck the will of the people, we don’t like the big orange toupee, we’ll give you the nomination at the convention.”  Mind you, there were plenty of people within their party who were perfectly willing to let that happen, so to say Cruz or Kasich had no chance at the nomination isn’t quite accurate.  But their chances were…well, they were about as good as winning the nomination as Bernie Sanders’s is now.

So they went away.

Not Sanders.  Sanders sticks around, ignores the way the winds are blowing, and rants about the rules of the party he only joined because if he ran as the socialist that he is he would’ve gotten as many votes as I would.  And because a great deal of his supporters are the same kind of morons that Trump’s supporters are, that means we get to hear stories about how they’re calling up Nevada’s Democratic chairperson and threatening them because the system is supposedly “rigged”.

Sanders is the little brother who tags along to play hoops because your mom told you to take him with you, then complains because your friends didn’t let him win.

Sanders has some interesting ideas.  I won’t say they’re good ideas, because one of the core tenets of a good idea should be that it’s a realistic idea, and frankly, none of them really are.  Single-payer healthcare?  Sure.  You just wiped out the medical insurance industry.  College tuition for everyone?  How are you going to pay for it and, further, how does that affect the private schools throughout the country (although, to be fair, if it meant that Duke were forced to close up shop, I’d be all for it)?  A $15 minimum wage?  Sounds good, until you realize half the fast food employees would probably be unemployed the day that wage took effect.  But these ideas are enough to convince disenfranchised people who are swimming in college debt and think that working at McDonald’s is a worthwhile career will somehow get implemented and change their lives.

They’re as dumb as the people who believe that Trump is going to build a wall.

I’m not a Hillary guy.  Not by a long shot.  But the sooner Sanders gets out of the way the sooner she can stop dividing her focus between two anti-establishment morons and focus on the one that poses a greater threat to this planet (and lest you think I’m being hyperbolic when saying Trump is a threat to our planet, a recent report listed his becoming president as the sixth greatest threat to the security of the world).

Go the fuck away Bernie.  If you leave graciously and Clinton needs the Bernie Bros’ support, maybe you’ll stumble yourself into the vice presidency.  You can’t possibly be any worse than Dan Quayle.