practicing democracy during a pandemic

This post has had so many re-writes over the last weeks. I originally wanted to comment on how the novel corona virus was being handled in the US (not very well at all) and the reasons for the poor handling. Next was Bidens’ winning rout through South Carolina. Then there was Super Tuesday (and the start of early voting here in Florida on the same day) and Biden’s continued rout through the Super Tuesday voting states. By the time the dust had cleared, Biden had the lead in delegates, and four candidates had dropped out, with three of them endorsing Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the last of the four to leave, has yet to endorse either Biden or Sanders, and I can understand that. She fought long and hard, harder than anybody still standing, and had articulated pretty clearly what, why, and most importantly how she would execute her platform if elected President. I feel we have lost the better candidate with Warren’s exit, better than Biden, and certainly better than Sanders.

A week ago Biden picked up the three ‘M’ states in primary voting, which included Michigan, Sander’s so-called fire-wall state, the state he had to win. He lost it big time to Biden. Then this past Tuesday more states (Illinois, Arizona and Florida) overwhelmingly chose Biden. I helped by voting for Biden the first day of early voting.

So let’s talk about Sanders for a moment. Back in 2016 I wrote a positive post about Sanders, titled “Feel the Bern”. I have since come to regret those feelings, but I leave the post up as a reminder of how stupid I can be at times. It is my opinion that Sanders was in part responsible for the election of Trump, and I find his candidacy for 2020 to be wrong for the Democratic Party and wrong for the country. If by some miracle he was elected we’d have four worse years than we’ve had under Trump, and I consider Trump’s presidency God-awful to the extreme. I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me that Sander’s Bernie Bro’s helped to torpedo Warren’s candidacy. Sanders was in many ways attempting to beat Biden with tactics far too similar those employed by Trump and his minions. At this point it may not matter. Based on the results from this last Tuesday, various news reports have it that Sanders is considering whether he should stay in as a candidate. We shall have to wait on his decision; I sure can’t predict what he may or may not do.

If there’s one thing that COVID-19 has shown it’s that the current president it grossly unfit to be given four more years. If we’d jumped on COVID-19 when it first appeared and prepared ourselves, I have no doubt whatsoever that we could have contained it far better than we currently have. Biden has to become our next president, or we as a nation will come to an ignominious end as a democratic republic.

One thought on “practicing democracy during a pandemic

  1. That’s the problem alright: leaders dragging their feet and doing nothing while the virus spread. Ours is just now getting around to taking some measures – measures which should have been done in January. Too late now. Imagine these people running the fire department: after the town burns down they’ll start thinking about getting up a committee to look into possibly installing smoke detectors. Oh wait, I don’t have to imagine it; the same fools mishandle our wild fires every year. Fires largely made possible by their mishandling the forests for decades beforehand.
    It’s too late to stop the spread with closures now. We need to concentrate on protecting the vulnerable segments of society and stop taking actions that murder the economy and send us headlong into a depression.
    Neither your fool nor ours will be able to handle that either, as they both have the business acumen of a dead snail.

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