Bernie Sanders, Adolph Hitler, and Other Democratic Socialists

I understand you are planning to vote for Bernie Sanders.

It is free country, and you have the right to vote for him. I am grateful to live in a country were we actually have a choice when we go to the ballot box. There are many countries where that option doesn't exist.

Did you realize that?

That there are countries were the head of government places his/her name on the ballot, no competition, and still conducts an election. Of course, in such countries, voting is actually often MANDATORY. The result? The head of government receives overwhelming ballot box support. 80% 90% support!

Now these countries have many things in common.

For example, in most of them, the government owns everything and decides how everything will be used.

The government decides how much toilet paper will be produced, what car comes off the factory line (assuming the country is large enough to have an automotive industry).

The government makes intimately personal decisions too. What you will study if you go to university ("we need engineers, you look like an engineer, you will study engineering"), what career you will pursue ("we need sanitary landfill heavy equipment operators, you look like a sanitary landfill heavy equipment operator, you will be a sanitary landfill heavy equipment operator").

The government allocates resources according to its perception of needs. Perhaps you are accustomed to the quaint American practice of wiping your derriere with toilet paper after defecating? The government needs paper for documents of the government, and the odd American practice of butt-wiping has reduced available resources. Many people around the world wipe their butts, after defecating, WITH THEIR HAND. In a government that controls resources and their allocation, toilet paper can be made into an unobtainable luxury. (Ask the people of Venezuela.)

The government finds that too many people are becoming a vexatious burden and disposes of them. Kim Jong Un actually had his uncle taken out to a bombing range, had him forced to stand on a marked spot, and had a bomb literally dropped on him. Excessive, right? Many governments engage in similar acts of culling of the population. Another country forcibly aborts any child after parents have their first live birth.

The government limits the ability to depart from these happy lands. They restrict access to international traveling papers (passports, exit visas). They restrict access of outsiders (foreigners) to the people.

These countries all have something in common. They are modeled on various forms of a political and economic idea of socialism. On the hard left of socialism, bizarre leftist nutcases like Kim Jong Un and the Peoples Republic of China mark the dismal distance that can be traveled in the quest to disentangle the human heart from the love of individual liberty and autonomy. On the far right of socialism, we have the friendly socialism of countries like France, England, Canada, and, yes, the United States. Oh, don't forget Nazi Germany.

Now, you go ahead and vote for Bernie.

He's a tired, tiresome, old fart, who has never worked an honest day's work since college. He free-loads, first as a Congressman, now as a Senator and Presidential candidate. He is the only declared, elected member of Congress of the Socialist Workers Party.

You want free stuff.

I get that.

Lord knows, I'd love some free stuff too.

But the God's honest truth is that what he is offering you ISN'T free, except in the same way that a TV stolen from a business during the Ferguson riots is free. Yes, there is no difference from stealing during a riot (mob-based theft) and stealing by electing a man to government office who is planning to have the government take property, possession, and funds from others.

So, go ahead, vote for Bernie. It helps in the primary election because it exposes serious weaknesses of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

But here's a head's up for what a Sanders presidency would look like:

He is an incompetent buffoon who does not understand how economic principles operate. So he will try to do things like he's promised you. Things like taxing your father's salary massively (yes, your dad (or mom) (or both) to pay for your "free education" and your "free health care."

Of course, while sensible Democrats (if you can find them) and Republicans are controlling Congress he will be worse than incompetent buffoon. He will be an incompetent buffoon that can no more get legislation passed as President than he could as a member of Congress. (Look up how many bills for which he was the original sponsor actually passed both Houses and became law.)

Being stymied by a Congress that MAY possess marginally greater economic understanding than a man who, in his dotage, bitterly clings to a failed economic and social ideal (democratic socialism) doesn't mean he'd be unable to do anything. He does have the example of the current occupant of the White House, who, when he doesn't get a bill through Congress decides that he will undertake "executive action."

Odd words, "executive action." They are absent from the Constitution of the United States. There is, in the American Constitution, only one legitimate body for the MAKING OF LAW: the Congress. Yet the current president, himself an undeclared socialist, and your would-be president, a declared socialist, are in a grand tradition of socialists. That tradition is autocratic authoritarianism.

Bernie Sanders, a failed Congressman, a failed Senator. The producer of absolutely nothing. Nothing that you ever ate. Nothing that you ever drove. Nothing that you ever lived inside. Nothing that you ever sat on, slept on, wore. The creator of one known work of fiction, in which he details the imagined sexual fantasy of every woman, to be gang raped.

Yes, please. This is the exact president we need. The match to the fuse. The start of the Revolution. And you're voting for him because he is BUYING your vote with a promise HE CAN'T keep.

The prosperity of generations has eased the American love of liberty into slumber. In our dreams we have imagined that the government is a lovingly disposed parent. Yet true history, actual fact, dispels any truth to the benevolence of government.

The long train out of brutal serfdom has been a force march of stalwart folk that have refused to encourage the growth of power in central bodies, that have denied the "moral rightness" of theft by taxation, and that have called on the sterner, more hopeful beasts of human nature: love of liberty, despite of oppression, resourcefulness, and, frankly, enlightened self-interest.

So, go ahead.

After all, he is promising you "free" college.

After all, he is promising you "free" health care.

Why wouldn't you take his bribes? Why wouldn't you sell him your vote. Thankfully, your dream of a Sanders-led paradise can only do what every previous Socialist paradise has done:  fail.

Don't Be A Billy: Don't Vote For Bernie!

I have five dollars. You have five dollars. Fred has five dollars.

Billy?

Billy doesn't have five dollars. Billy says that it is unfair that we each have five dollars, and that he has none.

Billy joins with Sue and Tom and Lisa and hundreds of thousands more. They talk about the immorality of disproportionate wealth. They talk about how those who are "the haves" are besting the system and using it to their advantage to keep others from having their own five dollars.

With sufficient numbers, Billy and his political following form a political alliance, call it a party. They pass a law requiring everyone to contribute a "fairness" assessment. The purpose of the "fairness" assessment is to provide those who have been locked out of opportunity with a ready pool of cash.

The effect of the "fairness" assessment is that Fred, you, and I question why we worked hard, scrimped, saved, did without, deferred gratifications, etc., and we decide to reduce our labors and efforts. After all, thousands and thousands have joined together and made our actions seem most unseemly, perhaps immoral.

The "fairness" assessment cannot keep pace with the outflow of cash that was committed to by those that adopted it. They march on the printing operation where the money is actually printed. They seized the presses and begin a 24/7 operation creating additional dollars that do not reflect the product of a "fairness" assessment.

What a wonderful new world! If only we could have realized this sooner.

A problem develops.

There are SOOOOOOOOOOO many dollars on the market now, everyone is buying more and demand goes up. As demand rises, the price rises. Higher prices demand more money. More money means re-evaluating the "fairness" assessment. Maybe one should be attached to the the value of estates when people die? Maybe one should be attached to interest earned on savings and investment? Maybe one should be attached to the earnings of corporations?

With "fairness" assessments imposed on savings, there is a perverse incentive and people stop saving, but they do keep spending and spending creates demand and demand justifies increases in prices and increases in prices requires additional printing of dollars, whether funded by "fairness" assessments or whether covered by a new invention devised by the Billy Party. They came up with the idea of using IOUs to provide value for the dollars. They'll just promise to be able to pay the thousands, millions, billions, and trillions of accumulated promises to pay that the newly minted dollars represent.

Soon, the price of milk is $8.00, the price of a loaf of bread is $ 5.00.  The price of toilet paper? Well. Actually. Since no one can afford to purchase trees to make pulp to make paper no one has seen toilet paper in months.

The Billy Party begins to distrust its own members. It sees greed in their eyes, their constant hectoring for more, more, more, while doing less, less, less. So the Billy Party imposes a framework of controls:

• Wages are fixed at set rates by the Billy Party.
• Prices are fixed at set rates by the Billy Party.
• The Billy Party orders farmers to produce X gallons of raw milk each day.
• The Billy Party orders bakers to produce Y loaves of bread each day.
• The Billy Party orders toilet paper manufacturers to produce Z rolls of toilet paper each day.

The result?

The people living in the nation ruled by the Billy Party water their milk down 3 parts water to 1 part milk to make it last and to make it affordable.

The people living in the nation ruled by the Billy Party think of white bread as a luxury, nearly a dessert in character. A child that wants the crust peeled off is forced to watch as parents and siblings eat their piece of bread to teach them not to be picky.

The people living in the nation ruled by the Billy Party wipe their asses with their hands, and they aren't even Arabs, because ordered toilet paper manufacturers to make toilet paper will not force trees to grow, to chop themselves down, to be ground into pulp, to be shipped to the nation ruled by the Billy Party, and to be milled into toilet paper.

No one shakes hands with the people living in the Nation ruled by the Billy Party.

And it all started with Billy claiming it was unfair that three others had five dollars that he didn't have!

The moral of the story:

Venezuela is a festering cesspool that proves the vapidity of socialism. If you are voting for Bernie Sanders​ U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders​ We Want Bernie Sanders​, you ought to go live in Venezuela so you can look into the future you want to create here in America.

Arsenic and Old Lies

Growing up, there were a few favorite old movies I remember watching. One, "Arsenic and Old Lace," is a farcical comedy about an elderly pair of aunties who took bachelors in as boarders, and then gave them elderberry wine laced with arsenic, was a favorite. Cary Grant, the loving nephew, begins in the story with no idea of his aunts' proclivities to murder. He does know that his uncle, a bit demented, thought himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, and in that role, he was regularly digging new "locks" for the "Panama Canal" in the aunties' basement. His construction activities conveniently provided burial plots for the poisoned bachelors.

If you haven't seen the play or the movie, you are missing a gem. I am including this excerpted clip to set the stage for this post:

You really should give "Arsenic and Old Lace" a try.

Remember, when I watched the movie as a kid, there was no such thing as John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy or other, now notorious, serial killers, at least not whose mayhem came into our home in the drum beat of the 24 hour news cycle. So two elderly women poisoning lonely bachelors could still be funny, and the play did speak to an audience that could distinguish Teddy Roosevelt from his cousin Franklin.

Today, however, we are living inside the farce. We are under the ministrations of Arsenic and Old Lies.

This notion came to mind as I thought about the recent Democratic Candidates' debate.

Excepting Jim Webb, whose Democratic party credentials are undoubtedly doubted by Democrats (after all, he made out a case during the debate that "an enemy" was someone that was literally trying to kill you with a grenade (an episode from his wartime service in Vietnam), the candidates, answering a question about the enemy of which the candidates were most proud of making, America was treated to a laundry list of American freedom and enterprise, represented by such "enemies" as health insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, Wall Street, the rich, and Republicans.

So the association whose fairly moderate positions regarding the right to keep an bear arms is a worthy enemy for a political candidate to have acquired?

Why?

Why would a candidate for the Nation's highest office take pride in so positioning themselves politically that an organization that supports a clear cut provision of the Constitution -- the Second Amendment -- might be considered by them as an enemy?

And why is it a matter of bragging rights to have exacerbated the economic liberties of health insurance companies or of "Wall Street" (whatever "Wall Street" is supposed to mean in that context, it carries the connotation of American businesses)?

The answer is simple.

Again, setting aside Jim Webb, the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination are not Democrats as John Kennedy was, or as Truman was, or even as Franklin Roosevelt was.

As a group, and as individuals, they are Statists, they are progressives, they are Socialists.

Now we have lived, as a People, long enough to watch the rise of socialism in Europe, the Americas, Asian and Africa. Its collapse, in the Soviet Bloc, we have witnessed too. Were it has not been abandoned, its wreck and ruin continues unabated.

The depredations of socialism are evident in the land of Obama's new best buddies, the Castro brothers. Cuba's organized and planned economy has the been operating inefficiently since Castro's revolution, and the nation's inability to mount a successful domestic and international economic enterprise is well understood. Those very same ideas of central control and management of economy put the Soviet Union in the position of being unable to sustain a long term move-for-move build up in competition with the United States, and ultimately resulted in the USSR collapsing under its own weight. The current terrible economic suffering in Venezuela is the direct result of these same socialistic ideas put in practice.

Yet here we have old lies being fed to us in an unction of elderberry wine. Our old uncle, Bernie Sanders, thinks he can build up the house by digging holes of taxation under the foundation. Old auntie Hillary will "do us good" even if it means killing us.

I prefer the movie to the threatened reality of a farcical America under their poisonous, tired, and disproved old lies.

Are We Actually Wiser than the Founders?

To venerate the Founders to the point of denying errors in their judgments, or injustices in their actions, serves no good purpose.

Jefferson, Washington, and others owned slaves. We know that this was a moral wrong. In fact, we know that Jefferson and Washington both understood this point. That leaves us in the position of understanding that they made a choice to justify the ends -- development of their own landed estates, finding a ground on which the varying interests of the newly independent States would still permit the formation of new Nation -- while deploying wrongful means.

Still, the genius in their words, their actions, is evidenced by the fact that America is the longest-lived constitutional republic in the world. So, admiration of their words and work is warranted, but is tempered by recognition of their human failings.

As we approach another election season, a variety of "hot-button" issues allow us insight into the thinking of various candidates. That insight, in turn, allows us to compare those candidates with the Founders, and draw what conclusions that we may.

Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley, two of the three announced candidates for the nomination of the Democratic Party, have positioned themselves well as proponents of new and additional legislation to address gun crimes in the United States.

Hillary Clinton, in a recent campaign stop, as reported by CNN, staked out her claim as the President that would accomplish the necessary task of winning the "gun control" battle:

"We have got to do something about gun violence in America. And I will take it on," Clinton said. "It's a very political, difficult issue in America. But I believe we are smart enough, we are compassionate enough, to figure out how to balance the legitimate Second Amendment rights with preventive measures and control measures so that whatever motivated this murderer who eventually took his own life, we will not see more deaths, needless, senseless deaths."

Oddly, for a candidate opposed to the use of guns to solve problems, she has adopted a violent motif for her campaign website, casting her campaign themes as a "fight." Her major motif is "The Four Fights."

FDR liked the number four as well. In his day, with a broken economy, growing tyranny in Europe and Asia, he still did not stoop to portraying efforts at change, even progressive transformation, as a battle or a fight. Instead, he spoke of the Four Freedoms. How different are Democrats now, and Hillary at the front, making her policy initiatives "fights." By transforming engagement about policy into "fighting," she has, of course, made those who oppose her views, the "enemy." I certainly hope the two term bath of divisiveness given to us in Barack Obama is not extended a single day under that used up windbag's attempt to create energy by declaring war on Americans.

Martin O'Malley's Maryland has restricted gun rights literally since its founding. In fact, one argument made in defense of the gun restrictions that the Supreme Court overturned in the District of Columbia v. Heller case was that, because the District of Columbia was carved out of Maryland, that State's historically restrictive laws meant that DC residents had never had an unfettered right to keep and bear arms.

In the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting, candidate O'Malley sent an email to his supporters. He wrote:

I’m pissed that after an unthinkable tragedy like the one in South Carolina yesterday, instead of jumping to act, we sit back and wait for the appropriate moment to say what we’re all thinking: that this is not the America we want to be living in.

O'Malley bragged:

I proudly hold an F rating from the (National Rifle Association), and when I worked to pass gun control in Maryland, the NRA threatened me with legal action, but I never backed down. What we did in Maryland should be the first step of what we do as a nation.

Finally, O'Malley pitched a three point plan to further restrict gun rights:

A national assault weapons ban. Stricter background checks. Efforts to reduce straw-buying, like fingerprint requirements.

Bernie Sanders, the third announced Democratic candidate, and Hillary Clinton's stalking horse, has a mixed record of voting on gun control measures in Congress. Sanders has reacted to recent shootings and questions from media in a way suggestive that he will make pursuit of further gun legislation a feature of a Sanders presidency:

I do not accept the fact that I have been weak on this issue. In fact, I have been strong on this issue. And in fact, coming from a rural state which has almost no gun control, I think I can get beyond the noise and all of these arguments and people shouting at each other, and come up with real, constructive gun control legislation which most significantly gets guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.

See how his basic instinct is not to be seen as "weak on this issue"? And, of course, he voted to ban the sale of guns that look dangerous (the assault weapons ban), and he voted to ban possessing and using magazines with more than 10 bullets, so that a woman, trapped in her home and being assaulted by a gang of would-be rapists and murderers would be required to reload and reload to protect herself. The NRA has given Sanders a lifetime grade of D- on gun rights.

No real surprise is to be discovered in any of this information. These are candidates for the Democratic nomination. Of course they would support limiting the right to keep and bear arms. Of course Governor O'Malley pushed legislation in Maryland to require those that exercise the right to keep and bear arms to be fingerprinted as a precondition to the exercise of the right. For the Democratic Party, the fact that the "right to keep and bear arms" appears in the Bill of Rights is, at best, an anachronism, a throwback to the uncertain and unsettled times of our Nation's founding.

The right of the People to keep and bear arms, the Framers of the Constitution expressly concluded, was "necessary to the defense of a free State[.]" Moreover, the conclusion that the amendment was a necessary component of the federal Constitution plainly indicates that the danger at issue was one that would come, if it did, from federal encroachments. If the People of individual States were concerned that States would interfere with their right to keep and bear arms then the amendments would be to State Constitutions (many of which expressly guarantee the right).

The source of the dangers addressed in the Bill of Rights was the federal government. Episcopalians in Virginia no more wanted a federal government that could establish Presbyterianism as the National religion than did Baptists in Rhode Island want a federal government that could establish Episcopalianism as the National religion. Antifederalists in Virginia and the Carolinas no more wanted a federal government empowered to silence their speech than did Federalists want a federal government empowered to silence theirs.

The Founders did not stumble across the body of rights sheltered in the Bill of Rights. These particular rights -- religious freedom, freedom of speech, press, petition and assembly, rights against warrantless searches and seizures, rights to "due" (appropriate) legal process in criminal proceedings, rights to be tried by a jury of one's peers, and rights to the ownership and use of firearms against tyrannical government -- were the very ones violated by the Crown and Parliament. Those rights were the ones that were understood as being among the natural rights of men. Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist No. 84, laid out the argument that iterating a Bill of Rights would serve only to limit the larger body of rights natural to men. He noted that New York, for example, did not have a Bill of Rights in its State Constitution. He also argued that the English Bill of Rights actually served as a boundary of the rights of free men, and that, in the same way, the provisions of Magna Carta ceded broad swaths of power to the Crown, reserving only certain identified rights to the Barons and the Crown's subjects.

Hamilton's view nothwithstanding, James Madison eventually agreed to the compromise demanded by anti-Federalists, that if the Constitution was to be ratified it should be supplemented immediately thereafter by the express adoption of a Bill of Rights. In fact, in the first Congress following the ratification of the Constitution, James Madison managed the House legislation that eventually proposed the Bill of Rights, including the amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms.

James Madison is often touted for his express concerns about Establishment of Religion and religious freedom. In particular, strict separationists are fond of citing to a set of writings, the "Detached Memoranda." Madison's writings there, for example, are cited and quoted because he concludes, nearly thirty years after proposing the Bill of Rights, including its provisions for Free Exercise of Religion and against the Establishment of Religion, that the appointment of chaplains for the Houses of Congress violates the Constitution and is inconsistent with principles of religious freedom. So, when it comes to strict separation of church and State, James Madison is, for lack of a better way to put it, a "latter day saint."

Yet the same Madison that thought that chaplains in Congress violated the Constitution and the principles of religious freedom also thought a strict guarantee against interference with the right to keep and bear arms was necessary to guarantee what he thought should be considered a fundamental maxim:

The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.

Those who would canonize and lionize Madison for his separationist views go quiet on Madison when the question is arms. Madison wrote:

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. 

[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

Madison's views of the necessity of preserving a robust right to keep and bear arms was not singular.

Thomas Jefferson accumulated a collection of thoughts and writing on questions related to government. The following quotation appears in his Commonplace but, while it is often attributed to him, he recorded these ideas from the text of an Italian author:

[Consider] that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general convenienc[e]s, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it. 

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.

Lest it be supposed that this quotation in Jefferson's Commonplace was merely a copy book exercise in handwriting, Jefferson's thoughts on the right to keep and bear arms are known. In his proposed draft of a Constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson included this provision:  "No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." While that version of that language was not adopted, Jefferson's inclusion of it illuminates his thinking on the subject. More directly, Jefferson is well known for his prospect that "the tree of liberty be watered" by the blood of tyrants and patriots. His observation came in a larger letter to William Smith, in which he reflected on the fact that Shay's Rebellion was not, in his view, an entirely evil matter. His view reflected his thinking that those in authority ought to be reminded of the essential powers of the People:

What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & What country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Alexander Hamilton, though he died in a duel, understood the importance of the individual right to bear arms in maintaining the balance of power against an over reaching tyranny. On this point, he wrote in The Federalist No. 28:

If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair. 

...

[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.

Many, many more evidences in the writings of those that framed the Constitution and the amendments that came to be the Bill of Rights demonstrate that the Second Amendment's topic, the right to keep and bear arms, was not an add on or a tag along, but understood to be an important tonic in the preservation of liberty.

Now, today, between Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, and Bernie Sanders, Democrats face a choice of three candidates none of whom respect the reasoning or conclusions of those very Framers. And that brings me back to those opening thoughts.

Yes, the Framers were human. Yes, they exhibited frailties of character not much different than are common today. Certainly slavery is a weighty charge against honor and decency. One might say the same, however, of other policy choices that are weighed in lives, such as abortion, authorizations for the use of force, confiscatory taxation.

In the main, it occurs to this observer that these candidates' thoughts on the right to keep and bear arms warrant small regard. Because they mock as some distant memory that imminent threat to liberty that tyranny constituted in the Revolutionary era, because their party was, itself, responsible for the armed reign of terror known at Ku Klux Klan, and its depredations against the newly freed slaves and their Republican patrons, because they are forever aligned with devotion to government rather than liberty, they are simply without sufficient indicia of reliability.

No, in this respect, we are not wiser than the Founders.

Bernie Sanders: The One Candidate with a Plan ... the Malaysian Air Flight Plan

I have never "unfriended" anyone on Facebook or other social media over political disagreements. Even knowing that a person voted for the reprehensible Barack Obama twice, I have thought it a sorrowful admission that our Nation cannot find its way forward if we cut each other off amidst honest and open discussion.

So, no, I will not be "unfriending" those who are now engaged in the fantasy that Bernie Sanders (a) can win the Democratic nomination and (b) would govern our Nation consistently with the Constitution. 

Nor will I refrain from offering what I consider substantial reasons why voting for Bernie Sanders equates with sticking a fork in our Nation. Vote for Bernie Sanders? Well, sure!

There's a plethora of good enough reasons to vote for Bernie:

• If you loathe liberty, because every initiative on his campaign website enlarges government and does not adjure claims of government prerogative.
• If the government can spend your money better than you can, because he'll be spending your money on government employees, government plans, and government programs despite long-standing and clear evidence that Keynesian efforts to build economies by building governments always fail.
• If you think "free college" for everyone is a price tag you won't be paying.
• If you think that the best we have to offer is guaranteeing $ 15.00 an hour for burger flipping.
• If you think that adding another paid federal holiday to the calendar (resulting in federal government employees, but NO ONE ELSE) having a paid day off to vote makes sense.
• If you trust the government to run insurance programs.
• If you don't actually need the money you are earning.
• If you believe in Tinkerbell, magic fairy dust, and unicorns.
• If you believe that the federal government (not States) has the RIGHT to control educational decisions.
• If you believe that the federal government (not States) has the right to dictate to State and local policing agencies.
• If you like organizations like Planned Parenthood being able to harvest adrenal glands, brains, lungs, livers, etc, from aborted children in order to sell them to medical researchers.

There are so many reasons to vote for Bernie Sanders.

Just as there are so many reasons to have a drunk perform your brain surgery, just as there are so many reasons to have Barney Fife pilot that jumbo jet you just boarded. So yes, of course, I understand entirely your decision to vote for Bernie Sanders, because I am old enough to recognize 

(a) woeful ignorance

(b) self-destructive naivete, and

(c) suicide on the slow.