and talk to me here, remember something about my posting history. Like, for instance, I know you would never listen to Bernie about anything at this point; I know Roger would, and in fact was active in Our Revolution/BNC; I know Henry Wallace and Citizen of Earth are Stein supporters, etc. So I tend to believe that others who are active here keep track of my assumptions/beliefs as well.

Here are my assumptions about what's real:

1)Election fraud was rampant on the Democratic side of the primary. This matters very much. It included straight-up voter purges, as in Brooklyn, "party" purges via hacking people's registration data in AZ, NY, CA, and OR (and possibly more), death threats in Puerto Rican jails, some bullshit hocus-pocus involving coin flips and hidden vote totals in Iowa, and many other forms of fraud. Exit polls show that there was fraud, to the extent that actual statisticians say it was something like a 1 in 6 million chance that Hillary actually won the races she said she won. We could spend an hour talking about all the forms of fraud that took place.

2)This race has been associated, more than any in my lifetime, with a blitzkrieg on the voters. The character attacks on voters have been more or less constant, up to and including being framed for violence and framed as thugs, which is extremely dangerous and generally gets done only for one reason. For those of us who have exposed ourselves to this assault by being online and open about whom we support, the ugliness has been early and often, including, as you pointed out, flooding people's web pages with kiddie porn (which now I'm wondering if that has more than incidental significance, given the stories about the existence of a pedophile ring). Again, we could spend an hour, or more, detailing all the ways voters have been treated like shit, and encouraged to treat each other like shit.

3)Whether Bernie was a ringer from the beginning or bribed or bludgeoned into submission later has no effect on these facts. If you think the Clinton machine couldn't have accomplished all these forms of cheating and abuse without Bernie's help, you don't know the Clinton machine. And for the Clinton machine, it's just as good either way, although I think the added layer of disillusionment and demoralization provided by the sheepdog explanation would be seen as kind of a cherry on the sundae for them, since clearly one aim of their blitzkrieg is to demoralize us into passivity, hopefully permanently. That's not why I'm in disagreement with this idea; I simply think that it's more logical to assume that Bernie was bullied. I don't think she'd waste a bribe on him, and if he were meant as a sheepdog from the get-go, if he were her tool, the media, also her tools, would have treated him far differently. In fact, they would have treated him more like Donald Trump, loudly talking about him, but in a negative way (crazy racist socialist). They'd never try to suffocate his campaign with lack of airtime. They'd want to build him up to maximize his sheepdog potential and to channel the resistance they expect from the left into a harmless channel--just like they're using Trump to do something similar (but not identical) from the right. It's all about storm drains for the propagandists and psy-op folks; they can't obliterate resistance so they want to make sure to channel it in useless directions.

4)It kind of blows me away that you remember so little about me that you could possibly think that I'm advocating for "just shut up and donate and volunteer." For the record, another of my assumptions is that both parties are damaged beyond repair, to put it kindly, and while there are still a few (probably very lonely) individuals of merit in each party, they probably won't be there much longer. Both parties are blatant tools of oppression and, by their very nature, assaults on both democracy (if you think we had one of those) or the republic (if you think we had one of those). No future association with those institutions is warranted; at best, any such attempt at reform is wrongheaded and foolhardy; at worst, it demonstrates a willingness to accept corruption.

5)I think opdeny270 was a sheepdog operation that sadly convinced a lot of decent people to support it. It's also obvious that there's been a mobilization of attacks on Stein that have stepped up in recent days. The aim of these efforts, in my view, is to make sure the Left keeps fighting amongst itself over which weak-ass option it takes, since we haven't had any strong option to take since Sanders got on his knees. And, again for the record, I don't believe it's Stein's fault that she is a weak option; the establishment has created ugly systemic obstacles for any third party, which is why we have 40 third parties that haven't broken through into the mainstream. Among those obstacles are the corrupt media, election fraud/voter purges, and a corrupt legal justice system that winks at the fraud we're undergoing.

6)We should be looking at why "cutting the head off" automatically makes the body die, because taking out our leader shouldn't destroy and fragment the movement so completely. There are steps that could be taken to decrease the impact of the system's completely predictable attacks on the "leader" position, including steps that would diminish the impact of sheepdogging. We should, after so many years, be taking these steps as a matter of course. IMO, it's a point for your side of the argument that Bernie didn't take these steps; but on the other hand, none of us at the grass roots do either, except on rare occasions such as Occupy--and we need to do a lot better.

I can't write anymore because I'm trying to move into a new house, and am literally moving the cats right now.