A friend recently asked me why I dislike Bernie Sanders now. I said I didn’t dislike him; I just wish he hadn’t decided to run for POTUS again. I supported Bernie for most of his 2016 campaign, so of course I like Bernie. I mean, the guy has devoted his entire life to social justice. Plus he’s managed to demystify democratic socialism to a LOT of Americans. Also plus, he doesn’t smile of laugh a lot — but when he does, it’s a very genuine smile or laugh. How can you NOT like him?
But then I thought about it…and I realized that yeah, I kinda do dislike him now. Which is sad and disappointing because I really like Bernie Sanders a lot.
The problem isn’t Bernie himself. The problem is there’s a small but very loud segment of his base — folks I think of as OBAs. Only Bernie Assholes. As in ‘Only Bernie can save us!’ As in ‘Only Bernie has the right ideas!’ As in ‘Only Bernie, and if Not Bernie then America deserves Trump!’ As in ‘Only Bernie or let the whole world burn!’
I respect their passion (no, I really do), but I have no tolerance for that sort of political purity. Political purity is just a nice way of saying ‘extremism’. OBAs are extremists who won’t accept a nuanced opinion about Bernie. They think you must either be totally and completely FOR him and everything he says or else you’re absolutely AGAINST him. If your support isn’t pure, undiluted, and unqualified, then you’re compromised in some fundamental way. They see the notion of ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ as a betrayal of All Things Bernie.
That’s annoying, but everybody has the right to vote the way thay want. The thing that really cements the ‘asshole’ in OBA is that so many OBAs are as conspiracy-minded as the Q-Anon folks. They seem to be truly convinced that if Bernie isn’t winning, it can only be because shadowy corporate forces (usually in the form of the DNC) are actively conspiring and working against him. Other Democratic candidates are frauds who are stealing Bernie’s ideas only in order to get elected, at which point they’ll revert back to corporate whores. They are totally convinced Bernie was cheated out of the nomination in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, and are equally convinced the DNC is doing it again in 2020.
(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)
At the beginning of this campaign season I joined a pro-Bernie Facebook group (I also joined a pro-Cory Booker and a pro-Mayor Pete group because I wanted a better sense of who they were). The pro-Bernie group initially seemed pretty reasonable and I felt better about Bernie joining the race. Then it slowly became dominated by OBAs, who either drove less pure Bernie supporters out of the group or effectively silenced them. Here are some of the posts and comments that appeared in that group over the last day or so:
— Anyone who was in the trenches from the beginning knows this. It didn’t take Russians to talk us out of voting for Hillary. It took looking into her record. Her scandal. The theft of the 2016 primaries. her online army of trolls. Shutting down Bernie Sanders Web pages with child porn.
— If the dnc rigs the election against sanders and gave us Harris or Biden, then I’m going full Bernie or bust. If we don’t have standards, then the corporate dems are just going to shaft us.
— When the establishment prop up Warren, it’s only to try to hurt Bernie. They are focused on trying to take him out in any way they can because he is an existential threat to their excessive amounts of wealth and corporate bribes.
— If the democratic party really wanted to beat trump they would pick Sanders if that truly was their main concern. It is not. They would rather lose to trump then have a Bernie presidency and that is a fact not some outlandish conspiracy.
— I used to like [Meryl Streep], and watched most of her movies. But she is a hypocrite, a big supporter of HRC among other Hollywood elites and out of touch. She has blindly supported HRC who is also as corrupt as Trump. Because of this reason, I do not watch the Oscars any more.
— Biden sucks. Everyone knows it. Even the DNC. That’s why they are now artificially inflating Warren. Not cause they like/want her. But they’d rather have her, than Bernie. And it’s becoming clear to everyone.
— I voted for Bernie in the primary I voted for trump in the general reason I never trusted Clinton I am back behind Bernie now like him he is the original deal a true socialist the one that will enact everything he is saying BERNIE 2020
— I wonder why Obama is mute about Bernie but openly support HRC in 2016??
— Bernie or GTFO!
— [T]he 1% run the D.N.C. They want to run another “Hillary” candidate that no one likes to make it look like a real win for Trump again.
— Polls are same as gerrymandering, or even worse totally biased!
— Bernie in did win CA in 2016, his hundreds boxes of ballots were not counted. On the day of HRC declared her so-called landslide won in CA. The Staffs posted hundreds of unopened box of his ballots.
Okay, that doesn’t quite approach the lunacy of the Q-anon theory that 1) JFK Jr. is alive and 2) is actually Q, and 3) is working secretly with Trump and Mueller to build a case against Obama and Hillary. But still.
Let me just say that the OBA’s dislike of the Democratic National Committee has some basis in reality. Some members of the DNC openly disliked Bernie — although, to be fair, Bernie had spent years denouncing the DNC. But the DNC didn’t ‘steal’ the nomination from Bernie. He lost it. He lost it in part because his followers didn’t bother to learn how the primary and caucus systems worked. A lot of Bernie supporters who hadn’t registered as Democrats turned up at closed Democratic primary sites expecting to vote and were turned away. Instead of acknowledging their error, they claimed they’d been disenfranchised — that they were refused because they were Bernie supporters. Which is nonsense.
Bernie wasn’t cheated out of the nomination; he just lost. I say that as a person who caucused for him. He just flat out lost. There’s no shame in that. There’s no need to concoct conspiracy theories to explain his loss.
I really like Bernie Sanders. I won’t support him in the primaries, but I’d happily vote for him if he’s the eventual candidate. Because I believe ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ is a valid strategy to rid ourselves of the Trump administration. In my opinion, Bernie has always been more of an inspirational leader than a policy wonk, but that’s okay. One of the most important jobs of POTUS is to inspire the populace to be better citizens. Bernie would be good at that.
I like Bernie. I really do. But I don’t think he can win the nomination. And I cannot abide OBAs. And that’s why I’m done with him.
gregfallis.com 
In addition to the Bernie-or-I-take-my-ball-and-go-home crowd, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of the members of the Facebook group are Russo-Republican instigators.
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I’ve considered that. It certainly seems plausible that a proportion of the OBAs are Russian tools.
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Agreed. A look at botsentinel.com and the great work done at Graphika Report – From Russia with Blogs, clearly spells out we’re seeing large flows of Russian posts across all online media, cleverly posted by Russians posing as Americans with online monikers like ‘Texas_Soccer_Mom’, and ‘NYPD_Ret01’ so they seem legit when they are not. I believe 25% to 35% of all Facebook posts and tweets are Russian.
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I feel the same way. I actually voted for Hillary in the 2016 primary, but was uncertain until a short time before. At that time it was already the behavior of the Bernie Bros and OBAs that turned me off; as time goes by it has only intensified my antipathy toward him. I want to be fair to him, I want to like him, but it’s hard to separate his views and actions from those of his supporters. I also think there is more than a hint of misogyny in the OBA attitude; there are many highly qualified women in the race but they won’t even be considered by the Bernie or Bust crowd (even the ones who said, last time around, that they would TOTALLY vote for Elizabeth Warren if she was running).
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That’s exactly it. It’s NOT Bernie or his views — it’s the fact that the loudest and most prominent voices among his supporters are so aggressive and arrogant.
I can honestly nod in agreement when I hear folks say they’d vote for a woman, but not just because she’s a woman. But there are SO MANY qualified women running now that I can’t see any reason for most of the mediocre white guys to stay in the race. Okay…I said ‘most’ of the mediocre white guys. I should have said ANY of the mediocre white guys. I wish they’d just sit down and hush up.
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I personally think he should have stayed home this time. He’s started to believe his own press; that’s a bad thing.
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You sort of HAVE to be arrogant to believe you’re qualified to run the entire US government. But yeah, the decision to run again was (in my opinion) a bad mistake. Both for him personally and for the country.
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I have not being drawn to Bernie “the candidacy” that much. it just seemed odd that in the last election, people forgot that GOP and Dems are a private entity, and they have their non-democratic ways of certain actors channelling what they consider is good for them/party. not sure if there is a romanticism of democracy that kept this as something not learned, much in the way of the shock in the last 20 years of not having one-voice = one-vote.
in that sense, Warren, methinks, has been more effective in her run than Bernie. sure, they both scare the “pure” capitalists**, but one has to extrapolate into their effectiveness in governing: I am more sure of Warren doing it better than Bernie. (others in the field may do it better, but I don’t know, or may never know.) and as usual, Democrats tend to shift once in power into this sense that the GOP’s (lack of) policy can be negotiated into “good” policy.
also, I am tired of having to put so many scary-quotes in text, because the word is so compromised from an original concept.
also, again, methinks that the people’s vote, like with Bernie Bros and MAGA-nuts, will continue to swing to extremes until it is settled by demographics into only Dems Presidents, and a land-representing, rather than people, Congress. (it would be sad if the GOP then doesn’t reset from White Identity politics, and becomes happy with just obstruction.)
** which, themselves, are not, because they are rigging the capitalism and distorting its purity to “win” whatever game they want.
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Barney Frank, the former Congressman from Mass, said this about Bernie Sanders: “He plants his flag and expects that someday everyone will see he was right.” That’s how he operated in the House and how he operates in the Senate. He stakes out a position, announces it, argues for it, devotes his life to defending it — but rarely tries to implement it. He doesn’t have much of a legislative record.
Warren, on the other hand, was shaping and implementing policy before she ever ran for elective office. Warren is all about getting shit DONE.
Bernie would be an inspirational, big picture sort of president — which is a fine thing. He’d be a better president than he’s been a member of Congress. But Warren would be a president to presses policies forward and works hard to get them enacted.
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