Charles Chuckles Krauthammer is like a joyless William F. Buckley, who even dead brings more cachet than Chuckles will ever have.  Growing up, Krauthammer was a syndicated columnist in my local paper.  I’d read Mike Royko on page two, then turn to the editorials.  (Even as a kid, I was more interested in the op-ed pages than the news – must be pathological.)  I’ve always respected his erudition and the way he crafted an argument, even if I was in complete opposition to him, as I usually am.

But not today!  Today, I rise to speak in agreement with the aging Charles, the Hammer of the Krauts, as he schooled the sleazy, skeavy, angergasmic BillO, the Apoplectic Clown.

Sorry, BillO, Chuckles won’t vote for you. I will never vote for you, either.  Try to find the will to go on.

John Kasich, your table is ready.

May God continue to shed Her ineffable, glorious grace on thee!

WaPo: White House poised to create first monument to gay rights

Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

It’s hard to tar all these people with a single brush. There are some real dumb asses in that list, people who couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag, but who compensate with real mouth. There are a few smarter people on there. There are one or two pretty smart and accomplished folks on there, even. But there is one overriding characteristic that marks them all.

Each is/was completely, unutterably, tragically out of touch with reality. Many of them were just too plain stupid to know better: Reagan, Quayle, McCain and Palin spring to mind. The most talented in this crowd, however, bent and twisted logic and facts to make reality conform to theoretical ideologies designed not to improve conditions for all Americans, but rather to play into existing prejudices and pathologies, in order to game an election system rife with opportunities for hacking and hackery, for the furtherment of the plantation economy.

Until the Industrial Revolution, the plantation economy was the economic engine of the United States, even though slavery was limited mainly to the Southern states and some new territories. Even at the start of mass manufacturing, the cotton of the South fed the jennies of Lowell, Mass. American politics, American diplomacy, American growth, American power all revolved around maintaining a favorable trade status for American cash crops. All of that depended on a permanent underclass of cheap labor – in this case, for the price of a few mouthfuls a day, and a few sets of clothes, as well as a few roofs over a few beds. What some might call a “living” wage.

Although supplanted by the factories of the North and shattered by the Civil War, the basic economic model of the United States never changed: cheap labor, mass production of salable commodities and favorable trade conditions. Only this time, the profit margins had to be boosted in order to account for actually paying a “living” wage, but the new masters of the universe, the robber-barons, found many ways around that, didn’t they? (“I owe my soul to the company store.”) And the most marginalized members of society – Catholic immigrants, Mexicans, Chinese and of course the former slaves – seemed to always be the ones being exploited.

The ascendance of the labor movement, since the start of the 20th century, has not-accidentally coincided with the growth of electoral reform, including landmarks like women’s suffrage, the Voting Rights act, and the franchise for 18-year-olds.

In contrast, the growth of the conservative movement has been based on protectionist trade and a laissez-faire capitalism against anything that stands in the way of cheap resources, especially labor, on the ridiculous economic theory that the profit of a few are actually the profit of all, because the business of America is Business. As well as protectionist voting rules, and laissez-faire campaign finance laws.

Against this backdrop, Nominee Trump is just another member of the club. He might not be the candidate they wanted, but he’s both a plutocratic plantation master and a reality-denying dumb ass, so in retrospect he seems somehow inevitable, now, doesn’t he?

I apologize for the length of this post. I actually wrote it two weeks ago, after New York. At that time, Hillary Clinton had 502 superdelegates promising to support her, while Bernie Sanders had 38. At that time, Bernie’s alter ego and campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, aggressively laid out the superdelegate strategy for winning the nomination even if the popular vote and the pledged delegate count were both against him.

So I wrote this at that time and then, uncharacteristically, put it into a drawer. I wanted to give Bernie a chance to articulate his vision for the end of the race, and to let emotions drain out of the decision-making process, before forcing a 1000-word essay on y’all.

At first, Bernie seemed apt to wind down his rhetoric and accept the hand Fate had dealt him. But Weaver and Bernie’s wife, Jane, still seemed ready to fight. A week or so of mixed messages while they sorted out this intra-familial squabble has brought us here, where Bernie is chewing iron and spitting nails, and insisting that polls where Hillary leads Trump by fewer points than Bernie leads Trump mean that now 520 superdelegaters are all wet, and that the 17-point pasting he’s received thus far in the popular vote means NOTHING.

And so, without further ado, here are the Top Ten Reasons the Superdelegates Won’t Switch to Bernie.

Number 10: Superdelegates are people, too – And people generally don’t like to look silly in public. Even if they believed that Bernie was a better choice, so long as Bernie is not the ONLY choice, they won’t want to look stupid switching horses midstream. And staying with Hillary RIGHT UP until the time she’s boxed Bernie out wouldn’t just look stupid, it would look nuts.

Number 9: Superdelegates are DEM-O-CRATS – The Democratic Party is a private club, with very lax membership requirements. Essentially, all you have to do to BECOME a Democrat is to claim to be one, even if you were something else. Four of the five Democrats in the first debate have traveled that route, including former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton. But her declaration came decades ago, not seven months ago. Democratic superdelegates will stay with someone who has been a Democratic standard bearer for the past 25 years.

Number 8: Superdelegates are appreciative – Most of the superdelegates are office holders, looking to remain so. Hillary Clinton has committed to helping them do so, not with a nebulous army of revolutionaries who may or may not find a superdelegate running in a down-ticket race sufficiently pure so as to earn their vote, but with a turnout machine, personal visits by Hillary and money, all of which she has wielded on their behalf in the past and will continue to do so. “Bernie, what have you done for me lately?” has no answer.

Number 7: Superdelegates are risk-averse – Never mind the hundreds of superdelegates Bernie needs who aren’t going to switch to him, think about being among the first. To great fanfare, in contravention of the wishes of the majority of the Democratic voters, you decide to screw Hillary and switch to Bernie. But the cascade of late-adopters never comes, and you’ve just walked out onto a limb and President Hillary Clinton has the chain saw: your future in the Democratic Party will be a sharp drop and a sudden stop, assuming she uses it on the branch and not on you, directly. You may as well turn Socialist.

Number 6: Superdelegates are professional politicians – Speaking as a retired pro, we know that head-to-head polls between potential November candidates are meaningless, until both conventions are over. Until then, polls are soap bubbles and smoke. We also know that not one serious piece of opposition research has been dropped onto Bernie – he’s a paper messiah only until he’s withstood some of what Hillary has faced. She’s handled him with kid gloves, except for the occasional elbow. Everything in our gut says Hillary is the right move, and 500+ professional politicians can’t all be wrong.

Number 5: Superdelegates are proud – Bernie and his people have been running them down as the antithesis of democracy from day one, not just as a perversion of the democratic primary process, but also as “corporate whores” right alongside Hillary. Now he’s begging for their help, and appealing to the better angels of their “corrupt” natures? As a superdelegate, my answer to that would be two words, and they wouldn’t be “Happy Birthday.”

Number 4: Superdelegates aren’t dumb – Women and minorities ARE the Democratic margin of victory, especially women. Women and minorities support Hillary, who is a woman. How far do superdelegates think they will get in Democratic politics without women and minorities? How far do they think the Party will get? How far do they think the country will get?

Number 3: Superdelegates are fair-minded – Hillary took a bad beat in 2008 like a champ. She waited her turn, supported Obama, built up her relationships and her resume, won the 2016 primaries and basically did everything we’ve ever asked a candidate to do.

Number 2: Superdelegates are practical – Someone took umbrage when I called Bernie “underfunded” the other day. But a large amount of his working capital has gone towards ads rather than staff and infrastructure, which is why he spends more than Hillary in every state, and yet loses more than half of them. Comparing apples to apples, he has kept close, yet he has millions less cash on hand to finish the primaries with. Hillary, on the other hand, has spent less, and won more. But it‘s in comparing oranges to oranges that we really see the difference. Bernie has very few oranges – SuperPACs – compared to Clinton. He has a SuperPAC of some nurses spending on his behalf, and very little else. The challenge for SuperPACs supporting Hillary, however, was to decide the smallest amount of money to spend on ads for the primary, while hoarding their hordes of ducats for the general. Bernie hasn’t managed the practicalities of funding and building a winning campaign yet, and he would be destroyed by SuperPACs and irony in the summer and fall.

And Number 1: Superdelegates have their eye on history – To wit: Hillary Clinton, the first woman to become President of the United States. Another old white guy isn’t going to get in the way of that.

Absolutely nothing! On both the Democratic and the Republican sides, Indiana is the largest delegate haul between Pennsylvania last week and Jersey/California on June 7.  If either race were still a race, that would be kind of a big deal.  But on the Democratic side, Hillary has already pivoted to the general election, beginning with her victory speech last week.  On the Republican side, the Manafort coup was successful in that Trump has stopped hemorrhaging delegates to Cruz that he already thought he won, while the latest episode of John and Ted’s Excellent StopTrump Adventure didn’t even survive its first day, because everybody wants to stop Trump, but not as much as Everybody Hates Cruz, and Kasich is delusional.

Polls indicate that Bernie is close to Hillary in Indiana, but generally outside the margin of error. As we discussed last week, after Acela Tuesday, and after extrapolating the (still!) outstanding WA results, Hillary is indeed leading by about 300 pledged delegates.  Including super delegates, that lead expands to near 800, and Hillary is now within 200 delegates of the nomination.  She could lose each and every the remaining contest by 30 points, and still win the pledged delegate race.

Donald Trump could still, theoretically, be denied the nomination, but not before the convention. As he is the only candidate NOT mathematically eliminated, and leading in all the polls, I’m declaring this one “game over,” as well, until Cleveland.   Remembering that Everybody Hates Cruz, it’s doubtful that the GOP would like to further destroy their party by dumping the guy with the most voters and the most delegates in favor of ANYONE, but especially for God’s Cubanadian. Still, Cleveland will be must-see TV for politi-junkies like us; has major party convention ever needed a 7-second, bleep-able delay before?