it is easy to launch into such rants.

While my gut tells me to respond to your fantasies about what "Leftists" stand for by expounding upon the TRUTH about what the "anti-Left" stands for, my desire to continue to be able to exchange viewpoints with people who care more about building a future for our party than excusing its past failures tells me not to.

Instead, I will simply correct the following non-exclusive list of false statements about "the Left:"

1. Lie >>> The Left believes in "the subjugation of the many to one powerful man" Truth >>> "The Left" believes that the policies espoused by Senator Sanders are, where they differ, preferable to those espoused by the former power structure of our party. For all the insulting insinuations that supporters of Senator Sanders are nothing more than a cult of personality, I think you would have at least some difficulty finding a post among our community here referring to Senator Sanders as "that noble man."

2. Lie >>> "[H]ow is it that a Marxist cares about a politician and political Tribe to the exclusion of class solidarity? Truth >>> Though this seems more about me personally than "the Left," I will be presumptuous and answer for the whole of "the Left." This accusation rests upon a two basic falsehoods. The first is a repetition of the smear that "the Left" is a cult of personality, as opposed to simply a political viewpoint different from your own. I understand that when one is firmly convinced of the infallibility one's own political beliefs, such an accusation seems the only possible explanation why anyone would challenge those beliefs. It isn't. There is actually a principled opposition to the direction our party has taken (with, at least for me, the exception of the decidedly liberal 2008 campaign of the greatest president in history and his necessarily pragmatic campaign of 2012) since 1992. The second is a repetition of the intentionally false and divisive meme that people who look like me, our LGBTQ friends, undocumented immigrants, non-"Christians" of every persuasion but most prominently adherents to Islam, women, workers of every persuasion who have watched their wealth, their income, and their children's future being stolen by the largest transfer of wealth to the 1% in the history of world, and all other oppressed groups are not ALL victims and do not ALL stand in solidarity.

3. Lie >>> The Left are "people who have no idea what it's like to be poor, including some who talk about "only" having 4 bathrooms and wearing couture gowns, people who own multiple homes or think $70k a year a pittance, all because they divide the country according to Bernie." Truth >>> This little diatribe ignores the history of the American "Left" in favor of perpetuating the intentionally divisive meme that Bernie supporters are nothing more than young white ivory tower liberal males just because SOME of his supporters fit that description. It implicitly suggests that the fact that people like me vote 90% and more for the inevitably mainstream Democratic candidate (indeed, I myself have never voted for anyone other than the Democratic Party nominee in the almost half-century since I first voted) proves we reject leftists policies when the fact is that we do not have the privilege to vote our conscience except when that vote is for a potential winner because the consequences of losing in our community are literally matters of life and death. In fact, many of the heroes of the fight for liberation, including Newton, Seale, Cleaver, King, Malik el-Shabazz etc., were confirmed socialists and confirmed agents of change and NOT the wearers of haute couture gowns you might find at . . . (well, you know what goes here).

4. Lie (this time by omission)>>> "Instead we see demands to abandon reproductive rights and civil rights, demands that education funding not be need-based so the several hundred K a year crowd can benefit off the labor of the working poor" Truth >>> Go back through the posts here over the last three weeks on the "we need to welcome anti-choice candidates (actually anti-a woman's absolute sovereignty over her own body candidates because this issue way bigger than just choice)." Count how many of those demanding loyalty to the party over the party's loyalty to one of our party's most basic tenets come from the same pragmatists who routinely cheer these anti-"Left" diatribes and compare that number to the number of "Leftists" demanding the same thing. It's not even close and yet you lay this at the feet of "Leftists."

How much more of this mantra - a term I use because we see it repeated over and over again - do I have to address before you finally admit that "the Left" has always stood by Democratic Party values and by Democratic candidates come time to vote with much greater frequency than at least some groups whose loyalty goes virtually unchallenged? Do I have to go through every line?

Btw, just because I am over being lectured about things I know first-hand, I've been to Cuba and not just for a weekend. You can toss out a hundred articles about the way we are treated there but I will tell you that it pales in comparison to how we are treated here.