For the BernieBots

I've heard too much from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders about sitting out the election if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee (or voting Green, which is the same thing). They're pretending it's high principles -- "Oh, she's hand in glove with Wall Street," or "I don't think she's honest," or "she supports the TPP," or any of a baker's dozen of excuses. I see it as being childish and petulant.

So, for all you purist leftists (if any of you read this blog), I bring you this, via Digby, from President Obama's commencement speech at Howard University:

You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.

You have to go through life with more than just a passion for change – you have to have strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes. Change requires more than righteous anger. To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in customs.

There are over 310 million people in this country, including a lot of people who are frightened and dismayed by the pace of the changes we've had. You want instant Paradise? By whose definition?

Here's Obama delivering the speech:

And Tom Sullivan ("Undercover Blue") has a transcript here.