One Ring . . .

There's slime on everyone, somewhere up or down the line. Or maybe just imperfection. Maybe even signs of growth.

According to Paul Starr, a founder of The American Prospect and not your average mudslinger, Bernie Sanders was, in 1980, "presidential elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which supported the nationalization of industry and expressed solidarity with revolutionary dictatorships, including Iran (this at the time Iran was holding American hostages)."

I haven't checked it out. But if it's true, I have to wonder why Starr didn't go on to note that the SWP was the party of American Trotskyism. Maybe he felt his readers had no idea about Trotskyism, an esoteric, bygone creed, and he'd lose them if he went into detail.

So, then, what was Trotskyism? In brief, it boasted of being the real, the true, the genuine Leninism. The necessary Bolshevism and the only one worth having. The one without Stalin. . .

I do trust Bernie has moved on, moved way the hell on.

Starr isn't so sure. He's a liberal, skeptical about talk of socialism. He wants liberals, like me, to ask if Bernie's talk of socialism isn't, however distantly, beholden to Trotskyite ideals, if not the loathsome notions of democratic centralism and world revolution, then some version of nationalization.

Is it? I really welcome Bernie but Starr asks a few good questions.

Hillary: for sure, she lunched with Kissinger, and might again. For sure she voted for the Iraq war, as neither Senator Sanders nor then Senator Obama did, which dissent by Obama got him my vote.

She's lunched with power, was married to it, and obviously loved that diet.

What principles, if any, underlie her candidacy?

What will she do with power, if she gets it?

Can she be trusted with the Ring, the One Ring?

Who can?