Among a subset of the various and sundry candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination that I have already discussed, there’s an opinion that filing FEC paperwork entitles one to direct, unfettered access to the marketplace of ideas.

Michael Bennet, one of the useless Joe Biden clones with no actual ideas who does not belong in this race, said “The DNC process is stifling debate at a time when we need it most … rewarding celebrity candidates with Twitter followers.’’ No, asshole, they’re not doing that. They let you and 19 other people on the stage at one point, which is more candidates who have been taken seriously enough to be invited to a sanctioned debate than ever before.

The DNC’s criteria for the September debate were pretty basic: have 130,000 individual donors – that is, separate people who have pitched at least $1 into your campaign – and show 2% in four approved polls. Most of those polls are state-level polls that focus on the early states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. That’s it. Of the 23 candidates still in the mix at the deadline, 10 of them qualified. 10. 10 candidates is still a largely unprecedented number. In 2016, there were five. Yes, Republicans had 16 at one point, but that was an outlier. And of this crop of 10, only three have cracked double digits.

Now, the margin of error on these polls is ~+/-2%. That means that a number of the qualified candidates could actually be polling closer to zero. And candidates like Bennet, who are actually polling at zero, well, the might be negative. That’s probably not how polls work, but if I’m answering one and Bennet’s name comes up, I’m not just registering my lack of support, I’m registering my antipathy for him.

Then we get Tom Steyer, who is under the impression that the presidency is for sale (probably because it is). This guy jumped into the race halfway through the September polling period, spent literally millions of dollars to get 130,000 donors who all gave a dollar, and then had the nerve to complain that he didn’t make the stage because he couldn’t buy polling.

But then he did. He made the thresholds for the October debate, which are, for some reason, exactly the same as September but with a longer polling period. So this buffon who has no idea other than “Impeach Trump” is going to get on the stage. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but at this point it’s basically like running on the “Hawai’ian Pizza Is Good, Fight Me” platform. Just because you’re right about one thing does not mean you have anything to add to the discussion.

Steyer managed 2% in four polls, and I’d really like to know who those people are. They saw 25 other people running, and picked a random jar of warm mayonnaise from the warm mayonnaise shelf. These are where the margins of error happen. I can’t believe that anyone legitimately supports Tom Steyer, because he has no discernable platform. He says nothing of value. He adds nothing to the debate. He is simply a walking pile of cash.

We have a DNC that is willing to let pretty much anyone on stage, and a crop of useless idiots who are complaining bitterly that they couldn’t walk over a bar that was effectively on the floor. And then we have a small subset of people who can’t even answer a poll correctly allowing some of those idiots to trip over the bar and onto the stage.

Back in the dawn of the nation, calling someone a small-d democrat was a duel-worthy slur, because small-d democracy was roundly derided as akin to mob-rule anarchy. They weren’t too far off base. There’s a mob, alright, but most of them couldn’t find their own asses with both hands, let alone actually rule anything.