Some Bernie supporters are posting memes about how terrible that awful liberal George Clooney is. Did you hear? He hosted a fundraiser for Democrats where rich people paid a lot of money to eat with celebrities. And then that money went to Democratic candidates across the nation (including Hillary — apparently that was the part they disliked the most).

Now, I understand the complaint that we need campaign finance reform and that the system is bad because so much money is needed to campaign. In fact, George Clooney agrees. “I think it’s an obscene amount of money,” he said.

But the fact is that in order to change the system — to get rid of Citizens United and to enact campaign finance reform — we need to win. And how do you win? With money. It’s a vicious circle.

Come on, you know the Republicans are doing this, too. If we didn’t raise as much as we could, too, we’re giving up before we even start. And it doesn’t help us at all if we’re protesting ourselves. We can’t laugh at how stupid the Republican candidates are being for attacking each other constantly while we’re doing the same thing.

Money in and of itself isn’t evil. And there’s nothing wrong with being rich. The problem is in how you get the money and what you use it for.

I support Bernie, really I do, but some of his supporters are making it difficult. They complain about party rules that have been in place for over 40 years while they’ve done nothing to change them, and they often don’t understand how it all works — they confuse the rules for the primary elections with rules for the general election and just kind of look naive.

In many ways I am an idealist as well but I think it’s important to be an informed idealist.