Where da party at?
Thousands of Democrats demanded the ouster of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton as chair of the party’s national committee. They accused her of having conflicting motivations, being stubborn and out of touch with current times. And that’s just her hair.Even as she heads to the exit, amid thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, she insists on staying on at her post through this week’s convention, delivering both the opening and the closing address of the Democrats' televised cavalcade of stars, and then she accepts an honorary chair position with the Clinton campaign that she’s accused of having favored during the primary race. Nice. On 60 Minutes last night, during an interview that was designed to introduce Tim Kaine to the nation as the party’s vice presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton spent several minutes explaining to Scott Pelley that she had no insight into the Wasserman-Schultz/DNC affair, and wouldn’t be capable of knowing anything about what was happening with people that don’t work for her campaign, even as the Florida Congresswoman begins working for her campaign.
What has always been frustrating to true progressives about the Democratic Party is that, not only do their candidates and operatives too often choose political expedience over conscience, but they’re not even good at political expedience. You can't out-Republican Republicans. They have argued that their strategy has been a successful one for the party, but it’s created a horrible representative deficit in the U.S. Senate, in Congress, in state governorships, and we've seen the country drift aimlessly and shamelessly to the right. The decision this weekend by the Democrats and by Debbie Disaster to have her linger through this week distracts from the candidate, distracts from the “issues facing America,” and gives fodder to the Trump campaign, which looks shockingly more adult than the Clinton camp lately on issues such as trade and avoiding war with Russia.
Bringing Debbie Distraction formally aboard the Clinton train at this juncture will be correctly viewed as a big F-U to the progressive Sanders voters that Clinton should be trying to court. She still doesn’t get it-- showing the same ignorance in choosing Wall Street’s Kaine as a running mate over less compromised politicos such as Elizabeth Warren. Clinton is a true believer in the foreclosing political system that says you need a treasure chest of banking and corporate cash to win a presidential election, even as the 2016 campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Jeb Bush have all proved that the system has changed. She doesn’t yet recognize that her ongoing public display of political calculation no longer plays. The triangulation championed by the now-literally-defunct Democratic Leadership Council is finally being categorized and rejected by voters for what it is-- dishonesty.
Despite the loud reawakening of the political left in 2016, Clinton still takes for granted that she will get its vote. If and when she loses in November, however, it will be because she alienated those voters and they, alternately, stayed home or threw their support towards Green Party candidate Jill Stein (I personally recommend the latter). The Bernie campaign has succeeded in stiffening the backbone of millions of progressives, and Clinton will catch on to this fact now or later.
Her nomination was a terrible mistake aided by this internal party malfeasance. As Ralph Nader explained to Tavis Smiley on PBS last week, the Democrats should be running against “Cheating Donald,” as he was labeled by Nader in the Donald's catchy nicknaming style. The businessman has shown a willingness to cheat on consumers, business partners, regulators, creditors, and spouses. Yet they can't run against that particular candidate because the Clintons are well-known cheats themselves, from the Lincoln Bedroom to Hillary's computer room to Bill's windowless corridor. Trump lingers close behind Clinton in national polls, and during the week that she should be using to catapult herself back to a comfortable lead, pundits are talking about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Taking the place of the outgoing party chairperson this Friday will be long-time party operative Donna Brazile, a familiar presence on the Sunday chat shows who was conspiring with the DLC (Republican) wing of the party even before it became fashionable during Bill Clinton’s presidency. In a supposed-nod to Sanders supporters, Debbie is now out, but then the hacks replace her with whom? They choose a person, in Brazile, who was also implicated in the WikiLeaks email release to be anti-Sanders and acting against his campaign. Said Brazile about the Sanders campaign endorsing Wasserman-Schultz's primary opponent, "I saw it this am. How stupid. Don't know how to respond to Bernie anymore." And then she turned down an interview discussing Sanders' campaign with the Washington Post, "I have no intentions of touching this. Why? Because I will cuss out the Bernie camp!" Another slap.
Thanks to these leaked emails-- Julian Assange is the gift that keeps on giving, Sanders was proven to be correct all along that the party machine was against him. And those of us that lamented Sanders' decision to run as a Democrat in the first place, rather than mounting an independent campaign from the left in the general election, were really proven to be correct. With these snake-oil salesmen at the helm, it’s never even been about what’s good for Democrats. And it’s definitely never been about what’s good for America. It’s a naked careerism displayed by individuals that continue to fall “up” inside their sanctified system of corruption, individuals like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
posted by CM @ 1:48 PM
9 Comments:
You make a great point as you've said one party doesn't move to the right without bringing the other one right. How would you then argue a Trump presidency will move Democrats to the left?
Nothing will move Democrats to the left. Vote Green.
Since you admirably vote with purpose and conscience, what is your best case scenario outcome of you and I voting for the Green Party presidential candidate?
Best case: Trump beats Clinton. Bill and Hillary disappear forever. That's "day one." Trump pulls out of the Ukraine, realizing as he does that we are not at war with Russia, as Obama and Clinton believe. He pulls us out of NAFTA and all the global trade deals that are strangling America's workers, and workers abroad as well, and that Wall Street bankers love, which is why they support Trump's opponent. We never enter into TPP, an anti-environment, anti-regulation, anti-worker bill that strips countries of their ability to defend themselves against state-less corporations. Obama supports this, Clinton says she doesn't, but Terry McAuliffe accidentally revealed on stage last night that she does, and by extension, that she's lying again.
Trump's isolationism takes us out of the Middle East. He permits Russia to take the reins in Syria because, unlike Obama and Clinton, he doesn't fear their influence to spread, what, Communism still? I've never understood this unsupportable opinion except that we still want the Middle East to ourselves because our oil is under their sand.
The wall between Mexico and the U.S. never gets built because it never would anyway. It's a wall that's thousands of miles long. Democrats and Republicans both are ridiculous for believing in the threat. America's government will ALWAYS give American business a steady stream of inexpensive labor with which to work, and that is Mexicans and Central Americans. And Republicans don't even want to spend money to fix collapsing bridges. They're not going to build a giant damn wall that we can't afford to construct or defend.
Muslims are fucked either way, sad to report, but we'll have fewer refugees when we stop warring with their fundamentalists in a brutal exercise to maintain access to their oil. Trump's a bigot, but Bill Clinton just told us last night in his speech that Muslims have to earn their citizenship with their loyalty. Hacked emails reveal that DNC staffers are capable of the same racist rhetoric privately that Trump is publicly. And the Democrats, tonight, are hoisting up a speaker, Mike Bloomberg, that had the NYPD spying on every Mosque in the tri-state area and sending undercover "plants" to infiltrate each of them. Just another example of Trump "saying" terrible things, and Hillary's team actually doing them.
Best case finds the shootings of unarmed black children and young adults slowing to a trickle because the Black Lives Matter movement never allows itself to be co-opted by the Democratic Party, as the long-defunct anti-war, anti-Wall Street, and anti-death penalty movements did.
Gay rights continue to be gay rights, even expanding in the courts, because Donald Trump doesn't care what you do in your private life. Abortion stays legal because Trump was pro-choice until he decided to run for president on the Republican ticket. In office, he does all the moderate shit that 2010 Donald Trump would have done because that's who he actually is, and as an anti-authoritarian, left-wing activist, it's better for me having a Clinton Democrat in the White House that's a Republican than having a Clinton Democrat in the White House that's a Clinton.
Then, legacy's important, so fifty to a hundred years from now, best case, Ralph Nader is seen as a Gene Debs-like historical hero because of his foresight, and Dr. Stein is seen as a Ralph Nader-like historical hero because of hers. As a group, we are viewed, well-remembered or not, like the Socialists, Progressives, and Communists of the teens and twenties of the last century who opposed child labor, wars for profit, loyalty tests, and public lynchings even though the Democratic and Republican Parties of the time were blind to each of those issues.
When a grandchild or great-grandchild asks about us and our place in the world, we won't have to explain, like yesterday's cowards do, that we voted for Wilson or Harding or Taft, the corrupt anti-Indian, pro-white supremacy, pro-imperial Republicans or Democrats who were in office in those days, because those people will hold no meaning for future audiences, political context being gone. What will remain is what issues we stood for and whether they still hold up on that unspecified future date as moral.
Why do you think it is Bernie Sanders disagrees with you?
Sanders never thought his campaign would get this far. How could he have? Now he's in a position where he has succeeded and his victory is precisely based on the combination of his authenticity and his opponent's lack of it. He set out to provide a pointed contrast between him and the corporate party, and he did it entirely too well. He has to endorse her and repair the rift he created, or he will be Nader'd. That vicious assault that continues on Ralph has not only been a personal affront to the citizen superhero, but it was a targeted strangling, financially, of the dozens of citizen groups Nader founded, funded, and publicized, from Public Citizen to citizen utility boards to the Center for Auto Safety to the Center for Justice & Democracy. Every American has been victimized for it, and Sanders would get it worse if he pissed on the Democrats' national infomercial.
Any thoughts on why Noam Chomsky says he'd "absolutely vote" for Clinton if he lived in a swing state? And there are "enormous differences between Republicans and Democrats" at the moment???
Chomsky believes in strategic voting-- and lesser-evil voting. He suggested vote "trading" between residents of different states already in 2004 and 2008. Like almost everyone, he recognizes the rightward shift in the country, but he doesn't acknowledge how this strategy is a direct cause of it. The only difference between the two parties, but it's a big one, is the group of voters they pander to. Am I not aware of a mechanism in the voting system that allows us, the day after the election, to know which votes for Hillary Clinton are protest votes and which are actual endorsements? It's an utterly asinine strategy. You might intend it as an anti-Trump message, but to her, it's a mandate, and a reason to move further to the right. Do you also lie to pollsters?
I cannot stress this enough. Politics is about actions, not words. There's always at the base of everything a large financial incentive in it for the media to create a story of two warring parties, and a powerful ambition to re-create, every four years, the election of 2000, which was the ratings gift to them that kept on giving. They want conflict even in the results, just like the way college football media didn't want a playoff system. People want to watch a winner-take-all match-up, but a good controversy over the championship will sustain talk radio and talk television for months and months on end. America can never be allowed to return to electoral blowouts. Stock prices for these five media conglomerates would level off.
Now that large-sized wings of both parties are tuned to this frequency of unholy cooperation, the rhetoric from the candidates has to get even more heated for it to sustain. What comes after Trump's rhetoric is the question? The candidates get worse, but the wars, the violence, the privacy laws, and the Wall Street bailouts remain the same regardless of who's in office. Of course Gore would have gone to war with Iraq, just like Bush. No question about it. The national security state was for it. The corporations wanted it. It was good for oil and good for patriotism. It was predicted to be a repeat of the 1991 bludgeoning. That's why Hillary voted for it, and Gore's running mate literally became a Republican. A pussy like Gore wasn't going to put the breaks on any military action following 9-11.
I remind all that the Clintons went to the Trumps' wedding. Donald supported the Clintons publicly for years. He and Hillary worked in close proximity and friendship throughout her time in New York. He was a Democrat for 50 years of his life. Ivanka and Chelsea are called best friends by the Daily News. Trump is plenty preferable to Cruz, Carson, or any of the other Republicans. That's why fundies don't trust him, FOX News harasses him, and their establishment completely shunned him, even though the all agree with his idea for a wall and his plan to limit refugees when you ask them individually. His nomination is actually that party's partial return to the center. And his foreign policy is more Chomsky-ite than Clinton's. But that story doesn't sell conflict and it won't create another terrifying reason for liberals to delay voting their conscience. Everyone in the country does but them.
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