"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Posted on 11/07/2017 7:39:45 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Everyone knew the primary was rigged. The real question is: Why did they bother, when they would have won anyway?
Over the weekend, the Washington Post previewed passages from former DNC chair Donna Brazile's much-anticipated "blistering" tell-all book about the 2016 presidential campaign, Hacks. The piece written by Phillip Rucker originally included a passage that read as follows:
"Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton’s aides, she writes, she would remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to replace the nominee. If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee the process of filling the vacancy."
Later, the paper changed this and other passages, originally without an editor’s note. The new passage read:
"Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton's aides, she writes, she would remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to initiate the replacement of the nominee. If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC."
This was a significant change. It meant the difference between Brazile claiming she had unilateral power to change nominees, and claiming she had the power to start a discussion about changing nominees.
Hurricane Twitter naturally ran with the story about Brazile mistakenly believing she had unilateral power. There are countless examples, but for instance: here, here and here.
This became one of the key points of attack against Brazile, who is being loudly booted out of the Church of the Blue Establishment, mostly via social media condemnations.
There were other methods. Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson penned a denunciation on Medium that included his expression of disappointment that Brazile would allow herself to be used by our foreign enemies.
The "open letter" from the Clinton campaign was signed by about a gazillion people, in the style of one of those academic letters of disavowal that have become popular tools against professors with "problematic" ideas. It read:
"We were shocked to learn the news that Donna Brazile actively considered overturning the will of the Democratic voters... It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate's health."
This has become a popular meme: That even paying attention to some of the core charges in Brazile's book is tantamount to aiding the Russians.
Markos Moulitsas tweeted as much by way of an analysis of @SecureDemocracy's "Russian propaganda tracker," the social media tool of the Alliance to Secure Democracy. (The Alliance is itself part of a groundbreaking effort to build a bridge between modern Dems and Bush-era neocons, but that's another story).
When it came out that eight out of the top 10 trending topics on the "tracker" this weekend were about the Brazile-fueled DNC scandal, this is what Moulitsas said: "If you’re letting the Right and the Russians drive your agenda, then it’s time to rethink your approach."
The use of rumors and innuendo to gin up furious emotional responses through a community before facts and corrections can catch up; the use of letters of denunciation; the reflexive charge that dissenting thoughts aid a foreign enemy – does no one recognize this? Has no one out there read a history book?
The headline revelations in Brazile's excerpt in Politico were interesting. She wrote that she had promised to get to the bottom of whether or not, as leaked/hacked DNC files suggested, the 2015-16 primary race against Bernie Sanders had been "rigged."
The excerpt starts off with Brazile anxiously preparing to call Sanders to share the bad news: "I had found my proof, and it broke my heart."
Actually, what Brazile found were things we mostly already knew. The worst had originally been reported on by Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf (then of Politico). The story among other things described how the national Clinton campaign used funds that by rule should have redounded to state Democratic Party offices.
Politico described this situation back then as "essentially… money laundering."
I wrote about this, too, after the DNC leak, believing that details about this were among the only significant things to emerge out of the otherwise tedious DNC leak.
The emails seemed to give weight to the charges in the Vogel-Arnsdorf story, which amounted to the Clinton campaign using state funds to make up for a shortfall at a time when Sanders was still viable and raising a lot of money.
But the idea that Brazile's book amounted to a smoking gun that the primary was "rigged" against Sanders is "problematic" in its own right, for two reasons:
1) That the DNC had things stacked against Sanders from the start wasn't secret. After all, the DNC wouldn't even let Sanders use their headquarters as a venue to announce his candidacy, way back in April of 2015. As the book Shattered explains it, DNC officials felt it was inappropriate to "give Sanders the imprimatur of the party." He made his announcement on a strip of grass outside the Capitol. He was never treated by the DNC as a real candidate, not from the first minute of his campaign.
2) But it didn't matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race wasn't that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this.
But that is what's so weird. Why bother monkeying around with rules, when you're going to win anyway?
Why not welcome Sanders and the energy he undoubtedly would (and did) bring into the party, rather than scheme to lock him and others out?
There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it's over: Who cares?
It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the defining problems of our age first began to be sown.
The rise of Trump and the crypto-fascist movement that crushed establishment Republicans is half of the story. The sharp move among many white middle American voters away from Beltway Republicanism toward something far darker and more dangerous crystalized in 2015-16. So it has to be studied over and over.
But there is an ugly thing on the other side that also began at that time.
This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy and civil liberties and began to promote a "results over process" mode of political thinking. It's when we started hearing serious people in Washington talk about the dangers of "too much democracy."
This isn't about Hillary Clinton. It's about a broader movement that took place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to blue-friendly media and academia.
It's a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.
In the age of Trump, we're now throwing all sorts of once-treasured principles – press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance – overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede ground to Trump over principles.
But this distrust of democracy began before Trump was even a nominee. As Brazile notes, it started within the ranks of the Democratic Party near the outset of the campaign.
It would have been a huge boon to Clinton's run if the DNC had welcomed not only Sanders but other serious candidates into the race, in the true spirit of what the primary process is supposed to represent – the winnowing of many diverse views into one unified message.
But the attitude in Washington is now the opposite. Primary challengers are increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the "real" candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.
As the campaign continued, and we saw both Trump's rise and results like Brexit, the "too much democracy" argument began to emerge even more, along with the embrace of techniques that would have horrified true liberals a generation ago.
In the last year, we've seen the blue-state establishment celebrate the use of the infamous FISA statute against American citizens, and the use of warrantless electronic surveillance against the same.
We've seen the ACLU denounced for defending free speech and we've seen sites like Buzzfeed celebrated for publishing unverified and/or slanderous material, usually because the targets are politically unpopular.
Liberals used not to believe in doing these things not only because they understood that they would likely be the first victims in a society stripped of civil protections (a school district forcing the removal of Black Lives Matter stickers is a classic example of a more probable future in a world without civil liberties).
No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate, discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.
The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore.
If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.
First, to even speak of Hillary being sick within the DNC would seem to be tantamount to treason, given how hard the campaign worked to deny it. So that sounds awfully risky for her to have been doing on a regular basis as the book suggests. Second:
“If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee the process of filling the vacancy.”
Doesn’t mean she could just plunk in a substitute of her own choice, there would be some sort of “process” that she would “oversee”. Of course that would have been an E-ticked thing to see ;-) - but wouldn’t it have been far more likely that Bernie would become the nominee than Biden as she has suggested? And putting Bernie in place of Hillary would have torn the D party apart just as if the R party has tried to substitute Jeb! for Trump.
So, maybe a bit of revisionism going on here. Still, bigly entertaining!
In the age of Trump, we’re now throwing all sorts of once-treasured principles – press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance – overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede ground to Trump over principles.
There are a few nuggets of truth in this analysis.
What the author is unwilling to see is that the root of “progressivism” is a lack of faith in the democratic process.
Progressivism, right from the start, was all about elites ordering society for everyone else, and how to lie the right way to get everyone else to allow the elites to stay in power.
The leftists only used democratic processes when they were useful for obtaining power and keeping it. Just the same as any other method. Progressives have always been all about power, and nothing about morals or ethics.
Why does he still have a job?
Wrong.
Everyone did not KNOW it was rigged. True, a lot of people suspected it was rigged; but the DNC denied it was rigged.
The big deal is that this Agreement and Brazile’s corroboration is tantamount to the blue dress. It is proof positive.
Hard to believe they put it in a contract. Then again, certainly hidden in those missing 30,000 emails would be proof positive of Clinton Foundation corruption, among other crimes.
Matt Taibbi??? Oh, this Matt Taibbi????
The only truth I could find in Matt's article. How/why did he let that slip through?
Complete cramp. Anything reacting to the leftist Dem party line is dark and evil.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
“Progressivism, right from the start, was all about elites ordering society for everyone else, and how to lie the right way to get everyone else to allow the elites to stay in power”
Well stated.
What bugs me about reading hard-core leftist stuff like this is that just like a Soviet citizen, the leftists constantly see their history being revised, their once strident narratives being changed to suit new facts, and even their so-called basic beliefs being trampled out of convenience to the ideological line of the day.
Yet in the end, they still rally themselves to a new, greater, nebulous boogeyman - of course, the “proto-fascist Trump.”
Oh...that’s intersting that hardrock liberals are loosening opposton to things like extralgal assasinaions.
Heck, (cough) democracies like the Dominican Republican are on-board with that for some time.
Porfirio Ruburosa——infamous Hollywood body man——was the D/R’s “embassy exminer.”
That’s a colorful way the D/R describes a state assassin.
No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate, discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.
I think we may be playing word games here with the use of the term "Liberals".
The Radical Left from the 60s (these are Hillary's people) hated the Liberals. The Liberals were weak. People like Hubert Humphrey?? Bah! Liberal! People like that would not push for the radical, fundamental changes that the New Left was looking for.
If we say (as Taibbi does) that Liberals would not engage in unethical political behavior, this is true. That was a sign of their weakness. But the Liberals are gone. They are history. There are no Liberals. Now we have Progressives -- like Hillary and Obama. There are no rules for these people. They will do whatever it takes. Donna Brazile's book is documentation of this.
The Ends Justify the Means. The real Left has been operating under that principle for a long, long time. And 100 million people are dead because of it.
” Primary challengers are increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the “real” candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.”
This allowed Trump to get debating experience and made him more credible. He EARNED the Republican nomination. Hillary was seen as being given the job just like her role as Sec of State. She did not earn it.
“2) But it didn’t matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race wasn’t that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this. “
I’m not so sure that an unrestrained Sanders would not have won. The author is selling the “Hillary is inevitable” line.
Maybe the race wasn’t close BECAUSE of DNC actions.
Why did they bother?
Just as the Clintonites have no contact with fly-over types, they are disproportionately in relationships with Bernie types. When everyone around them who isn’t on the payroll is for Bernie, you think you could lose it ... and your cushy self-important gig ... if you don’t fix it.
Taibii raises a valid question: why does Hillary always choose lying, cheating and corruption, if she could prevail honestly?
His answer is astounding: Because her Leftist constituency requires total power now, and sees democracy and Constitutional government as impediments. Elections and the rule of law are just gimmicks to be exploited. On this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Taibii admits that his side is driven by Leninist tactics and amorality. We’re supposed to give Hillary a pass, since she is just riding the wave.
IMO Hillary has led the charge to inject criminality into everything she touches, as an extension of her sick personality. She did idolize communists (Alinsky) and intern for a Stalinist lawyer (Robert Truehaft in her youth, and her whole “change from within the system” schtick is reminiscent of how Stalin came to power. Is she is attracted to left wing ideology as a way to justify her criminality rather than the other way around? Or is it just a great fit?
_______
BS...
LIBS.... you have NO PRINCIPLES! You are nothing now but a pack of foul rats chasing after voters who suck the government dry..... and have so little brain power or learning after you "educated" them that they just may vote with you sorry *ssholes!
To hell with all the communists on the left.
*************
ps.--- Where is Pittsburgher martin_fierro when you need him?
YOI .... DOUBLE YOI
It was not about Hillary. It was all about Hillary’s money. She setup a money laundering operation through the DNC. The party benefited because it was no longer fiscally bankrupt. Just morally bankrupt. Donna Brazille’s Live Matters. Everyone cares about her, at least everyone except the Governor of Virginia and his band of Hillary sycophants.
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