Tuesday, July 26, 2016

In Soviet Union, election steals you


Given that Trump's friends in Russia, and therefore, Wikileaks, are committed to releasing more private conversations from the DNC, I think it's worth examining the role of the organization in US elections.

I've seen a lot of people proclaim that the DNC has violated some kind of oath of impartiality.  Right off the bat, let me assure you that such an oath does not exist.  It's not the job of the DNC to be impartial.  It is the job of the DNC to win in November.  

Full stop.

If you need more convincing, maybe take a look at the name.  It's the Democratic National Committee.  They exist to promote Democrats, and to enable them to win office against Republicans.  When they serve as a go-between for opposing candidates during a primary, they are never going to obstruct, or harm, the stronger candidate.  Never.  They're not your mom, they're not there to "be fair" or to tell Clinton that nice girls share their delegates.  That is not what they do, that is never what they did, and that is not going to change just because you're rooting for the underdog.

Something else they don't do, is actually run the election.  Counties do that, and states, and although the structures vary somewhat from place to place, when it boils down to how a governor wants to run an election, and how the state Democratic Committee wants to see it happen, the governor wins every time.  Because the governor has a lot of political power, and hey, quick question for you guys: what's the name of the chairperson of your county's Democratic Party?  How about your state's Democratic Committee?  Oh, you don't know?

Exactly.

So I'm just going to dismiss entirely any talk of the DNC suppressing selected voters in their own primary.

On to the stolen emails!  I see a lot talk in the media about how what's been released shows that the DNC was biased against Sanders.  First of all, imagine that!  Democrats, wary of the motivations of a Socialist who said to a reporter that he only joined the Democratic party in order to get better publicity for his presidential run?  Go figure.  It's like they are human with reasoning ability or something.

Secondly, what did they do to disadvantage him, exactly?  And if you're having trouble answering that, it's probably because they didn't actually do anything.  And if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Sanders's own press secretary, who couldn't take the conspiracy nonsense any more and blasted out a few choice tweets, such as "the system didn't cheat us," and "NO ONE STOLE THE ELECTION."

Yes, there was a private email strategy session that was stolen and made public, and the most damning thing that can be said about that is 1) Veep is an astoundingly accurate television show, and 2) if Bernie Sanders was sitting on an "I'm an atheist!" bombshell, then the DNC wanted to make damn sure that it went off during the primary, and not as the party's nominee in the fall, which sounds completely reasonable to me.  We also learned that the super evil supervillain Debbie Wasserman Schultz is really bad at living up to her evilness, because she apparently shot down every dumbass "should we expose Sanders's beliefs?" idea that came her way.

At least, so far.  I'm not a fan of DWS, although it's because she doesn't appear to always represent her constituents all that well, and not because she personifies any of the names that men on the internet call her.

But what about the debate schedule?  Sanders didn't get the time slots he wanted!

Seriously?  The debate schedule?  You do realize that this is the number one, perennial, never-changing bitch of every campaign since debates were invented?   It's also a bitch that is laughably irrelevant when you can watch anything anytime you want on that thing in your hand that you're using to catch Pokemon.

Ah, but what about Schultz's unfair treatment of the Sanders campaign, when she locked them out of their own voter database?  Is that how you remember that incident?  Here's how I remember it: Sanders campaign workers knowingly accessed confidential Clinton campaign data.  They did it more than once.  Then they claimed that they did it to "expose a fault in the system," complained about being denied access while the investigation proceeded, didn't publicly thank the Clinton campaign when they stepped up to vouch for their overall integrity (not counting the guy they fired for stealing and directing others to steal), and then sued the DNC and claimed that they were the victims.  Of their own crime.

Which leads me to my last point.  The Sanders campaign was really good at spin.  Because they excelled at politics, you know, politics, the game that everyone is playing here?

At any rate, while I understand that political coverage is not a zero sum deal, maybe we could spare a few column inches of the "DNC is a ravenous monster!" narrative and devote those to investigating a Republican nominee who appears to be in cahoots with a foreign government in order to influence American policy.  You know, kind of like treason?