livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
DnCriminals: the Democrats, a Corrupt Enterprise, Rigged the 2016 Elections, They’ll Do It Again in 2020
The Democratic leadership, the mainstream media, and likely most of Hillary Clinton’s supporters will never address the sabotage of American democracy that they were complicit with in 2016. This is apparent because despite all the details that have come out about the theft of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, the political and media class is approaching the 2020 race with the assumption that the contest for the Democratic nomination will be run fairly.
For this reason, it’s crucial that independent journalists continue to document what the Democratic Party did three years ago, and that we make Democratic voters aware of it in the lead-up to when they participate in next year’s primary elections. This is the story of how the selfish wishes of a political dynasty resulted in an unprecedented defeat for American democracy, and how this then doomed America to the depraved political landscape that we’re now experiencing.
Prologue: preparing for a primary that was destined to be rigged
The Clintons were famously Machiavellian political figures. They perfected the art of triangulation, turning the Democratic Party’s allegiance from labor unions and the civil rights movement towards corporate interests. Hillary Clinton especially seemed to have an authoritarian approach towards politics, with her prioritization of loyal subordinates over competent ones leading to her hiring the under-qualified team of campaign leaders who helped her lose the 2016 election. As the journalist Michael Graham has written about how tightly the Clintons controlled the Democratic Party prior to their political exile after 2016: “The Clintons held the purse strings; they had the power. If you wanted to rise in the ranks of the Democratic Party, you kissed the ring- the Clinton ring. Leaders and free thinkers were quickly weeded out. Cutthroat loyalists and corporate lobbyists were placed in positions of power within the party. If you weren’t a ‘team player,’ then you were exiled.”
When Hillary Clinton lost the primary to Barack Obama in 2008, the Clintons applied their skills at winning in the game of ruling class infighting. When a group of fanatical Clinton supporters emerged who called themselves the PUMAs-ostensibly standing for “People United Means Action,” and popularly nicknamed “Party Unity My Ass”-the Clintons made no effort to rein them in. As the PUMAs urged Clinton’s supporters to vote for McCain in protest of Obama’s victory, the Clintons leveraged the PUMAs’ threats towards party unity by negotiating for the loyalty of Obama and the Democratic Party leadership. Hillary would now get a position as Secretary of State, and she could pursue the nomination in 2016 without any more threats to her ambitions.
The PUMAs’ extreme loyalty and lack of concern for the harm that their actions caused makes them representative of the cynical political operatives who Hillary Clinton relied on for gaining the nomination in 2016. And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who’d been on Clinton’s staff in 2008, is the foremost among these operatives; in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Schultz and other top Democratic National Committee officials had almost unanimously decided that they would hand Clinton the nomination by any means necessary.
As far back as 2014, Schultz and other Democratic insiders were preparing to appoint a circle of Clinton loyalists to run the party’s election strategy. Throughout the year before the the primary elections started, the DNC chose consultants like Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Anita Dunn, Hilary Rosen, and Jon Reinish-all of whom had histories showing they would side with Clinton-to decide how the party would act. From the start, Sanders had few allies within the Democratic leadership other than Tulsi Gabbard, who was sent a rudely immature letter by the DNC for endorsing Sanders.
Hillary Clinton also ensured that the primary would be tilted by buying the loyalty of the DNC, and of many of the state Democratic parties. So says Donna Brazile’s 2017 book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” Clinton leveraged her fundraising clout towards giving the DNC funding in exchange for the ability to influence the DNC’s decisions, including who it would hire and fire. Clinton also funneled money to 33 state Democratic parties, effectively buying their loyalty right before they’d manage the primary voting processes in their states.
Unlike in 2008, the Democratic Party leadership had long been prepared to hand Clinton the nomination. And unlike Obama, Sanders posed a threat to the party’s neoliberal paradigm because of his rejection of Wall Street money and his support for policies like single payer health care. So as has been revealed in the resentful anti-Sanders emails from Schultz and other DNC officials, the party had no concern for democracy as long as the preferred outcome of the primary would be reached. As Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman observed about the Democratic Party’s corruption, the Republican leadership “could have taken any number of avenues that would have, for example, made it impossible for Donald Trump to ascend to the debate stage or to meet the requirements to secure ballot access at the state-level. Indeed, party officials flirted with those prospects, but cooler heads prevailed. The same cannot be said of the Democratic Party’s officials, who have been nakedly at work protecting Hillary Clinton from the scrutiny of her fellow party members.”
Next came the DNC’s manipulating the Democratic presidential debate schedule so that Sanders would get less exposure, along with their funneling money to the Clinton campaign after it was solicited for down-ticket candidates. The DNC also helped create a false public perception about Clinton being insurmountably in the lead by counting the superdelegates as if they didn’t vote at July’s convention.
But these disturbing underhanded tricks were relatively minor. When the primary elections started, it became apparent that we weren’t just seeing a few cases of political favoritism; this was a direct election theft whose scale surpassed the Bush team’s sabotage of the Florida vote count in 2000.
The theft of an election
The first active part of the party’s sabotage of Sanders was the pro-Clinton bias that the DNC and the Clinton campaign engineered within the media. WikiLeaks has revealed that in April 2015, Politico’s Glenn Thrush privately sent stories to Clinton staffers for approval, among the numerous other instances of major media sources colluding with the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC throughout the 2016 election. And this is aside from the blackout of the Sanders campaign that happened within the corporate media regardless of the DNC’s actions-a pattern of bias which has been confirmed by a Harvard study.
More at ...
DnCriminals: the Democrats, a Corrupt Enterprise, Rigged the 2016 Elections, They'll Do It Again in 2020
The Democratic leadership, the mainstream media, and likely most of Hillary Clinton’s supporters will never address the sabotage of American democracy that they were complicit with in 2016. This is apparent because despite all the details that have come out about the theft of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, the political and media class is approaching the 2020 race with the assumption that the contest for the Democratic nomination will be run fairly.
For this reason, it’s crucial that independent journalists continue to document what the Democratic Party did three years ago, and that we make Democratic voters aware of it in the lead-up to when they participate in next year’s primary elections. This is the story of how the selfish wishes of a political dynasty resulted in an unprecedented defeat for American democracy, and how this then doomed America to the depraved political landscape that we’re now experiencing.
Prologue: preparing for a primary that was destined to be rigged
The Clintons were famously Machiavellian political figures. They perfected the art of triangulation, turning the Democratic Party’s allegiance from labor unions and the civil rights movement towards corporate interests. Hillary Clinton especially seemed to have an authoritarian approach towards politics, with her prioritization of loyal subordinates over competent ones leading to her hiring the under-qualified team of campaign leaders who helped her lose the 2016 election. As the journalist Michael Graham has written about how tightly the Clintons controlled the Democratic Party prior to their political exile after 2016: “The Clintons held the purse strings; they had the power. If you wanted to rise in the ranks of the Democratic Party, you kissed the ring- the Clinton ring. Leaders and free thinkers were quickly weeded out. Cutthroat loyalists and corporate lobbyists were placed in positions of power within the party. If you weren’t a ‘team player,’ then you were exiled.”
When Hillary Clinton lost the primary to Barack Obama in 2008, the Clintons applied their skills at winning in the game of ruling class infighting. When a group of fanatical Clinton supporters emerged who called themselves the PUMAs-ostensibly standing for “People United Means Action,” and popularly nicknamed “Party Unity My Ass”-the Clintons made no effort to rein them in. As the PUMAs urged Clinton’s supporters to vote for McCain in protest of Obama’s victory, the Clintons leveraged the PUMAs’ threats towards party unity by negotiating for the loyalty of Obama and the Democratic Party leadership. Hillary would now get a position as Secretary of State, and she could pursue the nomination in 2016 without any more threats to her ambitions.
The PUMAs’ extreme loyalty and lack of concern for the harm that their actions caused makes them representative of the cynical political operatives who Hillary Clinton relied on for gaining the nomination in 2016. And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who’d been on Clinton’s staff in 2008, is the foremost among these operatives; in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Schultz and other top Democratic National Committee officials had almost unanimously decided that they would hand Clinton the nomination by any means necessary.
As far back as 2014, Schultz and other Democratic insiders were preparing to appoint a circle of Clinton loyalists to run the party’s election strategy. Throughout the year before the the primary elections started, the DNC chose consultants like Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Anita Dunn, Hilary Rosen, and Jon Reinish-all of whom had histories showing they would side with Clinton-to decide how the party would act. From the start, Sanders had few allies within the Democratic leadership other than Tulsi Gabbard, who was sent a rudely immature letter by the DNC for endorsing Sanders.
Hillary Clinton also ensured that the primary would be tilted by buying the loyalty of the DNC, and of many of the state Democratic parties. So says Donna Brazile’s 2017 book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” Clinton leveraged her fundraising clout towards giving the DNC funding in exchange for the ability to influence the DNC’s decisions, including who it would hire and fire. Clinton also funneled money to 33 state Democratic parties, effectively buying their loyalty right before they’d manage the primary voting processes in their states.
Unlike in 2008, the Democratic Party leadership had long been prepared to hand Clinton the nomination. And unlike Obama, Sanders posed a threat to the party’s neoliberal paradigm because of his rejection of Wall Street money and his support for policies like single payer health care. So as has been revealed in the resentful anti-Sanders emails from Schultz and other DNC officials, the party had no concern for democracy as long as the preferred outcome of the primary would be reached. As Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman observed about the Democratic Party’s corruption, the Republican leadership “could have taken any number of avenues that would have, for example, made it impossible for Donald Trump to ascend to the debate stage or to meet the requirements to secure ballot access at the state-level. Indeed, party officials flirted with those prospects, but cooler heads prevailed. The same cannot be said of the Democratic Party’s officials, who have been nakedly at work protecting Hillary Clinton from the scrutiny of her fellow party members.”
Next came the DNC’s manipulating the Democratic presidential debate schedule so that Sanders would get less exposure, along with their funneling money to the Clinton campaign after it was solicited for down-ticket candidates. The DNC also helped create a false public perception about Clinton being insurmountably in the lead by counting the superdelegates as if they didn’t vote at July’s convention.
But these disturbing underhanded tricks were relatively minor. When the primary elections started, it became apparent that we weren’t just seeing a few cases of political favoritism; this was a direct election theft whose scale surpassed the Bush team’s sabotage of the Florida vote count in 2000.
The theft of an election
The first active part of the party’s sabotage of Sanders was the pro-Clinton bias that the DNC and the Clinton campaign engineered within the media. WikiLeaks has revealed that in April 2015, Politico’s Glenn Thrush privately sent stories to Clinton staffers for approval, among the numerous other instances of major media sources colluding with the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC throughout the 2016 election. And this is aside from the blackout of the Sanders campaign that happened within the corporate media regardless of the DNC’s actions-a pattern of bias which has been confirmed by a Harvard study.
More at ...
DnCriminals: the Democrats, a Corrupt Enterprise, Rigged the 2016 Elections, They'll Do It Again in 2020
