Go For It, Hillary!

Well, it was history, all right, but what sort of history?

Bernie Sanders supporters—and do I have to tell that I’m right there among them?—will certainly agree that history was made. After all, has there ever been a primary process that was so utterly and conveniently skewed to assure Clinton a victory?

I wanted to like her. I almost did in 2008. True, there was always something a little entitled about her: was it Farrakhan who said something like, “she just couldn’t believe that a black man would come out of nowhere…?” Think so, but the internet just drifted out the door….

Well, well—it’s the old story: divide and conquer. Stir up the muck, get the minorities and oppressed groups hating each, and bam! Donald Trump—or whoever the jerk of the moment may be—gets off scot-free.

It was fishy for months, and like fish, it didn’t smell any prettier as time went on. There was the huge disconnect of reading The New York Times—Everyone Including Nosferatu Agrees: Clinton WILL Be Nominee, read one headline—and then seeing footage of lines extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles, all just to hear Sanders speak. (Full disclosure—I made all of that up, but you know what I mean….)

Yes, it was all a little bogus, wasn’t it? Even when Sanders won, as he did in Wisconsin, he still seemed to get shafted. I mean, what in the world do you make of this picture?

Right—I checked, and 56% of 86 delegates is indeed 48. So all is on the up and up, right? I can lay aside this particular conspiracy and go back to worrying about the illuminati, can’t I?

Well, no, because here is the Washington Times, weighing in on the super delegates:

If the superdelegates in Wisconsin would do that, Sanders would leave Wisconsin with 12 more delegates than Clinton. As it stands now, the best Sanders can hope for is an eight delegate advantage, but it could be as slim as just two.

So how did it all work out? Did Sanders supporters get the super delegates to agree to be bound to the candidate who won the election? Who knows—and that was exactly the point. Because it was dizzying, this primary season: no sooner did you get done seeing the YouTube clips of Arizona than you were busy worrying about the 100,000 or so missing democrats in the Bronx, and then….

They learned—the best way to get away with anything is to be brazen. Then, when confronted, they could charge that the Sanders people were being “ridiculous,” as some comedian put it on Monday or Tuesday.

In fact, I am very frequently ridiculous. But there are also some rules of the game: if some of the Sanders supporters were at times poor losers, weren’t some of the Clinton people rather poor winners? And really, no matter how much you believe that Clinton was the right candidate, can anyone also not believe that the process was flawed?

The tragedy here is that it never had to happen: running elections is not rocket science. You only need to do three or four things. First, you take every voting machine and sell it for scrap. Second, you print paper ballots. Third, you hold elections on Sundays, when most people don’t have to work. Then, you count each vote by hand, in the presence of representative of all the candidates. I would add, by the way, that you could crowd source the whole thing by use of cameras and the internet: I promise to stay glued to the computer as my precinct’s votes are tabulated.

Right—got that taken care of!

Of course, if you really needed help—I mean, I’m just a blogger, after all—you could call in…now what was his name? Oh yes, Jimmy Carter, since when he hasn’t been building houses, he’s been supervising elections. Or monitoring them. Or doing what he does, but anyway, at 90 plus, isn’t the elder statesman around here?

Oh, and didn’t he have some tart words to say recently about the primaries? Damn, wish the internet were here….

Would I vote for Clinton, if I could vote at all? Honey, I’d vote for Clinton as many times as anybody would let me—but not with a smile on my face. That’s what I told my sister-in-law, who is furious with the Sanders people.

“Do they REALLY want Trump to be elected!” she demanded.

I decided to tell her the truth: I’m one of those people….

But I did sweeten the affair by telling her this (note, drop voice to a baritone, and also intone): At no time in the history of our great nation have we required the strength of character, the wisdom, the leadership, the compassion, the vision, of a patriot who has the proven capacity to…

…steal an election.