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.
