Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five links!
Remember in 2015 and 2016 how the campaign of Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, pulled shenanigans to squeeze out the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont? Well, get ready for Phase 2! Excerpt:
If Sanders wins the Iowa caucuses on Monday and continues to gain momentum, it is possible he could arrive at the convention with the most delegates — but without enough to win the nomination on the first ballot. It is also possible that he and Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive, could arrive at the convention in second and third place, but with more delegates combined than the frontrunner.
If, on the second ballot, superdelegates were to throw their support to someone else, tipping the scales, many moderate Democrats fear the upheaval that would cause could weaken the eventual nominee.
Conversations about a potential rules change picked up as Sanders ascended in the primary, but they have not gained traction to this point within the DNC.
The DNC received a lot of flak for their nominating process in 2016, which many argued was designed to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton. Donna Brazile, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, wrote in her 2017 book Hacks that she promised Bernie Sanders that when she “took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention” that she would “get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process.”
“By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart,” she wrote.
My first thought on this is simple; the President and every member of the Trump campaign is no doubt hitting their knees every night, praying for loony old Bernie to be the Dam’s candidate. That would tip what should be a good-to-better chance at re-election to a walkover. The daffy old Bolshevik’s entire campaign is an endless litany of Free Shit, and while that may marginally sell better than Her Imperial Majesty’s two-fold campaign of “I have a vagina” and “It’s my turn, you peasants,” it’s going to lose big, big swaths of the blue-collar union workers who have long been a mainstay of the Democrat Party.
But the fact that the Democrats are even facing this turn of events speaks volumes about where that party has gone. Instead of a center-left party, which once included such members as Zell Miller, it is becoming a party of urban “progressives,” self-assigned victim groups, and every advocate for every form of Free Shit that arises.
Now, what that party did in 2016 to screw Bernie over was inexcusable, no matter how daffy his stated policy positions are. But the real question is this: Will they do it again this year? And, if Bernie is hosed by the Party apparatchiks again this year, will his not-insubstantial numbers of follower bolt for the Green Party or some other far-left stable of lunatics?
Whatever happens, it’s going to be fun to watch.
