Beto O’Verrated

To those who found Barack Obama’s generic — and ultimately unfulfilled — campaign slogans of “hope” and “change” to be appealing, Beto O’Rourke’s “sometimes saccharine call to summon the nation’s better angels” (per The New York Times) appeals. Let’s smother this one in the crib, for God’s sake.

Jesus fucking Christ, I hope that Betomania doesn’t last long.

Indeed, Beto O’Rourke is the white Barack Obama, the candidate with the initials B. O. who is whatever you want him to be, just a blank, white wall upon which you project your probably-futile dreams of hope and change.

“Will a soon-to-be-former congressman, with an unremarkable legislative record and a [U.S.] Senate campaign loss, upend [the Democrats’] best-laid plans?” asks The New York Times, acknowledging that O’Rourke is quite substance-free.

Even O’Rourke himself apparently doesn’t know what the fuck, if anything, he stands for. Reports Politico:

Asked if he is a progressive Democrat, O’Rourke told reporters, “I don’t know. I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels. I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”

If you’re for everyone and everything, then you are for no one and you stand for nothing.

I get it: O’Rourke campaigned in Texas, where if you’re one millimeter left of center you must deny it at all costs, claiming against credibility that you’re entirely non-ideological.

So O’Rourke is a left-leaning coward in a red state or he truly has no moral compass other than saying whatever he thinks he should say to win your vote — even if that means that, as he has done so far, he really says nothing at all.

We’ve been here, done this, with Barack Obama. (The New York Times reports, unsurprisingly, that “veterans of former President Barack Obama’s political operation (and Mr. Obama himself) [are offering] their counsel [to O’Rourke] and hampering would-be rivals who are scrambling to lock down influential supporters and strategists as future campaign staff.”)

I, for one, won’t be punk’d again. (I voted for empty suit Obama in 2008, but not in 2012, after he turned out to be, at best, a centrist caretaker, not a bold and progressive leader.)

O’Rourke has pulled only single digits in the nationwide polls of Democratic Party presidential preference taken over the past two months, with the exception of one poll, which put him at 15 percent, but in all of these polls he has come behind Bernie Sanders, who in all of these polls has come behind Joe Biden.

It’s safe to say that for right now, anyway, according to the reputable nationwide polls, it’s Biden at No. 1, Bernie at No. 2 and O’Rourke depressingly at No. 3, with everyone else in single digits.

(The MoveOn poll referenced in the editorial cartoon above that recently put O’Rourke at No. 1 was, to my knowledge, an entirely unscientific online poll that easily could have been rigged by the Betomaniacs, but even the MoveOn poll has Biden, Bernie and O’Rourke all in the top three.)

Worse, reportedly there is chatter within Team Biden about a desperate, twice-run-and-twice-lost Joe Biden making O’Rourke his running mate, as though one unappealing candidate plus one unappealing candidate somehow equals two appealing candidates.

Also, of course, even though I’ve railed against identity politics many times, I think that it would be a big mistake for the Democratic Party to run two white guys on its 2020 presidential ticket. (Only about one in three Americans is a white male.)

I’m for Bernie Sanders, who, ironically, is an actual Democrat, plus a non-white-guy vice-presidential candidate, perhaps Elizabeth Warren or even perhaps Kamala Harris, who, although she’s an empty slate much like O’Rourke is, at least won her election to the U.S. Senate.

As Matt Taibbi recently correctly pointed out, the corporate media hacks are busy trying to destroy Elizabeth Warren, trying to orchestrate her demise and then pretend that it was a naturally occurring event and not an event that they actively caused (perhaps probably to protect the corporations from which they draw their paychecks).

That said, Bernie would benefit should Warren not run or drop out (as he would, I’m sure, inherit most of her supporters), and it always has bothered me that while Bernie had the balls to run against Queen Billary in 2016, Warren sat it out — hardly courageous of her.

While the corporate media are unfairly savaging Warren, in the end it might mean a President Sanders — a wholly unintended consequence, I’m sure.

In the meantime, again, I very much hope that the ill-conceived love affair with Beto O’Rourke flames out as quickly as it flamed up.

P.S. I saw this on CNN, after I posted the above:

Former Vice President Joe Biden holds the pole position in the first CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll among likely 2020 Democratic [Iowa] caucus-goers, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke joining him as the only possible candidates in the field with double-digit support.

The new Iowa Poll finds 32 percent of likely caucus-goers saying they back Biden as their first choice, 19 percent Sanders, 11 percent O’Rourke, 8 percent Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 5 percent California Sen. Kamala Harris, [and] the rest of the 20-person field testing below 5 percent support.

The top three candidates in Iowa, including O’Rourke’s third-place ranking, match the top three in a national CNN poll released Friday. Early results nationally are often driven by name recognition, but in Iowa, the campaign is already underway, with several of the tested candidates having made multiple visits to the state, and at least one having already visited all 99 of the state’s counties.

The field will, I believe, shrink soon enough, as the second- and third-tier candidates realize that they can’t possibly compete with the top-tier candidates.

There will, methinks, be jockeying for the veep slot, though, mostly among the second-tier candidates, including Harris, Cory Booker and maybe Warren.

Pelosi probably should go. She won’t.

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks at a press conference the day after the Democrats won back the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi seeks to be speaker of the House again, a gig that she had from January 2007 to January 2011, and depressingly, she’ll probably succeed.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Nancy Pelosi. She never has struck me as progressive, having focused not on advancing a progressive agenda but having focused instead on fundraising, which might be a necessary evil but which certainly isn’t inspiring. (Bernie Sanders has managed to raise a lot of money and be inspiring, so it’s possible to do both.)

And Team Pelosi’s recently cravenly having taken a page from the Billary Clinton playbook and claimed that anyone who wants to see Pelosi replaced is sexist/misogynist is just another reason why Pelosi should go. (I’d say that craven identity politics is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but, alas, these days it’s the first refuge of the scoundrel.)

Pelosi has had the job of leading the House Democrats since 2002, when she became House minority leader, and then in January 2007 she made history when she became the nation’s first female speaker of the House.

That was an accomplishment, but Pelosi has been the Democrats’ boss in the House since 2002. It’s time to let someone else do the job, for fuck’s sake.

I won’t make an issue of Pelosi’s age (she is 78). After all, I support Bernie Sanders as our next president, and he is 77. But as president even he would be limited to eight years, for fuck’s sake; Pelosi has had about 16 years.

On that note, some say that Pelosi should stay on because the Democrats have just taken back the House, for which she should be given the credit. OK, but the Dems have controlled the House for only four years of her 16-year reign; what about the other 12 years when the House Dems were in the wilderness under her “leadership”?

Past generations used to step aside and allow new blood to take over. Not baby boomers* like Pelosi, though. In their narcissistic minds, they’re the only one on the planet who can do the job.

Even “President” Pussygrabber apparently seriously is rooting for Pelosi, claiming that if necessary he can get her Repugnican House votes to get her to the 218-vote threshold to be elected House speaker, probably because of her long record of supporting the socioeconomic status quo.

My guess is that Pussygrabber and his ilk would rather have to deal with the devil that they know, the centrist Pelosi, than perhaps an actual progressive fighter.

All of that said, I’ve heard the “argument” that Pelosi should go because the Repugnicans have savaged her for years. Um, fuck the Repugnicans. They’re going to savage whoever the Democratic leader in the House might be, and since when was it the Democratic House leader’s job to keep the Repugnicans happy? And when did the Repugnicans ever worry about keeping Democrats happy?

No, Pelosi should go because she’s had the job long enough and because she should step aside and let a fighter (not a mere fundraiser) take the job.

But she won’t. 

Because she’s Nancy Pelosi.

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*I agree with Bruce Cannon Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America that the baby boom generation began earlier than usually claimed, that it began in 1940. Pelosi was born in 1940.

No, you actually don’t get a medal for voting in your own best interests

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Democrat Doug Jones, pictured above at his victory celebration, will represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate after yesterday’s special election in the deep-red state. Black Alabama voters are being praised for their high turnout, but they’re supposed to vote in their own best interests anyway, and I easily could argue that because black American voters supported the widely despised Billary Clinton over the much more popular Bernie Sanders by a margin of three to one, they were instrumental in putting “President” Pussygrabber into the White House — so the meme that black voters are saving the nation needs to stop right about right now…

I was happy to learn last night that Democratic candidate Doug Jones (to whom I gave $20…) beat Repugnican candidate Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by Nazi elf Jeff Sessions when he became U.S. attorney general.

For a left-wing Californian like me, Doug Jones is pretty centrist, but I get it: He ran in Alabama. And the alternative was “Christo”fascist Roy “Moses” Moore.

But I was disturbed today to hear the meme that this narrow victory (Jones reportedly won by around 1.5 percentage points) was brought to us by black voters.

Let’s unpack that:

About 27 percent of Alabamans are black (whereas nationally, blacks are about 13 percent of the population).

I would hope that the voters of Alabama of all races would vote in their own best fucking interests, and it was not in their own best interests to vote for backasswards sex criminal and far-right piece of shit and nut job Roy Moore.

Is the message that white Americans sure should be thankful that black Americans voted for Doug Jones — even though he is white? Are the black voters of Alabama to be praised for not being black supremacists?

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and I didn’t expect a fucking Brownie button for having done so because I’m white; I perceived Obama as the most progressive yet still viable candidate, and therefore I voted for him.

Obama’s being biracial wasn’t high on my list of reasons for having voted for him (and it wasn’t at all on my list of reasons for being unable to vote for him again in 2012; it was how he lost the House of Representatives in the 2010 mid-term elections by having spectacularly squandered his political capital in 2009 and 2010 that prevented me from being able to vote for him again*).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it over and over and over again: I vote for the most progressive yet still viable candidate; that is, I vote in my own best interests, at least as how I perceive them. I don’t give a rat’s ass about a candidate’s race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

Perhaps what I find most disturbing about the heaps of praise for the black voters of Alabama for simply having wisely voted in their own best interests is that it probably is going to be parlayed as a race-based quid pro quo: We black voters voted in white man Doug Jones, so now the Democratic Party had better make, say, Sen. Kamala Harris or Sen. Cory Booker its 2020 presidential candidate; if not, we black voters will bolt from the Democratic Party! You can’t win without us!

To that I say: OK, go ahead and bolt. I won’t be your fucking political hostage. Because the Democratic Party is not actually supposed to be the vehicle through which only 13 percent of the U.S. population gains political control over the entire fucking nation. That’s not democracy. That’s a race-based takeover of the entire fucking nation by a minority of Americans.

Should a black candidate be the most progressive yet still viable Democratic Party presidential candidate for 2020, he or she will have my full support. But it won’t be because he or she is black; it will be because he or she is the most progressive yet still viable candidate.

Thus far I don’t see Kamala Harris or Cory Booker as presidential material. Harris hasn’t done anything thus far — she hasn’t even been in the Senate for one full year yet, and anyway, as long as the Repugnicans control the Senate, what could she do? — and Booker is a fakey-fake, a self-serving corporate whore and a pathetic knock-off of the “Kumbaya”-singing Obama whom I find unacceptable.

(Deval Patrick, another black American whose name is bandied about as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, works for Mittens Romney’s Bain Capital; I’ll very probably pass on him, too. I rejected Billary Clinton in no tiny part because of her coziness with Wall Street, and I love Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in large part for their distaste of Wall Street and their refusal to be Clintonian corporate whores.)

Black Alabamans, I am glad that you voted en force to prevent Roy Moore from being your new U.S. senator (even though Alabama makes it as difficult as it can for you to be able to vote; you probably do deserve credit for your perseverance). But you did your civic duty, I think I’d argue. You are, after all, between a fourth and a third of the population of your state. Methinks that you probably don’t get special props for doing your civic duty and for voting in your own best interests.

I’ve voted consistently since I turned 18 — one could argue, I suppose, that voting is pointless, but I vote religiously because I know that the religious and the other assorted wingnuts vote religiously — and I expect no thanks or praise for doing what I should do anyway. (Yes, in fairness, California doesn’t put up as many roadblocks as possible to prevent Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters [or any voters] from being able to vote.)

It is sweet that Alabama’s new U.S. senator is a Democrat, but the bigger picture is that if the Democratic Party hasn’t learned what a losing game toxic identity politics is over the long run, then it will continue to — and it will deserve to — keep losing.**

Billary Clinton lost in November 2016 in no tiny part because she and her supporters basically told voters that if they didn’t vote for her, they’re sexist pieces of shit. Not only was this toxic-identity-politics message related to us “Bernie bros” relentlessly, but Team Billary even trotted out crone Madeleine Albright, a war criminal, to tell women that if they didn’t vote for Billary, they’d find themselves in “a special place in hell,” to which Billary gave one of her grating cackles.

Calling Democratic voters “racist” for rejecting a black presidential candidate who, like Billary, is a center-right Democrat in name only, will result in yet another instance of the Democratic Party snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You can’t win a national election by catering to 13 percent of the national population. That’s just called math.

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*While I didn’t vote for Obama again in 2012 because I don’t believe in rewarding an elected official who has violated his or her campaign promises by voting for him or her again, let me be clear that it was safe for me to decline to vote for Obama in 2012 because I live in California, and it was a foregone conclusion that Obama would win California and all of its electoral votes in 2012 as he did in 2008. So shut the fuck up and educate yourself about the Electoral College.

**Largely because of toxic identity politics, a while ago I switched my voter registration from Democratic to independent. I approach 50 years old and it’s the first time in my life that I’ve been registered as an independent (I’d only ever been registered with the Democratic Party and with the Green Party before I switched to independent).

After the pro-corporate, anti-populist, center-right Democratic Party establishment royally fucked over Bernie Sanders, I left the Democratic Party and I won’t ever return to it until and unless it earns my support by ceasing and desisting with the Clintonian bullshit, which includes pushing identity politics while ignoring our grave socioeconomic problems, since our corporate overlords and campaign contributors don’t much care about identity politics but sure the fuck don’t want the socioeconomic status quo to be threatened.

Billary won’t take the hint (after all, there is more money to be made!)

Like Freddy, Billary Clinton is the stuff of nightmares and absolutely refuses to go the fuck away, but insists on inflicting poorly produced sequels on us, each one worse than the one before it.

Two wonderful headlines from Politico today: “Trump Hits New Low in Public Opinion — But He’s Still Beating Hillary Clinton” and “Democrats Dread Hillary’s Book Tour.”

Indeed, Billary projects much when she claims, as she has in her pathetic new book (horribly titled What Happened, it’s due out on Tuesday), that Bernie Sanders ran for president only “to disrupt the Democratic Party.”

Billary blasts Bernie for “disrupt[ing] the Democratic Party,” but it’s far more important to baby boomer Billary to continue to profiteer from her sad, pathetic, overlong political career than it is for her to step aside for the good of the Democratic Party that sorely needs to pick itself up off of the ground, dust itself off and learn how to walk again after what her center-right, sellout brand of “Democratic” politics did to it — including giving us “President” Pussygrabber, since it was so hard for the voters to decide in November which presidential candidate they despised less (I mean that literally and seriously).

Bernie Sanders, whose nationwide approval rating long has been in the black by double digits while Billary’s long has been in the red by double digits, is the future of the Democratic Party. That is, even if he doesn’t run for president again himself — and I hope that he does — his unabashedly progressive, anti-corporate, truly populist platform is the winning platform. If Bernie doesn’t become president with that platform, then someone else of his ilk will.

It doesn’t fucking matter that while Billary uses the label “Democrat,” Bernie doesn’t, something that Billary tried to make into an issue both when she was battling Bernie in the primary season and in her bullshit new book.*

“I am proud to be a Democrat. And I wish Bernie were, too,” she taunted in her new book like a mean girl in junior high school.

Um, I’m too fucking embarrassed to be a Democrat because of Repugnican-Lite Billary — who, as Politico notes, is despised by the American electorate even more than is “President” Pussygrabber — and because of the corrupt Democratic National Committee that fucked Bernie over to help coronate Billary as the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee, which is why I changed my voter registration from the Democratic Party to the Green Party to now, no party.**

Only when and if the Democratic Party once again becomes what it should be — a truly progressive, truly populist party — will I be able to register as a Democrat again. And that’s Billary’s fucking fault (and Barack Obama’s too, and definitely Bill Clinton’s, and probably even Jimmy Carter’s, too — the party started drifting to the right under Carter, but then that rightward drift was solidified by Billy Boy and was only perpetuated by Caretaker in Chief Obama).

Billary Clinton uses the label “Democrat” but isn’t a Democrat, while Bernie eschews the label but perversely ironically is more of a Democrat than Billary ever has been or ever will be, if we define a Democrat as a progressive instead of a center-right sellout, a Repugican-Lite asshole.

Yes, it is torture to have to continue to hear from loser-harpy Billary — like nails dragging along a chalkboard — but again, she’s a baby boomer, and among other things, boomers refuse to leave the stage even when the strong majority of the audience clearly is tired of them.

Billary’s refusal to leave the spotlight even though she is so despised might actually work some unintended good, however; her continued presence — her cluelessly and shamelessly perpetually waving her cold, dead hands of the past in our faces — might serve as a continual reminder that the Democratic Party sorely needs to continue to go left and to jettison Clintonism if it ever wants to win the White House again.

This bodes well for 2020.

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*Whether or not Bernie, an independent who calls himself a democratic socialist, was acceptable or not as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee wasn’t fucking up to Billary, but was up to us, the people, and Bernie won 22 states in the caucuses and primaries, and he won 46 percent of the pledged delegates (those delegates democratically won).

A huge chunk of us voters didn’t find Billary to be the actual Democrat in the race. Fuck Billary.

**The Green Party had a chance at being a decent, respectable third party after Ralph Nader ran on its ticket in 2000, I think, but it pretty much blew it.

Admittedly, I voted for Jill Stein both in November 2008 and in November 2012, as I couldn’t stomach voting for Obama again or for Billary, but admittedly, if she’s the best that the Green Party can do…

Billary blew it with ‘safe’ Tim Kaine

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Billary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine campaign in Virginia last week. Today Billary announced a Clinton-Kaine ticket.  Wake me up when this snoozefest is finally over. Zzzzzzzzz…

Queen Billary Clinton’s No. 1 requirement in a running mate, I am confident, was that he or she must not overshadow Her Highness. 

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, her pick, certainly fits that bill.

An adjective often used to describe him is “boring.” (He even calls himself “boring.”) Yahoo! News notes that Billary’s selection of Kaine is “a safe, centrist choice that will likely disappoint some in the progressive wing of her party.”

“Some”?

The No. 2 requirement in Billary’s running mate had to be that he or she is a centrist, that is, a fellow Democrat in name only — certainly no Bernie Sanders, and not even an Elizabeth Warren.

Billary’s pick of a moderate Democrat/Repugican Lite from the South is wholly in line with her and her husband’s political start in Arkansas — and their long history of giving the party’s left-of-center base the middle finger.

In having picked Tim Kaine, Billary in effect picked herself — as a man who is a decade younger.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate Tim Kaine. Indeed, I (and millions of others) know little of him, pretty much only that he personally opposes abortion, given his Roman Catholic background, and that he has been supportive of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which even Der Fuhrer Donald Trump opposes.

But Tim Kaine (whom I might come to hate in the future, as I learn more about him) is wholly uninspiring. His political philosophy, like Billary’s, appears to be stuck in the 1990s.

I’m glad that Billary didn’t pick as her running mate New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; he’s an empty suit, a Barack Obama wannabe.

And while we’re long past due for our first Latino or Latina president or vice president, neither U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez nor U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro has the experience to be only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Perez’s only elected office was a seat on a Maryland county council, and Castro’s only elected offices were a member of San Antonio’s city council and then the city’s mayor.

In my book, if you want to be president you had better have been a governor or a U.S. senator, and if you want to be vice president you had better have been a governor or a U.S. senator, since as vice president you might end up as president.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, like Kaine, was a governor, so he has vice-presidential chops, but, like Kaine, Vilsack isn’t an exciting or an inspiring person, so I’m glad that Billary didn’t pick him.

Billary should have picked as her running mate U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Why?

Billary, I believe, with her choice of running mate sorely needed to excite her party’s base more than she needed to try to assuage any fears of the voters of the flyover states — states that are going to go for The Donald anyway — that white men are losing their grip on positions of power to women and to non-whites.

(This was, methinks, Billary’s No. 3 requirement in a running mate: that she pick a white man in order not to spook too many centrist, center-right and even right-wing voters, to whom she always has shown more allegiance than she has shown to the Democratic Party base.

I mean, these are fragile voters, and after we’ve had our first non-white president, we can’t have a two-woman ticket or a ticket of a white woman and a non-white person!)

Even Donald Trump picked yet another milquetoast white man to be his running mate. Billary couldn’t do better?

Had Billary picked Liz Warren, she would have excited the hell out of her base. She would have excited progressives and women.

Instead, Billary picked Tim Kaine. Yawn.

To be fair, maybe Billary asked Liz and Liz said no. (If Liz were smart, and she is smart, she would have said Oh, hell no! to playing third fiddle in the Clinton White House 2.0.) I don’t know.

I do know that the addition of “safe” and centrist Tim Kaine to the ticket gives me and millions of other progressives (most of us Berners — and Bernie won 45.6 percent of the pledged Democratic delegates, let me remind you) zero reason to vote for Billary.

I mean, I’d had no intention to vote for her anyway — I still most likely will vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein — but the addition of an actual progressive to the ticket was the only thing that, coupled with the looming fascism of Der Fuhrer Donald, perhaps could have induced me to vote for Billary.*

And a two-woman ticket wouldn’t have been a bad idea; it would have been a brilliant idea, after having had nothing but two-man tickets throughout our nation’s history.

But instead of making a bold, visionary — even revolutionary — move, the utterly uninspiring, charisma-free Billary played it “safe.”

We’ll see what and where “safe” gets her on November 8.

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*Queen Billary is going to win my state of California and all 55 of its electoral votes anyway, so it doesn’t really matter for whom I vote for president or whether I even vote for president at all, but I will vote for president.

Sick of Bernie? You’ll miss him when he’s gone and it’s only about Donald

No, despite Slate.com’s recent snarky headline “Bernie Sanders Officially Announces He Will Run for President Forever,” he won’t actually run for president forever.

Bernie’s last chance to be able to sway the Democratic Party super-delegates to his side at the party convention in late July was to have a big win in California’s primary election on June 7, but he lost California (which, despite the conspiracy theorists’ angst, is not shocking, as Billary Clinton also beat Barack Obama in the 2008 California primary; I don’t know what’s wrong with Californians [well, I do have an inkling, actually, but that’s another post…]).

Even that plan (to win over the super-delegates after having won California) was a long shot for him, but now, Bernie’s only hope for the presidential nomination would be if Billary, say, had a major stroke or a major heart attack or died in a plane crash or bus crash or was indicted for some crime.

Bernie won’t win the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination unless one of those kinds of scenarios comes to pass, but he does have the right to continue through the convention. He has more than earned that. Against a deck stacked against him, he garnered 45 percent of the pledged delegates (the delegates more-or-less-democratically elected in the primary elections and caucuses).

Think about that: a 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist from Vermont with glasses, wild white hair and a Brooklyn accent whom most Americans have known for only about a year now garnered 45 percent of the vote against Billary Clinton, who has been around longer than has dirt, and whose resume includes first lady, U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and two-time presidential contender. (She is great at holding titles, but interestingly, she sure doesn’t have any real accomplishments to list on her resume.)

The Democratic Party establishment didn’t go down this time, but next time, it certainly can (and probably will); from having blatantly ignored the needs and the desires of us, the people, because for decades now it has been too busy catering to the desires of the corporatists and the plutocrats, the Democratic Party establishment is weak and is ripe for toppling.

For Bernie to drop out now would be to forestall that long-past-due toppling, which he apparently recognizes. (See this pretty good piece on Vox.com on this topic.)

An associate of mine has the theory that Bernie won’t drop out between now and the Dem Party convention because he wants to prevent another Dem convention conflagration like we saw in 1968. Maybe, but perhaps such a conflagration is unavoidable anyway; it has, after all, been that kind of presidential election cycle.

Although this protracted primary battle has been a bit fatiguing, I’m not mad about Bernie taking it to the convention, and if you’re mad at him, reflect upon the fact that not even a year ago, Billary Clinton proudly publicly proclaimed that she is “moderate and center.”

Were Bernie to go away now, Billary would return to the center-right even more quickly than she most likely is going to do anyway. At the very least, Bernie can force her to have to at least pay lip service to progressive values, beliefs and ideas at least through the convention.

If Billary were trustworthy and had integrity and didn’t have a center-right, Democratic-in-name-only, Repugnican-Lite record, Bernie could have exited already, knowing that she’d keep any promises to be more progressive.

So blame Billary for being a DINO, and don’t blame Bernie, for his hanging in there for as long as possible.

If Bernie if nothing else successfully changes the party’s presidential nominating process, such as by eliminating super-delegates and requiring open primary elections in all of the states that hold primary elections (that is, allowing at least independents as well as registered Democrats to vote)** — as he is trying to do — then with his presidential campaign he will have achieved something significant.

Bernie Sanders has run a valiant campaign, and the nation owes him gratitude that he probably never will receive (Americans aren’t very good with the gratitude thing).

The weeks before and the months after the Dem Party convention are going to (continue to) be dismal. As the Democratic Party establishment has done next to fucking nothing for us commoners over the past many, many years, their only “message” will be a message of FEAR of DONALD TRUMP!!!

I’d say that we deserve better than that, but since we don’t fight for more than that (true, some of us do, but most of us don’t), it probably is exactly all that we deserve.

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*California doesn’t certify its June 7 primary election until July 15, but as I type this sentence, Bernie has 44.5 percent of the vote that has been counted thus far in California, which is in line with how he has done nationwide.

Alas, California is a reliably blue state, but it isn’t as far to the left as are the other two Left Coast states (Oregon and Washington), both of which went to Bernie.

**The caucuses probably should go, too, as they are open to too much chicanery and don’t allow people who must be at work and people who can’t easily leave their homes to have their voice heard. The caucuses should be replaced with primary elections, and I’d rather that we have one nationwide primary election day rather than spreading the primary-season voting out over several months, but these two latter reforms are more unlikely to occur any election cycle soon than are the reforms that Bernie is suggesting now.

Also, of course, the Electoral College needs to be scrapped. We should have scrapped it long ago and replaced it with a simple popular vote. If it’s good enough that we choose our governors and U.S. senators by a popular vote, then it’s good enough that we choose our presidents with a popular vote, too.

If we chose our presidents by a popular vote, you could say with at least some credibility that when I don’t vote for Billary in November (I’ll probably vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein again) I have helped Trump, but since we have the winner-takes-all Electoral College, my not voting for Billary in November won’t matter at all, since I live in a solidly blue state and all of its 55 electoral votes already are assured to Billary.

Memo to the Democrats in name only: Game on and gloves off, bitches!

Note: I will live-blog this evening’s third Democratic Party presidential debate, which begins at 5:00 p.m. my time (Pacific Standard Time).

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Under the “leadership” of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee since 2011, the Democrats have hemorrhaged seats in Congress. Her only hope of holding on to power is to try to rig the game for pal Billary Clinton so that she can remain head of the DNC despite her abysmal track record. (It’s not all about you, Debbie! Truly, it isn’t!) The Democratic Party cannot continue to exist under the likes Wasserman Shultz and Billary. This center-right bullshit demonstrably loses the Democrats seats of power. When Howard Dean took a progressive, left-of-center approach as head of the DNC from 2005 to 2009, the Democratic Party won back both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives after years in the wilderness — and the Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress after his departure because the DNC returned to its Clintonian, center-right, sellout bullshit.

Yesterday’s news in the world of presidential politics was awfully interesting.

The Democratic National Committee — that is, Clintonista Debbie Wasserman Schultz — announced that it she indefinitely was withholding voter information from the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign because at least one Sanders campaign operative apparently had accessed Billary Clinton campaign information that hadn’t been protected by a negligent IT contractor.

It was a brazen attempt to cripple Sanders’ campaign and by so doing to boost Clinton’s.

After a shitstorm of hostile blowback (including an angry e-mail that yours truly fired off to the DNC, one of very many, I’m sure) — and a lawsuit against the DNC that the Sanders campaign very appropriately filed in federal court — the Sanders’ campaign access to the voter data — its own voter data — was restored by the Wasserman-Schultz DNC.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is one dumb cunt. Yes, she fully has earned the “c” word (which to me is just the female equivalent of “dick” or “prick,” so calm your self-righteous self if necessary). She is an incredibly vindictive, venomous and partial slimy piece of shit that needs to be flushed down the toilet once Bernie Sanders is elected president.

Yes, the beyond-shameless Wasserman Schultz is doing Billary Clinton’s bidding because she hopes that a President Billary will keep her on as the head of the DNC.

Wasserman Schultz would need a President Billary’s backing because the Democrats have hemorrhaged seats in Congress since she’s been in charge (more on this later) and because she doesn’t have the support of the Democratic Party base, whom she keeps pissing off, such as by limiting the number of presidential primary debates (only six of them, compared to the 26 of them that were held in 2008) and by holding them on Saturdays (such as this evening’s debate and the last debate), figuring that the less the voters see Billary debating, the better for Billary — and her latest antic of trying to destroy the Sanders campaign by blocking its access to its own fucking voter data.

All of these have been despicable tactics to boost Billary, which is called cheating, rigging the game. It’s entirely anti-democratic. It’s the attempt to shove Billary Clinton down our throats. Whether we, the people, want Billary or not, she and her supporters are trying to force her upon us, as they did in 2008.

Don’t get me wrong; anyone who broke any law regarding any improper access of data should be dealt with, and the Sanders campaign is fully cooperative with that. It already has terminated the staffer who apparently was primarily responsible. (The fired staffer maintains that no information that was accessed was stored, and that information was accessed only to discover the extent of the flaws in the IT vendor’s software. There is no evidence not to believe this.)

In  any event, you punish the individual(s) involved in any wrongdoing — you don’t punish the candidate and the millions of his or her supporters. That’s justice, of which Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Billary Clinton and their sick, craven ilk (who act just like the craven, cheating, election-stealing Repugnicans but who at the same time call themselves “Democrats” and even “feminists”) have no fucking concept and for which they have zero respect.

And it’s awfully ironic that in the very first presidential primary debate, Bernie Sanders basically excused Billary Clinton’s use, as secretary of state, of not only a personal e-mail address, but a home-brewed server at her residence, yet how does the Clinton campaign repay that wholly undeserved act of mercy? By trying to destroy the Sanders campaign by depriving it of its own fucking voter data.

I hope that the craven Clintonistas keep attacking Bernie Sanders like this, though. Billary Clinton, harpy that she is, lashed out more and more against the much more likable Barack Obama as the 2008 Democratic Party primary fight went on and she grew more and more desperate.

It obviously didn’t work, but only made it even clearer to the primary voters and caucus-goers of what a cunt — yes, she has more than earned the title, too — Billary Clinton is. (I mean, seriously — when your favorability already is struggling, acting even more like a major prick or a major cunt probably won’t do your favorability any favors.)

Another irony is that Bernie Sanders just recently (on Thursday) earned the endorsement of the progressive political action group Democracy for America.

Democracy for America grew from Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination; it started out as “Dean for America.” The Nation notes of DFA’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders (emphases in bold are mine):

DFA … [is] a well-regarded grassroots political and issue-advocacy organization with active groups in states across the country and a track record of backing progressive candidates at the local, state and federal levels.

Early in the 2016 race, the group urged Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to seek the Democratic nomination.

This month, it conducted a national poll of members that concluded December 15. Sanders won 87.9 percent of the 271,527 votes cast in a contest where an endorsement could only be secured with a super-majority (66.67 percent or more) of all the votes cast.

Clinton (who is backed by Howard Dean [yes, that is an unfortunate, premature, apparently fear-based mistake of his to have endorsed Billary so early; he apparently imbibed the “inevitability” Kool-Aid]) took 10.3 percent, while 1.1. percent backed Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.

The level of support for Sanders was unprecedented. When the 11-year-old group held a similar vote on whether to endorse in the 2008 presidential race, no candidate cleared the super-majority hurdle.

“This is an historic moment for DFA, for the progressive movement, for the Democratic Party, for people-powered politics — and for Bernie supporters who relentlessly rallied over nine intense days to get out the vote and win this pivotal endorsement,” explained Democracy for America’s executive director Charles Chamberlain. [I voted in that poll and encouraged others to, too.]

“Bernie Sanders is an unyielding populist progressive who decisively won Democracy for America members’ first presidential primary endorsement because of his lifelong commitment to taking on income inequality and the wealthy and powerful interests who are responsible for it.”

Chamberlain explained that “we’ll immediately start organizing on behalf of Bernie in key primary states, from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada to nearly a dozen states voting on Super Tuesday. We’ll also be building — as Bernie has called for — a political revolution ready to elect populist progressive candidates nationwide to local school boards, city councils, and state legislatures, and all the way up to the U.S. Senate.”

DFA activists will join Sanders backers from groups such as the Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America,  Democratic Socialists of America, Friends of the Earth Action, and a pair of key unions: National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union.

On the same day that Bernie won DFA’s first-ever presidential endorsement, he also was endorsed by the Communications Workers of America. The Nation reports (emphasis in bold is mine):

Historically, the Communications Workers union might have been expected to join those other large labor organizations in backing [Billary Clinton].

A major presence in states across the country, which represents 700,000 workers in telecommunications, media, airlines, higher education, healthcare, public service and manufacturing, the CWA is one of the largest unions in the national AFL-CIO (which has not made an endorsement) and in state and local labor federations.

On Thursday, however, CWA National President Chris Shelton announced that “CWA members have made a clear choice and a bold stand in endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. I am proud of our democratic process, proud of CWA members, and proud to support the candidate whose vision for America puts working families first.

“Our politics and economy have favored Wall Street, the wealthy and powerful for too long. CWA members, like voters across America, are saying we can no longer afford business as usual. Bernie has called for a political revolution — and that is just what Americans need today.”

The CWA endorsement followed a three-month process that included hundreds of meetings with union members in their workplaces and an online endorsement survey that CWA officials say attracted tens of thousands of votes.

As I have noted, my union’s process for having endorsed Billary Clinton was not democratic at all. Service Employees International Union head Mary Kay Henry, who apparently was separated at birth from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is a blindly obedient (and thus anti-democratic and corrupt) Clintonista who very apparently didn’t want to risk allowing us dues-paying pee-ons of SEIU to have a voice in the matter, lest we vote for Bernie Sanders (gasp!).

So she deprived us of a vote at all. My union dues automatically are taken from my paychecks, but I get no voice in SEIU presidential endorsements. It’s very much akin to taxation with zero representation. Mary Kay Henry & Co. use my money for their own self-serving political agenda without my consent or even my ability to have any meaningful input whatsofuckingever.

Note that the Communications Workers of America very apparently had no problem at all involving their rank and file in the union’s presidential endorsement decision, but SEIU would have all kinds of bullshit excuses (“logistical” and otherwise) for why it refused to do that.

Mary Kay Henry and her henchpeople within SIEU all need to be dumped, just as does Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her supporters within the DNC. The Democrats in name only, at all levels, have got to go. (There is a place for them to continue to sell out their fellow Americans; it’s called the Repugnican Tea Party.)

Democracy for America’s resounding endorsement of Bernie Sanders for president is significant for many reasons, but perhaps chief among them is that Howard Dean, who had founded Democracy for America and then went on to head the Democratic National Committee, did a fantastic job as head of the DNC from 2005 to 2009.

Under Howard Dean’s leadership of the DNC, the Democratic Party expanded remarkably. It took back both houses of Congress in the election of 2006 and there was Barack Obama’s presidential win in 2008. (For a half-black man who had been a U.S. senator for only four years, it was historic, even though Obama hasn’t been nearly as progressive a president as he could have been.)

Under Dean’s leadership, in the 2006 election the Democrats took back the the U.S. Senate after the Repugnicans had controlled it for at least 10 of the past 12 years and took back the U.S. House of Representatives after the Repugnicans had controlled it for 12 years — and the Democrats hit 257 members of the House after the 2008 election.

While Tim Kaine was behind the wheel of the DNC from 2009 to 2011, the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in the 2010 election, and under Wasserman Schultz, who has been in charge of the DNC since 2011, the Dems lost even more House seats — the Dems won only 188 House seats in the 2014 election — and lost the U.S. Senate in the 2014 election after having had control of it since the 2008 election.

The Democratic Party cannot survive with Debbie Wasserman Schultz behind the wheel.

Wasserman Schultz wants to hold on to power even though her track record demands that she be kept as far away from the DNC as possible.

The Clintonistas, including Wasserman Schultz & Co., are terrified of a Bernie Sanders presidency because it would, at long last, restore the Democratic Party to what it is supposed to be: a progressive party that works hard to bring the greatest benefit to the highest possible number of people — not a center-right party that sells its members out to the Repugnican Tea Party and the plutocrats at every fucking opportunity and benefits only those at the top of the party (like Billary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) who claim that they’re working for the people but who are working only for themselves and their cronies.

This is why these Democrats in name only are doing their best to anti-democratically, even treasonously, rig the game for Billary.

In doing so, they only strengthen the resolve of us supporters of Bernie Sanders and of truly progressive, truly democratic and truly Democratic politics, to get him into the White House and to remove their treasonous, sorry asses from power.

To the Clintonistas and other DINOs I and millions of others can say only: Game on and gloves off, bitches!

George McGovern’s death makes me yearn for real Democrats

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The death today of George McGovern, a progressive who ran unsuccessfully against incumbent President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 (and who is shown above right campaigning in 1972 with his first running mate, Thomas Eagleton), only reminds me, shortly before another presidential election, how far the Democratic Party has fallen.

It’s a perverse fact of politics that the possession of intelligence and compassion (concomitantly known as wisdom) often, if not usually, dooms an individual who is running for high public office.

I write that with the death of real Democrat George McGovern* in mind.

I was only four years old when in 1972 Democrat McGovern lost to incumbent Repugnican President Richard M. Nixon in a landslide. A landslide — and look how wonderful Nixon’s second term turned out to be: It was the Democratic Party’s operations that Nixon’s operatives were snooping into in June 1972 in the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to Tricky Dick Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. (Nixon’s remains the only presidential resignation in U.S. history.)

The masses often get it wrong.

I don’t remember McGovern’s presidential campaign, of course. The first sitting president I remember seeing on television was Gerald Ford, who followed the disgraced-by-Watergate Nixon, and I seem to remember seeing a perpetually stumbling and falling Ford parodied by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live” more than seeing the actual Ford himself on TV.

I remember seeing also Jimmy Carter on TV, and of course I remember Ronald Reagan and all of those who have followed him. But during Carter’s first and only term, I was an elementary school student who was interested in “Star Wars,” not in politics, and it wasn’t until Reagan’s eight-year reign during most of the 1980s that my political identity started to form.

My father always has been apolitical, not giving a rat’s ass about anything outside of his immediate personal universe, and my mother is one of those “swing voters” who seem to make their presidential picks based upon the logic of a Magic 8 Ball. (My parents reside in Arizona, where they belong, and I in California, where I belong.)

My point in bringing up my parents — which makes me feel like Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka when the topic of his parents is brought up — is to illustrate that neither of them even attempted to influence my own political views, with one of them being apolitical and the other being politically muddled at best, so the fact that I grew into a left-winger in the red state of Arizona, which is not conducive to the development of little “socialists,” suggests to me that a progressive political viewpoint is the natural path of human development, unless that path is obstructed (such as by committed right-wing parents who probably should be committed, a “Christo”fascist social environment, etc.) and the journeyer cannot overcome those obstructions, as I was able to do.

The first presidential race that I remember caring about was the 1984 race. I was in high school at the time, and I supported Democrat Walter Mondale over the re-election of Reagan, and I don’t know if I even could have articulated very well why I preferred Mondale over Reagan, since it certainly wasn’t my parents who influenced my preference for Mondale. If memory serves it was a visceral thing, my visceral, intuitive identification of Mondale as the truly wise (again, the compassionate and intelligent) candidate and Reagan as the poser, the phony.

Of course, in 1984 the very first presidential candidate whom I supported (not with money, because as a minor I didn’t have any [and are minors allowed to contributed to presidential campaigns anyway?], and not with my vote, because I wasn’t yet 18), very much like McGovern had done in 1972, lost to the Repugnican incumbent in a landslide.

Four years later, in 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, whom I supported and voted for as a college student (I remember having to sell my plasma as a starving college student, so I’m pretty certain that I wasn’t able to give Dukakis any money), performed barely better against George H. W. Bush than Mondale had performed against Reagan four years earlier.

Um, yeah, so I wasn’t off to a great start in life in my presidential picks, and for 12 long years as I was politically budding, I suffered through first Ronald Reagan and then George Bush I. (I never will forget graduating from college with a worthless degree but with plenty of student-loan debt during The First George Bush Recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s. These early socioeconomic experiences tend to color your political outlook for life, as the Great Depression very apparently colored my Scrooge-like maternal grandmother’s outlook for the rest of her life.)

Then in the 1990s came pseudo-Democrat Bill Clinton, who, although he benefitted from a rebounding economy (how much of the 1990s’ economic rebound was from his policies and how much of it was from the natural course of economic events I’m not certain), gave us such gems as NAFTA, welfare “reform” and DOMA — oh, yeah, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, because having an intern blow you in the Oval Office never can blow up in your face.

So the first Democratic presidential candidate whom I supported — I rooted for and voted for Clinton in 1992 and in 1996 — and who actually won the presidential election was the so-called Democrat who destroyed the Democratic Party by dragging it so far to the right that the Democratic Party today looks like Repugnican Lite. Yay!

Bill Clinton benefitted from a three-way race in 1992, and won with a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote, which today’s Democratic hacks forget or ignore. (Dems deny that third-party candidate Ross Perot, who garnered a-very-impressive-for-a-third-party-candidate 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, harmed George H. W. Bush’s re-election bid, but it seems to me that the majority of Perot’s supporters were right of center and that most of them would have voted for Bush over Clinton. [If memory serves, my Magic-8-Ball-wielding mother voted for Perot, and my guess is that had Perot not been a choice, she would have voted for Bush or would not have voted at all.])

I get it that after a string of Democratic presidential defeats — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter (denied a second term), Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis — and after long time in the political wilderness during the Nixon/Ford, Reagan and Bush I years — the Democratic Party apparently wanted to pull away, far away, from the egghead image.

Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Repugnican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956 yet sought (but did not get) the Democratic Party’s nomination yet again in 1960, seems to have been the eggheaded Democrats’ founding father, at least of our modern era, and indeed, Stevenson was the last presidential candidate from either of the two major parties who, despite having lost a presidential election, was nominated by his party to run in the very next presidential election. (These days, losing a presidential election very apparently means that you’ll never get another shot at your party’s presidential nomination again.)

The last Democratic egghead who lost — but who, surreally, actually won — a presidential election was, of course, Al Gore, who in 2000 won 48.4 percent of the popular vote to George W. Bush’s 47.9 percent, for a difference of more than 500,000 votes.** Only in the United States of America could the candidate who won fewer votes be made — crowned — president by the U.S. Supreme Court and his cronies (such as his brother, who was governor of the pivotal state that he “won,” and the chief elections official of that state who made damn sure that he “won” it), and this is yet another of those wonderful, deeply anti-democratic events during my lifetime that has shaped my current outlook.

So Al Gore’s win/loss in 2000 might have been the death knell for the eggheaded Democratic presidential candidate, but isn’t there some middle ground between a Bill Clinton and an Adlai Stevenson?

You might argue that President Barack Obama more or less fills that middle ground, since he’s known as both intelligent and non-nerdy (and, importantly, highly unlikely to be blown by an intern), but today we have Obama in a race for re-election that shouldn’t be nearly as close as it is, and probably wouldn’t be as close as it is had Obama spent his first two years in office actually delivering upon his ubiquitous 2008 promises of hope and change while both houses of Congress were controlled by his own party, a rare alignment of the stars that never should be squandered, and that even George W. Bush, dipshit that he is, did not squander. (Nor did Bush II, dipshit that he is, shit and piss all over his own fucking base, which seems to be the Obama administration’s and the Obamabots’ favorite fucking pastime.)

In Barack Obama, other than in empty rhetoric and false promises, we see precious little of the spirit of George McGovern that used to infuse the Democratic Party. In Obama we see instead the cynical, opportunistic, center-right spirit of Bill Clinton, an approach that the modern Democratic Party argues is the only approach that works, yet in actuality has no track record of effectiveness.

Again, in my book, Bill Clinton won in 1992 in no small part because of “spoiler” Ross Perot, and again, in 1992 Clinton garnered a plurality (43 percent of the popular vote), not a majority. (The only other president during my lifetime who garnered not even a full 44 percent of the popular vote was Richard Nixon in 1968, the year of my birth.)

Clinton again failed to get a full majority even in 1996 (he got 49 percent of the popular vote), and in his 1996 (and pre-Lewinsky) re-election bid he benefitted from having an incredibly wooden Repugnican opponent in Bob Dull — er, Dole — and he benefitted from a strong economy, which, again, I am not certain how much resulted from his economic policies and how much resulted from the natual ebb and flow of the nation’s economy.

Let’s reflect upon the fact that Barack Obama garnered 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, which was better that Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever did in the elections from 1992 through 2004. Obama’s 53 percent in 2008 bested Jimmy Carter’s and John F. Kennedy’s take of the popular vote, too.

How did Obama do it?

Again, he ran on a progressive (if too-vague) platform of hope and change. That was the bait.

Obviously, if Obama hadn’t perceived that that was what the majority of Americans wanted, that wouldn’t have been what he promised.

That progressivism is what the majority of Americans wanted, and that progressivism is what Obama Version 2008 promised (even if gauzily), even though his hacks (the Obamabots) love to engage in historical revision and deny that fact, but what Obama has delivered as president is just more Clintonesque, center-right, “bipartisan,” Repugnican-ass-licking bullshit, replete with Billary Clinton as his secretary of state and Bill Clinton as his current campaign surrogate.

So the news of George McGovern’s death early this morning at a hospice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at age 90 only underscores for me, with another presidential election only a little more than two weeks away, the fact that the Democratic Party of today is only a shadow of what it used to be.

I lament that the only presidents named George whom I got during my lifetime are surnamed Bush, and I have to wonder how George McGovern felt about the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who turned the Democratic Party into the center-right, corporate-ass-licking, lesser-of-two-evils monstrosity of a fundraising machine that it is today.

And I can’t see how I can honor the memory of George McGovern by blackening the oval next to the name of Barack Obama on the mail-in ballot that sits just yards from me right now as I type this sentence, yet unmarked.

—

*Wikipedia’s entry on George McGovern reports, in part:

George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922-October 21, 2012) was a historian, author and U.S. representative, U.S. senator and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.

McGovern grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota…. [After he fought in World War II] he gained degrees from Dakota Wesleyan University and Northwestern University, culminating in a Ph.D., and was a history professor. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956 and re-elected in 1958. After a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1960, he was elected there in 1962.

As a senator, McGovern was an exemplar of modern American liberalism. He became most known for his outspoken opposition to the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He staged a brief nomination run in the 1968 presidential election as a stand-in for the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.

The subsequent McGovern-Fraser Commission fundamentally altered the Democratic presidential nominating process, by greatly increasing the number of caucuses and primaries and reducing the influence of party insiders.

The McGovern-Hatfield Amendment sought to end the Vietnam War by legislative means but was defeated in 1970 and 1971.

McGovern’s long-shot, grassroots-based 1972 presidential campaign found triumph in gaining the Democratic nomination but left the party badly split ideologically, and the failed vice-presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton undermined McGovern’s credibility. In the general election McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Re-elected senator in 1968 and 1974, McGovern was defeated in a bid for a fourth term in 1980.

Throughout his career, McGovern was involved in issues related to agriculture, food, nutrition, and hunger….

Wikipedia also notes that anyone running against the incumbent Nixon would have had an uphill battle anyway, but after high-profile Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey and other Democrats declined to be McGovern’s running mate, McGovern picked U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, whom McGovern later replaced with Kennedy clan in-law Sargent Shriver after Eagleton’s history of treatment for mental illness came to light, casting doubt on his fitness to handle the presidency if it came to that, and raising doubts about McGovern’s judgment.

Wikipedia notes that Team McGovern didn’t vet Eagleton thoroughly and that Eagleton and his wife intentionally kept Eagleton’s hospitalizations for mental illness from McGovern. Bloomberg notes that less than a week after McGovern had proclaimed that he supported Eagleton “1,000 percent,” he replaced Eagleton with Shriver.

Bloomberg notes that McGovern later wrote in his autobiography, “I did what I had to, but the Eagleton matter ended whatever chance there was to defeat Richard Nixon in 1972. In the minds of many Americans the Eagleton episode convicted me of incompetence, vacillation, dishonesty and cold calculation, all at the same time.”

Bloomberg notes that “The Eagleton misstep ushered in today’s rigorous vetting of potential vice presidential candidates,” which doesn’t really explain what happened with Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin, but whatever…

**You might argue that the last Democratic egghead who ran for president actually was John Kerry in 2004, and while he does hail from Massachusetts, a la egghead Michael Dukakis (indeed, Kerry was Dukakis’ lieutenant governor), Vietnam vet Kerry ran such a war-hero campaign (the “swiftboaters'” defamation of him notwithstanding) that, in my estimation, anyway, he fairly escaped being branded as an egghead.

Obama’s move to the middle takes us off a cliff

Glenn Greenwald has posted a good analysis of what the fuck it is that Team Obama is doing, and I have to agree with Glenn.

Greenwald argues that it isn’t that Team Obama wants to defeat the Repugnican Tea Party’s agenda but just doesn’t know how. Greenwald argues (or at least I interpret his argument to be) that Team Obama, for its own political benefit, wants to c0-opt the Repugnican Tea Party as much as possible — even if that means hurting millions of Americans.

Greenwald writes:

Conventional D.C. wisdom — that which Obama vowed to subvert but has done as much as any president to bolster — has held for decades that Democratic presidents succeed politically by being as “centrist” or even as conservative as possible. That attracts independents, diffuses GOP enthusiasm, casts the president as a triangulating conciliator, and generates raves from the D.C. press corps — all while keeping more than enough Democrats and progressives in line through a combination of anti-GOP fear-mongering and partisan loyalty.

Isn’t that exactly the winning combination that will maximize the president’s re-election chances? Just consider the polling data on last week’s budget cuts, which most liberal commentators scorned. Americans support the “compromise” by a margin of 58 percent to 38 percent; that support includes a majority of independents, substantial GOP factions, and two-thirds of Democrats.

Why would Democrats overwhelmingly support domestic budget cuts that burden the poor? Because, as [Matthew] Yglesias correctly observed, “just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats.” In other words, once Obama lends his support to a policy — no matter how much of a departure it is from ostensible Democratic beliefs — then most self-identified Democrats will support it because Obama supports it, because it then becomes the “Democratic policy,” by definition.

Adopting “centrist” or even right-wing policies will always produce the same combination — approval of independents, dilution of GOP anger, media raves, and continued Democratic voter loyalty — that is ideal for the president’s re-election prospects.

Sadly, I can’t argue against most of Greenwald’s points. Most “Democrats” very apparently have just picked a team — and operate not out of a set of shared basic, non-negotiable principles and values, but simple-mindedly rally behind their team flag with the big blue “D” on it, no matter who is carrying it.

That’s fine. (I mean, it isn’t fine, but it is what it is.) But that a majority of so-called “Democrats” are unprincipled, easily led sellouts doesn’t mean that I have to join their ranks. (Besides, I’m registered with the Green Party, and I don’t much mind being on the outside looking in, especially if being on the inside means that I have to sell my soul.)

To give one of many possible examples of how Team Obama could operate differently, what should happen with our federal budget is plain and simple: The rich and the super-rich should pay their fair share of taxes — after all, their wealth comes largely from the infrastructure that other taxpayers’ dollars provide (public schools, highways, etc.) — and so the BushCheneyCorp-era tax breaks for the wealthiest never should have been extended like Team Obama allowed them to be in December. And the bloated budget of the bloated military-industrial complex sorely needs to be cut down to size. The U.S. spent more than $685 billion on its military in 2010, while next largest military in the world, China’s, gobbled up less than $115 billion in 2010. At numbers three and four in military spending are France and Britain, each of which in 2010 spent less than one-tenth of what the U.S. spent, as did No. 5 Russia. Here is what that looks like on a graph:

Cutting the insanely bloated budget of the insanely bloated military-industrial complex should be able to keep Medicare and Social Security afloat — but the right-wing traitors, aside from wanting to continue their looting of the U.S. Treasury via the military-industrial complex, want to privatize everything. “President” George W. Bush’s idea to privatize Social Security went over like a lead balloon, so now the right-wing traitors want to get their greedy grubbies on Medicare. But make no mistake: “privatization” means the theft of public dollars by unscrupulous fraudsters whose No. 1 goal is not to provide quality goods or quality services, but to profiteer — to take the money and run, just like the Wall Street crooks just did.

At the barest fucking minimum, U.S. military spending should be cut at the same proportion that any domestic spending is cut, yet the bloated budget of the bloated military-industrial complex, year after year after year after year after year, remains untouched — while the treasonous right wing tells us that we just can’t afford to spend the people’s money on the people.

It’s like the head of a household spending a huge chunk of the household’s income on a home arsenal instead of on things like food, rent or the mortage payment, clothing, and health care, and when the household’s income really tightens, the home-aresenal spending remains intact (or even increases), but the rest of the home’s budget (food, clothing, utilities usage, etc.) has to take cuts. It’s not just grossly irresponsible, but it’s insane. (And it’s soooo United States of America.)

Team Obama could make this strong case. Leadership is about leading. Sometimes leading means being unpopular at first, leading the people (kicking and screaming, sometimes) where they initially might not want to go. Disrupting the long-standing dysfunctional national narrative, including the sub-narrative that we need to spend as much as we do on “defense,” takes leadership. It’s hard work, not the path of least resistance, which is the path that Team Obama is taking. (Indeed, if the winguts have their “path to prosperity,” in which blatant thievery from the majority of the people for the further benefit of the already rich and super-rich few is redefined as “prosperity,” then Team Obama’s path is the path of least resistance.)

I get it that Team Obama is trying to appeal to the mushy middle, those who don’t understand politics and who thus believe that “centrism” — standing for nothing, so that you don’t have to bother to learn anything or to fight for anything — is the way to go. I get that.

The two problems that I have with this “strategy,” however, are that:

(1) The members of the mushy middle are unlikely to contribute significantly to presidential campaigns, so it seems to me that if he is going to raise as much money for his re-election bid as he raised in 2008, Obama is going to have to take much more from the corporatocrats than he did in 2008, since he has burned his base beyond belief and cannot realistically expect their level of support to be repeated. (I, for one, gave him hundreds of dollars but will never give him another fucking penny.)

and

(2) More importantly, I see no reason why the “independent”/“swing” voters should vote for any Democratic presidential candidate when the Democratic Party, first under Bill Clinton and now under Obama, continues to resemble, more and more, the Repugnican Tea Party. Why go for second-class conservatism when in the Repugnican Tea Party you can have the best? 

When we quite predictably will have both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney saying pretty much the same thing in their battle for the White House, I don’t know why the members of the mushy middle whom Team Obama loves so fucking much — over the disposable remnants of his base (you know, us suckers who got him into office in the first place) — should bother to vote for Obama when they’ll get the same thing from Mitt.

I know that for myself, when I see Obama and Romney singing the same old song and dance, I see no reason to continue to support the dog and pony show with my money or my vote, when I believe that the show just needs to be shut down. 

I want real hope and real change. And that won’t come through continuing to support Barack Obama or the so-called Democratic Party even though they see no reason to support me.

Trotting out Mr. Billary was a big mistake

 

Reuters photo

Match made in hell: Barack Obama doesn’t want to do the job of Democratic president of the United States of America and Billary Clinton wishes that he still were in the job of president, so Billary pontificated on behalf of Obama for a half-hour in the White House briefing room today.

Wow. As shitty a “president” that George W. Bush was, I don’t recall that he ever had any former president making his case for him — at the White House.

Yet today embattled President Barack Obama had Billary (former President Bill) Clinton make his case for him at the White House that the deal that surrender monkey Obama unilaterally made with the Repugnicans — violating his campaign promise to end the unelected Bush regime’s tax cuts for the wealthy — is a good thing.

It was, in my book, a stunning political miscalculation. Dusting off Billary and presenting him in front of the cameras does Obama little good.

The progressives who regret having supported Obama’s candidacy for the presidency and who want Obama to have a Democratic presidential primary challenger for 2012 aren’t big fans of the centrist, triangulating, give-away-the-store-to-the-Repugnicans Bill Clinton — and Billary stating, as he did at the White House today, that he would have done the same thing that Obama did where tax cuts for the wealthy are concerned doesn’t exactly disabuse progressives of their widely held belief that Obama hardly is a president who has delivered his promised “hope” and “change” but is just another Clintonesque “Democrat” who waves the white flag before the battle has even begun. 

Probably worse, having Billary cover for Obama makes Obama look like a pussy who doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing (um, because that is what he is) who, in desperation, asked his big bwubber to protect him from his playground enemies.

Having Billary speak in support of him would gain more confidence in Obama, Team Obama probably calculated; I calculate that the political stunt has had the opposite effect, and that it only further erodes Obama’s base — you know, those committed, passionate individuals who actually give their time and money to presidential candidates’ campaigns — even further.

We elected Barack Obama for a first term — not Billary Clinton for a third.

It would behoove us to knock Obama out of the 2012 Democratic presidential primary. Howard Dean, I believe, could do it.

And a primary challenger to Obama should be in it to win the White House, not just to temporarily force Obama to tack left of center.

Were Obama to win a second term, he’d only go right back to the center again after the election.

Barack Obama has shown us what he’s made of.

And he’s got to go.