From my post last year. This is actually a smidgen more optimistic than the present because Jeb was relatively sane compared to Trump.

The ideal of American Democracy wanders out of the two parties’ conventions like a gut-shot deer bleeding out.The GOP fest was crazy as one could imagine, with the Cinnamon Hitler (h/t to Lee Camp for that) now the candidate, while in foul Philly, the Democrats nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton after a race  that made clear that both the ostensibly neutral DNC and the ostensibly neutral MSM were both in the tank for her. Clinton is going up against Trump in a race that very few people I talk to are enthusiastic about.

A favorite new game. Flip it for Trump if you want.

I wrote about this all last year, when I laid out the case against Hillary Clinton based on her record. I made a case for voting for Bernie Sanders (then polling in single digits), and argued that even if we take into account the strong possibility that NO DEMOCRAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE will be able to pass legislation, the proposals from the Sanders camp were more progressive and smarter and would be better able to win support from the 99% of Americans who haven’t seen a pay increase or fulltime employment since 2008. I also confess that I have a smidgen of sympathy for Clinton. While she has willingly taken on the mantle of being the third term of an Obama presidency, many of the features of these years have caught up. Clinton is taking heat for the past eight years of structural depression, increasing military spending, and advocacy of the most abusive trade agreement in history. Perhaps because of his constant vilification by Conservatives, Obama has had something of a Teflon shield from complaints on the left. Hillary is inheriting his legacy; she is not inheriting his shield.

And now we have the Wikileaks release of emails from the DNC. We now know that the DNC put a very heavy thumb on the electoral scale for Clinton, including bullying media outlets when anti-Clinton statements were made on shows like MSNBC’s Morning Joe. And there’s the rigging of votes and the hacking of machine voting. I’ve written about that already, but there’s a fifteen minute video from comic/pundit Lee Camp that should dispel most doubts about the election being gamed. And Julian Assange of Wikileaks has promised another dump of documents–speculation is that the new documents will contain information about Clinton and US government support of ISIS. The point I’m making is that the Wikileaks document dump on the DNC is a big deal considering what the documents reveal.

And how has the DNC responded to being caught rigging the 2016 primary election?

The DNC response to the release of their emails is right out of the Nixon playbook for the release of the then-secret Pentagon Papers. For those of you not familiar with that event some 45 years back: In 1971 of the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NY Times by a conscience-stricken man named Daniel Ellsberg. The report indicated that Vietnam was not a ‘winnable’ war, a revelation that was at odds with the Nixon Administration’s pronouncements about finding ‘peace with honor’.  When the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, Ellsberg was charged with theft and espionage, and every effort was made by Nixon and the GOP friendly pundits who supported him to blur the narrative provided by the report and instead focus on Daniel Ellsberg’s alleged psychological problems (and/or communist motivations). Howard Hunt of Watergate fame burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. For awhile, Nixon succeeded–Ellsberg’s motives became the story for MSM instead of the issues raised about the ‘winnability’ of the war in Vietnam. And the similarity to the DNC  leak? Fast forward to 2016–Now the DNC and its allies in the media (and there should be no question that the DNC has hard-core allies in the media–it’s in the Wikileaks revelations) are trying to spin the revelation of the DNC emails as a story about Russia and Trump’s alleged love of Putin. Nobody (Bernie supporters or not) should be sweating bullets on the Russki allegation. What the DNC said in the leaked emails–THAT’s what matters.

(sidebar: I find it pretty sad that even those backers of HRC who acknowledge voter fraud and the gaming of the DNC for Clinton aren’t willing to say that those acts might be sufficiently heinous to ask Clinton to step down from the nomination. You can be sure that the GOP will use the election-rigging information in their tsunami of negative campaigning against Clinton. And though many Republicans are not supporting Trump, the GOP is now busying itself with the down-ticket contests (the Koch brothers are throwing their efforts into House and Senate races). This could eviscerate Democrats’ chances of regaining the Senate or House). 

I doubt that the DNC will withdraw Clinton regardless of what evidence is revealed about the election. And I’m pretty sure Trump wins if things stay the same in the race as they are.  At this point, if you want to see the choices changed, the best a person can hope for is that the hand of justice sweeps down on both of them. Clinton (as I’ve mentioned before) has several buzzards circling overhead. Trump may also end up facing criminal (not civil) indictment for the Trump University scam–if it’s treated by the feds as a Racketeering enterprise (i.e, that the university was created to facilitate ripping off vulnerable people), Trump’s involvement   might be something that requires prison time (or at least the threat thereof). I guess I can’t see him continuing after an indictment, but I’ve been wrong a lot before.

Pretty sad that the best hope I have for the election is that both participants get perp-walks.  And now we come full circle to where I was a year ago. 

ahh. That’s more like it.