Wednesday: Across the Divide

The party sure is divided.  Yep, I’m thinking Grand Canyon territory.  The party loyalists, their eyes glazed and glittering with feverish intensity, are screaming UNITY with an urgency that belies the reality of that claim.  Witness Debbie Wasserman-Schultz last week on Larry King Live insisting that Obama addressed the Women’s Congressional Caucus and everything was fine now.  There were air kisses and make-up sex and no, no one had an orgasm but they sure did come close!

As the Cry of the PUMA video says in it’s final frame “Simply proclaiming UNITY doesn’t make it so”.  And may I say something to the party leaders that I’m sure they will ignore, because why start paying attention now?  It isn’t Hillary’s job to unify the party. I know, I know, this comes as a shock to some of you but it’s true.  Hillary is not the presumptive nominee.  If you wanted her to unite the party, something that would have been a piece of cake for her, you shouldn’t have *selected* the guy.  You should have let the election process play out without a year’s worth of interference.

Hillary *could* just sit out the rest of the primary season and work on paying off her campaign debt.  Just like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and John Edwards, nothing more should be asked of her but her support.  There is no need to drag her along on some dog and pony show where she is forced to ask her reluctant and adamant supporters to vote for Obama.  Either we will or we won’t. The party is behaving like evangelists who will not stop trying to convert us in spite of years of persistence and emotional blackmail and shaming and every other trick in the book. We got the message.  You can stop now.  Some of us LIKE being heathens. If we’re not going to paradise with you, maybe it’s because the thought of spending an eternity with fundamentalist evangelicals makes us physically ill.

But whatever.  It looks like some of the blogosphere are starting to figure out what’s causing the rift, some more cogently than others.  For example:

• Did you know that Markos is a racist??  Yeah!  Yesterday, he decided to withhold his maxxed out contribution to Obama. (No, I am not providing a link) He claims that he hasn’t given a dime to any of the candidates during the primaries, no doubt to preserve the credibility of his famed impartiality (snort!).  But yesterday, Markos realized that Obama’s turn to the right was unacceptable.  There are a lot of things he could overlook, like throwing working class, elderly, women, gays, asians, latinos and Muslims under the bus and using Rovian campaign techniques to destroy Bill and Hillary’s characters when it comes to race.  No, those things were OK.  But when Obama shoved the Dirty F%&@ing Hippies under there, that’s when Kos blew the whsitle.  Well, we won’t say we told you so but we *did* mention on more than one occasion in the comments that Obama was going to have to turn to the right after he snagged the nomination but the Kossacks would have none of it.  And he will probably have to continue going right now because he’s on a bit of a slippery slope.  The more he goes right, the more votes he loses in his base, the more he has to go right.  That’s because he doesn’t have any core Democratic Principles to begin with to know where to stop.  That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you all this time, Kos, but you and your “shrieking band of adolescent zealots” just keep calling us racists.  You might as well send the $2300 bucks.  After all, as the party leaders have told us, “Where else are you going to go?”  Oh, and look for your “Now that you’re a Racist” welcome package in the mail with brochures on our program and coupons for free gifts.  It will arrive in a white envelope.
• Speaking of “Where Else Are You Going to Go?” go read Anglachel’s brilliant piece on the subject titled “No Where Else To Go”.  I’m starting to get the feeling that the Clinton supporters are being punished by the Stevensonians because so many of the working class defected to the Republicans during the 80’s and 90’s.  Nevermind that the rest of us didn’t or that they have come out of their trance now and want a true Democrat this year.  They ain’t gonna get one.  The party elite is determined to hold us down and force Obama on us and they are filling the void of the country club voters that the Republicans deserted in their quest for world domination through movement onservatism.  For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s over yet.  There are still two months and a lot could happen between now and then especially if we make a lot of noise and Obama keeps alienating people like Kos.  For sure the swing voters he is courting right now don’t want anymore moralizing on patriotism, faith and race.  They just want to be able to fill their gas tanks.  Go read the whole piece.  Well worth it.
• Heidi Li Feldman is trying to give the DNC one last chance to heal the divide before we take our votes and walk.  She has set up The Denver Group whose goal is to persuade the party to conduct the convention in a fair, open and transparent manner.  The means to do this are through advocacy for the millions of voters whose votes need to be honored at the convention.  This may require buying media so The Denver Group is accepting contributions for ads.  Please take a look and if you have the means, contribute to this worthy cause.

The blue PUMA is actually the old logo for my alma mater’s mascot, the Pitt Panther from the University of Pittsburgh.  I completely forgot that the panther is really another name for PUMA.  It must be in my blood.  And remember, JustSayNoDeal,