Yep. She was pretty steamed when Joe Lieberman decided not to abide by the results of the CT primary back in 2006. Jane was majorly pissed off. The woman just wouldn’t let up. It was an outrage when Joe Lieberman decided to substitute his judgment for the Democratic primary voters of CT in 2006. Jane was a woman on a rampage with missionary zeal. She would not stand for it. How dare Lieberman, Rape-Gurney Joe, ignore all of those Lamont voters and flip them the bird? How dare Chuck Shumer turn a blind eye to the innocent voters of CT?

Even before the primary, Jane was screaming for Joe Lieberman to do the right thing if he lost.  This is from Jane’s infamous blackface post:

E.J. Dionne repeats a piece of conventional wisdom that irks the hell out of me every time I hear it – if Lieberman loses the primary and runs as an independent it will distract everyone from the true villain, the GOP, and therefore we should just give him a pass.

Balderdash.  Lieberman has been an integral part of the GOP’s bully machine for the past six years, the Democrat useful for his willingness to dicipline his own kind.  Ned Lamont is running a legitimate primary contest and Joe is refusing to abide by the results of that primary.  As Lowell Weicker said the other day, when he became an independent he didn’t screw with the Republican primary first (my words not his) he just left.  Joe is mucking up the Democratic primary and then abandoning the party to attack it from the outside.  How this is the fault of Ned Lamont or his supporters I would very much like to know.

Tsk-tsk, Jane.  You sound bitter.  Odd, I remember defending your blackface post.  I thought it was a clever visual metaphor that perfectly illustrated the offensive nature of Lieberman’s pandering.  We all know now that not only is the definition of racism fluid but that it can also be used as a convenient cudgel to bludgeon your opponents into silence.

But wait!  There’s more.  Because Christy Hardin Smith, who I always liked, was practically joined at the hip with Jane back in 2006.  They tag teamed each other.  Christy was the legal, logical one while Jane lead from the gut.  What was Christy’s take on Joe’s Connecticut for Lieberman third party run for the Senate?

From Christy Hardin Smith in the post Lamont Wins:

Joe Lieberman is on C-Span right now thumbing his nose at the Democratic voters and the Democratic party, and announcing his run independent from the party. He’s saying he wants to “unite not divide.” This speech is right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Word on the street in Connecticut is that Lieberman will be running as an independent with Republican backing. Any doubts that his loyalty first and foremost is to Joe Lieberman, whatever it takes?

The question is: where will the DSCC and the party leadership be on this tomorrow? They had better be out in front and supporting the winner of the Democratic primary.

Jane called to say that Ned Lamont will be down to speak shortly. Here’s hoping that Democrats with some level of respect for their party, and with a healthy respect for the voters in the state of Connecticut, have a strong word with Joe Lieberman between now and tomorrow morning.

And here’s more from Christy from It’s a Win!:

Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary. And if he has so little respect for the voters in that primary that he will not abide by the results, then the party leadership must show him the door. To do otherwise would be to sanction cheating Democratic voters of their rightful say in the party process — and would render the party leadership moot.  That is true whether Ned Lamont won by one vote — or by several thousand.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Christy.

This is almost exactly the problem we faced in the 2008 primary.  Let’s do the math.

Hillary Clinton went to the convention in Denver in 2008 with 1730 delegates.  Barack Obama went there with 1747 delegates.  He had a lead of 17 delegates.  That’s a difference of .97%.

Why did it look like Obama had such a commanding lead before he got to the convention?  It’s because of the way MI was apportioned.  Obama got 55 uncommitted delegates from MI and 4 of Hillary’s delegates.  But they and Florida’s delegates were at half strength.  So, Hillary’s numbers and critical mass always looked less than Obama’s.

But the party knew that it couldn’t go to the convention with Florida and Michigan’s voters at half strength.  That could have been an electoral disaster in November.  So, the Sunday before the convention began, they quietly restored the delegates of those two states to full strength.  Voila!  Hillary and Obama are almost equal in elected delegates.  But by then, the media narrative was set, which was all the DNC really cared about.  Even though Hillary technically won the primaries because Obama should never have gotten the uncommitted delegates from MI in the first place, she lost momentum.  The media put everyone else on mute.  The convention steam rolled right over the Clinton primary voters.

Know how I know?  Because I voted for her in NJ, a state she won by 10 points.  And here’s what happened at the roll call at minute mark 49:00:

Our former governor, who no one showed up to vote for last November, gave all 127 delegates to Barack Obama.  I don’t remember giving up my vote to Barack Obama.  The voters of NJ were not consulted. Hillary didn’t get a single delegate from New Jersey or New York or many other states that voted overwhelmingly for her.  Out of the 1730 delegates she went to the convention with, she got  341 votes at the roll call.

341 out of 1730 delegates.

As Christy said, failure to abide by the results of a primary ” would be to sanction cheating Democratic voters of their rightful say in the party process — and would render the party leadership moot.”

Obama didn’t win MI.  He wasn’t even on the ballot.  Why didn’t Jane tell Obama to stop playing games with the voters and abide by the results of the Michigan primary?

He lost Florida by 17 points.  Why didn’t Jane insist that Obama abide by the results of the Florida primary?

Even Jane knows that what happened at the RBC meeting was shady at best and outright vote theft at worst.  But Jane was OK with it when it happened to Hillary.  The old Jane would have been on fire about what happened to Hillary’s voters.  The 2008 Jane?  Not so much.  Because if Hillary’s voters had been treated fairly and with respect, there’s a good possibility that Obama might have lost.  OMG!  We couldn’t have that.

What did that “class of women” know about politics?  It was Jane’s responsibility to take the burden of self-determination from their slender shoulders and relieve their feeble brains from all of that stuff.

Bullshit.

Jane  has lost all credibility with us now.  Nothing she says or emails or pleads to us will make a damn bit of difference.  She was willing to overlook the smarmy, unethical, nasty, cheating tactics of her party and its Lightbringer who never protested once any of the disgusting things that party did on his behalf.   And for that reason, Jane will continue to fail at moving the Democratic party to recognize her or listen to her complaints or do anything she wants.  She gave it permission to ignore her and any voter who inconveniently gets in its way.

Jane is a world class hypocrite.

Of course, if she threw her blog to Obama just to keep the money pouring in, that would be worse.

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake

I admit I have been warming up to Jane Hamsher a bit in the past couple of weeks because of her strong fight against the abortion language in the health care bill. But apparently I got fooled again. We’ve all read and discussed Jane’s post, “Shaking Off the Hangover of the Primary Wars.” Riverdaughter did a spectacular verbal takedown of Jane’s rationalizing yesterday.

The post itself is troubling enough, but Jane’s comments about Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the thread clearly demonstrate that she (Jane) is not yet ready to take responsibility for actions she took or did not take during the divisive primary fights of 2008.

Many of us were able to see through Obama early in the primary process–after doing our own research on his character and his political experience (or lack thereof). But Jane claims that her site remained neutral throughout the primaries because there were no significant policy differences among the top three candidates, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards.

It’s true that FDL did not publicly endorse a candidate, but the posts and comment sections certainly favored Obama. It’s possible Jane couldn’t control the Axelrod astroturfers and just threw up her hands, as Digby did. But she allowed her comment sections to be infested with abusive language toward Clinton and anyone who defended her. And she banned commenters who complained about the bullying.

Jane writes:

Sophisticated campaigns marketed the candidates as personalities and people became attached to them and felt like they knew them. Everyone who opposed them was the “enemy,” rhetoric was amped up and overheated, identity politics were exploited by both sides as strategic campaign elements and suddenly the blogosphere was a giant pie fight.

We made the decision to stay true to our charter and didn’t take sides, pledging to support the candidate that emerged with the nomination. We believed that once the election was over and we could get back to discussing issues again and evaluating politicians on both sides of the aisle with the same yardstick, we’d be back in our element.

She assumes that everyone who followed the primary battles focused on candidates as personalities rather than looking closely at their characters, policy goals, and personal accomplishments. She could not be more wrong. Most of us didn’t support Hillary Clinton for her personality. I actually began the primaries as an “anyone but Hillary” voter. But her performances in the debates convinced me she was the best candidate. It wasn’t about her personality or about her husband, and it wasn’t about her gender–although I admit I would have liked to see a woman President in my lifetime. I supported Clinton because she showed herself to be smart, knowledgeable, and most of all issue-oriented.

Obama, on the other hand, was all about Obama. He never was specific about issues, he never demonstrated any commitment to Democratic ideology. He admired Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake! He cozied up to fundamentalist preachers their anti-abortion, homophobic followers. Most damning of all, it became obvious from his many comments about and to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin that Obama was a misogynist through and through.

I knew Hillary was more conservative than I am, and I knew I probably wouldn’t be happy with her Iraq and Afghanistan policies. But I was even more concerned about domestic issues. All I wanted was a Democrat in the White House who would fight for universal health care and would protect what is left of our social safety net. Instead, thanks to people like Jane and Markos, we ended up with a Republican pretending to be a Democrat–who, if anything is as bad or worse than George W. Bush.

In the discussion thread attached to her post, linked above, Jane posted this comment:

“I had a woman call up and scream at me when I was on CSPAN the other day for all the horrible things Markos and I had done to Hillary Clinton during the primaries, telling me that I had destroyed the Democratic party.

“And I’m like, seriously? I know some people you should meet, you guys would have an interesting fight.”

Many thanks to Gweema for posting the link to Jane Hamsher’s appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal on November 26, 2009. I watched the whole thing, and right now I’m practically shaking with anger (want to call me a “screamer,” Jane?).

The women caller on C-Span did no screaming. She did not even raise her voice. Instead, she listed her credentials to confront Jane Hamsher and then did so very articulately. Jane responded with condescending lies and half-truths. I decided to transcribe that portion of the interview so we can dissect it here. The relevant section begins at about 25:50.

Elizabeth from Tennessee, calling on the Democratic line, wishes Jane and the interviewer a happy Thanksgiving and says she appreciates their working on the holiday weekend. Here is Elizabeth’s question:

To Jane Hamsher, I have been a lifelong Democrat, I was very involved in the health care battles of the 90’s. I was involved in actual implementing of town hall meetings back then in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois; so I don’t take a back seat to you.

But in the area of February of 2008, I discontinued reading your blog and also the dailykos blog altogether because of your extreme hatred and villification of another Democratic candidate, and that was Senator Hillary Clinton. [Jane Hamsher rolls her eyes at this point]

I don’t know how much you are aware [of]…how much damage you did and how much damage Markos did–

Hamsher interrupts the caller: “Are you sure you’re talking about our blog? We had Hillary Clinton on [patronizing laughter] …

Elizabeth says: I’m talking about your blog, ma’m, and you should know it. If anyone wants to know they should go read…from that time. [interviewer breaks in and asks when this was, but Elizabeth goes on with her points.]

“You mentioned today that Obama was an anti-war candidate. He was no such thing. In fact, throughout the campaign, he continued to say that Afghanistan was a good war…. “

[Jane Hamsher breaks in to agree with Elizabeth on this point.]

Elizabeth says: “You really caused a lot of people to leave the Democratic party during the 2008 campaign. And I’m telling you now, I’m sorry that you’re sick, I’m sorry that you’ve had three bouts with the cancer, but I’m gonna say this. You are going to be shown exactly what damage you caused our party last primary season, and I will never forgive you for that.”

Elizabeth was a bit harsh at times, but she maintained a level tone of voice and did. not. scream. In fact I’d have to say that Jane’s characterization of Elizabeth’s presentation as “screaming” verges on sexism. Perhaps Jane has some unconscious issues in that department.

Here is Jane’s response [highlighting is mine]:

I know that there was a certain class of women who decided that they would start supporting John McCain over what they thought was bad treatment of Hillary Clinton. In fact…I took a video at the Rules Committee meeting, a woman, Harriet Christian who said that…she was not going to support a party who would have an inept black man as a candidate, and that became a…rallying point for some people.

We didn’t take a position…in the primaries. We said that we would support whoever was the winner and in fact had Senator Clinton as a guest on the blog, so I think we represented all viewpoints. I think there were people their who were Hillary Clinton partisans; I think that there were people there who were Barack Obama partisans, and I think that each side…collectively saw the other side as the issue. But I don’t think we were unfair to Senator Clinton, and I don’t believe that the people who left the party to vote for John McCain, who was very much an anti-choice candidate, a pro-war candidate, reflect the same values that I have anyway, or reflect the values of Senator Clinton.

There is so much wrong with Jane’s response that I don’t know where to begin. You do need to watch the video–her facial expressions while listening to the caller and responding to her are unbelievably patronizing and condescending. It is evident from her use of the words “class of women” that Hamsher sees herself as superior to these working class (?), pathetic women (though we’re not all women by any means) who mistakenly think that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly. In addition she twists Harriet Christian’s words in order to imply that Harriet is a racist.

And what the f&ck is it these people don’t understand about protest votes anyway?

I honestly think that Jane’s rationalizing is an unconscious defense mechanism. Now that she has seen what Obama really is–a DINO, a conservative hack, maybe just barely qualifying as a Rockefeller-style Republican–she has to go back and try to cover up her own behavior during the primaries. But Jane has a very very long way to go before she understands the damage that she and the other A-list bloggers caused. I sincerely doubt that she will ever take responsibility for her actions–or lack of actions. For one thing, Jane was at the Rules Committee meeting and apparently she had absolutely no problem with Obama being given delegates belonging to to Clinton or with Obama getting delegates from a state he didn’t compete in!

Obviously Riverdaughter demolished Jane’s rationalizing yesterday afternoon, so I don’t have to do it. I’ll just post these three paragraphs from RD’s righteous rant here:

People like me are pretty steamed at you and your buddies. You took away our choice. We didn’t get a fair primary season. We didn’t even get a floor fight. There was no unity, Jane. It was all an illusion. Your guy was forced on many, many Democratic voters because YOU decided that Obama was best for us. And many people swallowed that because they were convinced that Republicans were worse. So they voted for a Democrat and they got a Republican anyway.

Jane, how many times do we have to tell you that it wasn’t about Hillary after May 31, 2008? It was about choice. Remember Choice, Jane? The right to self-determination? The ability to choose your own destiny? If someone else took that choice away from you, you’d be on their doorstep with a bullhorn and wouldn’t let up. But because it was YOUR guy who won, it was OK? What about the choice of the rest of us, Jane? What about CA, NJ, NY, MA, OH, PA, TX, IN, NH, WV, TN, FL, MI and so on and so on? Those big, Democratic states did not vote for Barack Obama in the primaries, Jane. They deserved to cast their votes for the candidate they *did* vote for. I was one of those voters, Jane and I am not letting the Democratic party off the hook for its outrageous behavior towards me and the others. With a primary this close and disputed, the nullification of my vote was unforgivable.

That is why the primary of 2008 isn’t going to go away and why you are going to continue to get angry callers who blame you and your friends for the state of the country under Obama. You took our choice away. Your incredibly high handed and self righteous decision to support Obama and shut down the rest of the party for the supposed good of that party has lead us to this point.

Don’t come crying to me with any more of your action e-mails, petitions, and fund-raising drives, Jane. I figured it out. You think I’m in “a certain class of women” who are beneath your contempt. You won’t get another chance from me, Jane. You’re just not seeing reality clearly yet, and I’m not sure you ever will.

Who could have predicted?

Jane Hamsher has taken a lot of heat lately from the likes of Booman, whoever the hell he is (we never read him).  Apparently, he wrote a post directed at the disillusioned party faithful who are now disappointed in President Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress.  We know he must be talking about Jane and other bloggers like BTD because he sure as heck isn’t talking about us.  We were hep to that step and we didn’t dig it a long, long time ago.  We’ve been calling ourselves Democrats in Exile since about May 31, 2008.  Do we regret the fact that we no longer have a party to call home?  Heck no.  We know all about free milk and a cow.

But this is a painful lesson for people like Jane Hamsher, who has now been told by Booman that if she doesn’t stop voicing her discontent at the bill of goods that Obama failed to deliver, she isn’t a real Democrat.  I beg to differ.  Jane has indeed defended her party credentials quite admirably in a post today.  I advise everyone to go and read it in its entirety as well as the comments.  It seems some of the commenters are still confused about who supported Hillary, PUMA, both, either and why.  I’ll try to clarify that at the end.

It’s not my intention to dump on Jane Hamsher.  She really does mean well.  I will always admire her for what she did in CT for Ned Lamont.  It must feel like a real sucker punch to be sold out by her own party on the issue of reproductive rights too.  I remember that Jane feels very strongly about that issue.  FDL was also doggedly persistent on Plamegate and I sat riveted to my monitor throughout the duration of Scooter Libby’s trial.  Jane was barely out of major surgery when that happened.  But it was the quality of the journalism, not just Jane’s incredible resilience, that merited an award for FDL.

But something went terribly wrong in 2008.  Jane, the party loyalist, took the path most traveled and lost her way.  She documents some of the atrocities in her post today.  Most of it consists of pitiful excuses for why Jane stayed neutral during the worst of the primary abuses.  I’m sure she would like for the primary of 2008 to die an ignominious but quiet death somewhere so we can all let bygones be bygones and get on with it.  It’s not going away, Jane.

Some of Jane’s commenters and perhaps Jane herself think the problem with us “bitter” holdouts is the fact that Hillary lost.  When they notice us, if they notice us at all, they think it is all about Hillary.  But a couple of days before Hillary dropped out, I had a conversation with Peter Daou on the phone.  I was enraged by what the DNC had done and not just because of Hillary.  Of course I was angry with how they had betrayed her but I was more angry at how they had betrayed US, the voters.  I told him that it wasn’t about Hillary anymore.  It was about the Democratic party primary voters.

Let me address some of Jane’s excuses for doing nothing during the primary war of 2008.  Jane says that during primaries, it’s all about personalities.  Maybe.  But I have certainly never seen anything quite like the massacre I witnessed on DailyKos or the emnity between the campaigns that was generated by Obama’s people.  It was like the primary was taken over by the smartest guys in the room from Enron.  That was my first clue that something wasn’t cool about Obama.  His followers seemed too “ends justified the means”.  The campaign was very weak about reining them in, which eventually lead to the “Sarah Palin is a cunt” T-shirts. But the aggression didn’t stay on the blogs.  Nope.  It made its way to TV and print.  It was evident at every televised debate.  It got ugly when the accusations of racism were thrown at the Clintons.  I thought it couldn’t get lower than that.  That’s when Obama lost me for good, Jane.

But your site stayed neutral.

Then there is the issue of their voting records.  Yes, they were very similar.  So, I can’t understand why Hillary got branded as a “corporatist” and Obama didn’t.  On what basis was that label applied, Jane?  But it was even more illogical than that.  If there voting records were virtually identical, why in God’s name would you choose to go with a guy who had virtually no face time in the Senate and ZERO experience in the Executive branch? Then there was the whole Lieberman Resolution on Iran which Hillary was forced to vote for, because no one with an ounce of common sense would vote against what amounted to an opinion poll on whether Iran should be punished if they used terrorism.  But Obama was conveeeeniently absent that day.  Huh.   But wait, there’s more.  Remember the MoveOn Petraeus Ad motion that Obama voted present on?  How about all of the Illinois Senate votes on reproductive rights and abortion that Obama voted present on?  Or how about the fact that he rode to the WH on a speech he gave on the Iraq War Resolution but never had to vote on?  It was a missing data point.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then there were the caucuses that were overrun by bussed in Obama people and the caucuses in Texas where the fraud was documented and reported on at length by the likes of Pacific John, who witnessed it.  There was the RBC hearing of August 2007 where Florida and Michigan were punished.  Two whole states’ voters disenfranchised for no fault of their own simply because the politicians involved had a dispute over timing.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then there was the RBC hearing of May 31, 2008.  We keep coming back to this but Jane doesn’t get it yet.  The issue was not simply Florida and Michigan, Jane.  The issue was CA, NJ, NY, OH, PA, MA and all of the other big and little primary states where voters did not vote for Barack Obama, sometimes by more than 10 points.  We covered that hearing, Jane.  We had boots on the ground too.  We saw Amy Siskind giving an impassioned speech about what it meant to her to be disenfranchised simply because she voted for Hillary Clinton and didn’t like being called a sweetie.  And then we watched when Donna Brazile had the nerve to call Hillary Clinton a cheater simply because she wanted to keep four of her delegates and leave the rest of the uncommitted delegates at that status.  Clinton’s position, as communicated by her representatives, was extraordinarily fair.  Instead, that same committee gave Michigan’s votes to a man who wasn’t even on the ballot and by doing so, wiped out every other Clinton voter in every other state.  They knew this is what they were doing.  They threw the game to Obama, in front of all of us.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then we went PUMA, which simply meant that we were going to withhold our votes from the Democratic party because we could not reward this outrageous, undemocratic and fraudulent behavior.  Since the convention hadn’t taken place and Hillary hadn’t officially withdrawn her name from the race, we felt there was time for the party and the party faithful to come to its senses.  We hoped that the party loyalists would put principles before party.  We thought they would be alarmed by the amount of money pouring into Obama’s campaign.  Where was it all coming from?  What did the money people see in a less than one term senator who had almost no legislative experience?  Then there was the FISA vote.  We were glad to see Jane as a signatory on a sternly worded letter in The Nation.  But when we got to Denver to protest the shameful way the party was treating Hillary Clinton and her voters, where was Jane?  I swear, Jane, if you had woken up and smelled the coffee and joined us, I would have followed you to the ends of the earth.  What did a full time working person with a new blog and a ferocious out-of-the-blue insurgency know about organizing and making a scene?  I could have used a Jane Hamsher.  If Jane Hamsher had stood up and demanded a real roll call vote for Hillary Clinton, if Jane Hamsher and her followers had insisted upon fairness and against delegate intimidation, Jane would have little to complain about today.  Jane could have said, “Well, at least I tried.  At least I did *something* to keep the party together.  At least I stood up for principle instead of letting a tidal wave of accusations and incrimination destroy the good intentions of the people who voted for Clinton.  At least I could say I stood up for the working class instead of the bonus class who controls us now.”

But Jane can’t say any of those things because Jane’s site flipped from neutral to pro-Obama as soon as the Convention was over.

This in spite of FISA and primary voting improprieties and Obama meeting with evangelicals and promising them God knows what.  In spite of the overt misogynism of the media that Obama never decried or the fact that the candidate barely called himself a Democrat or that he lobbied for the first TARP bailout bill- before the election- Jane was happy to climb aboard the Obama bandwagon and buy into the scare tactics on abortion to whip the rest of us into line.  We were all supposed to come together in unity and support Jane’s Democratic presidential candidate.

And now Jane doesn’t like her guy or the Congress he rode in to town with. Who could have predicted that he’d turn out to be a corporate loving, weak president with an equally craven Congress behind him?   The nation was in such dire straits last year that only a skilled and experienced politician with a quiver full of well developed policies ready for action could have *maybe* put the country and its financial sector straight.  We got Obama and his billion dollar campaign backers instead.  And BTD is still citing the DLC as the reason why he couldn’t get behind Clinton.  Oh, please.  When Bill Clinton was president, the center was where the left is now.  To centrists back then, the Left was a bunch of tree hugging, Birkenstock wearing, Alfie Kohn loving, Noam Chomsky pacifying vegans.  We’re not the new Centrists, the Lieberman types.  We former Clintonistas, Democrats in Exile, last year’s PUMAs are FDR style liberals.  You would think that Jane and us would have a lot in common.  But Jane has some weird mental image in her mind about who we are and who we support.  We are not Palin people.  We’re not birthers.  We’re not tea partiers.  And we sure as hell aren’t racists.

We are Democrats who were set free from the party or set ourselves free to go our own separate ways.  We put principle before party.  That’s all.  We saw what the Obama campaign and the DNC was willing to do in order to get him elected and suspected that big, corporate money had a lot to do with it.  It was the neo-feudalists flexxing their muscle and we wanted no part of it.  So, yeah, we are not Democrats anymore.  For us, the primaries told us everything we needed to know about Obama.

But one thing you can’t say about Jane is that she is not a Democrat or loyal to the party.  She is the most loyal of them all and she is facing an uphill struggle.

My condolences, Jane.

Seeking to dampen liberal anger about deals cut with centrists, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said House leaders have agreed to allow a floor vote on a government-run, single-payer system.

“A lot of members on our committee want a vote on that,” said Waxman said in an interview. “I believe their wishes will be accommodated.”

I guess the memory of last year is still too fresh. After a year and one-half of campaigning, with debates, fundraisers, rallies, primaries, caucuses, drama and trauma we had two nominees in a virtual tie, with Hillary holding a slight lead in votes and Obama (thanks to the RBC and the boys from Brazile) holding a slight lead in pledged delegates. Neither candidate had enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination outright.

The Democratic leadership had annointed Obama and they used threats and promises to apply pressure on the superdelegates to choose  so that they could declare Obama the “presumptive nominee.” Then they began planning his coronation with a scripted delegate vote where only his name appeared on the ballot.

PUMA members and other liberals put a lot of effort into making the roll call vote genuine, and succeeded in getting Hillary’s name put on the ballot. Since superdelegates could change their votes up until the last minute it was hoped that enough of them could be persuaded to support Hillary and give her the nomination instead. This application of democratic principles and Democratic rules was commonly referred to by Obama supporters as a plan to “steal” the nomination.

We got our roll call vote but it was a sham. The delegates actually voted in their hotels where they were strong-armed into voting for Obama. Despite the millions of tax dollars spent to hold primaries across the nation and laws requiring delegates to cast their votes for Hillary their votes were cast for Obama instead.

Even Hillary went along the kabuki.

This single payer vote will be another sham. All it will do is give Democratic sell-outs political cover so they can face the voters next year and say “I voted for single-payer.” After the votes are dutifully counted and the bill is defeated, they will pass a piece of shit Obamacare instead.

No single payer. No genuine public option. No ponies.

It might be different if the A-List “progressive” bloggers hadn’t betrayed us, but they sold their souls for Kool-aid and the occasional conference call with Obama. Right now they’re too busy worrying about birthers and Sarah Palin and beer summits to concern themselves with health care reform.

I’m gonna save my enthusiasm for the SF Giants and the Oakland Raiders. Unlike single payer, neither team has been mathematically eliminated yet.

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There are many things I’ve read in history that show how an unruly mob can change the direction of things.  The blogosphere is watching an unruly mob in action right now as Wonkette is trying to stack the WebBlog awards against all things PUMA.  I’ve started reading some of the threads coming in to The Confluence (example: here) and there’s a sense among some of the other folks in the other categories that they are the innocent victims of an unruly mob.  I’m sure that’s how the other Hun tribes felt when Attila assimilated them.

I’m still wondering how this blogwar got started but the basic idea is that Wonkette tribe has decided what it thinks PUMAS are and is out to crush them and it doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. 

All you have to do is take a look back at the entire dark ages and the crusades to get a pretty good answer as to how this type of thing gets its start .  It basically starts with some ‘character’ who may or may not exist who gets an incredible amount of buzz placed around them that is clearly not based in history or fact or anything.   Thus, a mythical hero is born.  Some one to rape and pillage for … some one to use to justify an attack on other tribes, other religions, any other. It just builds and builds until you get a Spanish Inquisition or something similar.  

The King Arthur legends come to mind also.  A tribal king who may or may not exist turns into the great fictional hero just because tons of unruly mobs need some kind of  legend to mob around.  All kinds of morality plays develop to show that our legendary hero is just that mythical, legendary, and grounded more in a game of rumor than history and reality.  I know I just gave some examples of things way back when.  Why would I think that in an age of  ‘information’ we could possibly see the same kind of history repeat itself?

While many of the blogs are now upset that they’ve been caught up in the raping and pillaging which was no fault of their own, they too, now have been caught up in creating the legends that turn the truth into a myth that gets WAY out of hand.  In my first case, about 2000 years way out of hand.

MYTH NUMBER ONE:  It’s all about Hillary losing.  PUMAs just won’t get over it.  They are like Astronauts for a Flat Earth or WW2 Japanese Soldiers trapped up in the Hills refusing to believe the Emperor gave in.

While Hillary Clinton eventually wound up to be the candidate of choice for me, one year ago I had no preference.  What really drove me to the PUMA realization wasn’t Hillary losing, it was HOW she lost or rather HOW the DNC went around constructing an OBAMA win.   If anything PUMA is about holding the DNC accountable for cheating that occurred in caucuses, how the distributions of delegates was determined, how lopsided the punishment of Florida and Michigan was compared to other states that moved their primaries up also against DNC ‘rules’, and the railroading of the democratic convention process.  If you think all of this is just one big conspiracy theory on the part of PUMAS either do some research or take up residency in the bat cave with Cheney.  I’m not certain he’s turning that over to Biden even though I know the Obama administration will want to lock him up there eventually. So that’s it, it’s not about HILLARY losing it’s about HOW Obama  “won”.  Yes, the “win”  (sic) is in quotes.

MYTH NUMBER TWO:  All Pumas are conspiracy theorists.  In every population there’s the average and there’s the extremes and outliers.  Yes, you can find the folks that went searching for that Holy Whitey Tape and the Kenyan Birth certificate, but the majority of the PUMA sites (especially The Confluence)  never  jumped on to the wingnut stories. Again, I’ll go back to the basic reason PUMAs exist and that is how positively fucked up the primaries and caucuses were and how they were completely mishandled by the DNC and the DRC.

MYTH NUMBER THREE:  ALL Pumas are Racists and just can’t deal with the idea of a Black Man being president.  I’ll again point to the Bell Curve.  Of course there are Pumas that are racists but the majority are not.  The problems that PUMAs have with Obama has to do with his extremely small level of accomplishments and his overblown and now mythic intelligence and academic records (which by the way, the public has never seen).  It’s been debunked that he was the first black on the Harvard Review by Harvard themselves although mysteriously in Obama’s senate site there was a resume that said that sitting there for the two years he pretended to be the Senator from Illinois.  The man has never been in an election where extremely weird things haven’t happened–like getting all your opponents thrown out on technicalities, having sealed divorce records of your opponents magically show up in public, or having the delegates to your caucuses in places like Texas leave the process with tons of forms in their arms.  I’ve looked and as far as I can tell, the man has never even had a full time job.  There are PUMAs of color. It’s not his skin color.  It’s his Chicago political career and his appalling lack of experience. For me it was, oh no, not another person who got into Harvard as a legacy.  I’m frankly tired of legacy Ivy Leaguers.  The hardest thing about the Ivy Leagues is getting in there if you’re anything but a legacy.  Getting out is nearly guaranteed.  Think DUBYA.

MYTH NUMBER FOUR:  PUMAS are bitter old white women who find sexism everywhere.  Considering the number of times during 2008 racism was found EVERYWHERE,  I just gasp at the total lack of awareness on the part of people on the obvious sexism.   If some one stood up  in a room and asked Obama if he’d shine their shoes, that would be such obvious racism that I doubt the KKK would rise to debate.  If every where he went there were folks wearing t-shirts with the N word emblazoned across them, there would have been riots.  If effigies of Obama hanging from trees on Halloween, or  Little Black Sambo dolls were being manufactured with his face on them, the outrage from every where would have been swift and justified.  These things happened to the two women candidates in the white house races using sexist instead of racist tomes.  The outrage was nonexistent. In fact, most Pumas find the press duplicitous in the lack of vetting of Obama and the complete  frat boy atmosphere that ruled when it came to the women in the campaigns.

Side myth to this:  ALL Pumas are uneducated.  Just having spent time on any of the PUMA sites, I have to say this is really not true.  If anything, especially at the Confluence, there are a large number of PUMAS with advanced educations.  Not that this really matters because having worked for universities for years I can attest that there are some miserably stupid people out there with Phds.  I really get tired of this elitist tome.  Believe me, some times I really wish I was kat the plumber instead of kat the economist.  Last week would have been a perfect time for that in my house.

MYTH NUMBER FIVE:  PUMAS voted enthusiastically for Mcain and Palin, were basically Republicans all along and were just spoilers.   All you have to do is go back to The Confluence’s voting strategy series to see that there were very few PUMAS that fell into the enthusiastic Republican voters categories.  Yes, there were folks who eventually decided they felt more at home as Republicans.  Many decided to re-register independent.  But most of the PUMAS I’ve met are still your basic democrat with no party home any more because they feel the party has abandoned its root principles including, most importantly the ONE man ONE vote principle. Most PUMAs I know disagreed with everything Sarah except for the fact that as a sitting governor, she didn’t deserve to be treated like a bimbo.

 Now you can continue to rewrite history out there in the blogosphere, much like Constantine the high priest of the Sun God decided to invent Christianity, create the Jesus myth, and control slaves, women, pagans, children, barbarians and other Roman property or you can sit back and use the internet to find the facts.  This is after all, the information age or have  you decided to ignore science and just restart the Spanish inquisition?

RISE, HILLARY, RISE!!!

WE LOVE YOU HILLARY!!!!

Conflucians, Senator Hillary Clinton will speak tonight at the Democratic National Convention at 8pm EST.  Our first viable female candidate who won more votes than any candidate in our nation’s history, is being forced to relinquish her votes on the 88th anniversary for Women’s Suffrage.  We know that she’s going to ask us to unite, to come together as she’s graciously asked us to do since suspending her campaign on June 7th, 2008, but everyone who reads the Confluence knows that we cannot unite as we have in the past when the DNC stole votes and delegates, thrwarting the DNA of Democracy itself: our right to have our votes counted and cast as they were intended.   

Esteemed Senator Clinton, we acknowledge you are between a Mt. Everest of rocks and a hard place.  But we will march and fight until every vote is counted and reported, and when Democracy comes back to the Democratic Party, so will we.  Until then, PUMA!

While Riverdaughter, Mawm and Gary go with their PUMA packs to PUMA headquarters in downtown Denver or prowl in the PUMAmobile, Rico’s got his Pink PUMA & Mountain Lion Martini glasses chilling in ice, while Flo’s got her catcher’s mitt ready for unwelcome words.  If you didn’t have any dinner, we have Denver Bison (or Tofu) mini-burgers and fresh popcorn for all the action that’s going down in Denver.

Speaking of action, just like RiverDaughter said here, and BostonBoomer said below, PUMAs are the news story!  Here’s this little nugget from Rebecca Traister from Salon.com:  Rebecca’s not exactly a PUMA-friendly reporter, but at last she gives Tweety a good slap: 

Aug. 26, 2008 | DENVER — “This is where you see the civil war!” burbled Chris Matthews, experiencing near-asphyxiatory pleasure on an outdoor stage in the sweltering Denver heat, while behind him two competing groups, Obama supporters and the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) backers of Hillary Clinton, chanted “Obama! Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” at each other. Matthews looked as though he might wet himself as a camera panned the crowd, and he declared, “We’re at ground zero!”

…

Talking to these women, I began to believe that the threat of PUMAs, or aggressive Hillary supporters who planned to take over the convention, was a full-blown myth. I couldn’t find any; I hadn’t seen any. I half suspected that they were the creation of a media anxious to gin up a story in which the villains were a bunch of grumpy old white chicks.

But that was before I left the confines of the official indoor events and stepped out into the wide world of public protest and freedom of expression. And before the news of Monday’s shifting policies on the roll call vote began to leak out, and before Hillary supporters lining the streets of downtown Denver heard convoluted versions of what was likely to happen.

…

“You mean Reverend Wrong,” Mar interrupted. “Look, I know about the race card. I know about race. I’m African-American. And it was Obama who played the race card, and it’s going to come back and bite Obama in the butt.” African-American supporters of Obama, in Mar’s view, “are proud. Yes, I understand that. But you want someone who can lead America, not because he’s African-American, or because she’s a certain gender, but because she can lead.” But what about the woman they wanted as America’s leader? Clinton has been leading her supporters, or trying to lead them, to vote for Obama. “We want Hillary,” said Novacek, with the fingers-in-her-ears insistence of an implacable toddler. “She can stand on her head and plead with us, and I still will not vote for him. I want her. She is best for the country.”  

Caption this DNC moment!  Add your Conflucian Savoire-Snark to these photos:

PHOTO 1:

PHOTO 2

RISE, HILLARY, RISE!!!

¡QUE VIVA LOS PUMAS!

(Long live PUMAs!)

My governor, Jon Corzine (D-NJ), he of the speedy car with no seatbelt accident (tsk, tsk, Jon), rephrases his “taken out of context” comments that he made on Squakbox from last week in a piece in the HuffingtonPost today. I’m glad he is clarifying his remarks because I don’t live that far from Drumthwacket and I was going to drive down there (seatbelts fastened) to give him a piece of my mind. In An Issue of Legitimacy and Democracy, Jon argues that MI and FL need revotes and then says:

Clearly, the cumulative delegate totals must be considered. Absolutely, the cumulative popular vote is important. And, a practical analysis of electability and the electoral map must be weighed.

For me, the most important of those factors is the popular vote since Democrats have rightfully and passionately long argued that every vote should be counted. Practically, that popular vote should include participation of the fourth and eighth largest states in the nation. Most Democrats agree that ignoring the voices of Florida and Michigan is a mistake and threatens to impact the outcome of the fall elections.

Like many, I fear that not considering the wishes of millions of Democratic voters in those states will taint the attitude of voters everywhere about our ultimate nominee. Early polling in Florida has already indicated as much…

I believe, as I think most Democrats do, that the popular vote is the most democratic way to select a candidate. In fact, I recently signed legislation in New Jersey that joins the state in a compact to choose a president by direct popular vote.

When we listen to all of the people in our party, we end up choosing the person the entire party can support.

Amen, Jon. Buckle up, buddy.

Update:  RealClearPolitics has another take on the popular vote in No Really, Hillary Has a Decent Shot.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Er, scratch that. It’s been used before. But surely, ladies and gentleman, you will have never seen a bigger miscarriage of justice since Bush vs. Gore than the DNC hearing that stripped Florida of its delegates. You may want to procure a strong drink or a xanax (but not both together) before you sit down for the next 80 minutes to view this classic of having every opportunity to avoid Murphy’s Law but diving headlong into it anyway. Here is the egregious piece of footage: Florida Democratic Primary Election Hearing of the DNC

(Didn’t it occur to anyone in that room that this was being recorded for posterity? I’m betting some of them regret having ever encouraged technology.)

And this piece of footage is of Howard Dean on This Week with George Stephanopolous (thanks to Katiebird) trying to justify excluding Florida because it broke the RULZ and wouldn’t have a caucus with a total of 150,000 ballots for all 4 million Floridian Democrats who were eligible to vote. It just warms the cockles of your spleen.

All that is left now it to re-erect La Guillotine and to escort Donna Brazile and pals to it in a trundle of their own making.

Did anyone besides me catch him this morning on This Week with George Stephanopolous?  He started out congenially alright.  It was all “two extraordinary candidates” and “unity ponies for everyone”.  Then George started to ask him about the popular vote and MI and FL and it became clear pretty quickly that he was one phoneme short of a scream.

What I learned from Howard is that Hillary’s claim to legitimacy through the popular vote pisses him off and that he still plans to sabotage the election this fall by seating FL and MI in a way that will make their delegates not count.  And the main beneficiary of the stifling of MI and FL is Barack Obama because as Howard insists, the only legitimate nominee is the one with the most delegates.  So, everyone else who voted for Clinton should STfU because the superdelegates will find out in June who the delegate leader will be and it will be over.  And Hillary can complain all the way to the convention because that is her right but it won’t make a damn bit of difference because the RULZ were violated, so THERE!

But, by Golly, we sure do have two swell candidates this year don’t we?  And we’re all going to kiss and have make up sex when this is all over and all the ladies in the auxilliary and the stupid Archie Bunker working peoplee will fetch coffee and make phone calls for Senator Obama in the fall.

Howard, you ain’t seen anger yet.

Fortunately for us, Ed Rendell on MTP gets it.  This won’t be over and we are NOT making phone calls unless all fifty states get a voice and have impact.  Deal with it, Howard.

Friends, this post is about Solidarity. Now, what does that mean exactly? Some people may think automatically of union movements and there is no doubt that unions understand that concept. That is, you are only strong if you stick together. If some of your membership get picked off by the bossies, you are diminished and it makes it that much harder to win the day.

So, this message is for all of you voters in NJ, NY, CA, MA, AZ, TN, OH, AR, OK, NH, TX and all of the other states that voted for Clinton, in many cases decisively. We voted for her not because we are ideologues. We’re not in it for the fame and fortune. We aren’t interested in testing some esoteric strategy. We voted for her because she is the best candidate we have to be president. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: she is so much better qualified than Barack Obama that if he weren’t the token male it is hard to imagine how they would be sharing the same stage.

But the bossies have picked off two of our members. I have to say that I am astonished that they think they can disenfranchise the biggest and most Democratic states by refusing to seat MI and FL but that is their goal. By shutting down MI and FL until the convention, they have weakened the other states that voted for Clinton, depriving us of our impact on choosing the nominee, who they have determined will be Barack Obama, the token male.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think it is very important that we get MI and FL back on our side and let the bossies know that we will choose the nominee with our votes. We will not be bullied or intimidated by the press or by the RULZ or dimwitted bloggers. There is a possibility that the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee that will be meeting April 5 will wake up and smell the coffee. But the best way to wake them up is to let them know how you feel. If you are a voter in one of the states I’ve mentioned, your opinion carries special weight because unless MI and FL are seated, *their* fate is *your* fate. Your vote means nothing.

That makes me, a NJ voter who proudly cast her vote for Hillary on super Tuesday, very, very angry. My vote is considered somehow less worthy than some Republican crossover in Utah. If my vote is thrown away because MI and FL are not seated, after all of the stonewalling by Barack Obama, Donna Brazile and Howard Dean, I may just decide to not cast a vote for president this year. My choice will have been made for me in spite of millions and millions of my compatriots who will see the best presidential candidate cheated out of her nomination.

But you can send a message to the Rules and Bylaws committee. There are still a few days left. If you are in a Clinton state, let them know that you know EXACTLY what’s going on here and you aren’t going to put up with it. See Hillary’s Action Alert: Florida and Michigan Deserve to be Heard. Be polite but forceful and let them know who the real bosses are. We Clinton state voters stand in Solidarity with Michigan and Florida.

And now I am going back to nursing my poor ski muscles…