I’m reposting my comment response to Falstaff in regard to what happened in 2008 that brought us to this point and how the Democratic activists screwed up by letting the ends justify the means (I’m leaving the typos and style mistakes in because I’m too tired to edit it):
I was absolutely sure that the fix was in the day after supertuesday when the Obots were screaming that the math was not in her favor and she should get out. The whole plan was to deliberately withhold Florida and Michigan. Without those two states, she could never get the critical mass to make her the decisive winner and popular choice. She always looked like she was running hard to catch up. And the Democrats were making sure that Florida and Michigan didn’t count even one more day than they needed to in August 2008. There was never any question that the votes would be counted fully. It was only a matter of timing.
So, let me take you back to supertuesday 2008 and ask you to imagine the scenario where she wins the big Democratic states AND Florida and Michigan had already been added to her plus column. Are you with me yet? NOW tell me who was winning.
In February 2008, they had already written off all of her voters by withholding Florida and Michigan. It’s surprising that she continued to win and win and win in spite of the rigging. But she did. In fact, she was getting stronger. By May 2008, they had to make a decision about Florida and Michigan and that’s when they changed the rules and allowed Obama to take delegates from Michigan where he wasn’t on the ballot and then they reduced the two state delegations to half strength to prevent Hillary’s numbers from rising. By doing that, they not only screwed Florida and Michigan, they screwed NJ, NY, MA, CA, PA, OH, TX, etc, etc, etc. If they hadn’t taken Florida and Michigan out of the picture, Obama might have lost. That’s generally the way it had worked in other primary seasons but this primary season was going to be different. Obama was selected, not elected, to the nomination and the primary results were reorganized to reflect this desired outcome. (go on, Matt Yglesias and Matt Stoller, admit it, that was what “The Math” was all about. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out but a background in science did help)
But let’s say that everything was conducted without any skullduggery and they still went to the convention separated by the width of a gnat’s wing. How do you explain the fact that two candidates who were so closely tied, (really, the final delegate separation was something like 17, which is statistically insignificant) how do you explain why there wasn’t a legitimate roll call followed by a floor debate? The whole convention’s tone was such that the average viewer could only believe that Obama had won in overwhelming numbers even though that wasn’t even remotely true. But they humiliated her anyway and harassed and intimidated her delegates. Those delegates were in Denver to represent *us*, the 18,000,000 of us who did not vote for Obama. Didn’t we deserve to be counted? Because I wasn’t counted. Jon Corzine gave the entire state of NJ’s delegation to Obama. But Obama lost the NJ primary by 10 points. How do you explain that? How do you excuse it?
You can’t. That’s why what the Democrats did was so unforgivable. They completely disenfranchised us and forced Obama on us when we knew he wasn’t ready and that he was a ruthless bastard who didn’t give a fuck about the outcomes of elections. That right there told me everything I needed to know about how Obama would govern and what I could expect from the Democratic party. And I was right. I don’t like being right about them but once I saw what was going on, I couldn’t unsee it.
And, that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the small evil group who runs everything, and to which no one we know belongs, was able to put a schmoozing, anti New Deal Democrat into the White House at a point in time when we needed a hard working second coming of FDR.
This week, the Democratic activists and Obama apologists (I am loving the 180 that Kevin Drum is doing lately) are starting the get the “oh my god, wtf have we done?!?” feeling we forecasted three years ago. There’s a little story that illustrates why the peak of the Obama supporters power occured in May of 2008 and was all downhill from there on:
George Bernard Shaw was at a dinner party once and turned to the elegant lady who was sitting next to him and said:
“Madam, would you sleep with me for 1,000,000£ ?”
“Why, yes, I suppose I would”, she answered.
“Well, would you sleep with me for 10£ ?”, he asked.
The lady became irate. “Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!”, she huffed indignantly.
“Madam”, he replied, “We have already established what kind of woman you are. We are now merely negotiating a price,”
This is why the Obama administration feels comfortable punching the hippies and is blowing off the liberals and ready to dismantle the New Deal. When the Obama contingent decided to go for the big one in May 2008 and gave the party permission to blow off half of the voters and all of those voters’ legitimately cast ballots, and didn’t say anything and didn’t stand up for fair reflection, it was giving tacit approval to the party to blow off the rest of the voters in the future. They know what kind of activists you are. They are now merely negotiating a price. And since you threw away your honor and credibility three years ago, they feel no compunction to take your demands seriously now. They know that all they have to do is whip out a ten spot and you’ll do whatever they ask without them having to do a damn thing for you.
When it comes to taking the money or doing the right thing, you’re always better off in the long run if you do the right thing. If you take the money, you’re giving the unscrupulous and dishonorable an opportunity they might not otherwise have and if you give in once, it’s easier to do it the second time.
You can get your mojo back. You can always say no, even if you’ve said yes before. And you do have someplace to go. There are other candidates you could shanghai into running if you really want to change history. All you have to do is take Susie Madrak’s advice and stop believing Obama’s schtick. Once you’re free, you can consider your options.
Consider this a public service announcement.
Update: I just noticed that one of my very first posts on this site after I was kicked off of is moving up the list of posts in the left sidebar. It’s probably just due to the Harry Potter character reference but whatever. So, I pulled the sucker up and reread it. I wrote it in January of 2008 but daaayum, did I nail it or what?! Here’s the link: https://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/this-weeks-esp-january-27-2008/.
Read it and weep, Obots.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
feel another “sore loser” gearing up to put a whole lotta “told you” on them…there’s no resolving this while keeping yer skirt down. The energy to rise up and take dominion over these trolling lower life forms is building. This was not just a political loss: this was everthing your piece says it was. Your outrage is shared and the coming year with the hacker in chief bragging about raising a billion from fools averaging less than $75. — who will duplicate those same amounts several times again should tell you something about people who neither view with skepticsm nor think for themselves.
well don’t feel so bad, he is actually getting the money from rich people with a lot of visa gift cards. It should be painfully obvious that his base has not chipped in that much at this early date.
And maybe there’s some grateful Mexican gun smuggling money in there too. Who says Barry can’t bring in revenues from exports!
Not to mention MO’s recent trip to Africa — there’s always some random rich Nigerian uncle dropping dead there and leaving $$$ to the nearest American.
On a serious note, I really think those “small donations” are a form of money laundering.
I remember coming back from our nightmare caucus on Super Tuesday (it was after midnight because we were so overwhelmed with people we had to do 13 mini-caucuses) and asking if Hillary had lost every where. But NO …. the news was that she’s won all over the place — HUGE wins. Landslides.
I was stunned the next day to learn that it was impossible for her to win the nomination. It was such obvious hooey.
(spits)
The reason is that we were all in simulation but we didn’t know it. That’s the problem. We have moved into simulation in homeopathic doses leaving us unaware. Once you are in simulation, there is no representation, only copies of copies. The linear historical dialectic is finished, and in simulation there is no true or false, no good or evil, no right or wrong, just endlessly circulating “floating ” signs. This is why they could disenfranchise the voters and spread the lie that Hillary had lost. It’s so simple to make people believe what you want them to believe.
Since you are trained in research you can see and can’t unsee. But most people never saw to begin with. So how can they know what is correct or what is incorrect? Since there is no referent, only “floating ” signs who can know if they are fooled by the “floating ” signs which can be “empty”, can be a mask for the opposite, can be ambiguous saying both at once. So if you are not trained to read “floating” signs, you can’t unscramble the data. And once something is out there, it has credibility. It may be contradicted, but it still has credibility because it was out there before it got contradicted. That’s what happened to Hillary. She got “swiftboated” just like Kerry.
Now this is where we must all be to figure out what to do next. Arguing against them just strengthens them. Vija Kinski in Cosmopolis, the voice and thought of Baudrillard. DeLillo is clairvoyant. He is telling us the way it is. He is showing the out. Virtual Reality is irreversible because there is no way to counteract it. The only possibility is to force it to its own extremes to make it suicide. To make it implode. No one can help us by coming in and trying to do the right thing. It’s too late. Obama had a chance but he threw it away. Now no one has a chance because it’s over. Too late.
So we campaign and vote for the worst one, the most ridiculous one, the stupidest one, and laugh while we do it. Not to take any of it seriously. We are in political simulation. All they did was emulate the tricks of the Bushies. All those hanging chads etc, scrutinizing each ballot. Laughable. These political joes and janes are clowns and idiots. David Foster Wallace saw it coming and decided to kill himself.
I don’t have any answers but I can’t unsee either.
I don’t know how to answer you. The truth hurts that much.
I feel like one of the Meg Ryan characters in Joe vs The Volcano.
Unfortunately none of us can sail far away from the things of man.
My Literary Intellectualese-to-English translation program has crashed. What in the holy name of Haruhi Suzumiya did AB just say? 🙄
Abbey? I’ve never read DeLillo (i hear he’s overrated and money is too precious right now to waste on more overrated authors). And I’m not sure what this Baudrillard thing is all about. Or Cosmopolis. Your comments sound a bit too deconstructionist/social sciences/humanities major for me, a lowly hard science geek who prefers empiricism to counting the angels on the head of a pin. Could we maybe not go there anymore? Most of us have no idea how to respond to your comments. They’re way over our heads.
They are best when broken up into hiku form. I’m not being snarky .
Overrated! Says who? Oh I know. All those people who can’t understand what he’s telling us. Look at the cover of Underworld. It uncannily predicts 9-11. Cosmopolis is said to have predicted the stock market crash under Bush I. No it didn’t. It predicted the derivative crash of 08. Someone(s) deliberately started that landslide right in the middle of the campaign. They were following Cosmopolis and thinking along intellectual terroristic lines.
You spend money for books? Cosmopolis was selling for about 0.46 the last time I looked on amazon. And I bought the audio for 0.01 yes, one cent. Of course there’s postage to pay.
This is not deconstruction. Deconstruction is a useless academic game. Even Baudrillard says so and he’s put in that camp.
And yes haiku is the preferred form saying all this but I can’t do it very well.
Yes, a wave of people with the 12 point platform is in this ballpark. They can’t argue points as there aren’t any to argue. Only action will do this.
What Eric Packer did in Cosmopolis was to crash the global currency markets by borrowing massive billions of yen as the yen went up and up beyond its resistance levels, which crashed all the other currencies including the dollar. Not much different from what George Soros did in the 90’s with the British pound by shorting it. In one day he made one billion dollars. And he says that he should not be allowed to do what he does. That day he almost broke the Bank of England. One fuggin day! That’s Baudrillardian implosion folks!
Now all we have to do is come up with a way to do it to Obama. He can be broken. So he can’t be fixed.
Two campus police cops broke some doors down in the social system of probabation and parole surveillance by noticing Jaycee Dugard’s two daughters looking strange (read not normal)and this led to Garrido’s capture and Jaycee’s release when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do diddly squat.
How can we get Obama?
Glad to be the occasion for this, RD.
The whole thing is a crying shame — but it’s not the apocalypse. There are plenty of scoundrels in the room — but there are lots of smart, talented, good people, too. Hopium is phony, but actual hope isn’t dead. We live in primitive times, but as your own research taught you, real progress is happening all around us.
Where?
Never stop looking for an opportunity to change things around. I told you a couple of months ago that giving up and giving in was premature. You need to look for a eucatastrophe.
At this moment, I think the bigger eucatastrophe is the imminent collapse of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. We should be all over that like flies on, er, rice. Breaking his stranglehold on the news is the biggest break we’ve had in nearly 2 decades. For all we know, the Republicans are dragging out the debt ceiling crisis to keep us from busting Fox News wide open.
Well, there are enormous advances being made in science, in genomics, in information technology, in the democratization of media, in the entry into the middle class of hundreds of millions of previously desperately poor people in emerging markets, in attitudes toward GBLT people (the idea that a growing number of states are actually legalizing gay marriage would have been inconceivable in my childhood), etc. The exponential advances in information technology and data capture make it possible for us to begin getting our arms around enormously complex natural, economic and social systems — things that were simply beyond our capacity before — because we can have a better idea of what is actually happening at very small and very large scales in real time.
Will this progress have a chance to develop before we nuke or globally warm ourselves out of existence? Are the humans just too unhappy to live? Will we develop the new kinds of institutions and governance and societal systems to manage this very new reality? Dunno. It’s entirely possible to believe we’ll just blow it. But maybe we won’t.
Not to mention, Hillary will only be 68 in 2016. 🙂
I don’t think Hillary would have a prayer of winning in 2016. Her best chance was in 2008. Her next best chance is 2012.
Historical precedents are meant to be broken. I don’t care how many people tell me how impossible it is to challenge an incumbent, if Obama can’t win next year, don’t be surprised if the party calls for a backup. It may not be Hillary, because of the party’s preference or her own. But she did win the most votes in the 2008 primary and as far as I can see, no other Democratic candidate comes close to her stature in the public’s mind. They were thwarted the first time, it only seems fair to let her have a crack at it in 2012.
But after that, it will be too late. I think a lot of women will be so disgusted by the party if she isn’t given a chance in 2012 that the Democrats will lose us forever. She will not run in 2016 and we can’t take another 4 years of Obama.
Could be. Nothing would make me happier than a primary challenge from her. I hope she does. All I’m saying is that she’d still be viable four years later. That’s far too far in the future to predict where people’s heads will be at — including hers. She has deep political capital, which she can use in a wide variety of ways. Maybe she’ll do things over the next five years that are as trailblazing as those she’s done over the past 35 — I wouldn’t bet against it. Who knows where that would position her in 2016?
Of course, as you note, she may not want it anymore. She may have gotten to a point in her life where she no longer needs or wants the game. One of the things that’s most remarkable about her, to me, is how she has fought to arrive at a position that is unique in American history — a public woman with meaningful and consequential options before her. She carved her path in life. She really is the master of her fate, the captain of her soul — something only men have been allowed.
I think we’ll have to wait and see.
Did you have to stir up all my rage again? As angry as I’ve been lately, it hasn’t been eating holes in my soul the way the spring of 2008 did.
Yeah, I did. It was unrealistic for the Obama contingent to think we would ever, “get over it”. There was too much at stake in 2008. Our livelihoods were on the line.
And what they did to women was especially unforgivable. If you are a woman and voted for Obama in 2008 because the campaign scared you to death or made you feel so much better than the stupid, dowdy Clintonistas, I don’t know how you live with yourselves.
Me? Not a chance.
I will not stop until everyone of the super delegates, media shills, Botties, appeasing arse lickers, apologists for a Illinois crook pol, dumb ass, grandparent selling, self absorbed, foolish Democrat is out of office and out of control of the party. Ever damn one of them. If they are on TV, change the channel. If they write some self serving, rationalizing drivel, write the paper or cut the subscription. Every single one of them needs to pay a price. They need to loose their jobs and every ounce of influence they have ever enjoyed and see what it is like. Then wear dunce hats and apologize. Can I forgive. Of course. But I would not trust them to take out the garbage.
Oh, mimi, that’s so divisive!
The day I turned off CNN for good was when Hillary won another state, Wolf lead off with the exit polling of people who voted for Hillary and the percent that race was a factor in their votes. That’s when I realized that ‘journalism’ was working for a candidate rather than reporting facts in an unbiased manner–CNN was just another Fox. Shameful
Excellent post, RD! But you say, “…and gave the party permission to blow off half of the voters and all of those voters’ legitimately cast ballots, and didn’t say anything and didn’t stand up for fair reflection, it was giving tacit approval to the party to blow off the rest of the voters in the future.”
That would make it seem that then-Senator Obama just did not say no to TPTB (the powers that be). I think he helped plan it, as it fits the pattern of all his other campaigns.
djmm
Mebbe but that would be giving him credit for strategizing that I don’t think he deserves. I think Edwards was the preferred candidate when Florida and michigan were punished in August 2007. But he had a bun in the oven and the party pulled the plug on him. Let’s just say it wad more of an anti-Hillary move than a pro-Obama move. it worked out for him. We just have to wonder why the party had it in for Hillary.
Because O is so much easier to control. He wants to be loved. And RD why don’t you want to know what the best thinkers are saying about the moment we are in?
Marcuse said a long time ago that capitalism is like pac-man. It eats up its opposition and is nourished by it. Michael Moore said that the big distributors snap up his films because they make money for them. The fact that they tear down the powers has no effect on them. The films make money for them.
And now we are in global capitalism and once simulation is total we are permanently fucked. VR is irreversible.
The Matrix: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. The book he was hiding in the beginning of the film was Baudrillard’s Simulation.
You want to know what simulation is? It’s our government. It is a simulacrum. A copy of a copy with no original. That’s what is leading us. There’s no one home.
Abbey, I learned a long time ago to do my own thinking. I’m not interested in what the best thinkers think unless it squares with reality and conclusions come from actual observation. I appreciate that you have your own preferences in this regard and for all I know, you may be right. But your approach differs radically from mine. I’m not interested in diving inti the esoteric thought processes of postmodern deconstructionists. It goes against my nature.
Sorry.
The facts that you gave is quite impressive, because I never thought like this before. People like me like to travel a lot and thinking that this can change my opinion is very hard to believe it. I suggest writing more about this “topic” in the future posts and focus more on people opinion already expressed here. Thanks.