The Bernie Operatives protest too much, Methinks

Suddenly, there’s a bunch of posts and articles all over the intertoobz about why it isn’t right for Hillary people to tell Bernie people that it’s time to get out.

It feels a lot like, what’s that defense mechanism called again? You know, the one where you accuse someone of doing the very thing you would have done? Oh, yeah. Projection.

Then there’s this crap from David Axelrod via Greg Sargent:

“He’s pushed her on a lot of issues in a positive way, and I think that his young supporters will be bitterly resentful if anyone tries to shove him out of the race.”

Yes, they probably would be resentful. But it’s not like 2008 when the party will deliberately withhold delegates from his win column from two large states, gift uncommitted delegates to his opponent, re-engineer the rules so that he gets those delegates back but only at half strength until the Sunday before the convention so it looks like he’s always behind, and then doesn’t get a full first ballot roll call vote at the convention so that nobody knows how close the earned delegate count actually is so that it won’t provoke a justified floor fight.

If all that happened to Bernie, his young supporters would have a very good reason to be bitterly resentful.

Funny how David Axelrod was totally onboard with all of that when it happened to Hillary in 2008. He wasn’t overtly worried about her supporters being bitterly resentful. It probably had something to do with her being a woman and assuming she was ok with being shoved aside and not complaining about it. I’m not sure he gave a damn about her supporters’ feelings in the least tiny bit. That’s why some of them left to join the Tea Party. That went well. So, you know, David can piss off for all I care.

But I can’t see Hillary’s people treating other candidates’ voters like s^&*. It’s not what decent people do. It does not result in party unity. And if Hillary approved of that kind of thing that David Axelrod encouraged in 2008, I would very much question her motives. Is she so determined to win that she’ll risk destroying any sense of fairness? Would she be willing to completely discount the votes and sentiments and will of millions of voters (like her voters in 2008, made up over half of all the Democratic voters in all of the primary states including CA, MA, NY, NJ, PA, TX, FL, MI, etc, etc)? Because if she would do that, then what else might she ignore during her presidency? Long term unemployed people? Desperate homeowners? Working people in general?

I only ask.

Fortunately, there’s no reason for any of us to have to contemplate scenarios where Hillary and her people would scream at Bernie’s people to “GET OUT, YOU STUPID <fill in the stereotypical offensive epithet here>, YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING!!!”. (We have pictures, Greg)

The primaries are going well. Everything looks on the up and up and Bernie will have his say at the convention and a honest to goodness first ballot roll call vote.

In the meantime, it is very important that Bernie doesn’t sink to the level of a Republican and damage Clinton and the party just so he can stay in the good graces of his supporters who may or may not be some of the same obnoxious Obots who had to have their way in 2008, got it, and got burned because they weren’t paying any damn attention to the fact that their candidate’s favorite presidents were all Republicans.

They are allowed to be disappointed. I have been disappointed many times in Democratic primaries. I always got over it and voted for the nominee. But I drew the line in 2008 because of all of the nasty crap that happened with the full consent of the party, Obama, the media and DAVID AXELROD.

WE were cheated, bullied and disrespected. Bernie’s voters are simply losing. BIG difference.

This part was particularly offensive:

It’s not yet clear whether the Clinton camp thinks it will have to make any meaningful concessions to Sanders in order to unite the party and bring in his supporters. But during her victory speech yesterday, Clinton struck the right preliminary tone for navigating what’s ahead. She stopped short of declaring the nomination locked up, while suggesting that “more voices” across the country still deserve to “be heard,” and thus that the contest should continue for the foreseeable future. Her surrogates may be tempted to heap disdain on Sanders and his supporters for wanting him to keep going, particularly if her pledged delegate lead expands. The Clinton campaign should discourage that.

We don’t need a lecture from Greg Sargent. We had enough of that crap in 2008, along with the Convention media narrative, “Why is Hillary not releasing her delegates? Doesn’t she know she’s harshing Obama’s melloooooow??” (I was in Denver, Greg. I talked to “journalists”. They all parroted the same damn thing)

No one has to tell Clinton or her far more sensitive supporters how to behave towards our friends who are still feeling the Bern, especially not some tut-tutting male blogger at the Washington Post.

I have full faith in Hillary Clinton to do the right thing for the party, to which she has been far more loyal than it has been to her, and for all of the voters, both hers and Bernie’s.

When she wants your input, I’m sure she’ll ask for it.

Update: Why are Clinton people so cranky? Why don’t you put up with 20+ years of lies and innuendo from the nutcase right and then find that the guy you thought wasn’t going to hurt you is using the same personal attacks that could have been written by some back office flunky at Fox News.

And add to that the media is determined to never say anything nice about you. Even the surrogates of the most determined, successful, accomplished, over qualified candidate in the last 20 years would start to get a bit peevish.

Especially after having gone through it once before in 2008. It’s generally true that women have to work much harder to get to the same position as a man. But this is like asking her to run this gauntlet twice without any help whatsoever. It makes what Obama had to go through look like a cake walk.

The better question is, why is Bernie doing it? What can he possibly hope to gain by it?

 

 

SUNday, SUNday, SUNday!

Monster trucks and funny cars!

Whoops!

Ok, I am watching This Week With George S., and Wolfson is hammering Axlerod on Obama’s committee assignments in the Foreign Relations committee. Obama hasn’t held a single hearing on NATO and Afghanistan and Axlerod is tap-dancing all around the issue with, “But Hillary voted for the IWR! SHE voted for it! It’s her judgment.”

Jeez, David, is that all you’ve got? I mean, let’s think about this for a moment. Almost the entire appeal of Obama to the left blogosphere on DailyKos and OpenLeft and TalkingPointsMemo is this one vote. This one vote out of the entire 35 year history. Everything else about Hillary they’re pretty cool with but THIS vote and that meaningless Lieberman-Kyl resolution, gets their knickers in a twist. And let’s be absolutely clear about this, they were willing and able to overlook this in Senator Kerry in 2004. Yep, it was all ticketyboo for Kerry to have voted for it AND say that he would have voted for it again if he’d had a chance. Hillary at least regrets it and wishes she had a do-over. But Kerry had no coherent message about Iraq and was all over the place about his vote. And to our merry band of Kossacks, that was O. K.

The hypocrisy is really quite astonishing when you think about it. For Hillary Clinton, her entire body of accomplishments in public service is reduced to nothing because she did this one stupid vote. Maybe that’s how it should always be. If you are an accomplice to getting us into a war we have to spend years getting out of at a cost of thousands of young lives, you *should* be held accountable. But at least be consistent. And when it comes to Kerry vs Clinton, at least you can say that her constituents would have demanded it. They would have preferred to be safer than sorry. One other thing we didn’t consider is that Bill Clinton was a very responsible president when it came to foreign affairs. Maybe it was unthinkable to either Clinton that Bush would be so reckless with the military. I don’t know. I am not making excuses. I don’t know what was going on in her head. All I know is that she was in a tougher spot than Obama has EVER been in and her options, as a senator from the state of New York, were very limited.

Do I trust her to do the right thing in the White House as Commander in Chief? Absolutely. She knows that a broken military leaves us vulnerable in terms of national security. One of the first orders of business for her will be to stabilize what is left of our forces. We are overcommitted and depleted. We can’t stay in Iraq. We must address Afghanistan. Along with Generals Wesley Clark and Hugh Shelton, Madeline Albright and the Big Dawg himself, I feel confident that she will move quickly to halt the further disintegration of our foreign policy around the world. Obama, on the other hand, will spend his first couple of years just getting up to speed.

Maybe he can fit a meeting on NATO and Afghanistan into his schedule. That is, if he has time from the Recession. Good luck with that, Barry.

On other thing: Howard, with respect to the Rezko issue, don’t go there. Really. After Whitewater, we just really don’t need to encourage the media to dredge up that stuff and distract us. If we end up with Obama as our nominee, the media will just use it against him in order to promote McCain.

Nevermind. Pound the bastard.