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[EnigmaticHat]

Donna Brazile, the DNC party chair from July 2016 to February 2017 released a rather interesting article.

In summary, the previous DNC chair was grossly incompetent.  Some of you may remember hearing about how Obama's campaign had a large staff of competent analyists working for them?  Apparently, none of those people were let go after the election.  They were kept on the DNC payroll for at least the 3 and a half years between the 2016 and 2012 election, possibly even since 2008 (the article doesn't mention).  As a result, the DNC's operating costs doubled, to as much as 4 million a month.  The previous chairperson also did very little planning or monitoring of the party's operations.

As a result, the party signed a deal with the devil with Hillary, just not the one that we thought.  Hillary used a loophole to launder money in which her PAC would get past individual donation limits by gathering money separately 51 times from the same person, once for Hillary and once each for congressional officials in each state.  The 50x donations were simply sent to the party, rather than Hillary.  No, the deal was that Hillary would gain control of the democratic party prior to being nominated, rather than after.  Inevitable candidate indeed.  Donan found this out late into the election, as it seems only a few higher ups in the DNC were even aware of this and the rest weren't actively sabotaging things.  She only found out because of a written contract between the DNC and Hillary, which stipulates all the above (and isn't illegal, because campaign finance is bullshit).  After finding out she says she called Bernie, told him he was basically fucked, and then told him that her alternative to the Hillary deal was the democratic party going bankrupt.

We've talked a lot about the schism within the republican party, the 2016 primary corruption scandal is the first evidence of the schism within the democratic party.  In the short term the fault line will be income inequality and in the long-term the    I'm uneasy that conservatives are going to use this as part of the larger Benghazi/email narrative that I don't agree with, but there's no defending this.  The DNC sucks, Hillary sucks.  I don't regret voting for her but I wish we got Bernie and I wish he was younger.

To note, as Nate Silver noted on Twitter, Donna herself donated to campaigns in several non-competitive states to try and push Clinton's electoral collage victory even higher, so there is some revisionism going on in her article.

There really isn't.  She explains herself around the phone call bit.  She called Bernie, told him what had happened.  Then he asked her what his chances were, she told him, and then she asked him to start moving his supporters towards voting for Hillary.  She also told him that she didn't trust the polls and she'd personally talked to people and found a lack of enthusiasm.  Which he clearly agreed with because he did just that.  Her problem with Hillary wasn't that DNC funds were benefiting Hillary's campaign or that Hillary was gathering funds for the DNC (remember, without Hillary there wouldn't be a DNC right now).  Her problem was that Hillary wasn't supposed to have control over the party until she was nominated.  And that she usurped a massive amount of power from Donna's predecessor, which means Hillary pre-emptively stole a lot of Donna's own power and authority.  Donna describes learning that things were being done without her knowledge, then getting in explanation only that the previous chair hadn't wanted to know.  Then not getting a straight answer about what was being done and basically having to look through the papers.

She defends herself quite well.  Nowhere in the article does shes say she didn't want Hillary to win the general election.  She says she's mainly feels mad about the mess she inherited, and powerless that she couldn't resolve the primary situation in a way that was fair to Bernie.  If we should be mad at anyone in the DNC, it would be the previous DNC chair.  We only have 2 major parties in this country and she brought one to the brink of extinction through sheer incompetence, and then "solved" the problem by selling out.  And now that selling out is probably going to create a second democratic crisis in 2020.

[smjjames]

I feel like absolutely no one is surprised. I certainly am not.

I also wish we had Bernie or really anyone who wasn't the ultimate ultra-concentrated representation of everything wrong with their party.

Yeah, not surprised either really, it just confirms what so many people suspected what with the pre-crowning and so much else. I think THIS is the number one above all mistake that was made, they allowed a candidate to rig things in their favor. It's technically not illegal, but it's definetly shady and corrupt as all hell. I'm actually glad Clinton lost because the Dems deserve it by doing that with the DNC.

I don't think the runner up reason she lost even comes close to the importance of that reason. So, both campaigns were up to extremely shady stuff, how the hell did we get here? I mean, there's always going to be a bit of underhandedness, but what Clinton did would be straight up corrupt and Trump was up to extremely shady stuff by virtue of having a really incompetent and inexperienced campaign and staff.

@EH: yeah, we all wish Bernie Sanders was 10 or 20 years younger.

In other news, Trump is off on a 2 week diplomatic trip to Asia, Sessions is in even more trouble since he's been contradicted even more, and Trump complains about not being able to meddle in the FBI and DOJ. The storm goes on.....

[smjjames]

@Enogmatichat: Not sure how it's going to create a second crisis in 2020, other than maybe trust issues. Sounds more like a failure of leadership on the part of Debbie Wasserman-Schulz since she is the one who allowed it to happen. They just have to not make that mistake and transparently prove that they aren't doing that again.

[EnigmaticHat]

Superdelegates man.  I just have a feeling in my gut that this problem isn't going to go away unless someone finds a way to abolishe it.  But since the system naturally benefits the same people that would have a say in that decision, well...

Maybe 2020 crisis is pessimistic.  But its going to be a fault line.

Oh also, we're going to have a much sooner crisis if the democratic party's finances are still that bad.

[smjjames]

Aren't the finances on the House side actually pretty good? They're outraising their Republican colleagues by a good deal.

The superdelegate thing is probably alleviated a bit by the fact that there isn't a single powerhouse potential candidate or elder that they would all get behind and I'm pretty sure the Dems would still be doughly split into two camps, so, they'd be split among each other. Superdelegates are always going to be contentious no matter what. Not sure there have been any instances where the candidate who got the nomination wouldn't have won without the superdelegates.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There was never a candidate as hated as Trump who won without the popular vote, until there was. Make no mistake, the filth politics of the DNC would have used the superdelegates to eliminate a left candidate for a business candidate in a hot second. Until the superdelegates are abolished, that's always going to be the reality.

[smjjames]

Yeah, good point there. The Superdelegates don't have the influence that they used to I don't think, outside of the vote itself, so make them like endorsements and non binding. That way the superdelegates can stick around but have no actual voting power, it'd be purely symbolic.

[Folly]

November 4th Antifa rumors

Tons of news outlets are reporting that tomorrow is going to bring acts of violence, terrorism, and civil war. Other, more credible news outlets, are claiming it's all fake news.

I very much doubt anything noteworthy will happen...but I'm staying home just in case.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

All the shit about planning to dress up as Trump supporters and commit false flag attacks right where the media can see it makes me smell vodka.

Such is the world we live in now, where everything is fake news of false flags of foreign agents in an enigma of rage.

[nenjin]

Discrediting media and news sources is one of the prime requisites of a successful fascist/totalitarian takeover though. If no one believes the people calling you on your bullshit, you can get away with a lot.

[smjjames]

Methinks that the alt-right are trapped in their own world of conspiracies and conspiracies within conspiracies and conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies.

I haven't seen any mention of it on CNN or a few other places, even Vox which might give notice to it.

Discrediting media and news sources is one of the prime requisites of a successful fascist/totalitarian takeover though. If no one believes the people calling you on your bullshit, you can get away with a lot.

They're discrediting news sources that aren't their own, this is the right wing and left wing echo bubbles doing its thing, not some prelude to authoritarian/totalitarian takeover. Though the danger is definetly real in this political and media climate.

[Flying Dice]

I mean the American journalistic bloc has basically dismantled itself when they jumped down the rabbit hole of view-chasing. It's yellow journalism writ large, with all the extra potency of the information age. It's much easier to convince Joe Blow that the media is full of shit in a way which favors you if they are for the most part full of shit, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. I can think of maybe two newspapers and one magazine that I can trust to deliver genuine investigative journalism, timely reporting, and insightful editorial pieces fairly consistently with relatively minor bias and little in the way of clickbait-equivalents.

[Baffler]

Yeah, you can make vague gestures toward Nazi Germany and waggle your eyebrows suggestively all you want, but at the end of the day it actually is possible for journalists to be unworthy of public trust, and that isn't anyone's fault except for their own for being so in bed with politicians and corporate interests that nothing they say can be taken at face value, at best. Trust must be earned at the end of the day.

[Ehndras]

I mean the American journalistic bloc has basically dismantled itself when they jumped down the rabbit hole of view-chasing. It's yellow journalism writ large, with all the extra potency of the information age. It's much easier to convince Joe Blow that the media is full of shit in a way which favors you if they are for the most part full of shit, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. I can think of maybe two newspapers and one magazine that I can trust to deliver genuine investigative journalism, timely reporting, and insightful editorial pieces fairly consistently with relatively minor bias and little in the way of clickbait-equivalents.

About sums it up. Its easy to take advantage of the intrinsic bias or outright deception present in most media formats as a means to reinforce your own bias and deception so long as they maintain few superficial parallels.

[nenjin]

Yeah, you can make vague gestures toward Nazi Germany and waggle your eyebrows suggestively all you want, but at the end of the day it actually is possible for journalists to be unworthy of public trust, and that isn't anyone's fault except for their own for being so in bed with politicians and corporate interests that nothing they say can be taken at face value, at best. Trust must be earned at the end of the day.

Yeah but media isn't some monolithic organization. Even within a media organization there are different people pulling for different priorities. It sorta sounds like people are saying "one bad apple ruins the whole lot" and I'm not sure that's the attitude you want to take with the only people with the means and the inclination to collect news in the first place.