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[Paxiecrunchle]

I just have one question, how do the Republicans not see all of this blowing up in their faces for the next 20 years

[sluissa]

I just have one question, how do the Republicans not see all of this blowing up in their faces for the next 20 years

Trump takes the fall, they become the minority party again and they can settle in for another decade of NO.

[Reelya]

The Republicans are the people who probably want off Mr Bone's wild ride more than anyone. They can't get off.

Why would they need to hold the presses for internet and TV news?

It's a figure of speech. The point however is that they are people who work regular office hours. Todays morning news, and the whole day's worth of news, for the most part, was already finalized and handed into editors yesterday, because that is the only thing that makes sense. Nobody in their right mind would write all today's articles on the same day. Not even for TV and the internet. Because that wouldn't make sense as a business model.

Unless something is a huge scoop, then they're not going to fit it into today's news once the day already began. Think about how a day at the office would actually work if you're a news writer, you have a pile of stuff on your desk that you came in to see that you're supposed to write today. Sure, that Trump shory probably broke in a UK paper while they were commuting to work in Ney York, but ... today's news headlines aren't written today, for almost all news. It will go on the pile for tomorrow or later.

[Helgoland]

Goddamn do things have to change.  Sometimes I drift towards questioning my cynicism towards establishment politics.  I wondered whether my attitude was too cynical towards Hillary, as knowledgeable people who I respect insisted I was.  But then the stuff that everyone shrugged off for being too conspiracy-sounding gets confirmed as true... after it's too late to matter as anything but a lesson for next time.

Edit:

Ah, yes, there it is.

I think it would be responded to with the same misdirection and propaganda tactics being used by the media right now. "Oh Bernie did the same thing." "Oh, it's perfectly normal." "Oh, it's not as bad as it sounds." "Oh, she's obviously an idiot and doesn't know what she's talking about."

It's easy to pile onto Fox News when they do it in Trump's favor... but WaPo and the like are just as guilty of doing it for the Dems.
[/quote]

- You'd have to show that Hillary 'bought' superdelegates. As it stands she gained a lot of power by pouring money into the DNC, yeah, but that was because the damn thing was close to going bankrupt. Sure, we all know Bernie - and by extension his followers, I guess - don't care much for the party, but is it such a miracle that the people inside it do?

- Hillary won without the superdelegates. Since everybody's saying she's a sore loser for analyzing her defeat: Isn't this the same sort of behavior, only amplified by a general disgust with 'the system', whatever that is?

[Reelya]

Hillary won without the superdelegates.

The first point is an excuse, this is not. e.g. if you try and bribe a judge in a case but then it turns out that the bribery was not needed since you win the case anyway, then you're still guilty of bribery / perverting the course of justice, because it's what you intended to do which makes it a crime. Or if you rig a sporting event but then the outcome you wanted happens anyway without the rigged thing needing to be executed, you're still guility of conspiracy / fraud charges or whatever you get for that. Just the same as e.g. merely hiring a hitman is a serious crime, it doesn't matter if the guy dies first and you call off the hit.

So ... if they founded that she "bought" the superdelegates that's enough to cast doubt on here as a trustworthy candidate, regardless of whether the superdelegates votes ended up being needed. It's the attempt to rig the system that is the corrupt act, not whether you win or lose.

[penguinofhonor]

Are people still spreading this story around as "confirmation" that the election was rigged? Donna Brazile has already denied that's what she was claiming, and even added that the primary was fair and ultimately decided by the voters. This is not some Hillary shill, this is someone who made it her main goal as DNC chair to dig up dirt on Hillary's campaign.

Like... I'm sure there's something potentially shady or irresponsible going on here, but it's very clear that nobody is interested in that. This is getting blown out of proportion because people will uncritically accept any story that they can read as "Everything bad you've said or thought about Hillary Clinton in the past two years was justified."

[SalmonGod]

- Hillary won without the superdelegates

The thing that bothers me most about the superdelegates is that the DNC and mainstream media both set the narrative extremely early on that Hillary had a broad majority of them in the bag (pledged) long before any votes had been cast.  This was pushed really fucking hard. 

It puts out an extremely undemocratic message to the public.  General response I got when I complained about this was "Oh, don't worry about it.  It's not really true.  The superdelegates will follow the will of the voters when it comes down to it."  But if that's the case, then why the hell push that narrative in the first place?  If nothing was decided before voting took place, then the only reason for it was to demoralize voters by lying to them about the process.  How many more voters might have put forth the energy if the people running the show weren't telling them it was pointless?

[sluissa]

Are people still spreading this story around as "confirmation" that the election was rigged? Donna Brazile has already denied that's what she was claiming, and even added that the primary was fair and ultimately decided by the voters. This is not some Hillary shill, this is someone who made it her main goal as DNC chair to dig up dirt on Hillary's campaign.

Like... I'm sure there's something potentially shady or irresponsible going on here, but it's very clear that nobody is interested in that. This is getting blown out of proportion because people will uncritically accept any story that they can read as "Everything bad you've said or thought about Hillary Clinton in the past two years was justified."

Except in that same article it calls into question whether that "walkback" was closer to the truth or just damage control for the party as a whole. Aside from this one instance, she is a long time campaign worker for the Democrats in general, going back to Dukakis as a major player, and even further as a minor contributor. I think she was originally careful to not implicate the DNC specifically in anything, to protect the party, and only mention specific people in detail, but after this all came out, and the pundits ran with her quotes (admittedly out of context like she said)... she realized there's no way this could have come out without making the party as a whole look bad. Thus... damage control.

And again, while it may not have been rigged in any illegal sense, there was a lot of obviously shady stuff going on during the primary. Just the sort of stuff that would result from what she describes. Just the sort of stuff that you get when you have one candidate controlling the primary election.

[Frumple]

Was a lot of stuff people kept trying to tell everyone was obviously shady, anyway.

I just have one question, how do the Republicans not see all of this blowing up in their faces for the next 20 years

The trick is that they either don't care if it does,* or can't stop doing it unless they want things to blow up in their face for the next 4-6 years in particular, depending on the individual politician.

Some might not see it coming, but there's not much they can do about it either way save jump ship, and that has good odds of losing them their next election just as well. Twenty year time scale isn't really something they can consider these days, even compared to normal for a stateside politician.

* Do remember, things blowing up for the next twenty years, especially if it screws over the government and/or their political establishment in the process, is a win condition in the eyes of some of these folks.

[Frumple]

Because they're old or they're already aware they're pretty certain to lose the race if they try

Least that seems to be a fair chunk of it, anyway. Not so sure they're seeing twenty years ahead rather than twenty months or less, heh.

[SalmonGod]

I do actually agree with you on that, SalmonGod. I don't think that was necessarily a deliberate part of what the Clinton campaign did; I think that was the general impression in the media and in the DNC that she was going to win, and pushing the narrative that she already has it in the bag. Much like what they did during the election proper.

I don't mean a general impression, though.  I mean there were counts going around of superdelegates that had already "pledged" to Hillary months before any votes had been cast.

[EnigmaticHat]

Like... I'm sure there's something potentially shady or irresponsible going on here, but it's very clear that nobody is interested in that. This is getting blown out of proportion because people will uncritically accept any story that they can read as "Everything bad you've said or thought about Hillary Clinton in the past two years was justified."

Bolded bit is why I kind of groaned when I saw the story first.  I knew it would happen.

That being said the actual content of what Donna said still makes Clinton look bad.  The election wasn't rigged but it wasn't managed fairly either.

[Sheb]

I do miss mainiac for these kinds of time. Oh, well. As far as I know there was nothing about "buying delegates" in the Brazile book. Actually, the book seemed short of exactly what Clinton used her influence over the party for during the primary.

[smjjames]

There's always some retirements though, and the average is either 23 or 27, so, a lot more than the average could mean trouble for the Republicans in the 2018 midterms. The total is at 16 (or thereabouts) Republicans and one or two Democrats, so, a ways to go before it gets significantly higher than the average.

[EnigmaticHat]

I do miss mainiac for these kinds of time. Oh, well. As far as I know there was nothing about "buying delegates" in the Brazile book. Actually, the book seemed short of exactly what Clinton used her influence over the party for during the primary.

The biggest thing that Hillary did was use the DNC for a legal money laundering scheme.  From each donor she raised the maximum allowable donation for herself, and then that same amount 50 more times for troubled candidates in each state.  Then she hands the 50x maximum donations to the DNC.  But the DNC signed a document ceding control of its finances to her.  As it turns out, the most troubled congressman in every state is Hillary.  So the DNC just happens to send all that money back to her.  The figure Donna mentions is 95.5% of that money going to somewhere other than its stated purpose, although she stops short of saying it all went to Hillary.

As for everything else... the party was under Hillary's control.  Anything they did she had a hand in.  But she mainly used this power negatively rather than positively.  She didn't cause the DNC to take action against Bernie, but she could veto any DNC decisions that helped him or hurt her.  She also could and did staff the DNC with supporters.  The most relevant bit in the article is here:

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.