Greenwald: Democratic Party is 'broken and failed'

Glenn Greenwald has delivered a devastating critique of the inept, corrupt, and sickly response of the Democratic Party to the 2016 election debacle.
The whole article is great, but there is one juicy item that stands out.

Perez was in Kansas campaigning for votes from county leaders and was asked about the need for the party to retain the support of the Sanders contingent. Perez unexpectedly blurted out a truth that party functionaries to this day steadfastly bury and deny even in the face of the mountain of evidence proving it. This is what Perez said:

We heard loudly and clearly yesterday from Bernie supporters that the process was rigged and it was. And you’ve got to be honest about it. That’s why we need a chair who is transparent.

That’s quite an admission from the party establishment’s own candidate: “The process was rigged.” And he commendably acknowledged how important it is to admit this — “to be honest about it” — because “we need a chair who is transparent.”

But Perez’s commitment to “transparency” and “being honest” had a very short life-span. After his admission predictably caused controversy — with furious Clinton supporters protesting the truth — Perez demonstrated the same leadership qualities that were so evident when Zaid Jilani asked him about Israeli human rights abuses.

He quickly slinked onto Twitter with a series of tweets to retract what he said, claim that he “misspoke” (does anyone know what that word means?), apologize for it, and proclaim Hillary Clinton the fair and rightful winner:

So in Tom Perez’s conduct, one sees the mentality and posture that has shaped the Democratic Party: a defense of jobs-killing free trade agreements that big corporate funders love; an inability to speak plainly, without desperately clinging to focus-group, talking-points scripts; a petrified fear of addressing controversial issues even (especially) when they involve severe human rights violations by allies; a religious-like commitment never to offend rich donors; and a limitless willingness to publicly abase oneself in pursuit of power by submitting to an apology ritual for having told the truth.

That is the template that has driven the Democratic Party into a ditch so deep and disastrous that even Vox acknowledges it without euphemisms. That is the template that has alienated voters across the country at all levels of elected office and that enabled the Donald Trump presidency. And it is the template that Democratic Party establishment leaders are more determined than ever to protect and further entrench by ensuring that yet another detached, lifeless functionary who embodies it becomes the next face of the party.

The rigged Democratic primaries is the infected, open wound of the party.
You don't have to have a medical degree to know that pretending an infected wound doesn't exist won't make it go away.

The day before Greenwald delivered another biting critique regarding the Dems anti-Trump movement.

And it is important to resist them. And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn’t what this resistance is now doing. What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that.
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again and again during the primary from Hillbots. Granted, it's a cliché. However, you'd think that people expressly themselves spontaneously would occasionally have said, "Hillary won fairly" or "Hillary won honestly" or "the primary was not crooked" or any one of other ways to express the same point made by "Hillary won, fair and square." Then again, we call them bots for a reason.

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snoopydawg's picture

@HenryAWallace fair and square when he was asked about it. That's when I lost respect for him because he knows damned well that the DNC and Hillary stole the primary from him by disenfranchising his supporters by changing their party affiliation and kicking people off the voting rolls.

This comment is spot on but I would add that Obama didn't try to get his legislation passed until the republicans were able to block it.

The Republicans did not win control over all three branches of government, and control over most state governments. Democrats gave them control. For eight years the DNC acted as nothing more than a placeholder for Hillary. They spent eight years dreaming of all the goodies they would grab during the next Clinton administration and they did nothing at the state of local levels to strength their base. There was zero strategy for the midterm elections, zero strategy for pushing Obama’s agenda, zero strategy for staying in touch with the needs of their constituents.

Before the primary, I had concluded that the Democrats were weak, ineffective and just occupying space in Congress. I was wrong. They way they schemed, manipulated and connived to shut Bernie and his supporters out of the process, I understood that they had not forgotten how to fight, they just didn’t care enough to fight for the American people. They turned our media into a propaganda machine. They remained stone silence while hundreds of thousands of Democrats were denied a right to vote. They refused to register new voters, feeling it would benefit Bernie. They deliberately alienated our young people. The fiasco during the convention took the cake. They locked out delegates and paid actors to sit in the seats. I still can not believe what I witnessed.

If Perez wins, the Democratic party is history. It is history anyway. Franky, I don’t know why Bernie bothers to try to revive it. We are better off with a new party, representative of the people minus the sell outs who work only for corporate interest. The Democratic name scares like minded Republicans who are sick of the Republican party for the exact same reasons. American people are better off leaving both parties to their madness and just moving on. Both parties work for Wall Street, not American citizens.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.

@snoopydawg

If so, I may throw up because, IMO, those words come from a Clinton script.

During the primary, Jane said that the primary was not stolen because there were just to many votes between Sanders and Hillary. That was a weird statement because primaries, like Presidential elections, are not won by the popular vote. Primaries are won by the number of delegates. As I posted yesterday, Bernie lost Massachusetts on Super Tuesday by exactly one delegate--and after Bill Clinton made a Super Tuesday tour of Massachusetts polling locations.

There were so many kinds of hanky panky in various states and I don't think Jane or Bernie are that naive. Still, she didn't use the words "fair and square" or I would have vomited.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace . OK. Supposing someone wants to commit election fraud/voter suppression, they can do it digitally, or not. If they're operating in the old school way, then it is difficult, or can be, to create the illusion of a large margin of votes going your candidate's way, because you're dealing with a paper world. You've got a lot of paper to get rid of and a lot to replace.

If you're in a digital world, how much more difficult is it to flip 5,000 votes than 5?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace Whoops. Think I responded to the wrong person, sorry. In any case, this whole "but Hillary had such a big margin!" thing doesn't address the issue of whether there was fraud or not, at all.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

shaharazade's picture

@Big Al @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal perhaps when all the dust settled and they tallied the results, she did have a 'wide margin'. My question is where and how did she get that wide margin? I followed the primaries really closely as it seemed the people had turned on the Democratic party which is owned and run by the neoliberal/neocon Third Way /DLC. I was impressed by the insurrection among ordinary people who took the establishment on.

The dirty shenanigans they used imo were not limited to fixing the voting machines. They went full Tammany Hall from the very start to the revolting coronation. I used my lying eyes instead of believing the story line that came from the long dead 4th estate. The Guardian where I used to get my 'news' became an example of full on propaganda wherein they even drug in Tony Blair to preach the dangers of the Berniecratic extreme left.

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@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

First, as you say, having a wide margin says zero about how that margin came to exist in the first instance. I think Jane was assuming, for some unknown reason, that cheating would result only in changing a few votes here and there. Maybe she was thinking of vote suppression or something. I have no idea. That's why I called it weird.

Second, as I said, the national popular vote isn't what determines a primary victory, any more than it determines a Presidential election victory.

But, at least Jane Sanders did not use the Hillary script of "Hillary won fair and square."

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace It is kind of nails down the blackboard when the establishment repeats its own talking points to saturation and doubly disgusting when they get decent, or fairly decent, people to do it.

I remember way back during the Gulf War, the line was "We support our President 100%."

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

don't think Trevor Noah is funny in that role. I wish they had given it to Larry Wilmore, but that's neither here nor there.

Point is, I don't know if Noah does what Stewart used to do, namely show one newscaster or politician after another on different networks and cable stations reporting the same information in identical words. That spoke volumes about how very controlled the information we get actually is. It's semi-spooky. They all get the same press release or talking point from the White House or from a political campaign or wherever, and they all repeat it, like zombies, because no one does actual reporting anymore.

However, if Bernie or Jane were using the identical words the Hillbots used during the primary, I'd get physically ill. I donated so much and, worse, worked so hard to get others to donate, I just would not be able to deal.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

of Republicans, Freedom Caucus/Libertarians, etc., who felt very strongly about the bank bailouts, etc., and who likely did oppose the appointment of bankers (to the Cabinet). But, from my observation, many of DT's supporters--including Reagan Dems--are not particularly concerned about his appointments from the billionaire class, Goldman Sachs, or otherwise.

Of course, Steve Bannon worked for GS at one time; yet, many DT supporters seem pretty enthusiastic about him. It could be because he is one of the 'economic nationalists' in the Administration, and comes from a working class background. Dunno.

Hey, have a good one!

Mollie


"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving."
____Author Unknown

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Available For Adoption, Save Our Street Dogs, SOSD

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Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.

Strife Delivery's picture

There are still far too many people attached to the Democratic Party.

Far too many people are saying that "we just have to get our messaging down. We have to message better." Oh boy, alright everyone time to head to the corporate boardroom and work out our new twitter slogan.

How many slogans did Hill have?
I'm with her.
Fighting for us?
Stronger Together.

All duds. Blop.

But sadly they do have a point. When they get a slick con man like Obama or B. Clinton then hey the "messaging" work. Though when you get someone like Hillary, who tells the truth* on what she will do, yeah people don't like that.

"Hey Hillary the economy sucks and we can't afford to live anymore"
"America is already great!"

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@Strife Delivery

And the much-beloved Dem slogan: "Americans don't want change!"...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

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