I read the latest review by Matt Taibbi about the book "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" and one thing stood out for me above all else. And while it applied to the Clinton and her campaign, it also applies to the Democrats current party leaders and elected officials.

Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?

Isn't that in essence the reason the Democrats have lost over a 1000 seats across the country since Barrack Obama won in 2008? Obama said he was for a lot of things, like single payer health care, and for cracking down hard on the Too Big To Fail financial institutions that caused so much misery for so many. He said he was in favor of lots of other wonderful things, but when push came to shove, nothing ever seemed to get done.

He was for closing GITMO but that never happened. He was for less military intervention, but then expanded the war on terror and found new ways to murder innocent civilians in the Middle East through his Drone program. He was all for renewable energy, but somehow allowed more drilling for oil and gas then at any other time in recent memory, even citing natural gas from fracking as a bridge fuel to a sustainable future as did Clinton. The Dems ran in 2008 and 2012 on improving the lives of the middle and lower classes, struggling from the devastation of the "Great Recession." Guess what. It didn't happen, despite all their bogus claims to the contrary. Only the rich were better off under Obama's eight years in office.

And now, post-election, we see the Democratic establishment doubling down on their economic platform that favors wealthy people and large corporations. What could be more iconic of their refusal to back away from a neo-liberal agenda that has g=created such gross income and wealth inequality than the vote by thirteen Democratic Senators whose votes killed a bill proposed by Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar ...

[That would have allowed] both pharmacies and people with prescriptions to order their pharmaceuticals from Canada and other countries where they sell for significantly cheaper prices than in the United States.

In the DNC leadership elections they elected old school corrupt Dems over progressive candidates, and voted down a resolution that that would have banned the DNC taking money from corporate lobbyists. They claim to represent the downtrodden and marginalized, but their willingness to actually do something to improve the lives of the very people they claim they champion - minorities, the LGBTQ community, women, etc. - clearly has its limits, and by that I mean anything that would be opposed by their wealthy donors.

The Dem elites claim they lost the 2016 election because (tick any box that applies) James Comey, Sanders and his supporters, Third Party candidates, low African American turnout, racist white people who live in rural communities, media bias, sexism and especially - Russia!!!! The truth, however, is that they really do not stand for any policies that would help the people they expect to vote for them. They certainly don’t stand for eliminating income and wealth inequality.

As gjohnsit noted in his essay, "A question SJW's need to answer" their still and future Queen, Hillary Clinton, has bluntly stated, in effect, "that racism and sexism have to be defeated before we can worry about wealth inequality." Which essentially means the Democrats will never lift a finger to stop the ever growing divide between the rich and the poor, between struggling small businesses and transnational mega-corporations whose only concerns are how to acquire more market share and more profits, not their workers, their customers and especially not the struggling citizens of these United States of America. A war to eliminate racism and sexism or any other ism has as much chance of being "won" as our wars on drugs and terror. Zip, zilch, nada.

And yes, they are using Bernie Sanders to try to corral the people who support progressive values and policies to vote for Democrats again, even as they conduct a coordinated smear campaign against the man, and by implication all those who support the values and/or policies he advocates. Their goal clearly is to purge the party of any and all progressives and the people who might support, fund and vote for Democratic candidates who campaign on a progressive agenda. Take a look at this article posted on Medium, entitled "Fuck Bernie Fucking Sanders." It is just one small example of what I'm talking about. Some choice excerpts should give you the idea of what the Party really thinks of us:

Let’s get something straight: Dems are not “divided.” We don’t have an “identity crisis.” What we have is an extremist fringe faction, just like the other side has. The GOP’s biggest mistake was giving their lunatic fringe a seat at their table. Now it’s taken over the asylum. At least we could pass our own health care bill.

We don’t need to welcome or embrace or fellate our own version of the Freedom Caucus. We need to kick them to the fucking curb. [...]

There’s too much blood under the bridge to make amends. ... At this point, anyone who clings to “THE DNC CHEATED!!!” “BERNIE WOULDA WON!!!” does so with the kind of mindless religious zeal that flies planes into buildings. Destroying the only party that’s actually working to make progress happen is not how we get to socialist utopia.

But destruction is all these people understand. We’re going to have to return the favor. Because, unfortunately, Bernie isn’t irrelevant. Yet. He’s made it clear he has every intention of continuing to peddle his divisive bullshit on every cable network, on every stop of his “unity tour,” where he will explain in detail exactly how fucked up and corrupt and wrong and inept and stupid the party is. SO UNITY SUCH PROGRESSIVE WOW

90% unity is going to have to be good enough. The 1 in 10 who refused to vote for the most qualified candidate in U.S. history are a cancer on the party that needs to be cut out. THAT’S how we heal.

That's right. Democrats calling for progressives to be curb stomped. Being compared to the 9/11 terrorists. Being referred to as a "cancer" that must be "cut out." We must be destroyed. That's the rhetoric the most brazen Dem establishment enablers are employing, but it's not that much different from what we are hearing from our elected Democratic officials, who tell us we are crazy to want "nice things" like medicare for all, the re-regulation of Wall Street, relief from excessive student loan debt, free tuition, and all the other good things that we find in other developed countries that are far less well off than "the richest nation in the world."

These anti-progressive sentiments resonate throughout the Democratic Party. Their failure to support a higher minimum wage, or strengthen labor unions, or end the mindless wars in the Middle East, or address the concerns of young people who carry a heavy burden of student debt and still can't find decent paying jobs, and on and on, is not a problem in their minds. No, the problem is you and me and everyone in America who supports single payer healthcare. Or better working conditions. Or an end to corporate subsidies that allows multinationals to ship jobs overseas while not paying their fair share of taxes here. Who believe austerity and cuts to our social safety net are not necessary, nor needed to provide even more for more bombs for our military to use to kill more people in more wars. Or who think ot is wrong to providelaw enforcement at home the means to treat anyone who gets out of line who needs to be put down as if they were"enemy aliens" and not citizens with rights supposedly enshrined in the U.S. Constitution (see, e.g., Occupy Wall Street and NoDAPL).

No, to the Dem establishment and everyone who identifies with them, the only problem is us. Not their party's beyond shabby treatment of the middle and lower classes people, including the very marginalized communities they claim to defend and support. Certainly not their economic ideology or militaristic, imperialistic foreign policy. Nope. Just us. We are the problem that must be "fixed." The Dems don't stand for us in any way shape or form, and if they say they do they are either lying or telling half-lies to convince themselves they're the only real good guys on our political scene. Well, my dear Dems, as a fictional movie character once put it so eloquently and succinctly:

A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.

Either way, Democrats have doubled down on not standing up for the people whose votes they insist are owed to them. So, why should any of us stand with the Democrats? They clearly have demonstrated they are not going to change their ways, no matter how many elections they lose or how many people they harm in the process of pursuing their lesser of two evils election strategy. They can trot out Bernie all they want, but until real progressive candidates, and not neo-liberals and Third Way Dems pretending to be progressives, are on the ballot, where's the benefit to voting for them? Like Hillary's campaign, all the Democrats really stand for is getting the wealthy to donate to them, while promising anything to anybody. There's a word in the vernacular for such people: you call them con artists.