Occasionally I visit old sites where I've been bumped and banned from, just to check out their current reality. These infrequent visits, unfortunately, pretty much confirm my view of the rump Democratic Party. They have learned nothing.

Exhibit A today is a post by "Doug!" at Balloon Juice asking for donations to the campaign of Jon Ossoff for Tom Price's old seat in the Georgia 6th District.

Balloon Juice, as far as I can remember internet history, is run by John Cole, a college professor in West Virginia. Balloon Juice was originally part of Green Footballs, which, and I'm willing to stand corrected, was a collection of Republican snark sites. It "evolved" into its current condition as a neoliberal Democratic site. That's their history, briefly, as I far as I know.

When the DNC backs a candidate, it is almost never a progressive Democrat. For example, Patrick Murphy, the former Republican whose father did a lot of "beak-dipping" in the construction business. If you ever stop by "DownWithTyranny" you probably have come across some of the numerous columns written by the folks there about this guy. Murphy managed to lose to Marco Rubio, who barely ran a campaign against him. Like McCaskill, his most prominent feature of being a Democrat is the "D" after his name.

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in Georgia's District 6, fits nicely into the neoliberal profile currently in vogue at the DNC. He got a degree at Georgetown and was a student of Madeleine Albright and former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, getting his degree from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. Then he got a master's at the London School of Economics, his thesis on foreign trade relations. Just the kind of guy to appeal to appeal to the heavily Republican district that regularly sent Newt Gingrich to Congress in the last century (That's being snarky.).

What did Ossoff do after he got his masters? He was a national security staffer and aide to Representative Hank Johnson. He's the CEO to Insight TWI, an "investigative reporting" documentary company.

Ossoff is the perfect candidate, according to the DNC profile that developed during the Wasserman Schultz era. He doesn't say much about domestic concerns of Americans, but appears to be a neoliberal Cold Warrior. She may as well have sprung from Madeleine Albright's loins.

These DNC neoliberal candidates have two general flavors. They are either wrapped up in Wall Street or they are young Cold Warriors, ready to send people to war to defend America's right to kill brown people who live on top of petroleum deposits around the world. Ossoff appears to be the latter.

How do these candidates fare in congressional elections? Not very well. They have very little grassroots, populist appeal aside from the "D" after their names. These are the people that the DNC has been running for office, almost always outspending their more progressive opponents in the primaries and then losing in the general election. If they do manage to make it to Congress they vote with Republicans enough to block anything progressive from being passed.

This is the insidious process that has been destroying the Democratic Party for the last half century, accelerated with the rise of the Clintons and the DLC during the Reagan/Bush era.

Why would the Democrats do this? As Obama displayed, this is the perfect constellation for a neoliberal Democratic President. With a Republican Congress a Democratic President can hardly be blamed for not passing progressive legislation. An increase in taxes for the ultra-rich? A real infrastructure rebuilding program? Ending the war against drugs? Providing a sufficient safety net for the poor and the poor seniors? Raising the minimum wage? All the things that H. Clinton meekly half-supported during the campaign that she'd never get past the Republican Congress.

And here I get a little conspiratorial on you again. Often I work back from the results of a political strategy and make a judgment as to whether the Democrats continue to make the same mistake over and over or if it is an intentional strategy:

The DNC and the Clintonites don't really want a Democratic Congress. Imagine a President Clinton in office now. Maybe she would go through the motions to support raising the minimum wage, but the Republican majority would swat it down. Safety net? We saw how the other Clinton handled that. Free college education? Hahaha. It doesn't serve the hierarchy that now owns both parties to educate the masses.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz's perfect Democratic Party would be a permanent minority party.
And if Trump weren't so deliberately awful Schultz could probably abide by a Trump (although a Bush would have been better).

There is, however, one thing that Donald Trump will not offer to our Deep State that Clinton has been falling all over herself to give them: a war with Russia. When Clinton casually mentioned in the primary debates that she was going to set up a "no-fly zone" for Syria she was implicitly announcing her intention to go to war with Russia. Russia and Syria are the only other countries with military aircraft over Syria (although it looks like Israel lately is coming to the aid of ISIS and the ISIS-lite military formations there).

There's more: the coup that put the fascist Banderites into power in Ukraine was overseen by Clinton's State Department holdovers. During the nineties the CIA under Bill Clinton was supporting the Chechen uprising against Russia. Clinton also engaged fascist movements in Croatia and Bosnia to help break up the socialist state of Yugoslavia.

Trump has a lot of business connections with Russia (both "legal" and "gangsterish"), as do the Clintons. Instead of heating up the situation with Russia to get hold of that huge pool of petroleum in Central Asia, he and his wing of reactionary right-wing billionaires were willing to negotiate with Putin and Russia. In other words, the Trump wing of the ruling class was willing to compromise with Russia to dip their beaks into Russian oil. The Clinton wing wants to conquer it.

I have my suspicions about the current "Putin hack-Trump traitor" scandal being played out in front of the American public, and it will take another piece to explain it. Let me just say that originally it was being run to give President-elect Clinton more war footing against Russia, for that indeed was where her foreign policy was aimed. Unfortunately, she ended up being an even worse candidate than most pundits expected. Americans will vote crazy over a slow death. Now the scandal is a negotiating tool, either to get Trump to back the war effort, or to get a President Pence to back the war effort.

The current DNC is filled with corporatists and Cold Warriors. Republican majorities are more in line with DNC goals than progressive Democrats. Unless someone has a way of bringing down the current constellation in the Democratic Party progressives will get nowhere following the "D".

[I have an essay in the works about the nature of the "Putin hack-Trump traitor" scandal.]