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Excuse Me, But The DNC Leaks Are Still A Thing

By Caitlin Johnstone
Published on: 13:23 PST, Sep 29, 2016

Err. Guys? When are we going to talk about the fact that the DNC was caught rigging the primary red-handed? And that their chosen nominee is illegal?

I just say this because that fact seems to have been lost in the wash. Here we are, furiously debating to calculate the exact percentage point of Hillary’s evilness in order to assess her accurately against that other evil dude, when she’s not even a real nominee.

The whole process was proven to be a sham, first with the email leak and now with this double-speak motion-to-dismiss from the DNC lawyers confirming it by claiming that everyone knew it was a sham, but everyone is still operating under the assumption that Hillary’s nomination is legitimate.

And make no mistake, the DNC did unquestionably, irrefutably violate Article 5, Section 4 of their own Charter, which promises the American people that the DNC chairperson “shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” The WikiLeaks drop of the DNC emails shows former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz both being included in and participating in conversations wherein Sanders and his campaign were both insulted and blatantly conspired against, again and again and again. This happened. Stop denying it. It happened, and those leading it were forced from their DNC positions as a show of penance, but they still maintain powerful positions within the party establishment, and everyone’s just marching on like that settled the matter.

We’ve been bullied into operating from the assumption that Hillary Clinton is our nominee, and then arguing from there. But she’s not our nominee. We want Bernie. We still want Bernie.

And I’d wager, if anyone was brave enough to do a legitimate poll across the country, you would find a resounding “Yes” to Bernie across all ages and all walks of life. Bernie is our choice. He is our real nominee. He is the one we want.

It’s important for us to decide now what happens. Not them. Us. We need to decide what happens to them, and we need to start from a place of the nomination being stolen, not from the assumption that her nomination is legitimate. We got hustled into “Oh well, what’s done is done, what do we do now?” and we never stopped to assess our real options.

It’s important, because it may mean we have to finish the job we started way back in 1968.

Let me give you a little history lesson.

Here is an old C-Span video of the riots that broke out in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when liberal Democrats erupted in outrage after the party announced that it had nominated the Vietnam war-supporting candidate, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, over anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in its internal nomination process. You should watch the video when you get a chance; if you followed this year’s Democratic Convention you’ll recognize a lot of very familiar parallels.

After the 1968 fiasco, the presidential nominating process underwent a major overhaul within the Democratic Party to keep its liberal base happy, and, much more importantly, to prevent the collapse of the party, which had become unrecognizably fragmented and chaotic at that point. Johnson had ended up dropping out of the race to abysmal approval ratings and was replaced by Hubert Humphrey, who went on to receive a one-sided beatdown in the general election at the hands of Republican candidate Richard Nixon (who later resigned; this was back when evidence tampering and election scandals were considered disqualifying factors for a president) due to low voter turnout from the Democrats.

Thus the modern Democratic presidential primary process was born. Its purpose: to prevent disenfranchisement and alienation among party voters by including them in a streamlined democratic nomination process wherein everyone gets to be involved and have a say, thereby rescuing the embattled party from the brink of destruction. Political parties get replaced by other parties all the time in governments all over the world; just like organisms in nature, they either adapt to changing conditions or they die, and their niches are filled by other critters. The fact that this hasn’t happened in America in a long time doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen now.

The keystone of this process is the aforementioned Article 4, Section 5 of the DNC Charter, also known as the Impartiality Clause. The DNC committed heart and soul to making the nomination process impartial, in order to facilitate a democratic election process. Impartiality means fair elections means a democratically decided nominee. It was the key to getting everyone in 1968 to put down their pitchforks and return back to the fold.

It was this Impartiality Clause that was violated during the primary process. The clause upon which the whole process rests was incontrovertibly ignored by the entire DNC in 2016.

So to reiterate: the modern Democratic presidential nomination process exists for the sole purpose of giving voters a democratic say in their party’s nominee, thereby keeping its base and allowing for the continued existence of the institution. If the people are involved in a fair and equitable democratic nomination, they won’t riot and abandon the party in droves to create a progressive alternative which would end up replacing it. To ensure their party’s continued political relevance, they promised their voters something that they reneged on this election cycle.

My question to you is, what do we want to do about it? The DNC keeps pretending that they hold the power here and we’ll do whatever they decide, but the thing is, they don’t. The party is the people. We are the people. The whole of the DNC amounts to a handful of people. We are millions. Do we just keep pretending for them that their nominee is legitimate? Because that’s the assumption they keep insisting we start from. She’s not in any way the choice of the people. No one likes her. No one likes her because no one trusts her. She gives everyone the heebie-jeebies because you can’t believe a word she says. If you say this out loud, people bleat “Sexism!” but seriously, do not tar my whole gender with that level of creepiness. If you meet a woman who is that shifty, you do not have to like her just because she’s a woman, okay? Let alone hand her the keys to the whole planet. She’s creepy because she’s creepy, she lies all the time, she’s shifty, she says one thing and does another, and you sense it and it makes your animal body feel yucky. None of that is inherent to my gender. Women can be just as trustworthy and honest as men, okay? Check out Jill Stein for just one example.

I digress. She is not a legitimate nominee and we should keep reiterating that fact, for a start. She is not our party’s choice. Bernie is our choice. And if you put in Bernie, we would win in a landslide. Everyone knows that, because that’s democracy; democracy rests on a nominee’s popularity. We keep getting blamed for Hillary not being popular, in this whiny high-school poor-widdle-Hillary handwringing way. They try to position her as the little nerd with a heart of gold that everyone is picking on, when in reality, we all know she’s just another mean girl. Nice to her face because we’re scared of her, but would never vote for her unless we had a serious dose of Stockholm syndrome.

News flash, DNC — elections are popularity contests. This is democracy. The nominee isn’t popular because she wasn’t popularly elected. If you want to win, put Bernie in. He’s our choice, and we’ll get behind him in vast, stadium-filling numbers. You know that’s true. That’s how the whole, you know, democracy dealio works, see?

In the coming weeks, Assange has told us another leak is about to drop and more intense pressure than we’ve seen will come to bear on Hillary’s nomination. We must be ready to loudly reiterate that hers is not, and never has been, a legitimate nomination. We have no loyalty to a pretend process. We must be ready to forcefully and unequivocally push her fake and failed nomination aside and install our resounding choice for nominee — Bernie Sanders.

If not, we will be forced to finish what we started in 1968 and completely destroy our party come election time by pushing in our new progressive platform, in historic and unthinkable numbers. And that will happen, and they know it. Don’t be fooled by their poker-face; their internal polling has them in absolute chaotic, hair-tearing-out disarray. We already know that CNN has dropped minorities, millennials, Gen X-ers, and anyone who does not live in a southern state from their polling pool presumably because the numbers for third party are knee-bendingly staggering with them in it. Have no doubt about it, the DNC may be playing it cool, but I’m willing to bet the house that their internal polling has them quietly terrified.

They know that, come October, their next move will define our next choice upon which their survival rests.

We, the people, are the party, and we will decide what happens next.

Give us our guy, or the party gets it.

[Featured Image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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hillary clinton News wikileaks julian assange bernie sanders Opinion Donald Trump Debbie Wasserman Schultz
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