Go read the original. It’s easy to find here, and Succuri…the site’s security app…is being very persnickety today.
I am replying to this post as a standalone article rather than a reply because:
#1-It’s quite long.
And
*2-Centerfielddj and his neocentrist cohorts have a disturbing habit of zeroing out replies and comments that oppose their pro-DNC positions.
The entity centerfielddj makes a number of points in that post. I am going respond to the one that is central to its argument. (Emphasis mine.)
Regardless of which candidates prominent Democrats choose to support, the candidate who persuades the most people to vote for them will be the winner. What the voters do will be the measure of the campaign. What Party leaders do will not be the measure of the campaign.
Read on.
In 2016, “the party leaders”…the neoliberal/neocentrist Democratic party leaders who were and had been deeply affiliated with the Clintons for a couple of decades…pulled bureaucratic string after bureaucratic string (including a number of under-the-table, old-school power politics strings, bet on it) to cripple the Bernie Sanders movement. They succeeded. HRC was the nominee. They then proceeded to run a presidential campaign that failed to reach roughly 74% of the eligible voters in the United States.
How do I compute that percentage? It’s simple math. There were roughly 250 million eligible voters in The U.S. in 2016. Hillary Clinton got almost 66 million votes. Do the math. (https:/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_election)
Donald Trump got an even smaller percentage of those votes, but there lies the other flaw in the Democratic campaign in 2016. They did not commit to effective campaigning in too many states that they considered “hopeless.”
Guess who won?
That plus a really bad candidate…sorry, neocentrists, but Hillary Clinton lost more votes than I can even estimate with her various gaffes…the most serious of which were the “basket of deplorables” remark (https:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables) that she made at a campaign fundraising event in early September, 2016 and the “public positions/private positions” speech to a group of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street hustlers that was itself supposed to be “private.” (https:thinkprogress.org/hillary-clinton-defends-telling-wall-street-in-leaked-speech-that-politic
ians-need-a-private-and-dd4a36432030) Like almost everything else in the post-social media world except things said in debugged, spook-operated rooms, it was leaked.
Duh!!!
Ain’t much that’s “private” anymore, as another baby boomer (Trump) is most painfully beginning to realize.
So it goes.
As I wrote almost a year ago in a still frontpaged (on the hotlist) post titled “Perez now chairman of DNC. Oh Well…There Goes THAT Idea!!”:
—snip—
This is a victory for the Pelosi/Schumer PermaGov/centrist axis of the Democratic Party, and a serious loss for the Sanders/Warren wing.
–snip—
Where is the new party coming from?
And when, fer chrissake!!!???
Because this old one ain’t worth shit!!!
AG
The answer to my question “Where is this new party coming from?” should now be quite clear to anyone with an ounce of honest common sense.
It is coming from the people who felt abandoned by the neoliberal/neocentrist-dominated, corporate-owned and controlled Democratic Party of the Clintons, Obama etc..
It is coming from people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat the pants off of a powerful, old-line Dem in 2016 by simply telling the truth about what has happened to this government, and has continued saying it…loud and clear…since her election.
And…it is coming from Beto O’Rourke.
Will it win in 2020?
I dunno.
I certainly hope so, but even if it doesn’t…short of some kind of coup…it’s only a matter of time until it does. There is a new majority rising in this country…a multi-racial, multi-cultural majority that in my opinion is the culmination of hundreds of years of efforts by a majority of those who live in the U.S. to actually bring to fruition the words of The Declaration Of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I repeat:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Now…this can be done peacefully, provided of course that the structure of said government has not been so ruined by corporate influences that no amount of campaigning will get it done.
Or it can be done less peacefully.
My own greatest hopes are for the former option.
Amen.
AG
P.S. While I am at it…since the much of the gist of centerfielddj’s post seems to be aimed at me and my own posts…one of the repeated falsehoods of that small cadre of neocentrist, DNC-affiliated posters here is that I am all for “breaking up the United States.” Centristfield pops that one out in one of his comments on his referenced post above.
Please click the link to read Arthur lay out his case to “BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!”
Yes indeed!!! Please click that link!!! (http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/9/12/1356/19864)
In fact…I’ll save you the trouble.
Below is the important part of what I said in it. It is a crie de coeur, not a call for the breakup of the United States. The plain fact that I am supporting Beto O’Rourke should put that fallacy to rest. Last I looked, he was trying to unite the entire population of the United States, not break it up.
Who are we to say that no “decent people” believe other things than do we?
My grandparents were “decent people” on both sides of the family. They went to church; they stayed married…sometimes for the sole reason of raising their children well…they fought wars in which they believed; they took care to harm no one who did not threaten them and their families. They also had no fucking idea about what it means to be a minority citizen in this country, thought that women belonged in the house raising children, would never have dreamed of voting for a black dogcatcher let alone a black president, lived in strictly segregated neighborhoods, had absolutely no use for people whose sexuality was different from their own…including people who had sex out of wedlock even if they were heterosexual…and cast a squinty eye even on Christians of other denominations. My parents…one a member of a rabble-rousing NYC Irish Catholic Democratic family, the other a member of a semi-rural, rock-ribbed Protestant Republican family whose history in the NYC area went back to the 1630s…had to elope and go join the Royal Canadian Air Force and fight in The Battle of Britain because their families were so opposed to the relationship. Do you not have “decent people” in your family who never evolved to the level at which you exist in terms of social beliefs? I’m betting that you do.
We all do.
So now…back to the problem at hand.
It is often said that you cannot legislate morality. I’ll go one step further. You cannot legislate evolution. It either happens or it doesn’t. How many millions of the roughly 325 million Americans (not counting however many millions of so-called “illegals” are here, most of whom work for people like you and me washing dishes and delivering food, etc. at wages so low that they that defy imagination) absolutely, positively resemble your ancestors and mine in their beliefs. Given the low tide 28% approval rate of people like Butch II when he was in office, it looks to me like fully 1/4 or more of U.S. residents are right back where my grandparents lived in terms of societal evolution. That’s pushing on 100 million people. Plus…they’re the ones who own most of the guns. Can we somehow “legislate” their obedience to what we consider higher socially evolved notions? On the evidence of the last 50+ years, the answer is a resounding “No!!!” Are they dying out? I sometimes wonder. Given the Trump phenomenon, I wonder more now than at any time in the past. So I say…give them their own damned country/countries and let’s see who wins that competition. My bet? The country/countries that operate on the principle of human ecology will win and the others will degenerate into satellite states like the many small Eastern European countries that now waver back and forth between being part of Europe and part or Russia.
But that’s a real minority opinion.
At least for now.
It’s a dream.
So it goes.
We will see how long it remains a dream.
Another 8 years of the bullshit in which we have all been forced to live by the oligarchy and there are going to be a lot of people looking for a way out.
On all sides of the societal evolutionary scale.
Watch.
In that post I included a Youtubed performance of one of my primary musical influences, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson.
I Had A Dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=QjB02aaAt9w)
Check it out.
He says it all.
P.P.S.
Please excuse the unwanted italics formatting on a couple of paragraphs here. It’s just another Succuri tic, and I have spent enough time today writing and then cleaning up this post. I always try to make my posts interesting and clearly formatted. Robots don’t give a shit. Even the human ones. Especially the human ones, apparently.
Clomp. clomp, clomp. clomp, clomp.
I AM A GOOD DEMOCRAT!!!
Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!!!
Could be, I guess…
We shall find out, soon enough.
Won’t we.
