Soundtrack in my head: Thievery Corporation, “Web of Deception”
The DNC is rigging the primaries for the 2020 Presidential election. Their methods are a bit more sophisticated than 2016. So far, they’ve managed to exclude Presidential candidates Mike Gravel and Tulsi Gabbard from the official debates. With nearly a year to go before Democratic National Convention, it remains to be seen how the DNC will winnow the field further. But the DNC has never acknowledged or apologized to its base or the public for its heavy-handed manipulation tactics during the 2016 election, and as such, we have every reason to believe that history will repeat itself.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) failed to meet the Democratic National Committee’s criteria of reaching a 2% threshhold with four of its hand-selected polls in order to qualify for the second round of debates. While the mainstream media has somehow dismissed Tulsi Gabbard’s concerns about the transparency of the process as “unconvincing,” Real Clear Politics has done a remarkable job of pointing out the flaws of the DNC’s “qualifying” process. The DNC name “qualifying polls” but did not lay out any criteria as to what made a poll “qualifying.”
The DNC listed polls from twelve mainstream media outlets and four universities as qualifying, Strangely enough, only four of those sixteen organizations released polls between the first Democratic primaries and the August 28 deadline. TulsiGabbard listed on her website twenty-four other polls that put her at 2% or above, including the Boston Globe, and The Economist. Both Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight declared some of Gabbard’s listed polls as being more reliable than some of those handpicked by the DNC.
Former Senator Mike Gravel from Alaska failed to qualify for the first round of debates. He had an even more difficult problem with the polls—on many of these polls, he was not even listed. A former aide to his campaign reported that she tried calling the DNC over 200 times to find out about the qualifying criteria, and couldn’t get an answer.
Both Gabbard and Gravel qualified with the number of donors. For the first round of debates, 65,000 donors were required and Gravel had over 70,000. For the second round of debates, 130,000 donors were required, and Gabbard topped 160,000.
Gabbard and Gravel have one more remarkable thing in common, and this may be part of the real reason they’ve been excluded. They are both highly critical of what has essentially been a bipartisan consensus foreign policy. Gravel, who made his mark in history in 1971 as the US Senator who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record went on record as favoring US withdrawal from foreign bases. Rep. Gabbard has been blunt about what she regards as wasteful regime-change wars. Her volunteering for the Hawaii National Guard after 9/11, and her two tours of duty in Iraq gives her remarkable credibility on the subject. She, like all Hawaiians, also had to endure a frightening false alarm of an impending nuclear missile strike.
The DNC is a corrupt organization that lost faith in the electorate and its own base a long time ago. We now know that candidate Hillary Clinton lent a large amount of of her campaign money to a broke DNC in August 2015 in exchange for being able to direct DNC activities from her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, NY. This included being in charge of the primaries in which she was also a contestant. Wikileaks’ release of DNC emails also demonstrated that the DNC sought to promote far right candidates from behind the scenes when polling found her trailing the likes of Jeb Bush, Scott Walker(!) and Marco Rubio. They also plotted in 2015 to promote a meme associating Donald Trump with the Russians.
There were many irregularities in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries. This included questionable calls and procedure changes in the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada, the disappearance of 125,000 voter registrations in millennial-heavy Brooklyn, New York, the manipulation of paper ballots to match voting machine tallies in Illinois, and confusion when a large cut in the number of polling places, long lines, changed or disappeared party registrations created chaos in the Arizona primary. A Stanford paper showed an unusual correlation in which states that didn’t have paper trails for their ballots overwhelmingly swung in Hillary Clinton’s favor— a correlation that didn’t reveal itself in the 2008 primaries in which Clinton competed and lost to Barack Obama.
Tulsi Gabbard, in particular, has a lot of firsthand knowledge of the DNC’s machinations given that she resigned her role as vice-chair of the DNC in March 2016 and endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. She was a thorn in the side to the anti-reform wing of the Democratic Party long before she declared her candidacy for President. In this November 2017 video, she referenced DNC’s rigging of the primaries and called for DNC reform.
She also tore down Sen. Kamala Harris’s potential leadership standing in primaries by pointing out previously published reports of the Senator’s conduct as California Attorney General. Harris had heavily promoted by large donors, and test balloons were sent out as early as 2017. Harris’s response did not at all acknowledge the charges Gabbard made, and indeed, her response was very Clinton-like. Harris continues to decline in the polls, and the DNC may have not been happy with the fact that Gabbard interrupted the narrative they’d hoped would propel Harris to the top tier of candidates.
Perhaps, then, this is no coincidence that the DNC found a way to disqualify Tulsi Gabbard from its second round of TV debates. The debates have long been an active campaign tool of both political parties since the League of Women Voters quit sponsoring the debates 1988. They did so because the major parties imposed changes to the debates that the LMV couldn’t support. The LMV said they had “no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”
Gabbard isn’t dropping out. She pushing forward based on the belief that the debates are not going to be what decides the outcome of the primaries. The DNC’s actions may come to haunt the party leadership in 2020.
What is worse is the way that the DNC actively promoted the claim that Russia had been intervening in the 2016 elections. While the Russia meme was hatched by John Podesta in 2015, it was employed as a tool after the election as a way to mask the DNC’s wrongdoing. I thought I would have never seen the day that McCarthyism would emerge as a theme in the Democratic Party. It is noteworthy that Hillary Clinton got her political start supporting Republican Cold War hawk Barry Goldwater in 1964, so for her, neo-McCarthyism is not completely unimaginable.
What many people have forgotten is the effort that the Democratic Party made to get Electoral College members who would have normally voted for Trump to switch their votes to Clinton, based on the assertion that Russia had interfered in the elections. This is shameful—how would rank-and-file Democratic voters feel if Trump tried to sway the Electoral College in 2020 based on a conspiracy theory he hatched? Fortunately, the Democrats’ effort actually backfired—Clinton ended up with less electoral votes that she normally would have been awarded.
Undeterred, Democratic Party backers, starting with Rachel Maddow, went full-tilt in engaging in a smear campaigns to link everything to Russia. Rachel told us we need to worry about Russia turning off our power during the polar vortex. Painting Robert Mueller as a savior on a white horse rescuing our democracy has backfired. But then, what else would you respect from someone who testified before Congress that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Adam Schiff’s shameful Russia-bating should be an embarassment to any Democrat—especially when he makes a Fox News host look intelligent by comparison.
Ironically, Hillary’s husband, as President, actually intervened in a big way to get Boris Yeltsin re-elected as the President of Russia in 1996—with far greater impact than any Russian efforts in the U.S. And the history of US interference in foreign elections is staggering.
This is not the first time I’ve been critical of the Democratic Party establishment. I also talked about how the leadership in both the Democratic and Republican parties teamed up to stop the efforts of insurgents within both parties to put an end to the widespread government surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed to the public. Rather than uphold their sworn statement to uphold the US Constitution, they have dug in their heels as tje eager enablers of increased invasions on our privacy.
Noted activist and intellectual Noam Chomsky said that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in world history. I agree. I don’t say much about the Republicans because plenty of other people have done so. I did feel it was important to highlight the alignment between Trump and white supremacists, and the real danger of fascism in the US. But the Democratic Party has been remarkably corrupt, tone-deaf, and more and more contemptuous of the democratic process. In doing so, they have been one of the strongest enablers of the Republican Party over the last 30 years.
The Democratic Party, which began in 1828, has changed through the years in response to political developments. But in these extreme times when the existence of human civilization is in question and the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the party has become notoriously tone-deaf and inflexible. While still wielding considerable power, the party has become a living bloated corpse that still insists it is thriving and healthy. That is why the DNC is rigging the primaries. If they continue as they have, they will likely not exist when the two hundredth anniversary of their founding arrives.
