The RBC = Bush v. Gore
By Bud White on June 3, 2008 at 5:00 AM in Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Credentials Committee, Cult, Cultist Thugs, Current Affairs, DNC, Daily Kos, Democracy, Democratic National Convention, Democrats, Disenfranchisement, Donna Brazile, Electability, Electoral College, Elitism, Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court
the RBC arbitrarily handed Michigan delegates to the DNC’s preferred candidate to try to prevent him being defeated at the convention. There is no rule or guideline in the DNC that allows that organization to redistribute a state’s delegation to the national convention. They can refuse to seat a delegation, they can refuse to permit the delegation to have full voting authority, but they cannot change the composition of the delegation.
It’s no accident that this feels like a recurring nightmare. We are seeing a recreation of the Florida 2000 coup d’état in mirror image. The Dean/Brazile/neo-liberal wing of the Party learned their lesson in Broward County all too well.
The most obvious clue of this theft, of course, is that Hillary has won more votes than Obama. Usually the popular vote winner wins the contest. Just ask Al Gore.
The insistence on “the rules” as a way of rewarding Obama over Hillary was a transparent power-grab echoing the Republican “Sore Loserman” narrative from 2000. The “rules” were created specifically to deny Hillary the nomination. The rules, as we saw over the weekend, are malleable, only needing to be massaged to assure the desired outcome. Similarly, in 2007, Republican operatives tried to change how California apportioned its electoral votes in an obvious attempt to change the rules for electoral gain.
The RBC’s back room deal regarding Michigan, which only won approval by a single vote, has the familiar ring of Bush v. Gore, where one Supreme Court Justice vote made Bush president. As Jerome Armstrong writes, “One RCB vote changed everything.” The always insightful Anglachel writes:
Reallocating votes based on the outcome you want to have, not what the certified vote count actually was, eviscerates democracy as such.
Think about this. Really think about this. A committee of people, behind closed doors and under pressure from a specific candidate to shore up his crumbling support, has functionally declared Michigan’s votes null and void and has reallocated the delegates to suit themselves.
The notion that a “committee of people” can decide outcomes regardless of voter intent is hauntingly similar to Vicent Bugliosi’s angry and brilliant essay on Bush v. Gore published in The Nation in 2001:
[By] the US Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law
Bugliosi argues convincingly that it wasn’t just voters of Florida who were robbed of their franchise, it was the 50 million voters across the country who voted for Gore. Similarly, the delegate stealing of Michigan and Florida isn’t only about the intent of 2.5 million voters, it’s the intentional disenfranchisement of nearly 18 million Hillary voters, a majority of the Democratic Party’s 2008 voters. Vicent Bugliosi continues:
this means that these five Justices deliberately and knowingly decided to nullify the votes of the 50 million Americans who voted for Al Gore and to steal the election for Bush…
The RBC acted in the same manner, deliberately and knowingly taking away votes from the candidate who had clearly and convincingly won in both Michigan and Florida. All of this done under the pretense of a scheduling conflict, yet the punishment was not applied equally to the other three states who also violated their “rules.”
The Rehnquist Court, according to Bugliosi, perverted the meaning and intent of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:
“no state shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
By punishing states only Hillary won, the RBC became an arm of the Obama campaign, using its power to reward their favored candidate without giving equal protection to all Democratic voters:
The stark reality, and I say this with every fiber of my being, is that the institution Americans trust the most to protect its freedoms and principles committed one of the biggest and most serious crimes this nation has ever seen–pure and simple, the theft of the presidency. And by definition, the perpetrators of this crime have to be denominated criminals.
By going beyond its powers by taking away delegates from Hillary, the RBC became accomplices in another “theft of a presidency.”
The neo-liberal beta test was against Joseph Lieberman in 2006, a politician who had the gall to be socially moderate and hawkish on national defense — voting with Kerry, Edwards, Clinton and 73 other senators to approve the authorization to use force against Iraq.
It should come as no surprise that it was Howard Dean’s organization, Democracy for America, who spear-headed the anti-Lieberman drive.
Taking over the Connecticut Democratic Party’s nomination was relatively easily, but winning state-wide proved much more difficult. We’re likely to see similar results nationally.
The neo-liberal animus against Lieberman, like that against Hillary, is both crazed and hateful. A Daily Kos diarist, Susan Jumper, wrote that she’d like to “gas” the Jewish Lieberman, and others on her post compared Lieberman to a dog that should be killed. Der Stürmer couldn’t have said it better. While there are many examples of the crazed and hateful mindset of the Obama camp, one commentator at No Quarter exemplifies the violent imagery regularly used against Hillary, when writing:
Stop Hillary Now jkldjlkj@jlkjkldj.net
“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
Hillary is batshit, Liebercrat crazy.
Fuck her with a pitchfork.
Like Lamont, Obama is a light-weight candidate of the neo-liberal, Dean/Brazile/MoveOn.org wing of the Party. A fair number of his foot-soldiers and DNC insiders are willing to say and do anything to win, and this includes selectively disenfranchising voters. Like the Young Republicans chanting “Sore Loserman” in Broward County, the neo-liberals are intoxicated on their will to power.
It is likely that the hawkish, salt-of-the-earth John McCain will crush Obama. And after the RBC’s delegate stealing (perhaps the worst of the many offenses to occur during this campaign), many Democrats, disgusted with our Party’s undemocratic ways, will vote to help McCain do just that.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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