Friday, the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee proposed a rules change for the 2020 campaign.  The new rule is directed straight at Bernie Sanders:

The new rule specifically requires that someone running for president must declare in writing his or herself as a member of the Democratic party and that they will run and serve as a Democrat.  Easy, right?  Not so fast.  The two party system in the US is cemented in place by statute, creating an almost impenetrable wall to outsiders.  Party primaries are paid for by the taxpayers, and getting on the ballot in all the states as an independent presidential candidate is virtually impossible.  Because of this, the only realistic path to the presidency is as insurgency in one of the two entrenched  political parties.  You saw that in spades in 2016 where Trump used his television persona to hijack the GOP and Sanders’ grass roots campaign almost uprooted Hillary’s coronation.

This rule seeks to stifle competition for the nomination, all while DNC political operatives are loudly denying that fact, which is as obvious to normal people as a hillbilly at a Newport garden party.  Even while these operatives are all sniffy that outsiders understand their actual intent, Sanders supporters aren’t happy.  Mark Lonabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor, call the new resolution “stunning”.

Someday, establishment Dems will have to face the fact that they are way out of step with their constituents.  The Sanders phenomenon should have shaken these pillars of the party to the core, but it didn’t.  They are ignoring, at their own peril, the 13 million voters, many first time voters, who went for the tottering old candidate from Vermont instead of the tottering old candidate from New York, Chicago, Arkansas (pick your accent).  He brought a message of social justice, equity, and fairness that the Dems abandoned in the 1990s.  And it appears that, rather than learning from that experience, the DNC is trying to keep it from happening again by further rigging the rules in favor of the establishment.

Oh, and one last thing – While the DNC specifically designed a rule to keep out insurgents, there are no adopted rule changes to eliminate or significantly reduce the influence of superdelegates, and no rule that prevents a presidential candidate from controlling the national party until AFTER they are nominated.  It appears the Democratic party is the LEAST democratic organization in US politics, and that should piss you off.

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that newly nominated gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez has $12,000 in unpaid back property taxes.  So, not only did the Dems nominate someone who had little chance of attracting any voters outside of the base, they nominated someone who’s going to be framed as a tax cheat.  Even worse, Valdez campaign spokesman blamed Greg Abbott for her unpaid taxes.

I can hear the commercials now.  Hello, four more years of Greg Abbott.

Jesus.

Note:  Sexual misconduct and sexual harassment are serious issues that are systemic and have been allowed to persist in our modern society.  It should not be allowed to exist in any part of our culture, and the only way to eliminate it, in my opinion, is to have equal representation between men and women in every government entity from villages to Washington, as well as in every board room in America.  Short of that accomplishment, this problem will continue to persist.  Now, having said all that, I have an opinion about this issue.

Politicians are generally Stupid.  Democrats tend to be Really Stupid, and Democratic party leaders are Perpetually Super Stupid.  Given almost any tough situation, party leaders take the easy Stupid route versus the tough and true route. Let’s take the case in 2009 when Democrats allowed a twenty-something rightwing lying asshole to flog his clumsily and dishonestly edited video tape and take down a major community service organization, ACORN.  The media enabled him, and Democrats’ defense of the organization was virtually non-existent until it was way too late.  James O’Keefe, the little lying shit who used Breitbart money for his first successful hit job, paid no price, and indeed just this week was honored as a “hero”, receiving the Impact Award from United for Purpose, a rightwing propaganda generator.  He received the award from none other than Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas.  To add insult to injury, the award came a week after the Washington Post blew the lid off of his latest “sting” operation.  By the Democrats not crucifying this little shit when he committed his first crime, he’s still around doing damage today and is even being “honored” and taking home a hefty six figure income to produce his lies.

With that one textbook example of Democratic leaders being Super Stupid, let’s talk about Kirsten Gillibrand and the rest of her posse this week when they Super Stupidly used an obvious rightwing hit job to take down one of our best and dedicated members of the US Senate.  If Ray Charles were alive today, even HE would have seen that Leeann Tweeden’s coordinated attack on Al Franken was trumped up (no pun intended), aided by Roger Stone.  Further, it’s now coming to light that she was also aided in the attack by her colleague, John Phillips.  More about this jerk later.

One of the most infuriating features of this particular attack is that prominent women in the media and politics didn’t look at the objective facts, enabling the attack to work like a charm.  I pointed out almost three weeks ago that Tweeden is well known for horsing around with men, playing grabass with them, forcibly kissing them in public, and posing semi-nude in magazines.  She also had a very graphic discussion about having sex on Howard Stern’s radio program.  She’s a rightwing anchor on KABC radio in Los Angeles, right along with John Phillips, another rightwing talker who has his own show.  Trump pal and future prison convict, Roger Stone, announced the attack hours before it happened on Twitter, through a surrogate, since he’s been banned.  It doesn’t take Robert Mueller to connect these dots.  And no, pointing out glaring facts is not “slut shaming”, so don’t even go there.

After the attack, the normal pile-on happened, coordinated for maximum effect, mostly anecdotal and/or anonymous with the normal “his hand went too low when I had a picture taken with him” kind of accusations.  There was not ONE accusation that demonstrated some terrible pattern of misbehavior.  Those facts were ignored.  At the very beginning of this mess, Franken called for a Senate investigation of the claim.  He was never given the opportunity for these charges to be investigated in public.

On the Republican side, the parade of well documented perverts continues.  Trump has never been investigated for the dozens of claims of serious misconduct from groping to rape.  He now endorses Roy Moore, whose stalking of little girls has been well documented; now there is your friend an mine, Blake Farenthold who used $84,000 of taxpayer money to buy the silence of his accuser, and then comes creepy Trent Franks who offered a staffer $5 million to carry is baby.

Gillibrand, like other Super Stupid Democrats, decided that she should railroad Franken out of the Senate to take the “moral high ground” against Republicans.  The first stupid decision was thinking that taking the “moral high ground” would force Republicans to do anything.  WRONG.  They couldn’t care less about moral high ground, because their base doesn’t.  When in the hell are Dems going to figure that out?  Answer: NEVER.  Second, Gillibrand thought taking the zero tolerance route will change people’s minds and get them to vote for Democrats.  WRONG.  See the above answer.  Finally, I’m sure she made the calculation that Franken didn’t matter since Mark Dayton, Democratic governor of Minnesota, would appoint a Democrat to the seat, so they wouldn’t lose any votes.  WRONG.  Now, they’ll have to defend that seat in 2018 instead of 2020.  STUPID.

Making this catastrophe even worse is that, in treating Franken’s seat as a party commodity, we’ve now lost the strongest and most effective progressive voice in the national dialogue.  Franken is brilliant, and had made the difficult transition from comedian and entertainer to statesman.  His takedown of Trump appointees is some of the best CSpan you’ll ever see (well, at least WAS). Gillibrand, and the other women in the Senate, with the aiding and abetting of some of the worst reporting in the history of the Fourth Estate, has abruptly snuffed out one of our strongest voices without due process nor even a pretense of being truthful.

Yeah, I’m pissed.  I’m really pissed, and for several reasons.  Gillibrand and company tiptoed around Tweeden, who clearly set the whole thing up to damage Franken, which simultaneously delegitimizes the stories of millions of women who have been ACTUALLY sexually assaulted. The damage done is simply breathtaking.  Secondly, she attempted to influence the Moore vote in Alabama by railroading Franken out of the Senate before even ONE ethics committee hearing.  No thinking person believes such nonsense.  They destroyed the reputation and career of a good man for political expediency.  All she did was railroad Franken and in the process railroaded all of us.  SCREW HER and the horse she road in on.

Finally?  I’m so pissed that I’ll just poke some of our Hillary Hardliner friends in the eye on my way to the bottom of this post.  I GUARANTEE that if Hillary was the current occupant of the White House and Ol’ Bill was First Husband (or whatever they would call him).  Gillibrand and the rest of the crowd wouldn’t have made a peep about Franken, fearing retribution for Bill’s documented malfeasance that many prominent women defended, and continue to defend to this day.  Yeah, that’s what I think.

So there.