A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:
~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.
Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.
I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.
Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:
Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.
But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:
Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.
As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.
