Saturday, November 4, 2017

Today in things that are not at all the same:

Hey, nobody really thinks that this thing with the DNC giving Hillary Clinton a better fundraising deal than Bernie Sanders is in any way the same thing as colluding with Russia to win the election, right?
Ok, this guy does but c'mon.
"Account locked? How am I supposed to
tell everyone what's BAD FOR COUNTRY?"
-The President
Sure, Trump believes it's comparable, but then he also believes that millions of immigrants managed to conspire against him in order to vote illegally and rob him of the popular vote, yet somehow still failed to tip the electoral vote to Clinton, so I'm not really sure he's necessarily the best judge of what is and is not a plausible conspiracy. Of course that didn't stop him from chiming in on Twitter about it. That is once his account was back up and running after an eleven blissful minutes of peace.

Anyway, because 140 characters are simply not enough to contain the flailing, rabid foam attempts to deflect attention from all the indictments, he went on:
Busy investigating your people, why do you ask?
Turns out millennials are pretty broke,
so like, thanks preceding generations...
According to Donna Brazile's article on Politico, the DNC was being mismanaged by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and was millions in debt. Clinton stepped in, paid off the party's debts in exchange for crazy control over the DNC's operations and a fundraising agreement. An agreement that was offered to Sanders' campaign as well, but they turned it down for philosophical reasons opting for small donations from individuals. Laudable? Absolutely. Was it going to prevail against Clinton's fundraising infrastructure and connections? Absolutely not.

Turns out you can't buy
ad time with passion.
Either one would have been great candidates and both are far, far more qualified to be President than the former host of The Apprentice, it's just that Sanders' base was all passion and not a lot of money while Clinton had the Democratic Party behind her. I don't know, maybe it wasn't fair, I mean after all, the kind of control she had isn't usually allowed until a candidate has become the nominee. But she's been a loyal member of the party for decades while Sanders wasn't a Democrat until he wanted to run for President.

"Master Blaster runs Bartertown!"
-Paid for by Master 
Blaster for America
But whatever, was the deal shady? I don't know, but even Brazile doesn't think it was illegal. Unfair, and a bad visual, sure. Maybe even unethical, but not illegal. I mean, it's not like she had surrogates meeting with Russian intelligence. Look, I'm not an expert on how political parties work, but my understanding is that they're not mentioned in the Constitution so how they choose their candidate is up to them, right? If one party or the other wants to choose their candidate by Thunderdome, I think they're legally within their rights.

The take away here is that it's almost a year in, and instead of a united opposition to the unceasing shit show that is the Trump administration, the left is sitting around blaming each other over who got what from the DNC and who should have conceded earlier.
"Now that I have endorsed Hillary Clinton, I'm sure it'll will be smooth
sailing to the White House. Unless of course the electoral college screws
us over again. But hey, what are the odds that'd happen again?"

-Bernie Sanders, July 2016
Which is weird because his base never
seems to need help rallying. Just some
tiki torches and a persecution complex.
So what the shit does any of this have to do with the Russia investigation? Nothing at all. Despite (technically) winning the election, President Trump has spent the last ten months campaigning against Clinton. And he's probably going to continue running against her as long as he needs to distract the media and rally his base. As long as we're all focusing on whose fault the Democrats' defeat was, then maybe we won't notice that an unqualified gameshow host most of us didn't vote for is handing out tax breaks for corporations and Tweeting bullshit about Crooked Hillary.

And maybe laying blame for the 2016 election should be on the agenda, but we probably need to shut up about how Bernie Sanders was unwilling to deal with the reality of party politics or how Clinton's pull with the DNC plays in the media. Instead maybe we could focus on real things like how a thuggish goon is using our obsession with social media to turn us against each other.
Which goon? I don't know, both? They're both pretty thuggish, like, does it matter?

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