The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior. #DrPhil — Dr. Phil (@DrPhil) March 24, 2014

Phil gets it. Ignore someone’s story and watch their actions, and you’ll see clearly where they’re headed.

A couple weeks ago when news first broke about Donna Brazile violating the Impartiality Clause of the DNC Charter by acting as a mole for the Clinton campaign during the primaries, I wrote an article saying that she obviously needs to resign, just like her predecessor Debbie Wasserman Schultz did. I argued that this would be the perfect opportunity for Clinton supporters to show us they mean business when they promise Berners they’ll hold Clinton to the progressive promises she’s been campaigning on; if Hillary supporters loudly demanded Brazile’s resignation for her illicit behaviors and consistent involvement with party corruption, we might have reason to believe they really mean it when they say they’ll fight the Clinton administration for these things.

Since that time even more scandals have erupted around the acting DNC chairwoman, as a leaked document revealed that Brazile forwarded a question to the Clinton campaign which was to be asked in the primary debates against Bernie Sanders on CNN. And, needless to say, Clinton supporters have remained dead silent about it.

I’m a cocky gal, but I’m not so arrogant as to believe I can actually mobilize a political movement on the mainstream left with my little gig here at Inquisitr. I wrote that article to draw my alert readers’ attention to the fact that Clinton supporters have no intention of holding anyone in the Democratic Party accountable for their actions at any time, ever. When they say they do, they’re lying. It really is that simple.

“Identity politics” is a really great term, because the phrase itself shows why people fight so hard to maintain political positions long after they’ve been shown to be deeply flawed. When you take something on as an extension of your identity, any threat to that thing can feel as existentially threatening as a threat to yourself. Like all primates, humans are deeply tribal creatures, and by including Hillary Clinton in their tribe, people can become just as biased toward her as they can toward their own family members. Although I’m not even sure I’d allow my kids start a war with Russia, come to think of it. I’d at least tell them they’re being very naughty.

So while Hillary supporters try to recruit Berners by promising to “hold her feet to the fire,” and longtime Democratic Party henchman Robert Reich writes viral blog posts about there being a Democratic primary in 2020 to kick Hillary out if President Clinton “isn’t sufficiently progressive and bold during her first term,” we may be certain that none of that will happen. All they care about, all they’ve ever cared about, is making sure that a member of their tribe becomes king of the hill. This is true from the very top tier of Hillary’s campaign staff all the way down to your aunt Sally with the H-arrow sign on her lawn. Aunt Sally isn’t going to be holding anyone’s feet to any fire. You know it, I know it.

President Obama is already being given a hero’s farewell with great celebratory fanfare, his warmongering, crony corporatism, and brazen assault on the Fourth Amendment being blamed on an “obstructionist congress.” Right, guys. It’s the Senate’s fault that Obama authorized the NSA’s PRISM program of Orwellian government surveillance. The legislative branch of the federal government is to blame for the executive branch’s prosecution of more whistleblowers than any other administration, the deportation of more immigrants than any other administration, committing over a trillion dollars to nuclear weapons development over the next three decades, expanding the drone program in what Noam Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist action of modern times,” and dropping 23,144 bombs in 2015 alone on Muslim-majority countries. It’s Congress we should blame for Obama being Bush 2.0, because we can’t possibly blame Obama. We can’t hold his feet to the fire. He’s part of our tribe.

It’s not his fault. Congress made him do it.

He’s the victim.

Obama says he's working towards a nuclear-free world. That's a lie | Trevor Timm https://t.co/P6UDP74caT — Jonathan Cohn (@JonathanCohn) April 2, 2016

We blame everyone else except him. We believe his “Poor me” stories about why he had to abuse us with his own power. We’re like abused kids of an alcoholic defending his story about where the food money went. Jimmy Dore often brings it back to the analogy of having an abusive dad because that’s how he woke up to his own Stockholm syndrome. One day he realized that he could make all the excuses in the world for his dad, but it wouldn’t change his dad’s behavior. Whether his dad meant it or not, his behavior hurt Jimmy, and would continue to hurt Jimmy, no matter what excuses Jimmy made for it. The only sane response was to get out of the way.

If someone’s beating the shizz out of you on the daily, you have to get away. Making excuses for them doesn’t work, pretending they’re not doing that doesn’t work, hoping they’ll change if you love them more doesn’t work. Trying to buddy up to them works, but then you become poison too. That’s what we’re seeing with Hillary people. They’re becoming accomplices to war and the Walmart/welfare economy, by making it their mission to protect her corruption and ascension to the throne.

Regular people spend their leisure time on this. What a way to spend your time and intelligence, defending the one percent day after day, seeking out and attacking anyone who speaks for the 99 percent on their walls and in their in-boxes. But that’s what Hillary people have had to become in order to defend their drunk-on-power mother.

We can forget about them changing anything. If they’re defending her now, they have been poisoned already. They’re accomplices to her crimes and they’ll only grow more defensive of their classically insane, power-mad ghoul mother as time goes on. The deeper they get with her, the more of their own humility it will take to break free. People aren’t good at admitting they’re wrong, even when the reward is freedom. Holding to their rightness becomes the bars of their prison.

Watch their actions, ignore their stories. Philbro was right, the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior. We can comfortably predict they have no intention of holding her to anything, because they’re not holding her or her predecessor to anything now. They’re apologists for Hillary now, and that’s what they’ll always be.

We have to let them go.

[Featured Image by Star Shooter/MediaPunch/IPX/AP Images]