Posted on by riverdaughter

Let’s put aside your increasingly delusional thinking about how EEEEEVIL Hillary is with her wicked neoliberal machinations that she is going to gag you with.

If you voted for Obama in 2008 and didn’t think the system was rigged and never raised your voice when the evidence of the rigging was staring you in the face from your TV during the Rules Committee meeting in May 2008 as Harold Ickes furiously said “You bet your ass I’m angry”, then you weren’t paying attention. It was deeply unfair and rigged, especially when the candidates went to the convention in a statistical deadheat in elected delegates but a plan by the DNC to cover it up denied Hillary a real role call vote.

Oh, but that was OK because it was Hillary, right?

I suppose you’re going to tell me that we should ignore all of the primary state votes this year and that only caucus states are holy and inviolable because, after all, this is Hillary we are talking about.

And it was perfectly OK with you that the woman who had won the popular vote in 2008 but through elected delegate reapportionment in Michigan for a candidate who wasn’t even on the effing ballot, lost the elected delegate count by a tiny, tiny amount, was abandoned by the superdelegates en masse and in vastly dispproportionate numbers to her delegate count. Those superdelegates, if they were following rules you insisted on this year, would have given her the win in 2008. One of those disloyal superdelegates broke the news to Hillary that they were leaving her. Do you know who that person was? Debbie Wasserman Shultz. But that’s OK because it’s just Hillary we are talking about.

Do you know WHY we went PUMA in 2008? It wasn’t about Hillary. It was about how a bunch of arrogant, militant, temper tantrum throwing mostly male voters decided to substitute their judgement for the judgement of 18,000,000 voters who did not vote for the candidate of THEIR choosing. And the DNC approved that message. It was because rigging the primary was setting a bad precedent and as Ickes said, was a bad way to start down the road to party unity. In fact, I might argue that it was that very Rules Committee meeting back in 2008 that makes you think that if you just make enough noise, you can get any primary outcome overturned. Because it’s just Hillary.

Compared to the PUMAs of 2008, you have no right to complain. She. Won. Nothing Debbie said or emailed changes that. Even if there were no superdelegates, she still won. It wasn’t even close. Every vote for her was a legitimate vote and the sum of those legitimate votes was greater than the sum of his legitimate votes.

This is not a childhood organized sport where everyone gets an award. In this game, there can be only one clear winner and this year, there was no cheating. Even if Debbie gave you every delegate from Nevada like the DNC gave an overwhelming number of delegates from Michigan to Obama, Bernie still would have lost. This year there were no reasons for dirty tricks because it was never close.

And here we are AGAIN, the votes of 16.5 million people held hostage by a bunch of arrogant voters from the other candidate’s side who are convinced beyond all reason that Hillary is some kind of demon incarnate who is going to jump on us while we’re sleeping and suck out our political souls. Not all of Bernie’s people of course. Some of them are old enough to remember when primaries that resulted in a clear winner meant “Better luck next time”.

This year, like 2008, it is not about Hillary vs her opponent. It is about one group of voters arrogantly demanding that they substitute their judgment for everyone else’s because they know what’s good for us. OUR votes are negligible, YOUR votes are the only ones that count.

Vote for whoever you like in the fall. Nothing we do or say is going to persuade you otherwise. Your vote is your own.

But if you think the Clinton supporters at this year’s convention are going to let you get away with invalidating our choices and make a spectacle out of the proceedings, you may be very surprised by what happens next.

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Filed under: General | Tagged: 2008 convention, Bernie people, PUMA |