I'm chuckling to myself. Well, now I'm chuckling onscreen, which is almost the same as chuckling out loud. COL? I'm not exactly feeling the Bern, and I am not particularly excited about a Sanders presidency. But man do I love watching the Clinton Machine crash and burn, the ClinThenardiers of modern American political theater, former Secretary of Death and her former Master of the House husband, hypocrite and toady and inebriate. Such an apt metaphor.
But more than all of this, I just love being proved right. It's like heroin isn't it? I mean speaking of hypocrites, who actually believes themselves when they say "I hate to say I told you so.." Bullshit. A college buddy and I used to call the lie on this by saying "I hate to say 'I hate to say I told you so,' because I f*cking *love* saying I told you so!"
Okay so here it is. Doubling down on earlier predictions that people laughed at. Back in December I said publicly that empire would settle on Sanders to sell its wars--a kinder, gentler salesman, if you will. I now say again that I believe Sanders will be the next president of the US. As I suspected (and said loudly), all the stars are coming into alignment. If you, dear readers, and I--and I trust you would probably not still be reading unless you are one of *us*--if we despise this charlatan and hold her in such abysmal contempt, then I don't think it should come as a surprise that the real money folks despise her just as much, albeit for very different reasons.
Now hang on, I said for very different reasons. So bear with me. She is without question the shittiest candidate produced by a major party in decades. They have to be sitting around the table, if that's how they still do it, saying ahh sh*t, is *she* still around? What are we going to do? All successful candidates for the Chair in the Oval, which is to say the sock puppet of empire, have at least one thing in common. I realized this in an uncomfortable epiphany I had while listening--painfully--to the Master of the House campaigning for the Obomber just before election day in November 2008 in Florida.
It was a creepy, unsettling feeling, and I actually felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. It was off the cuff, so I'm sure it never appeared in writing. And I have never, ever seen or heard it repeated in any other forum except my own writing, much as I have tried to track it down. But as friends who know me will attest, I have an auditory memory that is virtually absolute, the prose version of perfect pitch, or Luria's patient if you will. I know what I heard, and I will never forget it. Old Huckster Bill was waxing eloquent about his new buddy (after having tried to smear him for months, but hey, blood under the bridge I guess, right?) and why he was the perfect dude for the job.
When the real money guys took him aside in a back room (ah, so that is still how they do it) and surrounded him with all the "experts," [scare quotes mine], "He said [and I'm quoting M. Thernardie verbatim now] 'You tell me what the right thing to do is and I'll sell it!" Wait, whaaa? [record screech]. Are you f*cking kidding me? *That's* why he's the right guy for the job? I shuddered, flipped off the set and went back to knitting, or whatever it was. Just incredible. To me, this is the absolute proof that he is *not* at all the right guy, and in fact the most dangerous stooge to put in the chair at a pivotal moment in world history. Like Harry Truman being led around by Jimmy Byrnes, an empty vessel whose "experts" filled his empty head with bullshit and used him to change world history.
See, but that's why I'm not at the table. I would be wrong. The job of salesman-in-chief is the main--if not the only--criterion these bastards despearately need to keep their illusion of sham democracy going, and to keep the money flowing from their project of destroying the world for profit. Obama has it in spades, as Bill obviously did, and even George W (or so they thought). Reagan goes without saying, which is why they all praise his moronic, lying ass whenever they get the chance. So they basically need someone who can talk a dog off a meat wagon, and are stuck with The Thing, who, to use the british saying, couldn't sell a bucket of water to a bloke in flaming trousers. She just plain sucks, and everyone knows it. So I said a few months back that they would dump her at the first real opportunity. And now they will do just that.
And now we see the puzzle pieces coming into place to make it more palatable for them to do this. Reuters 5 day tracking has Sanders up 2.5 among Democrats, and 5 points including independents. Marquette now has the Bernster up 10 in Wisconsin, and Quinnipiac has him surging in NY, closing from 25 to 12 only days after opening his campaign there.
More importantly, Clintons inflated and baseless "firewall" of support from nonwhite voters is collapsing with all the deserved vengeance. The mainstream press (of course) missed what Marquette did not: Though Sanders is "only" up 5 in Wisconsin, support from nonwhite voters is up 10. In other words, his lead in this demographic is *fueling* his surge, not dragging it--the exact opposite of what we have seen to date in the deep south.
While I have spoken and written extensively on the need to end the Clintons' unearned pass on race [see video clip and transcript here: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article23488], this swift and devastating collapse is even greater than a certain self-congratulating Harvard dude expected. And I believe we are just beginning to see the tip of this voteberg. Given infinite time and access to social media it had to happen eventually. What a crock Brand Clinton has pulled over on black people lo these many years. To think that the architects of mandatory sentencing, three strikes, bringing superpredators to heel, 'ending welfare as we know it,'--to think that this pair who have visited viciousness on the African American community for two decades could get away with being a Friend to Black Folks is one of the marvels of modern marketing.
But that's all gone now. The Candidate herself is starting to leak hydraulic fluid, with the now viral meltdown at the eco-voter and Beneson's ridiculous "tone" comment on Monday. My godson recently compared the Killmeister to Edgar from Men In Black--an alien wearing a human costume. Edgar is starting to lose the mask, and will be retired and sent back to Zoron before any more damage is done.
Sorry, Sanderistas. If this all sounds like a calculating, cynical takedown of Her Horribleness rather than a spirited jig for the end of empire, it's for a reason. He's a great guy, but your boy is not the Second Coming (or is it First) and the revolution is not upon us. If it goes down the way I lay out, it is because the boys around the table have sanctioned it. That's how it works. They can deal with Bernie. A modest boost in the minimum wage and a little tweaking of the safety net is a small price to pay for keeping the money flowing. And they can hem him in nicely, so they might not even have to pay anything. My millennial friends will be disillusioned to hear him move sharply to the right in the run up to the general, talking about how 'drones do some good things' and how we have to continue to be Israel's staunchest ally. And even more sadly, he will convince too many of you that Russia and China are our greatest enemies, and that wars x and y are justified, but only in this case, and only because of the extreme circumstances. Get ready for an even bigger than normal tidal wave of bullshit on this front.
And if I'm wrong? Awesome then--yay revolution! I don't see it happening. But it could happen I suppose if we made it happen. If I'm wrong in the other direction? Win-win. The scary thing about me is that I don't care. My millennial friends will be devastated to see the blood on the floor at the democratic convention in Philadelphia. But it will be a much needed wakeup call, and may stoke the rage necessary to build an actual movement for real change. The Clintonmongers and their minions still have cards to play (viz DC ballot, superdelegates, media toadies etc etc), and they are ruthless. But it is increasingly clear that Sanders is the people's choice, and if they manage to wrest, i.e. steal the nomination at this point it will be epic. At the risk of sounding mean (oh, what the hell), I will gleefully prepare the popcorn at the prospect of watching the Demoncrat Party shelve its only two humanistic abberations and stop pretending to be the party of the New Deal and Civil Rights and revert to its true home as the party of the Klan. Democracy? Who needs it. Pass the popcorn.
also here: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article23493
(c) 2016 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to danielpwelch.com. Political analyst, writer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. Welch has also appeared in numerous television and radio interviews, and can be available for comment and analysis as his day job permits. Please contact to schedule.