More from PDiddie
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http://brainsandeggs.blogspot.com/
My two observations about Hillbot behavior this cycle are 1) they just don't care that she's a war-mongering, lying, corporate shill, and 2) they see people like me saying things like that about Hillary as a personal attack upon themselves. This is chosen ignorance. The blind who will not see.
It's hard to hold them fully accountable for their obtuseness and misdirected anger when it is coming directly from the top. I'm trying real hard, Ringo, to give 'em a pass, but on some level the only thing left to do is disengage. That's what I have done and am doing with the worst and dumbest among their lot.
-- Maha:
I told someone this morning that it’s starting to feel like 1971 again; Sanders supporters are the antiwar movement, and the Democratic Party and its loyalists are the Nixon Administration. What should have been a temporary disagreement is turning into a generation-changing moment that will hurt the Democratic Party for years to come.
It feels more like 1980 to me, with Sanders as Ted Kennedy and Clinton as Jimmy Carter. That ugly split in the Democratic Party gave us Ronald Reagan, and the Dems, in their shock, awe, and fear turned toward more autocratic, top-down authority in their candidate selection process, aka superdelegates, the unelected Democratic nobility.
What parties do tend to do is to react to the last election. 1972 was a real trauma for the Democrats—the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition. Then Jimmy Carter loses in 1980—two Republican landslides in 10 years. In each case, the Democrats were very unhappy with their nominees and their president, for different reasons. They thought George McGovern was too far to the left, that his coalition alienated the regular party and so on. 1972 was also what created the Reagan Democrats who by 1980 were voting Republican.
[...]
How did the bitter fight between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in 1980 figure in the Hunt Commission’s deliberations?
It was a particularly ugly fight that left very deep wounds in the party. As those floor debates were going on and Kennedy was making his statement speech, there were no party leaders on the floor. There was nobody there to put things back together.
The McGovern-Fraser reforms were aimed at opening up the party to other factions, particularly the anti-war faction in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But that didn’t mean that they wanted to cut out the entire party apparatus, which is what happened. A lot of what the Hunt Commission talked about was restoring the balance at the nominating convention.
The Hunt Commission brought the theory of superdelegates into practice; that, as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has enunciated, "Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."
Those dirty hippies. Freaking peasants, what do they know?
