Democrats are consoling themselves by claiming Donald Trump’s election is illegitimate, but they’ll do themselves and the nation a favor if they consider their own faults — including the top-to-bottom corruption in their own party and political strategy.
1. The Democrats’ rigged primary: Democrats should begin by accepting the obvious truth of a rigged primary revealed by WikiLeaks. The party’s key leaders — not the party’s voters — picked and promoted Hillary Clinton, meaning she was secretly coronated before the primary ever began. Her rival Bernie Sanders never had a chance. The “nomination” contest was theater designed to make Sanders voters accept Clinton. His voters ought to be furious at Sanders for playing along with this farce, which he most certainly did.
When Party elders shriek about nefarious Russian interference in the election process, they’re trying to distract from what the leaked DNC emails actually said, and the fact that we now know those emails are 100 percent genuine, despite early Democrat statements to the contrary. One of those shrieking claims came from Donna Brazile, who was directly involved in doctoring a primary debate by leaking questions to Clinton, not to Sanders.
2. The Democrat superdelegate system: Then there’s the openly rigged element of the Democratic primary, the superdelegate system. It is a political instrument specifically designed to shut down insurgencies and make the interests of Democrat voters secondary to the judgment of party elites, and the powerful lobbyists who manipulate them. Hillary Clinton was chosen by special-interest donors who had already spent a fortune currying favor with her, as demonstrated by the instantaneous collapse of the Clinton “charities”, the instant the Clintons had no more favors to sell.
3. The Democrat money machine: Building a titanic campaign war chest was the paramount concern of the Democrats in 2016, because they thought it — and their media allies — would give them an unbreakable headlock over the public debate. So Joe Biden was told he could not afford to get into the race. Same for Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who barely raised enough cash to pay for a Philly cheese sandwich. Their financial kneecapping allowed Clinton to suck up hundreds of millions in campaign cash, sometimes in legally questionable ways, even as she railed against the influence of money in politics.
4. The media was part of Clinton’s campaign: It’s fun to watch Democrats wail about Russian spies using WikiLeaks to influence the election, when it’s clear the mainstream media was able to downplay the actual contents of those emails enough to keep most voters in the dark. Sure, outfits like Breitbart News did everything we could to report those revelations, but that’s nothing compared to the influence wielded by the establishment media when it gets a “narrative” avalanche rolling.
Wikileaks: Clinton Workers Polled Voters On Obama Ties To Drugs, Islam In 2008; Audio Excerpt Autoplay: On | Off Of course the establishment media was an active participant in the rigged primary scandal. Those leaked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta reflected very, very poorly on the press. That’s something Democrats could fix – there’s no reason for illegitimate behind-the-scenes coordination between their candidates and the media.
Democrat voters also should demand an end to the incestuous relationship between the media and Democratic politics because it has become as much a liability. Sure, it’s helpful to have the media in your hip pocket, but the value of that advantage is severely degraded when the public knows about it, and has lost faith in the establishment press as a result. Worse, the media enabled a weak, out-of-touch candidates like Clinton to capture the Party nomination.
5. The law was bent and broken to keep Clinton in the game: Democrat voters also should be questioning the legitimacy of Clinton’s nomination because the rule of law was corrupted to preserve her political viability.
Her candidacy should have ended when the email server story broke. (Really, it should have ended with the publication of Clinton Cash, but the Democrats incorrectly believed their controlled media could insulate her from the fallout of those astounding revelations.)
The politicized Obama Justice Department did Democrats no favors by staving off indictments that would have taken Clinton out of the game, or by slow- walking the email investigation until her replacement became prohibitively difficult. The Obama administration perfected tactics for dragging scandal investigations out until they became “old news,” but they miscalculated and prolonged Clinton’s email scandal until it blew up like a string of demolition charges throughout the 2016 election.
Before they began howling about Russian espionage, Democrats were pushing the narrative that FBI Director James Comey sabotaged Clinton’s election hopes by speaking at length about her “extremely careless” actions when he announced no charges would be recommended, and then kneecapped her again by reviving the Clinton investigation briefly during the last days of the presidential campaign.
As with their narrative about WikiLeaks, Democrats are complaining that Clinton was “sabotaged” because people revealed the truth about her. They’re saying their presidential candidate could only win if damaging facts were concealed, false media narratives were perpetuated, and special exemptions from the law were granted to her. That sounds like the very definition of an illegitimate candidacy.
6. Democrats try to hack the electorate: We might also challenge the legitimacy of a political strategy that relies so heavily upon using immigration to hack the demographics of the American electorate. Before Clinton’s defeat shocked them into silence, liberal analysts were beginning to churn out a fresh wave of “Emerging Democratic Majority” pieces about how native-born GOP voters would never win a national election again. One of the reasons Democrats subjected the Electoral College to one of their post- election tantrums is that the EC makes it harder for them to hack the presidential vote with mass immigration. That’s the true significance of the observation that Clinton’s popular-vote “victory” came entirely from California.
Before the 2016 election went down, it was commonly observed that Republicans might have won the previous two presidential contests if they were still running with Ronald Reagan’s electorate; this observation was used to mock Trump as foolish for pursuing an obsolete electoral strategy that could never work in the new, demographically-upgraded America.
That observation also lies behind the Democrats’ decision to downplay the economic concerns of struggling Americans, and to largely ignore the distastefully un-diverse electorates of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in favor of outreach to immigrants, racial subgroups, gays, professionals, unmarried women, and other element of the hoped-for ‘Emerging Democratic Majority.’ If Democrats didn’t believe they had a reserve army of immigrant voters for Clinton, they might have nominated Biden or Sanders to instead win ordinary Americans to their side. Amusingly, if those immigrants didn’t exist, American voters’ incomes would be higher — and fewer would have been angry enough to shift their votes to the GOP’s candidate.
To sum it all up, everything about Clinton’s nomination and campaign stinks to high heaven.
That’s why Democrats should try to reform their own corrupt party before they lose again in 2020, if only because they can’t overthrow the Constitution or persuade the military to install their next candidate. As President Barack Obama would say if the shoe was on the other foot, reform of the Democratic Party is the legitimate thing to do.
As for Republicans, they know that there are many other techniques that Democrats use to hack the electorate, including the Democrats’ control over the media and education systems. That’s why Republicans should work hard and fast to disable all of them, permanently, because they have a sworn duty to protect the legitimacy of our voting system.