A Couple Of Thoughts On The Donna Brazile Tell-All…

Joe Cunningham lays out the basic gist of Donna Brazile’s devastating POLITICO piece dishing on the internal corruption within the Democratic Party she found when she took over as its interim chair last year here at The Hayride this morning, but the full Brazile piece deserves a read in its own right.

Frankly, this thing is as shocking as it is entertaining.

The piece, which is an excerpt of a book Brazile wrote titled Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House which will be out next week, is written more or less as an apology to Bernie Sanders for his having been screwed out of the Democrats’ nomination last year. This is how it begins…

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

Noooo-body knows de trouble I seeeeen….

Brazile describes how when she took over the DNC she was shocked to find out it was broke despite all the big-money fundraisers Hillary was doing, and how the Clinton campaign was giving the Party a mere pittance to run on while hauling away campaign dollars by the truckload…

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint venture between the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The corruption here is that Clinton got all the money rather than it being actually shared.

Brazile talks about how when she called Sanders to explain and apologize about this crooked deal in which the Democrats had agreed to fix the nomination process in return for Hillary giving the party a financial lifeline, Sanders told her he and his people already knew about it.

I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were.

Brazile is far too generous toward Sanders here. What she leaves out is by then Sanders had already left the Democrat Party, which he was never a part of to begin with other than when he decided to run for its nomination. Sanders did so even though he knew Hillary had bought the nomination with that fundraising agreement, and he never disclosed any of what he knew to the public.

In other words, Bernie Sanders wasn’t running for president to win. He was running as a grift, with the Democrats’ voters as the marks. His campaign was raising money through small donations, but also big ones, and he was leveraging it into a book-selling enterprise that made him a fortune. Anybody who thought Bernie was an honest guy who cares about America and was running for president to fix the country is a fool – he was practicing a long con on the stupid James Hodgkinsons of the world, and if anything his extremist rhetoric drained Hillary’s voters away from the Democrats in November. So if he gave a damn about the crooked Hillary-DNC deal his revenge was already baked in the cake.

Besides, Sanders would never have pulled any of that swag if he’d stayed as an “independent socialist” like he formerly and currently calls himself.

The sad thing is Brazile knows all this and won’t say any of it in the POLITICO piece. That’s marketing for you – it’s a good bet she doesn’t say it in her book, either, because the readership she’s looking for is Sanders voters who’ll use it as evidence that if their man hadn’t had the nomination stolen from him Trump wouldn’t be president.

Which is laughable, by the way, because the trolling and big-boying Trump would have done to Sanders (“He’s a bum who’s never had a real job.” “Maybe he ought to go on The Apprentice and learn something about how the real world works.”) would have made what he did to Hillary look like a Swedish massage.

So Sanders isn’t the only one conning his voters. Brazile is as well. You know what they say – a fool and his money are soon parted.

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But there’s another piece to this which deserves a mention. And it’s the obvious piece, I suppose. Joe hit it square with his headline about how Brazile put a nail in Hillary’s coffin.

Which is that the Democrats are now in full-on Get Hillary mode.

After Trump won the election, they were in a state of bewilderment and as such they went along with the ridiculous Trump-and-the-Russians business – so much so that supposedly intelligent Democrats actually talked out loud about how the election could be nullified and Hillary would be declared president. They carried that forth for a long time; it’s been just under a year and some of them are still dragging it around.

But now you’re starting to see things change. The New York Times, which might as well be the Clinton Times, pops a big expose’ on Harvey Weinstein, who was the Clintons’ Hollywood moneybags connection, and essentially makes Weinstein toxic. He’s now completely without political influence and unable to help anyone politically – so that’s one chunk of the Clintons’ influence over the party.

Then there’s the Fusion GPS “Pee Pee Dossier” revelation, which didn’t come from the Democrats but has certainly been reported on by the Democrat media. That it’s been given play is another indication they’re trying to extricate themselves from the Clintons.

Now Brazile, who has been a Clinton lieutenant for 25 years, sticks a shiv in her. Brazile doing that is a whole lot like those actresses now coming forward with the sordid Weinstein tales; it’s a declaration that Hillary can no longer help or hurt anyone, so out comes the truth.

They gave Hillary an opportunity to sell her stupid self-exonerating memoir, and now that the book tour is done, they’re retiring her and attempting to move on.

But best of luck with that. The Clintons didn’t dominate the Democrat Party for a quarter century because they’re good public speakers. If they still want to be relevant they’ll go to great lengths to do so, their party be damned.

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