Promises to Keep

     About the only promise Hillary Clinton has made in her whole life that's got a chance of coming true is her unspoken mantra of, "I'm not Trump." And even that's veracious only in the most general and abstract of ways. Beyond that, I'd run my hand under the tap and check for myself if Clinton announced that water was wet.
     One of the many, many unspoken narratives during this convention, indeed this entire shambles of an election cycle, is that Hillary Clinton owes a lot of people. And by "people", I don't mean those artificial collective entities known as Wall Street banks and corporations. We all know how much she owes them for their unstinting and freakishly generous support made possible by, ironically, the SCOTUS's Citizen's United ruling. We all know Hillary Clinton's in more pockets than 1964 nickels. The only thing dividing those at the DNC convention is whether or not you care.
     No, I'm talking about the Sanders delegates who were promised quite a few things by Clinton in her never-ending quest for cheap, easy, momentary and wholly disingenuous populism in exchange for their short-term support. Those who've believed the bullshit and have been cowed by Tammany Hall 2.0 and the air of inevitability are what I call "Fair Weather Berners."
     These concessions and promises were only grudgingly made when Clinton realized she wasn't getting as much right wing support as she'd counted on (Billionaires like Bloomberg and the Kochs notwithstanding), Clinton was savvy enough to know that, going into the convention, she did not have the number of delegates to win the nomination and, as Barack Obama said of her eight years ago, "she will say anything to get elected."
     But there's the much greater number of us embittered clingers and hangers on who are rightly enraged that the primary, caucus and nomination process has been bowdlerized to the point of parody. That would be those of us who were sneered at by crooks like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and called "conspiracy theorists" for daring to suggest the MSM were managed and told what to say and not say and that the DNC was all in for Clinton, that the primaries and caucuses were rigged and that election fraud was rampant. That Bernie was hamstrung at every opportunity and in virtually every way.
     We're watching her, too, just as surely as Teabaggers watch the psychopaths they help put into office. And teabaggers are a merciless sort. In one of his first votes as a new senator, Scott Brown sided with the Democrats on an issue and the tricorner hat-wearing psychos who put him in the Senate were immediately calling for impeachment and for him to be primaried.
     Scott Brown was a senator for less than a two and a half years. Enter Elizabeth Warren.
     While we shouldn't be as reactionary as the most mentally and emotionally unstable elements of our society, we could take a lesson from the unforgiving Teabaggers and be just as stringent in our expectations from our leaders. And this segues into what I mean when I speak of unspoken narratives.
     What the diehard Bernie faction essentially is is something between a mere moment and an actual movement: Right now in our evolution, we're a loosely-connected watchdog group, dogging Clinton's every step and parsing her every word. We are that part of the 99% (or perhaps the 43% to whom Romney had derisively referred at a GOP fundraiser in 2012) who are tired of being preached to, sneered at, vilified and insulted by having our votes and the entire electoral process stolen from us by machine Democrats who are more crooked than an ebola cell.
     Those of us who are smart and aware enough to know what's going on know that, exactly like the Republicans, the scumbags that run the party (and the DNC email leak proves Wasserman Schultz is just the tip of the iceberg that will surely crack up and sink this ship of state) hold in utter contempt anyone who gets in their way or openly criticizes them.
     To show their complete lack of transparency, refer to my tweet from last night showing a Facebook post bringing us the news the delegate roll call vote would be done behind closed doors at a breakfast today instead of on the floor. They will, however, magnanimously announce the results on the floor later tonight. If Trump's speeches are inspired by Hitler then the DNC's warped idea of democracy must be inspired by Stalin.
     And I have to give the Devil his due: The teabaggers are certainly politically engaged and we are finally learning that lesson on our side of the tracks. Clinton will in all likelihood crowned The Queen Apparent at the convention tonight but it will not be the end of the revolution that Bernie's been calling for. And we will be dogging her every step if, God forbid, she actually gets elected President.