Time For a Party Makeover

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Right now, there's a frenetic hum of activity going on between New York and Washington. It's a super-charged current of electricity of which we're aware only in a historical sense, silent but deadly.

     It's the transition of power, countless decisions being made by countless people, starting with President-elect Trump and the head of his transition team, Chris Christie. Among those decisions are those ranging from who will be the next Secretaries State and Defense to who'll do Trump's double weave and umber makeup every morning.

     There are also two other phenomenons gathering steam like a hurricane about to hit the coast- Anti Trump protests and attacks being waged by his voters and supporters on those whom Trump had singled out for special attention. They are circling around each other now like two sharks or gladiators about to do battle and it's only a matter of time before this human binary bomb finally converges and blows up the country.

     And insiders of both parties are aghast at the spectacle quietly unfolding on newspapers, internet news sites and social media. Muslims, Mexicans and African Americans are being physically and verbally attacked because now racists and bigots finally have one of their own in the White House. They're letting their freak flag flap high and proud and it has a swastika on it.

     Evangelicals supported a guy who's on his third marriage and counting, has lived the life of a dissolute playboy, sexually abused women for decades and had once been pro choice,

     Rednecks south of Mason Dixon supported a good old boy from Jamaica, Queens.

     Women supported a sexual predator.

     Minorities supported a racist whose first agenda will be to deport Muslims and Mexicans.

     Yet Wall Street, much of the Congressional GOP, the Koch Brothers and their fundraising arm and virtually all of Trump's fellow billionaires turned their backs on him. The RNC had also cut off all his funding, preferring, as had the Koch Brothers, to focus on the down ballot races.

     What's wrong with this picture that I've painted? And I haven't even begun to paint one of the so-called Democratic Party.

     One doesn't need to be a political journalist such as Jonathan Tasini (who lost to Clinton in her cynical Senate re-election bid a decade ago) or a Matt Taibbi to know there is something very deeply, disturbingly and dangerously wrong with the Democratic Party. As Taibbi put it in Rolling Stone yesterday,

The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

     This was readily obvious to anyone who was even sporadically on social media over the last year and a half. We saw self-identified "Liberals" and "progressives" resorting to the same exact thuggish tactics and arrogance toward anyone and everyone who didn't toe the party line that we'd seen with Bush backers from 2000 to 2009. Those who didn't swear undying, unconditional and unswerving fealty to Queen Hillary were immediately pronounced, as Taibbi said, as KGB operatives, Trump supporters and even paid shills.

     They resorted to blocking those dissidents in huge numbers, getting them shadowbanned and censored on Twitter and elsewhere which the brainless social media giants happily allowed to happen thanks to automated algorithms. The Sanders campaign had a dozen Facebook pages shut down when the real paid shills for Hillary Clinton posted child pornography on the eve of the five state mid Atlantic primary.

     In short, Hillary supporters became nothing more or less than the new faux-feminist right wing (In fact, I'd classify them as the closest delineation we've ever seen to Rush Limbaugh's "Feminazis") while still arrogantly insisting with red, spittle-flecked faces that they were Democrats.

     If both Clinton and Trump had one thing in common this election season, it was that their supporters were militantly and willfully blind to the many grave defects of their candidate that should've immediately disqualified them for the most powerful office in the Free World if not the entire planet. Both ought to be in federal prison for their past crimes. It was the convenient bipartisan defenestration of once-cherished party principles for a cult of personality.

The Dean of Corruption

     And now we're hearing that Dr. Howard Dean, a man most notorious for a scream, is running for the chair of the DNC. Sorry. That's not going to do. That's just reshuffling the inner office chairs of old Tammany Hall.

     In fact, a simple litmus test for the next DNC chair could be this: "Have you ever supported Hillary Clinton for President?" If the answer is Yes, that should immediately disqualify them from the running.

     Because Hillary Clinton, whether her faux Democratic supporters like it or not, is the very face of political corruption. It is not Donald Trump because he has never held elected office. Both candidates have crooked Foundations that exist solely to serve themselves but the spotlight of public scrutiny outside of Camp Clinton had been put on her and for good reason.

     Whereever she went, whether it was the Executive Mansion, the US Senate or Foggy Bottom, that Huey Long-class Clinton Corruption followed her like a slime trail. And it had slowly rolled up and caught up to her. Despite the intoxicating novelty of her being the first female President (and a President ought to be elected for reasons other than it being a novelty- the ruinous Obama administration taught us that or should have) and despite most of the nation, and the planet, being female, she still lost in the Electoral College virtually by a landslide.

     Trump's female deplorables aside, that meant a lot of women stayed home on Election Day.

     The campaigns of both candidates were the wrecking balls that put the first hits to ancient, virtually irrelevant parties that had begun crumbling decades ago. Super delegates were largely made up of corporate lobbyists and both of Clinton's Presidential campaigns were infested with them. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the disgraced, corrupt ex Chair of the DNC, last October quietly changed the rules so that corporate cash could underwrite the convention. Sanders supporters holding up innocuous signs at that convention were threatened by DNC thugs with the revocation of their credentials, were thrown out of their seats and replaced with paid actors, and noise suppressors were installed the last night of the convention. Schultz's interim replacement, Donna Brazile, was revealed by Wikileaks to be every bit as much the collusive crook her predecessor was.

     And now Howard Dean, Clinton backer, wants to replace her.

     As with the Republican Party, the Democratic Party needs to rebuild from the nap of the carpet on up and I'd even suggest from the floor joists on up. It does not represent true Democratic principles any more than Germany's National Socialist Party represented socialist interests. I would even propose a rebranding and a renaming so that the tarnished and shit-stained name of the Democratic Party is never used ever again. Hillary Clinton spoiled it as surely as Nixon forever tarnished the Republican Party's name.

     The party's been taken over by crooks, right wing zealots, Wall Street and Beltway insiders. It had been transformed, under the ruinous Clinton brand, into Tammany Hall 2.0. The original Tammany Hall is now a historic relic and so should be the Democratic Party. It's time for the Green Party, the real progressive party, to move their furniture into DNC HQ, put up new signage and one at the door saying, "Rebuilding under new management."