by Ted
Rall
Who are you
going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That’s the good word from
Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the
corporate media, in response to the “allegations” by Bernie
Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.
I used scare
quotes around the word “allegations” because the truth is plain
to see and undeniable by anyone with a microgram of honesty: Hillary
Clinton cheated. If the rules had been followed, Bernie Sanders would
be the nominee.
As with all
things Clinton, of course, definitions matter. It depends on what the
meaning of “cheat” is.
To most
people, “cheating” means breaking the rules of a contest. By this
standard definition, there’s no doubt that the Clinton campaign,
its political allies and the Democratic National Committee cheated in
favor of Clinton and against Sanders. They broke the law. They
disenfranchised voters. They broke party rules. And they violated
long-standing customs that are so widely accepted that they are
essentially de facto rules of the Democratic Party and the American
political system.
Bernie
Sanders, on the other hand, ran a clean campaign.
Like many
other voters, I subscribe to a somewhat broader definition of
cheating in political elections. To me, Richard Nixon-style “dirty
tricks” – the disgusting tactics George W. Bush used against John
McCain in South Carolina in 2000 – rise to the level of cheating
because they deny voters the facts that they need in order to make an
educated decision in the voting booth. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
famously said that people are entitled to their own opinion, not
their own facts, and outright lies about your opponent’s – and
your own – positions and experience not only violate Moynihan’s
dictum but constitute the essence of cheating in the political arena.
If Hillary
Clinton manages to dodge both an Emailgate-related indictment as well
as fallout from her husband’s corrupt tarmac rendezvous with the
now-tainted Attorney General Loretta Lynch for the next few weeks and
formerly secure the nomination she’s been working on since at least
the year 2000, it will be a historic moment for identity politics.
But it is absolutely imperative that no one watching the first woman
to accept the presidential nomination of a major American political
party be fooled into believing that she did it on the up and up.
Hillary
Clinton did not run a clean campaign.
She cheated.
If we want
to be the kind of country that doesn’t care about that sort of
thing, if fair play isn’t an American value, fine with me. But
let’s go into this general election campaign with our eyes wide
open.
Caucus after
caucus, primary after primary, the Clinton team robbed Bernie of
votes that were rightfully his.
Here’s
how. Parties run caucuses. States run primaries. The DNC is
controlled by Hillary Clinton allies like chairman Debbie Wasserman
Schultz. Democratic governors are behind Clinton; state election
officials report to them. These officials decide where to send voting
booths, which votes get counted, which do not.
You thought
this was a democracy? Ha.
In the first
in the nation Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders pulled off a surprising tie
where he was expected to lose badly — Hillary won by just 0.2%.
However, party officials never bothered to send vote counters to the
most rural parts of the state, where Bernie was favored over Hillary.
About 5% of Iowa caucus votes were never counted. At other caucus
sites, Democratic officials loyal to Hillary purposefully
undercounted Sanders caucusers. No doubt about it, Bernie should have
won that one, as well as votes in other states that would have been
affected by a big Sanders upset.
Voters in
pro-Sanders precincts in Arizona faced long lines because pro-Hillary
elections officials didn’t provide enough voting booths. With lines
of three hours or more still to go, the media called the state for
Hillary.
New York
State was arguably the most important contest of the primary season.
Had Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in her adopted home state
where she had served 1 1/3 terms as senator, he would have dealt her
campaign a blow from which she might never have recovered, along with
a pile of delegates. Because of her local roots and the fact that New
York was a closed primary state in which independence were not
allowed to vote, it was a long shot for Bernie. But like the LAPD in
the O.J. Simpson case, the Clinton team wasn’t taking any chances.
Did they
drop a line to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who endorsed Clinton? Or did
state elections officials act on their own initiative? Either way,
Bernie Sanders stronghold, the borough of Brooklyn where he was born,
was targeted for massive voter suppression. At least 125,000 New
Yorkers were illegally purged from the rolls, had their votes
lost/thrown away, or were not permitted to vote due to broken voting
machines – all in Brooklyn.
Even Mayor
Bill de Blasio, who endorsed Clinton, was angry. “It has been
reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting
lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of
entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists,” De
Blasio said. “The perception that numerous voters may have been
disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral
process and must be fixed.”
The
skullduggery continued through the last major primary, California.
The night before, the Associated Press put its thumb on the scale,
declaring Hillary the nominee in an epic act of voter suppression.
Who knows how many Sanders voters decided to stay home once they
heard it was all over?
Hillary
Clinton was declared the winner by a substantial margin, but after it
turned out that state election officials, who report to Governor
Jerry Brown, who endorsed Clinton, didn’t bother to count a
whopping 2.5 million provisional ballots. According to investigative
journalist Greg Palast, the nation’s leading expert on the
manipulation of elections, Bernie Sanders actually should have won
the state of California along with the majority of its delegates.
(Disclosure: I work with Palast as a Fellow of his Investigative
Fund.)
One of the
most disreputable moves of the campaign was the Associated Press poll
of party superdelegates, party insiders who are allowed to vote for
whoever they want but, because they are party insiders, inevitably
support the establishment candidate. Truth is, the superdelegate
system itself is official cheating. But the AP survey made a terrible
system even more deadly to democracy.
If they
cared about free elections, the superdelegates wouldn’t have stated
their loyalty in public. The DNC ought to have told superdelegates
that they would lose their status if they expressed their opinions
before the convention. As it was, Bernie Sanders started the race
miles behind the finish line.
The only way
Bernie could have caught up would have been to have scored one
landslide win after another. As it was, he came close to doing that.
His surprising early momentum, big rallies and popularity with
younger voters might have convinced superdelegates to back him, but
after they told the AP they were for Hillary Clinton, it was too late
for them to change their minds.
I’m out of
space. So I can’t get into the DNC’s attempts to deny Bernie
Sanders airtime in the form of widely seen debates against Hillary
Clinton, her ridiculous claim that she supported Bernie’s
$15-an-hour federal minimum wage at the same time that her website
confessed that she didn’t, the Nevada Democratic convention in
which Sanders supporters were denied seats by Clintonites in charge
and then falsely accused of violence, and Clinton’s sleazy “I was
for the TPP before I was against it, and now that the primaries are
over, I’m for it again” gambit.
That stuff
isn’t the usual hardball.
It’s
cheating.
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