I am Very Disappointed with the Democratic Party [View all]

[Time for change]

I don’t know whether or not what I have to say in this post will be considered to be against DU rules, so I guess that there is a possibility that this the post could be hidden or even that I could receive some sort of warning from DU management for this. I am quite familiar with the rules as posted on the previous DU format, but I can’t find any rules on the current format. Anyhow, I’ll just take my chances here because if I can’t say what is most important to me, then I guess I may as well be banned anyhow.

But before I get to the main point of this OP, I’d like to say a few words about the time I’ve spent on DU. As I believe most of you know, DU was founded in early 2001, as a reaction to the tragedy of the 2000 Presidential Election. That election was characterized by a great amount of election fraud in Florida and a 36 day legal battle following the election, which was terminated when perhaps the most blatantly corrupt Supreme Court decision in U.S. history stopped the vote recounting in Florida and thereby made George W. Bush President by fiat.


My experience as a DU member

My son was one of the first members of DU. But I didn’t begin posting on DU until immediately after the 2004 Presidential Election. That election was characterized by substantial national and individual state discrepancies between exit polls and official results, with the exit polls favoring John Kerry and the official results favoring George W. Bush, well beyond the “margin of error”. I and many others strongly suspected massive election fraud because of this, very shortly after the election results came out, and that is why I joined DU. As an epidemiologist, I have a good amount of statistical training, and I had visions of grandeur that I could actually play a role in overturning the election results by showing the great improbability of so many large exit poll discrepancies, all pointing in the same direction (I was unaware at first that others, with better academic connections than me, were working on the same project). Others outside of DU became aware of some of my posts, and I became part of a small group organized to lobby U.S. Democratic Senators to officially object to the election results and thereby block them from going into effect. Other similar groups were formed for the same purpose, and one U.S. Senator (Barbara Boxer) agreed to officially object to the results, thereby mandating a couple of hours of public Senatorial debate, which was seen on national TV – to no avail in the end, except to make some U.S. citizens aware of this terrible situation.

That’s what got me started on DU, and I then became a very active member, posting about 700 relatively long OPs between early 2005 and late 2012. During that period of time, DU became a great source of political information for me, and writing OPs and posting on DU became an immense source of satisfaction for me. I’m sure that the same applies to perhaps tens of thousands of other DU members, and for that I have much admiration and appreciation for Skinner and the others who founded DU.

Then I virtually stopped posting on DU, posting only 3 OPs during the next 3 years. I never made a conscious decision to do that – I just stopped. There may have been several reasons for that. But probably an important one was the nasty comments I was eliciting from my anti-Obama posts. Why was I posting many anti-Obama posts? For reasons similar to why I posted anti-Bush posts while Bush was President. I very much resented the direction he was taking our country, and I thought it required serious discussion. One of my last anti-Obama posts was in June, 2012, a few months prior to the general election. It was titled “Whether or Not to Vote for Obama – Two Sides of the Question”. It was voted to be “hidden”, I think for the reason that I was in part advocating not voting for Obama – though I think I made it clear that I preferred Obama to Romney.


My growing disgust with the Democratic Party

The Party’s turn to the right
As the influence of money in politics has continued to grow, the Democratic Party has drifted further and further to the right, as has the Republican Party. When liberals challenge establishment/corporate candidates in Democratic primaries, the Democratic Party almost always puts its money and influence behind the establishment candidate. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the support they’ve given to Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. At this point I consider the Democratic Party to be the Republican Party of the past and the Republican Party to be nothing but a bunch of crazed psychopaths. The bottom line is that I feel that my party (I don’t consider it my party any longer) has deserted me, as it has deserted the vast majority of American citizens, in favor of the wealthy interests that support their campaigns. I vote liberal before I vote Democratic (before 2008 I had voted Democratic in every Presidential election since I became of voting age in 1972).

I am proud to say that I am a liberal. I am a liberal before I am a Democrat. As the Democratic Party has drifted further and further to the right, I have felt more and more alienated from it. My basic definition of the word liberal (which is a virtual synonym for progressive, but even liberal Democrats abandoned the liberal label in exchange for “progressive” because the Republicans and our national news media made “liberal” into a term of abuse) is simply a belief that all human beings deserve the opportunity to have a good life. Actually, that is too simple a definition because if you asked any politician of either Party whether they believe that all human beings deserve the opportunity to have a good life, they would all say yes. But actions speak louder than words, and the truth is that today there are few high elected officials in either major party who truly act as liberals. So if you want to understand my more specific interpretation of what a liberal is, you can read the post I referred to and linked to above, “Whether or to vote for Obama…”. I consider Obama to be the most conservative Democratic President we’ve had in over a century, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton (and I don’t think that Hillary Clinton is going to be much different than him). My post describes the many reasons why I believe that.

Democrats making jokes about massive election fraud in the Democratic Party primaries
I recently returned to posting on DU due to my great excitement over the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Many of my recent posts have dealt with evidence of massive election fraud in the Democratic primaries this year. Two of those posts warned of massive vote purging in New York, apparently targeted against Bernie Sanders. What was the response from the vast majority of Clinton supporters to that? All they did was make jokes and snarky remarks about it. Almost no intelligent discussion about it. Just jokes and blaming the voters themselves for being purged. This is the kind of behavior we saw from Republicans in response to accusations of the massive fraud in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Nobody on DU joked about that or blamed the voters then. Those Democrats whose only response to reports of election fraud this year is to joke about it or blame the voters may as well be Republicans.

But the evidence of “irregularities” in Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary were massive enough to force various people to take notice and acknowledge it, as noted in a New York Dailey News article titled: “Bungled NY Primary Voting Brings Board of Elections Probe”:

A record-setting deluge of Primary Day voter complaints led Tuesday to the angry promise of a full-scale investigation…. The flood of gripes, running the gamut from locked doors to botched voter rolls, led irate city Controller Scott Stringer to announce an immediate probe of an incompetent agency….

Presidential primary voters in the five boroughs ran an obstacle course of ineptitude to cast their ballots: Broken machines, shuttered precincts and purged voter rolls. The most complaints came from Brooklyn, where entire sections of poll books listing the names of eligible voters were reported missing, according to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman….

Mayor de Blasio {who has endorsed Clinton, by the way} issued a statement charging that entire buildings and city blocks of voters were among the 126,000 voters purged from the Brooklyn books since last fall. “These errors indicate that additional major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election,” said de Blasio. “The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process, and must be fixed.” The purged Brooklynites included 12,000 who moved out, 44,000 shifted to inactive voting status, and a stunning 70,000 removed entirely from the books. “I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge,” said de Blasio. “We support the Comptroller’s audit and urge its completion ... so corrective action can be taken.”

What is missing from this article is even a remote suggestion that the botched voting process may have been purposeful, or that all the evidence points to the fact that it was targeted at Sanders voters. My daughter has seen tons of reports on Facebook of Sanders voters disenfranchised by all this.

Also missing from the article is the fact that there was a huge discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, more than I’ve seen in any other state so far. I’ve noted exit poll discrepancies in a previous post in several other states, all favoring Clinton in the official results and Sanders in the exit polls. The magnitude of these discrepancies has been on average even greater than what we saw in the Presidential Election of 2004, which gave George W. Bush the Presidency. In New York on Tuesday it was a stunning 12%. Such things would cause almost universal outrage among DUers if a Republican had gained an advantage over a Democrat from such actions. Instead I see a deluge of jokes and blaming the voter from Clinton supporters.

This is not the kind of Party or people who I want to have any association with.

Disrespect for Independent voters
We all know that tons of voters who consider themselves independent have legally registered to vote in Democratic primaries this year in order to vote for Bernie Sanders in closed primaries. This is legal. States have deadlines for doing this, and the vast majority of such voters have registered as Democrats prior to the deadlines, though many tens or hundreds of thousands have then found themselves purged from the voter rolls.

From Clinton supporters I have seen a good deal of disrespect for these independent voters, with comments indicating that even if they have a legal right to vote in Democratic primaries, they have no moral right to do it, and so if they find themselves purged, that is what they deserve.

Why do these Clinton supporters feel that independent voters have no right to participate in the process that determines the only two viable candidates for the general election? We live in a country that has only two viable political parties, largely because we have an oligarchic national news media that gives no attention or credence to any presidential candidate outside of the two major parties. But as I noted earlier, both parties are so influenced by money from powerful corporations and multi-millionaires and billionaires that they now fail to represent the vast majority of their constituents. That is the reason why wealth inequality in our country has now reached the highest levels since the 1920s. This situation is intolerable and will not change until the monopoly of the two major parties is broken.

Independents are not a fringe group. They now outnumber both Republicans and Democrats by quite a bit (Republicans 26%, Democrats 29%, Independents 42%) – and for good reasons. Why shouldn’t they have a role in choosing our presidential nominees?


The only solution

So the only solution is the formation of a viable 3rd party that takes its responsibility to represent ordinary American citizens more than it sucks up to powerful corporations, millionaires and billionaires.

Bernie Sanders is a true phenomenon, who is one of the few non-establishment politicians who has managed to break through all the obstacles to reach supreme national prominence. He is the only presidential candidate of either party who currently has a net positive favorability rating. His national net favorability rating is about 20 points better than that of Hillary Clinton. He has come from low single digits in national polling to draw almost even with Clinton in national polls of Democratic voters. Those Democratic voters are only a small minority of voters who will be voting in the general presidential election in November. The vast majority of non-Democratic voters favor Sanders over Clinton, and he does far better than her in head to head competition in polls against every Republican candidate. But he cannot overcome massive election fraud, when it is tolerated by the Democratic Party. Nobody could.

Therefore, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many other Sanders supporters, the only hope for our country now is a third party, and Bernie is the only candidate at this time who could win running as an independent this November. Under the circumstances, given the numerous virtually insurmountable obstacles thrown in his path to the Democratic nomination, I think it is time for him to give serious consideration to doing so – and the sooner the better.

This would start with doing 3-way polling between him, Clinton, and the likely Republican nominees individually. If Bernie comes out ahead in such polling, which I believe he will, and if he now decides to run as an independent, he will very likely be our next president, and the American people will finally have a President to represent them.

Lastly I would like to say that if you consider me to be a former “disloyal” Democrat, please consider the idea that a political party should earn the support of its members and that they have no good reason to take it for granted. In other words, principle is more important than party, and when a party fails to represent the principles that their members feel are of great importance, they should be prepared to lose members – as both major parties have in recent years.