Super-Delegates; Bribery, Blackmail, Extortion, Oh My!

It’s time to address the very ugly back-room antics that are going on that the Democrat Party is desperate not to have discussed.

The several hundred gorillas in the Democrat room are the super-delegates; and only a fool will think that these gorillas will not demand to be fed.  But, they’re not like that, are they?  Only if you still believe in the tooth fairy. And, because these are super-delegates, all of this feeding will occur out of the public eye.

So what do you feed a super-delegate gorilla?   Political favors, positions, contributions, even outright cash.  All of which requires money or political power. In other words, subtle or outright bribes 

Or you can not feed the gorilla and choose threaten him with bigger gorillas, if you have them in your corner.  Exposure of bad (even illegal) habits, loss of current positions, major support for the gorilla’s opponents.  In other words, subtle or outright extortion and blackmail.

Now, who has the most capability of feeding or intimidating these gorillas in this way?  Barack Obama, the political newbie with minimal personal resources, or the Clintons, with all their years of power and massive amounts of ‘mystery money’ associated with the Clinton Library and the Clinton Foundation?  In this back alley fight, Barack is going into a gunfight with a pocketknife.

Barack  can only counter this by keeping things in the light of day; out of the back alley, as it were.  That’s why the cry continues to be to ‘honor the pledged delegate vote’ for him, even though he has won almost no key state and has heavily dependent on the caucus system, which correlates poorly to general election success.  Obama isn’t doing this out of a sense of fairness; the guy is a product of the Chicago political machinery, where fairness is a pretty foreign concept. 

But the Clinton minions have come up with a perfect counter that would provide a great cover for the back alley massacre, ironically in the name of ‘democracy’.  A superdelegate primary, complete with a secret ballot! Oh, the bloodbath that will occur in the background of that spectacle.  But it would given the super-delegate the group cover that would actually allow them to overturn the pledged delegate count and avoid personal responsibility for the race riots such an outcome would bring in Denver.  It’s the only way to overturn the pledged votes and it’s a sharp political ploy.

Supposedly, it would also protect the gorillas from individual retribution and reward, but the Clintons would merely make it an all-or-none offer;  bananas to all if they win, carpet-bombing if they lose.  And who in the Democrat party want the Clintons on a suicide mission, with all they know and all of their resources? 

The super-delegates would prefer that arsenal being used on McCain and they know Obama is now seriously damaged for the general.  Their desperation is so bad, there is the ludicrous talk of taking the white male elitist Al Gore, who has not faced a single vote this primary, to replace the first serious woman and the first serious black candidate.  That shows the Democratic leadership has reached full psychosis.

Ain’t it grand?

The Dems run Conventions like Keystone Kops

And these bozos want to run the country??  They can’t even run district-level conventions here in Texas without almost matching Mugabe in Zimbwabwe for class and fairness. 

 The 23rd district got together at 8:30am; the convention managed to start at 6pm.  There was challenges and shouting galore.

Sheila Jackson, the Democrat Congresswoman, was booed in Houston.

They had this stuff going on 3 weeks ago, which I witnessed myself at precinct (a single night of hypocracy was all I could manage).  They couldn’t take notes and prepare any better than this after that??

Manners, competancy and democracy, Democrat style.  Just what the nation needs more of.

UPDATE:  The tedious process included numerous precincts redoing the caucuses held March 4, an act repeated across the state. Re-doing the March 4th caucuses???  No legal issues there; yeah, right!  Sorry, you either seat a delegate or you accept a challenge to one; no ‘redos’ are possible, since most of the precinct caucus goers aren’t there.  I speak as someone who has run district conventions myself and I would have rightfully been burned at the political stake had I run a mess like that, no matter how much lipstick the local paper tries to smear on this pig. 

Truly Dedicated Democratic Buffoonery

Well, Daily Kos is in the middle of political cannibalism, using their traditional excessive venom on each other, shocking some of their moonbat brigade.  The Clinton campaign has its back-alley knife fighters going full-tilt with the nastiest forms of identity politics, continuing their decades-long tradition of political eye-gouging.  The Obama campaign is struggling to explain that- while the people closest to the candidate (his wife and pastor of 20 years) are clearly believers in race-obsessive, ‘us-vs-them’ politics, the candidate himself does not.  And that his association with Rezco was innocent and does not taint Barack.  They haven’t addressed the issue yet about the million dollar earmark for his wife’s employer, which gave her a 261% annual raise right after his election to the Senate.  But, however this and the other issues pan out, Obama looks a lot less like a political Messiah, than another over-promising, under-achieving political product of the Chicago Machine.

The GOP couldn’t ask for a bigger mess if they custom ordered it.  They certainly did not, though some of us ‘right-wingers’ might have helped by extending Hillary’s ‘Black Knight’ campaign with our votes.  The election that has always been the Democrats to lose (and only through truly dedicated buffoonery) is looking a lot less a sure thing.

But it also raises a historical question: Karl Rove has always been credited- and damned- for the political success of the current administration.  Does the current Democratic debacle suggest that maybe Karl wasn’t so smart as the supposed ‘smarter’ Democrats were just plain stupid?

My Advice to Hillary…

(Mild content warning on the videos) 

Hillary:  Well… (sniffle) sometimes it’s just so… hard!

Hillary:  But how can I deal with the Messiah?

Me:  Well, he’s a product of the Chicago Machine.  You can deal with him (Metaphorically only, please!) like many others have been dealt with before:

 

Hillary:  But what do I tell my campaign staff?

She is Aliiiiive!

 The Hildebeast lives on- ironically, probably thanks to the ‘Rush Limbaugh’ contingent in Texas Republican and independent conservatives.  (I was on board with that strategy for Republican voters switching weeks before Rush mentioned it; I helped run the caucus in my precinct).  The victory was worth far more headlines than delegates, however; thank the Democrat primary and caucus ‘undemocratic’ features for that.

All is good, and not simply because of crass desire to see the GOP retain the White House.  That does enter in, though; EITHER party having control of both houses and the presidency is always a disaster, as shown by the GOP recently and the Dems on several occasions before. 

Let’s get to the primary election impact first.  Hillary’s impressive popular vote win in Ohio and her pseudo-win in Texas (she’ll end up with less delegates due to the caucuses) makes her a political poker player with a weak hand but lots of outs, instead of no outs at all. 

She will be selling the valid point the Barack has not been able to win in the big states needed to win the General.  She also may be able to show at the end of this that she has more popular votes than Barack (she is essentially tied now).  She can try to bring Florida and/or Michigan back into play for ‘fairness’, even if it involves ‘do-over’ primaries.  If Florida and Michigan remain left out, she can also go to the super-delegates to argue that they need to help her make ‘adjustments’ to the ‘pledged’ delegate counts to compensate for the ‘disenfranchisement’ of those two states.  It could give some of the super-delegates the public talking points to go along, when what they’ll really be thinking about is the very private political blackmail/extorsion/bribery the Clintons are capable. She can cut a deal with John Edwards for his 26 delegates, outbidding Obama based on her superior deal-cutting experience (and under the table resources).  All of these will likely be employed, in some form or fashion, to give her a shot at an outright win, no matter how ugly.

Any and all of these outs depend on her to be within striking distance in ‘pledged’ delegates; certainly less than 100 short.  To accomplish that, she needs to keep chipping away at him, smiling motherly-fashion all the way.

With Hillary within striking distance and the decision not to be rendered for at least  seven more weeks, certain lines of political investigation will go on that could not have gone on in a straight Obama-McCain fight.  Those investigations involve internal Democrat aspects of the Chicago politics from which Barack sprang, currently centering around the corruption trial of his supporter and neighbor, Tony Rezko ().  And possibly, a little more scrutiny will be accorded interesting tidbits like this one:

Just after Barack was elected to the United States Senate, Michelle received a large pay increase—from $121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 in 2005. “Mrs. Obama is extremely overpaid,” one citizen wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tribune, after the paper published a story questioning the timing of the award.

The only way to get to the bottom of such is from inside the Democrat machinery; Hillery can do that, John McCain cannot.  And Hillary will have to for enough leverage to carry the day.  The back-alley knife fighters that work in her shadow campaign will be very busy.

The Sometimes Catastrophic Nature of ‘Renewability’

The drive for being ‘green’, especially for using renewable resources, often forgets that nothing operates in a vacuum.  Low-energy fluorescent lightbulbs contain mercury and become a toxic waste nightmare.  Wind farms slaughter birds by the thousands.  The batteries used in that Prius assure that the supposed ‘green’ car is actually more environmentally damaging than a Hummer.  Biolfuels result in more greenhouse gas production, not less.  But the latest issue, that of ethanol and the federal government’s financial incentives for ethanol production, is likely to be the most costly. 

Thanks to major government subsidy programs, more and more farm country in the U.S. is being converted to corn production and more of the existing corn is being used for ethanol production.  The highly predictable result: Cereal grains of all forms have spiked 41% in price in just 6 months.  This is not only starting to show up on grocery store shelves, but is heading us for a humanitarian nightmare as food agencies around the world are having to significantly scale back.

How real is this?  To me, very real.  The charity I support in Uganda has lost the support from the World Food Program; a combination of the increased costs and flooding in Northeast Uganda resulted in WFP shutting down their aid everywhere except the flooded regions.  The organization was highly dependent on that food; kids I personally know stand a very real chance of starving over this.  Graves may be ecologically friendly, but I doubt that was the intent of the ‘renewable resource’ gang and their government enablers.

If you’d personally like to help fill in the gap (and I’ve personally done all I can, in that regard), you can be a real help to these kids.