An Inconvenient Election

(Crossposted at Alegre's Corner)

What have I learned from the 2008 election?

I learned that:

Voter fraud, vote theft and voter intimidation are all OK with the Democratic Party, so long as they're done on behalf of their chosen candidate, Barack Obama.

It's all right with the Democratic Party to have incompetent, immature twits on your staff -- sexists included -- so long as they're part of Barack Obama's staff.  (No need to worry about your liberal credentials, boys!  So long as you're for Obama, that's just fine with us.)

It's all right with the Democratic Party if, after being handed the nomination and winning a general election by a relatively close margin considering the huge amounts of money spent by their own candidate, that candidate (Barack Obama) then proceeds to throw most of the party apparatus under the bus.  (No need to worry, folks.  Howard Dean was just leaving anyway!  And you'll love Tim Kaine, right?  Who cares that he's neither liberal nor progressive, and is a DINO?  He's pro-Obama, so he's one of us!)

No, when your name is Barack Obama, you're a sacred cow -- to the Democratic Party, anyway -- and you can do no wrong whatsoever.  Vetting is certainly optional, and everything you do after being elected in a tainted and highly corrupt process is golden precisely because -- well, you're Barack Obama!  And you're golden because the media says you are!

What's the worst thing about all this is that a conservative friend of mine years ago predicted all this.  He said that while I was good, and I was tolerant, and I wanted a free and fair exchange of ideas, most liberals didn't.  Or at any rate, that the liberals who were drawn to high office didn't -- and those were the dangerous ones, because if you didn't agree with them wholeheartedly, in lockstep, they'd treat you the same way as they did conservatives.  (Like dirt.)  And the liberals who failed to agree with them -- such as myself, in his long-ago hypothesis -- would be the "first up against the wall."  (Once again, hypothetically.  Or at minimum, figuratively.)

And isn't this what we've seen from the Obama team (not to mention the Obama true believers)?  That any criticism, no matter how gentle, is disloyal or wrong or "giving aid to the enemy" (that is, the conservatives); that vetting isn't needed because mass hypnosis will do the trick in half the time; that "Dem-on-Dem violence," as Corrente Wire has put it so aptly, is OK so long as you're going after those who don't worship at the altar of the Great Obama?

All of this is deeply disturbing, and yet, it has gone on again and again.  It has riven the Democratic Party into shreds -- and yet the people at the top either don't know or don't care, and think they can force us -- fellow liberals -- to believe as they do and throw reason, logic, judgment and justice out the window.

I'm sorry.  I can't do that.  And I'll never be able to do that.

While I continue to believe that Obama himself means well and isn't a bad man, the people around him embraced "any means to this end" -- and Obama didn't refuse that tactic.  Whereas Hillary Clinton absolutely refused it; she knew that scorched earth tactics always come around to bite the person (or people) who has (or have) used them.

The good thing for Clinton Democrats/PUMAs is that we know that Hillary Clinton is a stand-up individual.  She did what she felt was right, and she backed the party because she didn't want to cause distress to the party.

No.  She did not do that, which once again shows that she puts some things above herself -- probably a great many things -- and that she is a true patriot.

That being said, the closer we get to the Inauguration, the worse I feel.  Because I believe the media isn't doing their jobs; they aren't treating this President-elect the same way they'd treat any other; there is gross favoritism going on.

I continue to believe that the Democratic Party wanted Obama all along, and that the election in 2008 was (to their minds) a waste of time.  Because they knew what they wanted, and they got it -- and they didn't care what they had to do to get it, either.

In closing, what I've learned from the 2008 elections are nothing I'd ever expected to learn from so-called "Democrats" -- and what I learned shook my faith in the entire Democratic election system.

I've also learned that, to the present neo-lib "Democrats" controlling our once-proud party, principles are optional; the only thing that's important to the Democratic Party is winning -- at any cost.  Which is why I became a PUMA Democrat just as soon as I heard about the concept.

In short, when it came to Barack Obama and his team, the 2008 election was just what my title says: An Inconvenient Election.