Nancy

Documentation. Witnesses. Facts. Truth. That's what they're afraid of.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

OK, That's Enough, Donna





Just... what the fuck? The Washington Post drops more excerpts from Donna Brazile's book, and I have to wonder who greenlit this book, because I think even a fiction publisher would've thrown this manuscript in the circular file.


Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”
In an explosive new memoir, Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the removal of Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.


Huh? On September 10th, WaPo said that Hillary's lead was dropping, but she was still up 5 points among likely voters and 10 among registered voters. 5 points would've been a really nice win. If you're up 5, you don't expect to lose.


What was her "solution?"


Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump.


Cory Booker? To win working-class (read: "white") voters? Forgetting for a moment that he's African-American; he has a reputation (earned or unearned, that's not the purpose here) of being one of Wall Street's favorite Democrats. That's how she'd appeal to the working class? Then again, it was a campaign she ran that nominated JOE FUCKING LIEBERMAN onto the 2000 ticket.


 But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them.”


She's clearly so noble...


Brazile paints a scathing portrait of Clinton as a well-intentioned, historic candidate whose campaign was badly mismanaged, took minority constituencies for granted and made blunders with “stiff” and “stupid” messages. The campaign was so lacking in passion for the candidate, she writes, that its New York headquarters felt like a sterile hospital ward where “someone had died.”


Oh, go fuck yourself, Donna. Were you ever actually in those headquarters? I spent weeks there volunteering; there was so much enthusiasm there that the last few days and nights we had volunteers filling up an extra overflow room and several hallways. And all the pizza! And we were filling up busses every weekend to canvas out of town. But of course, I was just a volunteer. However, another thing I volunteered to do was stick around after the election for a couple of weeks and spend my days cleaning up the offices of the paid staff. It had all been put together really professionally, and it looked like they'd had a lot of fun -- group pictures everywhere, hundreds of bottles of liquor and wine, signs, maps, computer networks, posters, buttons -- all the things you'd expect in a campaign where people were both enjoying themselves and working their asses off.


Brazile alleges that Clinton’s top aides routinely disrespected her and put the DNC on a “starvation diet,” depriving it of funding for voter turnout operations.


SHE FUCKING SAVED THE DNC! The whole reason she signed the joint agreement was because the DNC was going broke! She didn't deprive it of money, she replenished its coffers.


As one of her party’s most prominent black strategists, Brazile also recounts fiery disagreements with Clinton’s staffers — including a conference call in which she told three senior campaign officials, Charlie Baker, Marlon Marshall and Dennis Cheng, that she was being treated like a slave.
“I’m not Patsey the slave,” Brazile recalls telling them, a reference to the character played by Lupita Nyong’o in the film, “12 Years a Slave.” “Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!” 


OK. Who's playing her in the movie that Mark Halperin is currently writing as his big comeback after 30 days in the penalty box?


Brazile’s book, titled “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” will be released Tuesday by Hachette Books. 


How appropriate, given that she's one of the biggest Democratic hacks I've ever encountered; that's not revisionist. I always grouped her in my mind with the losers -- the Bob Shrums, Juan Williamses, Alan Colmeses... As I wrote Friday night:


She's since held a number of different positions in the party, but also was one of the first Democratic talking heads I became familiar with when I began watching cable news in the early 2000s. She was never very strong on TV, and as I started to identify with the Democratic Party more and more, I always cringed to see her represent the Democratic point of view.


Back to WaPo:


Brazile writes that she was haunted by the still-unsolved murder of DNC data staffer Seth Rich and feared for her own life, shutting the blinds to her office window so snipers could not see her and installing surveillance cameras at her home. She wonders whether Russians had placed a listening device in plants in the DNC executive suite. 


*Blinks about twenty times*. SETH RICH? That's quite the tell. Only Fox News thought that his death had anything to do with his political work.


That fall, Brazile says she tried to persuade her Republican counterparts to agree to a joint statement condemning Russian interference but that they ignored her messages and calls.


Obama and other members of the Democratic leadership did too, and got the same response. This isn't news.


I have something else in the works that's more interesting than this, and I'm sure many better writers will dissect her whining about where she was sat at a debate and whether she got a call from Hillary after the campaign (which she clearly didn't deserve at all if this was how she behaved), so I'm going to just leave you with one more quote:


Brazile writes with particular disdain about Brandon Davis, a Mook protege who worked as a liaison between the DNC and the Clinton campaign. She describes him as a spy, saying he treated her like “a crazy, senile old auntie and couldn’t wait to tell all his friends the nutty things she said.”


Robby Mook didn't need a spy to get those nutty things; she's apparently compiled them all in one handy book!

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