Members or Embers of the Democratic National Committee

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

24 February 17

wish to at once add this to Bill McKibben’s luminous piece published on Reader Supported News yesterday morning urging the Democratic National Committee to elect Keith Ellison tomorrow to be the next chair of the Democratic Party of the United States.

We all knew during the primaries across the country that the inspired Bernie Sanders and his inspiring wife Jane were the great new force in American politics, attracting hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of young people back into the Democratic Party or smack dab into it for the first time.

Here in Austin, where I live, we in the general public learned only at 7 o’clock or later one night that Bernie would speak at a sports ring outside town at 10 the very next morning.

A young friend and I drove out there and advanced slowly in the half-mile long line for about an hour. As they let us in at the gate, they seized from me the pocketknife I had had in my right pocket. Ten thousand or more people, mostly young (the future!) but many older, filled the stands and stood patiently in the field. An hour or two late, Bernie and Jane came. While race-cars whipped around the adjacent sports ring, Bernie inspired us repeatedly for more than an hour. He had command of the issues that we all care about, and he championed the strong ideas to require clean, clear, honest change for our common good. He got it said, and said, and said, as he did again and tirelessly again to crowds of tens of thousands of us all over the country.

In my long life I have never seen anything like this in an American presidential election. Where the hell did they come from? Here was a guy calling himself a socialist who with Jane had been fighting for economic and political justice for decades without a break in Vermont and then in the sold-in Congress — the House, the lofty Senate. There was no way to doubt his and her integrity. We could trust them.

Well, I’ll tell you where they came from —

From the criminalization of American politics by paid-off candidates for the people’s offices shilling for those corporations and millions-to-billionaires that finance their campaigns.

From euphemisms like “growth” to cut corporate taxes and taxes for the rich, thereby to super-enrich the rich.

From hyperpatriotic warmongers itching for more wars of aggression.

From enemies of national health insurance who are hell-bent to kill Medicare and Medicaid.

From “campaign contributions” that lyingly disguise bribes, and from lawyers’ lies to disguise the corporations’ and the Supreme Court’s theft of the people’s free speech and to openly give our stolen rights to the corporations.

I especially appreciated Bill McKibben naming it in advance as “political malpractice” if the DNC Friday does not elect the Bernie Sanders candidate, Keith Ellison, their new chair of a thereby rescued Democratic Party.

In the primaries it was as clear as the nose on history’s face that Trump and Hillary were in a race to the bottom to be the most distrusted leading candidates for President in recent American history. Who of the two was less respected or trusted as honest? That was the question, and everybody knew it in their bones if not in their voting habits. Our common sense knew that Sanders was an almost certain winner for the future against Donald Trump and that the banks’ $225,000-speaker Hillary was likelier to lose to him.

And they knew that in the closed-door schemings of the Democratic National Committee, too.

Yet those few insiders in control of the Democratic National Committee, having conspired for Hillary’s nomination in direct violation of the neutrality expected by the members of their party, rejected the ethical future proclaimed by Bernie and Jane Sanders’ crowds and victories and jammed Hillary on in.

That, too, Bill, was political malpractice, and with historically calamitous consequences, making the chronically lying egomaniac Donald Trump the most powerful person on earth and collapsing our great American government into criminalized politics and militarism, endangering ourselves, our families, and our species, indeed, life on earth.

You hundreds of the members, not embers, of the Democratic National Committee from our far-flung cities and towns, hark. Vote, we pray, for hope and the future, not more of the ongoing Democratic sellouts of the past 50 years.

Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer, has written presidential biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, books on Hiroshima and universities, and countless articles for The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper's, Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and won the George Polk career journalism award in 2012. He is writing a book now on nuclear-weapons ethics.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.