Murder and Mayhem

The Democratic presidential primary season is just underway, and already the hackles and dander of Los Netroots are up ("Like a twelve-year-old's dick," as Marky Mark memorably said of something else in The Departed). The nominal frontronners, HRC and BHO have begun snittering at each other like a couple of city rats over a crust of rotten bread, and now the various and sundry voices of the Bush-made-me-angry Left are shocked, shocked that the campaign is not being conducted on the high moral ground of right honorable this and right honorable that, tender as a virgin, pure as driven snow, etc., etc. Here's Digby mewling that one or the other of the pair isn't playing by whatever decorous rules she thinks should govern the pre-silly-season silly season. (Here The Son lays it out in pretty clear terms through the lens of L'affaire Marcotte.)

Democrats are always waiting for this or that white knight, tough but kind, good but firm, loving but steely, to ride in like Franklin Delano Shane, to fix the houses, saw the logs, tame the horses, arrest the bad guys, and so forth and so on. How precisely this character is going to win the White House in that "system" the Donkle always agitates that we must "work within" is another question. Clinton. Kennedy. Truman. Roosevelt. These were mean motherfuckers. Clinton would've eaten an infant alive for a vote, and Kennedy would've sold Jackie O. as a cocaine sex slave to Kruschev to win the big one. America is an empire, boys. Grow up and get used to it. Not even Jiminy Carter was a nice guy, although he played one well on TV, and in the end he lost for it.

David Geffen, the über-Donkle, once-Clinton, now-Obama partisan said "I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms." Digby and the Donkle phalanx finds this unconscionably crude coming from some billionaire. Wake up; smell the cigars, bubba. The smoke is just a metaphor. It's the room that counts, in this case the boardrooms of government-subsidized corporate America, the anti-free-market free-market economy at work. This "process," another word much in favor, is designed to preserve a patina of choice while finding a candidate most palatable to a very particular group of people. This is a profitable fucking gig for the dude or dudette who wins it, and they will say or do anything to get it. If you must be Democrats, at least grow up. They would kill each other in an arena if that's what it took. They are crazy. That's what it takes.