Thursday, July 28, 2016

Rigged!

Grim writes at Grim's Hall,
Is a "Trainwreck" Ever Good?
To answer Ed Morrisey's question, there is one really positive aspect to the trainwreck in Cleveland. It proves, again, that the Republican party is not rigged.

The Democratic Party really is. We've seen the fix in for Clinton from the DNC's own internal messaging, from the way in which they structured the debates to favor Clinton's interests, and especially from the handling of her criminal troubles by the Justice Department. The whole system, up to and including the criminal justice system, was rigged to deliver her as nominee. When a substantial number of Democratic voters said, "No, thank you, we'd really prefer Bernie," the DNC bent itself backwards to make sure that he failed. The voter fraud was so bad that even Snopes can't bring themselves to fully deny it.
WHAT'S TRUE: Two researchers (presumably graduate students) from Stanford University and Tilburg University co-authored a paper asserting they uncovered information suggesting widespread primary election fraud favoring Hillary Clinton had occurred across multiple states.

WHAT'S FALSE: The paper was not a "Stanford Study," and its authors acknowledged their claims and research methodology had not been subject to any form of peer review or academic scrutiny.
That's funny stuff -- 'OK, the part about the study proving widespread voter fraud is true, but it's not really a 'Stanford Study,' it was just done by students at Stanford... and, er, nobody's going to check their work, because nobody wants to know if they're right.'

So, democracy is messy. The RNC had a rules fight, a floor fight, Ted Cruz's excellent speech on principle, and then nominated Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I mean, and not Jeb Bush. If the Republican party were rigged like the Democratic party, Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee this morning.

Factor that in to the choice, I suppose. The Democratic system is rigged from stem to stern. The Republicans are really taking this democracy thing seriously, even at the cost of losing control of the party, even at the cost of public embarrassment. Even, possibly, at the cost of what should have been an easily-winnable election.

Maybe that commitment to democracy ought to mean something. I leave it for you to decide.

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