Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile exposes the Clinton Campaign.

 Donna Brazile, Chairman of the Democratic National Committe for the final portions of the 2016 race.  Photo by Ron Aira. Copyright holder Brazile & Associates LLC. - The uploader on Wikimedia Commons received this from the author/copyright holder.

One of the very real disappointments for me of this past election cycle was when Donna Brazile, whom I've always liked, replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom I've never liked, as head of the DNC.  That effectively made her a mouthpiece for the Clinton campaign and I just couldn't understand it.  Brazile always seemed to me to represent the old rational Democratic party that took a moderate/liberal view towards things, not a wackadoodle approach, and which had actual working people's interest at heart.  The Clinton campaign, in contrast, always seemed to be about power for the aging 1970s Boomer section of the Democratic Party that's holding on to power within it with cold dead skeletal hands.  So to hear Brazile act as an apologist for Clinton, well, it was just too much.  I lost respect for her.

Well, not much of that respect is back.

Lost in the mix of last weeks turbulent news cycle ist hat Brazile is out with her election postmortems, in the form of a book and an article, and its really a bombshell.  Far from defending Clinton, she goes after her in spades.  Political has an article in advance of her upcoming book entitled:

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC

When I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the Russians hacked our emails, I stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton campaign.

Wow, even the title is a shocker.

The article starts off:

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

What caused that level of emotion?

 Chair of the Democratic National Committee for part of the 2016 campaign, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Well here's a hint, slammer her predecessor Schultz:

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

Everybody gets slammed from there. Wasserman Schultz is shown to have been disinterested and ineffective.  President Obama left the party financially broke. The Clinton campaign stepped in and bailed out the debts, but took over everything.  Brazille relates:

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

But it goes further than there:

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

 Basically Brazille has accused the Clinton campaign of operating to purchase the DNC during the 2016 campaign.  This isn't illegal, but Brazile feels it was unethical. And it confirms suspicions that existed during the campaign and which emails pirated by the Russians suggested.

Clinton had taken over the party before she was the nominee.  People who accused the Party of all but being a Clinton organization before the rank and file had made up its mind about who was to be its candidate were right.

So then, why is anyone still listening to Hillary Clinton now?

 Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. While pundits never gave Sanders a chance, just as they didn't give Trump a chance, he did much better than expected, just as Trump clearly did.  While its still widely believed that Sanders was doomed to go down in defeat against Clinton, Brazile's revelations raise some doubt about that in an election year of wild surprises.

Pundits keep talking about a "civil war" inside the GOP, but maybe a recent cover of Time, showing a huge GOP elephant holding a tiny Democratic donkey got it right.  If the GOP seems to be two parties, an old establishment party holding out against an insurgent Trump populist party, the Democrats seem to be Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and a five white upper middle class kids in their 20s who have time to protest everything and to back anything that's edgy. That's not a party, that's two odd stamtische, one in Greenwich village serving Free Trade Green Tea and another in Washington D. C. serving Domaine de la Romanee-Conti 1990.  Those people need to go.

Will they?

That's another question entirely.

As is one lingering question. Would Brazile have made these revelations had Clinton won?