STABBED IN THE BACK

Summary: Bernie Sanders deserves better than his supporters. Yesterday, in a magnificent, unity-building gesture akin to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s similar gesture in 2008, Bernie moved Hillary’s nomination by acclamation. Unfortunately, many of his supporters haven’t been willing to follow Bernie’s lead. They been pitching a fit on all the various media about how the election was “stolen” from them, and a great many of them have evinced a determination to throw their votes and their support to the Kremlin’s candidate, Donald Trump. To justify such behavior, the intransigents have tried very hard to fabricate a Dolchßtolegende (a stab-in-the-back narrative) that the entire primary process had been “rigged.”

On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.


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Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.

I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.

Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.

To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.

What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!

Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.

And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.

If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity. 

 Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.

 But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.

But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.

What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.

Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)

The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.

To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”

As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.

We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.

Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.