Venting about the DNC

The things America keeps getting surprised by never cease to amaze me.

This weekend Wikileaks dropped a crapload of emails hacked from the Democratic National Comittee servers, in them we found a whole lot of stupid bullshit that is making everyone think the sky is falling and apparently took us all by surprise.

Get this, it appears that the DNC spent a non-zero amount of effort to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, I gotta say folks I am shocked, shocked! At this development, and they had such an appearance of even handedness throughout the primary.
Additionally, some were amazed when a leaked email showed bullet points for tactics on how to secure the Hispanic vote, as well as general qualities about the group, a political organization basing strategies around generalizations of a minority group? Well I never! I thought they just all fucking attracted voters by beaming good thoughts directly into their heads!

The emails also contained evidence that some members of the press shared stories with people in the DNC before going to print, leaving aside the fact that submitting stories to the subjects for comment is a near universally accepted thing to do that adds a level of trustworthiness to your story, and that many of these stories were indeed submitted for just that purpose, some of which were actually quite negative on Clinton even when they went to print, leaving aside all that. Why does it surprise anyone that a major political party colludes with the press on coverage?

Fucks sake people Corey Lewandowski is a paid commentator for CNN despite still being on the Trump campaign in all but name, and I mean that literally, Trump is still fucking paying the man, but no, the fact that a Washington Post writer sent a story to the DNC before publishing it is the worst goddamn thing to happen in the history of politics, sure, okay.

Not to say this should be right and proper mind you, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is stepping down as DNC chair after the convention, and her participation has been scaled back to opening and closing the thing, and this is good, because she kind of sucks, and has been among the most visible and outspoken opponents of the legitimacy of a primary challenge to Clinton basically all campaign. However it just boggles my mind that anyone is surprised, at all, that shit like this goes down.

We go through a similar thing every few months to a year it seems, anyone who honestly was surprised when it was revealed that various services used torture on prisoners should get their head checked, the same goes for the "revelations" that America was spying on our allies, or that the NSA was collecting bulk phone call data in violation of its directives, or, or, or. Fucking hell this is what blows your minds? Governments are corrupt, well fucking stop the presses already.

I am not saying don't get mad, do get mad! This sucks! But don't act all shocked because you ignored it until they fucked up enough that the media (which remember apparently works for the government) was forced to recognize it and a number of serious people have to go on 60 minutes to talk about how it is actually the Millenials that are at fault here.

Our government is corrupt in ways that are probably unfix-able, the fact that it functions at all(sometimes) is a testament to the robustness with which it was set up. And the system as it works now does not let a non corrupt person get into power, it can't, even Bernie Sanders, who I thought was the best choice in decades for president, still got up one day and said to himself "I want to be one of the most powerful people in the world" and then worked to make it happen, do you think he never made a questionable decision, or let his ego run rampant? Because the very act of a serious run for president puts the lie to that.

Our so called "third parties" are almost just as bad, the two major ones, the Libertarians and the Green Party are pretty fringe, although for different reasons, but they suck in their own way, yes the Libertarians are worse, what with their literal privatization of everything and the fact that child slavery was quite literally in their party platform last I checked. The Greens long ago made alliance with the hard left, and while their platform is pretty sane looking at first glance, it is carefully written to attract the part of the country that is anti science in some pretty awful ways, namely on the vaccination and natural medicines front. That said I do them a disservice lumping them with the Libertarians, but again, both parties have someone who wants to be president, and both parties have to know they don't have a chance in hell, but they run anyway, and waste resources that could go down-ticket and have some hope of success on what amounts to vanity runs.

No one will save you, instant change won't happen without tearing down the system itself, and no, throwing your vote at the Green party this November doesn't count as tearing down the system, it just means you have decided to make yourself even less relevant than you already are.

Why act so surprised? Corruption scandals have plagued politicians since basically the formation of our government, the assembly of a power group broad enough to run a country as large and diverse as this one barely seems possible without shady doings, does anyone really think that 2000 was the first election stolen just because that was the most publicized? If you think that then I don't know what to tell you, your willful ignorance is just as harmful as the outright malice of the right these days.

I have no answers, I don't think there are any answers, I am just pissed off to see so many people acting shocked about what I assumed were obvious, and comparatively harmless, "leaks".