Just when you thought there was nothing else that Hillary’s minions could say or do to make you dry heave in terror (like, for example, claim that perennially pampered Florida voters are facing Zimbabwe-esque levels of political oppression), Harold Ickes has gone and done it.

Yes, it’s true that today’s DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting was an overall win for Obama, in that, shitshow* notwithstanding, the Committee decided to seat the FL and Michigan delegations with half-votes each, and to give Obama the uncommitted delegates from Michigan. Yes, Obama is still going to be the nominee, as he now has 2050 delegates, needs 2118 to clinch, and will pick up at least 40 between now and the final primaries in South Dakota and Montana on Tuesday, meaning that he needs only 20 of the remaining 200 superdelegates to finish the job. And yes, Hillary did indeed have every right to fight for her desired outcome, which her surrogates did in a losing effort to seat the Florida delegation with full votes before unanimously backing the half-vote compromise.

But Harold Ickes needs to get a grip. When it came time to talk Michigan, a state where Obama (and Edwards) had taken his name off of the ballot, where “Uncommitted” had garnered 45% of the vote, where turnout was absolutely anemic because there was only one candidate running (in Soviet Russia, election wins you!), Ickes had the gall to say that Hillary should get her delegates and Obama should get none, and then got so huffy about it that he threatened to take that dispute to the convention.

Huh? For a campaign that has been playing fast and loose with the word “disenfranchisement” it’s pretty befuddling to think that counting the results of an election with only one candidate on the ballot, where more people stayed home than voted, without any consideration of those factors is not basically the worst solution. Wouldn’t such a solution disenfranchise those non-voters? And what about all of the African American voters who went with uncommitted, you know, the ones who will be absolutely crucial to winning Michigan?

“Fannie Lou” Ickes cannot be bothered with such trifling matters. Here he is debasing himself in a duke-it-out with Sen. Carl Levin:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PewIXrzzazo]

Levin is right, of course: there is no perfectly representative solution to a flawed process. One might even note that Sen Levin was instrumental in creating this flawed process, indeed driven to do so by his intemperate hatred of the Iowa/New Hampshire duopoly. Still, Harold Ickes is a total dick.

Of course, as an insider shill, his behavior is to be expected. What’s even scarier are the eerie similarities between the “Count My Vote (Only)” protesters who spent the entire 12 hour long meeting heckling and disrupting the proceedings, and the “protestors” who took to the streets in Florida in 2000 - you know, the ones who it later turned out were not democracy-loving Sunshine staters but rather GOP operatives flown in from DC.

This, my friends, is what we call astroturf - manufactured, faux grassroots action, the political equivalent of psy-ops. So far, it looks like the media is falling for it. On the one hand, you have Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party being bandied about by HRC’s surrogates as evidence that Hillary’s campaign is somehow the civil rights movement of the 21st century. On the other hand, you have this ridiculousness, which I believe is fairly deemed a shitshow:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KACQuZVAE3s]

Absolutely unbelievable. Fannie Lou Hamer is rolling over in her grave at this crap.

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