by
Justin Raimondo

Recently by Justin Raimondo: Our
Truth, and Theirs

No one believed
the vote on the “God and Jerusalem” wording in the Democratic platform
was conducted fairly or democratically: a two-thirds vote was required
to restore the deleted words and that clearly
– and audibly – didn’t happen. Neither the audience nor
the news media was convinced by Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s
ruling that the amendment passed. But no matter. As he
told the Los Angeles Times, the Mayor has the good opinion
of those who really count:

“I can
tell you this – the president of the United States said, ‘Wow.’
The president said, ‘You showed why you were speaker of the California
Assembly. The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of
them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that.’”

Democracy
shemocracy! Who cares when the Supreme
Leader claps you on the back and congratulates you for a job
well done? In that Villaraigosa moment, the true contours of power
in the world’s greatest democracy were revealed.

The little
people – i.e. the delegates, the voters, and those who have
stopped voting for precisely this reason – are irrelevant pawns,
to be moved about the chessboard by these giants.

“It was a
lot of ado about nothing,” said Villaraigosa, misquoting and well
as misusing Shakespeare:

“When reporters
told him after the vote that they did not clearly hear two-thirds
support, he responded, ‘That’s nice to know. I was the chairman
and I did, and that was the prerogative of the chair.’”

This is the
face of our political class: arrogant,
authoritarian,
and on the level of some banana
republic south of the border. Welcome to the New America, where
leader-worship has taken the place of politics, Team Red and Team
Blue battle it out to see who gets to be El Supremo for the next
four years, and politics resembles a prolonged soccer game.

At least the
Republicans ran their operation with a modicum of formal “democracy.”
It wasn’t their fault the bus driver bringing Morton
Blackwell, chief opponent of the controversial rules change,
to the convention somehow got “lost.” The Paul delegates were a
minority, albeit a vocal
and well-organized one, and they got voted down squarely if
not fairly.

Villaraigosa
didn’t bother with such old-fashioned formalities: he simply asserted
his “prerogative” and declared the amendment passed. One dictionary
defines prerogative as follows:

“1.
An exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially
a hereditary or official right.

“2.
The exclusive right and power to command, decide, rule, or judge:
the principal’s prerogative to suspend a student.

“3. A
special quality that confers superiority.”

His Honor’s
choice of words reflects the mindset of his class – an increasingly
assertive political class which views itself as a justly privileged
elite. These paladins of the New
Order are brazen because they know they can get away with it:

“Villaraigosa
noted that any delegate who objected to the process could have made
a formal challenge within 10 minutes of the vote. ‘Not one person
objected. It’s more a media concern than a delegate concern.’”

I don’t know
whether this is true, and I certainly wouldn’t take Villaraigosa’s
word for it. If there are any antiwar Democratic delegates to that
convention, who might be in a position to know, please write me
– because it’s an important point. If indee d no one rose to
object and register a formal challenge to the decision of the chair,
then what passes for the “left” today is truly as dead as I’ve long
maintained.
I’m not talking about the Marxist left, which has too extensive
a history
to be uprooted even by the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Adlai
Stevenson type liberals and the plentiful peaceniks-for-Obama who
put the old Bush-is-Hitler antiwar coalition in mothballs when Obama
took the oath of office.

As the third
vote was taken, with the same audibly fifty-fifty results, Villaraigosa
didn’t have to worry about what to do: the decision had already
been made for him. As Fox News caught
on camera, the teleprompter telegraphed the results before the
vote was even taken.

As low as
my opinion is of the Democratic party, that this happened in America,
rather than North
Korea, is hard to believe.

Read
the rest of the article

September
15, 2012

Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

Copyright
© 2012 Antiwar.com

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