The Democracy Trap: It’s a Rabbit Hole

Roger Simon had an interesting post this week titled Are We Now or Have We Ever Been… a Democracy? In it he attempts to explains the RNC’s Byzantine rules for their National Convention this July.

“But then, as I understand it, you can still vote for them (Kasich, Ryan, etc.) even if they’re not placed in nomination (go figure) and more importantly and most obviously, rules are made to be broken — or, if not broken, rewritten.

And who would rewrite said rules? Why the rules committee, of course (said Alice to the Mad Hatter, or vice versa). And who determines who is on the rules committee? Well, that depends. (Didn’t you just know that?) Actually there really are rules for who sits on the committee, but they vary from state to state and can be rewritten themselves. (Didn’t you just know that too?)”

So let’s just cut to the quick okay? The only rule they have is that there are no rules and even that can change.

“Plenty of opportunities for the Republican delegates to vote themselves silly to find their favorite candidate.”

“But would that be democratic? By then, the primaries and their humble voters would be far in the rear view mirror, a distant memory of one man, one woman, one vote.”

“But whatever the Republicans do, when it comes to being anti-democratic, they can’t hold a candle to the ironically named Democrats whose convention will be manipulated by the Super Delegates. The “super people” — straight out of the backroom party bosses of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — are so super important and powerful Hillary Clinton can lose to Bernie Sanders in New York and practically every other state from here on in by landslides and Her Chappaquaness still gets the Democratic Party nomination.”

Oh look said Hillary Alice, I’m growing! Right before my blue eyes!

“Going further the lawyer averred that the convention, in his view, was too early and didn’t give the warring sides sufficient time to come to terms, i.e. calm down.”

And so we find ourselves, again, at that fork in the road.

And again it’s hard to decide which way to go. Especially if it doesn’t matter. It’s enough to drive you mad.

I would suggest just one rule that each party adopt for their convention. It might not get us out of the rabbit hole butt it might prevent us from falling any further:

Simple, no? No Thinky, No Talkie. Capiche?

Perhaps I could have handled that whole Tea Party thing a little better.