THIS STINKS!

I haven't had much to say about the Donna Brazile allegations against the Clintons, except in comments at Thought Criminal.

But this is taking on the stink of mendacity:

As reported by Philip Rucker, Brazile writes in her new book that she became concerned with Clinton’s candidacy — calling it, “anemic” and saying it had taken on “the odor of failure.”

“Again and again I thought about Joe Biden,” Brazile wrote, adding “No matter my doubts and my fears about the election and Hillary as a candidate, I could not make good on that threat to replace her.”

Brazile writes that she considered multiple candidates to replace Clinton but backed off attempting to drop the first female Presidential candidate.

“I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them,” she wrote.

Is Brazile really trying to convince us she had the authority to replace Clinton? *(Josh Marshall confirms that she, in fact, did not.)  Talk about a weak candidacy!  And after telling us Clinton had bought the DNC body and soul (a gross exaggeration that doesn't pass the smell test itself), and "rigged" everything so she (Clinton) could win?

This is what a party does when it loses and is leaderless:  it looks for scapegoats while waiting for a leader.  Fact is, both parties are leaderless at the moment.  Trump is no more a Republican than Sanders is a Democrat, and both are too old and feckless (in their separate ways) to provide new leadership to the party.  In fact, if this analysis is correct:

In 26 states he remains above the threshold of 50 percent approval, giving him enough electoral college votes to pull off a win in the 2020 election. A survey conducted by NPR late October showed that 55 percent of white Americans believe white people face discrimination.

If anything, some of the white voters who support Trump on immigration and racial issues think he doesn’t go far enough. For a poll tracking how Trump’s support is slipping in rural areas published in early October, Reuters spoke with John Wilson, a 70-year-old retired banker in Ohio who voted for Trump. One of his main worries was Trump might back down from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.

Then the only hope the Democrats have of defeating Trump is to run another black candidate.  It's the only chance they have to overwhelm the angry white old guy vote.

Brazile wants her turd polished on her way off the stage.  It's ignominious, but it's small beer compared to the need to field a candidate, not just a platform, who will bury the GOP's racism in history's grave.

*Josh Marshall puts the stake in the heart of this nonsense:

This and other claims from Brazile’s book which have come out in the last few hours only confirm me in thinking that her claims are at least self-serving, in other cases highly improbable and in some cases literally impossible.

And he draws the right conclusion:

I can’t say I think this controversy is worth it because I think it is fundamentally based on falsehoods and ones that resurface all the most toxic battles of 2016. But rethinking the way the DNC works would be a good thing. The DNC is the one committee whose stakeholders should be all Democrats – not the DCCC, which works for House incumbents or the DSCC or the DSCC which works for Senate incumbents. It should never be about one candidate or one election cycle. It is a genuine shame that someone like Donna Brazile, who has worked so hard and so consistently in Democratic politics for decades, has now chosen to make it all about herself.

One is tempted to say Trump is truly poisonous, that he's infected Donna Brazile with the same egomania he displays.  That's too simple, of course, and confusing correlation for causation.  It can't be cured or expunged from the psyche, but just as Harvey Weinstein is highlighting how truly heinously some men treat women (and too many such men, whatever percentage of the population they actually represent), Trump highlights the problems of self-aggrandizement.  Perhaps we can at least learn some self-examination from these public crises and lessons.