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Having been on DU for quite a while, having been through the bloodbath and mayhem that was the 2004 Primaries, I would have to immodestly say I've been around the block on here. Having been around said block doesn't prepare one for what both the supporters on here of Clinton and Obama have been engaging in.
DUers like me who remember those days, when you had vicious eight-way brawls between the supporters of the candidates, remember that as bad as things were, there was never such a concentrated effort to alienate so many Democrats with such heavy-handed efforts. While there was certainly a great deal of flamebait and guttertrash dredged up and poured in the streets, at the end of the day there never was such a concentrated effort to strongarm people into supporting someone they did not like. What is happening to Edwards and his people right now and has been happening to Kuicinich did not, to my recollection, occur on any real scale in 2004. What we have here is not politics anymore, this is no-holds-barred zero-sum bloodshed. Both the people working on here for Obama and Clinton are equally guilty, it is not even a matter of angles and degrees anymore. Both groups have decided in their quest for victory to engage in total war, to settle for nothing less than absolute dominion with those who will not join them left with nothing but scorched earth.
Many have compared the previous primary season to having been a battlefield, and certainly that comparison is apt. But if 2004 was the frontlines of a conventional fight, the supporters of the top two have decided to up the ante and turn the key. If one could say 2004 could be likened to the mud-choked wire-infested mire of Flanders Fields or the smoke-filled rubble-strewn streets and alleys of Leningrad then considering how things have been shaping up here 2008 will be most certainly remembered as a blasted, eradicated, utterly immolated nuclear wasteland populated only with the dead or the dying with the only sounds being the mournful howl of the winds and the groans and screams of the innocent bystanders whose only crime was not choosing a side.
Yet both groups seem to forget one thing when they so eagerly seek to destroy all who will not join them. The object of war, as much as politics, is to capture territory, to hold it, to make it your own and exploit it to your best use. When you cross into enemy territory and instead of conquering you slash, burn, devastate, and desecrate, you leave yourself with nothing to work with. If you instead of holding the land taken ruin the roads, blast the bridges, demolish the dams, immolate all industry, and salt the earth so nothing may rise again you are left with nothing. All you have is some acres of land that, while may be good for your ego and look quite nice on a map, ultimately gives you nothing and will give you nothing. If the option you give all who you meet is either surrender or die, do not be surprised if the vast majority having seen what you did to their neighbors will take up arms and fight to the bitter end than live on bended knee.
While both these warring hordes do battle for the party's body, they forget that in doing so in such a ruthless fashion, in seeking to turn all who stand against them into a living Hell on Earth, they do most calamitous and irreversible harm to the party's soul. For the Democratic Party, as they seem to forget, is not a top-down hierarchy where its members fall in line when the orders are given but a collection of groups and individuals who share similar ideas. If in seeking victory the Big Two devastate all others, they will most certainly reap what they have sown. Both sides seem to forget that this is not something trivial like the Super Bowl or March Madness, this is determining who will lead this party in an election that will change the course of the history of this country and the world. There is little harm in contests of sport or chance in upsetting those who you compete with, but in contests of politics the greatest danger is pushing those who are not with you too far and refusing to act at all. This coming election is ours to LOSE, and if the partisans for Obama and Clinton continue in the fashion they have, lose they shall.
Yet it is not just their candidates or party who loses if we hand the reigns of power back to the same cabal who has run amok for the past seven years. It is the whole country. Those are the stakes, and all involved must always remember that you shall reap what you sow, and if one plants the seeds of destruction then a most bitter crop can be the only outcome, bitter not just for the Democratic Party but for the United States of America.
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