Somewhere along this long and drawn out Democratic primary process, the Clinton machine lost site of the goal. When things started looking tough for Hillary, the machine simply forgot about the good of the country and decided to use every twist and turn to get elected. What started out as a healthy, respectable and competitive political challenge became something ugly. The machine decided it was now a no holds barred old fashioned World Wrestling Federation Cage Match to the death. There were several places along the way that the party could have become unified like never before, but as often happens in politics egos prevailed. It has turned into something that is not a pretty site.
A couple of decades ago I saw Ralph Nader speak at Virginia Tech. In Ralph's early days he fought tirelessly as a consumer advocate fighting corporations and drawing attention to horrible quality or dangerous products the market. With his book, Unsafe At Any Speed, a car called the Corvair died a quick and unceremonious death. It was a cute car but had a nasty habit of flipping over while being driven. I hate when that happens. As he talked about the Corvair and a variety of other atrocities in the corporate world, many people in the audience nervously laughed. I asked him about the laughter and he said sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.
That is the point I have reached as I watch the Clinton spin game. The spin-to-win at all costs has me laughing to keep from crying. I am not naïve and understand that the political game is sometimes played that way. We have all listened to the idea of changing the rules and the different ways to count the votes to favor Hillary. We all painfully listened to the attempt to talk about how good it was to win Indiana when we all knew what the slim victory really meant. However, there comes a time when the spinning does nothing but make you sick.
It's reminds me of the piece of playground equipment found in almost every school yard 25 or 30 years ago. It was a mini merry-go-round with pipe rails looped up so you could hang on as your 'best friends' tried to spin it so fast that you would fly off and tumble across the asphalt covered playground. Aaahh, the good old days.
The bad thing about that piece of playground equipment was that it made you very dizzy and usually made you very sick. I once heard it affectionately referred to as the Puke Machine. As every day passes, the Clinton machine seems more and more like that old Puke Machine. It has been spinning for so long everyone is very dizzy. I am begging as a Radical Centrist for an end to the spin. The country needs it to end and the Democratic Party certainly needs it to end. Please stop the spinning before we are all throwing up.