Even as Hillary is sighted, somewhat like that bear, slipping out of the woods back into the mainstream, I see again and again the disgruntled comments arising in each story, the "we wuz robbed", the "DNC rigged the primaries", the "crooked woman", and the "party left us" kind of betrayed mentality you seldom see so strong except for WWI German vets distraught over Versailles. Not just a few comments - *DOMINATING* the comments section.

It's not like Mayor Daley calling out the cops to break protesters' heads at the '68 convention, or LBJ having his friends register & vote several cemeteries. It's not like Kennedy's father buying off the Democratic establishment to push JFK's candidacy or putting a friend temporarily in a Senate seat to reserve it for Ted or holding up the Illinois results in 1960 to find a few more votes. It's not like the array of Democrats who undermined McGovern's '72 candidacy far beyond his foolish nomination of Eagleton. It's nothing like the old-time smoky backroom wheeling-and-dealing that chose VPs and sometimes Presidents. It's nothing like purged voter rolls and polling place challenges that black voters have to fight against every election. It wasn't Bernie's own internal emails and strategy papers being hacked like his opoponent's and leaked out for the world to know. It wasn't even like a CREEP organized attack on Muskie via an anonymous letter + the main Manchester, NH paper attacking Muskie's wife and then claiming he'd cried (somehow unnoticed by the NY Times reporter standing next to him in the snow).  And certainly nothing egregious like Bernard Shaw asking Dukakis in a debate whether his wife being raped and killed would change his mind on the death penalty. It's nothing like being accused of hiding Parkinson's Disease and having the world's press condemn you for not being more open over a cold. It's certainly nothing like RFK's campaign being stopped in cold blood in an LA kitchen.

It's rather hard to see where all this expectation of easy sailing and powderpuff softball politics came from, or where the impression from a few mild emails confirms the worst of a sinister plot to break up a promising arousing competitor's campaign.

Back in 1972, as Nixon faced the first blowback from Watergate, an unknown southern governor took the ambitious step of chairing the Democratic Governor's Campaign Committee and in 1974 took over as head of campaigns for the Democratic National Committee, aka DNC. Instead of waiting for the traditional start of season back when presidential campaigns lasted just over a year, he announced his presidential candidacy by end of 1974, beating a large pack of contenders to the gate. While some candidates avoided Iowa & New Hampshire, Carter set out to get a bit of skin on each occasion - pulling a suprising 2nd in Iowa and numerous upsets in the critical first months. Later in the campaign, liberals protested his candidacy with a futile "Anyone But Carter" movement. Carter had seen the end of backroom dealing coming through and as they say, early bird got the worm.

[When Castro planned *his* revolution, he spent years in jail, time in exile in Mexico, launched a fairly well-planned & daring boat raid across the sea, and hid out for months in the jungle conducting guerrilla hit-and-run missions].

Contrast that with last year's "insurrection" that started over *1 1/2 months after* (May 30) the main contender and presumptive nominee announced her candidacy at already the late date in April 13, 2015. The challenger then proceeded to get in tiffs with the main democratic organization over debate schedules, and later sued the DNC when his staff was found exploiting a database glitch to access his opponent's records. Continually he declared the process rigged, refused to accept results of elections, continually pointed to the long-known superdelegate situation that had sunk his opponent in 2008 as cheating, and promised a messy fight to the convention despite already having lost badly in numbers of elected delegates.

In short, the usurper did his best to make it likely the party would *not* welcome his candidacy, even though there was certainly a lot of enthusiasm for his bid and ideas, as shown by their half-adoption at the convention, and the DNC did adjust the debate schedule to give him the extra debates he desired.

Still, he did not clearly win these debates, and while he managed some impressive populist fundraising, he did not overwhelm the favorite in funds, and overall he did poorly in primaries while pulling some surprises in caucuses that were tinier, less strict, and more open to upsets through fewer participants.

He lost 3 of the 4 February contests (unsurprisingly winning the NH primary in his back yard), and lost 8 of the 13 "Super Tuesday" events, putting him behind 467-663 by March 5 and 861-1170 by March 15 in *PLEDGED* delegates, with Clinton safehouses in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, NJ, and California to come - i.e. most populous states #1, #4, #5, #11, #14, #19,

Additionally, despite being a lost cause anyway, Bernie did not come through on his Joe Namath promise about California - despite loads of speculation about its slow-counting system and loud claims of vote theft, Hillary won easily by 7% and 350,000 votes to end an already decided primary season.

Aside from a couple well-publicized claims of Hillary being severly ill with Parkinsons or being about to be indicted by the FBI.

Which is when Wikileaks stepped in to keep tempers flared, dripping out hacked emails that showed some partisan emails within the DNC, mostly from May - when the primary was all but over, suggesting (but rejected) a couple naughty underhanded tactics to get Bernie to concede or go away.

And so the permanent split was solidified - a healthy chunk of Sanders supporters committed to never giving Clinton the time of day, with the feeling that they had been unfairly treated - the invitation to help write the Democratic platform at the convention doing little to heal the wound, or perhaps even exacerbating it.

It's ironic that Tom Perez, the supposed Obama-Clinton choice to lead the DNC, slipped out with a "primaries were rigged" proclamation (to attract Bernie factions away from Keith Ellison???) before he quickly put that outburst back in (Pandora's?) box.

So now we're left with a seemingly permanently disgruntled faction of the party (or independents, depending), with a permanent split and a heavy tilt *against* the fairly mainstream measures that typically poll well for the bigger majorities of the populace.

Again and again we will see that the positions that easily won Clinton the nomination and still won her the popular vote despite Comey & blocked voter access will be seen as a "failure" to be discarded, and the opposition faction will demand a new tack to the left to rebuild the party.

But there will be no healing until people decide to heal - or like in Germany, until they burn the whole shithouse down. And at this point it doesn't seem as if the farther left care to compromise or play nice at all.

I'm at a loss to see what will assuage this feeling of betrayal, that the system is so corrupt that it can't be trusted with anything, yet it's the system we go to elections with (and we're in a minority position anyway - perhaps shining well in opposition, but still far from prepared to take 2018 elections and reverse Republican hegemony).

I'm at a loss to what will allow even the most innocuous comment to pass muster without invoking the "she did-no she didn't" barbs, or even to know how much is from Bernie fans and how much from sock puppets.

While the press had a field day with the "anti-establishment" tone of the campaign year, it was largely a self-serving proclamation - it fed their news cycle, it kept people interested, and it was a largely an outburst of contrafactual utterings and substance-free declarations that left both candidates and the press free to write pretty much anything they liked, including the poorly justified polling data that fed a thousand conspiracies.

Maybe it's nothing, but the Ellison-Perez proxy fight seemed real enough, another North-v-South internecine battle among many that resolved little but stirred up a lot.

Trump and his buddies at Wikileaks and especially those in Moscow must be quite pleased.

Some time ago Rod Serling did an episode where all aliens had to do was turn on and off a few lights to get the people of a town to panic, to start fighting and killing among each other. Seems it's easier than that - a few emails, tweets or Facebook posts and we're easily turned. We do live in the Twilight Zone - progressive and modern? or the butt of a familiar ironic tale 50 years after it went off the air?