My mind is still blown after Donna Fucking Brazile come out yesterday to confirm that the DNC "rigged" the primary for Hillary Clinton:

The agreement--signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias--specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn't write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

...I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party's integrity.

(Also click through to see how Obama and Debbie Wasserman Schultz ran the DNC into the ground in the first place, and for more on that, see here. Also, Elizabeth Warren now agrees that the primary was "rigged".)

One laughable defense i've seen from people still circling their wagons around Clinton is that Clinton didn't buy the DNC and infiltrate it, she saved it with her own money and didn't even take credit for it! And besides, Bernie was offered the same deal and didn't take it, because he didn't care about downticket races!

It's a joke on several fronts. As Brazile notes (and as we already knew), the whole thing was a money laundering scheme. Wealthy donors that wanted to give Clinton more than the legal limit donated the rest to the "Victory Fund" which went to the states. That money then got funneled back to the DNC, which spent it on Clinton. Clinton didn't "save" anything. Neither downticket candidates nor the DNC held on to that money. And the DNC is still broke.

Sanders didn't "participate" in this scheme because he was getting his donations at $27 a pop, so no one was going over the legal limit. And most importantly, Sanders never had a deal that allowed him to replace the DNC communications, financing, and strategy teams with pod people, as Brazile says Clinton did.

The other "rebuttal" i'm seeing is that even if this is all true, it doesn't prove that Bernie would have won a fair primary. But that's not the point. Regardless of who you supported, you should want the DNC to be a neutral arbiter. We already knew that the debate schedule was rigged in Clinton's favor. We know how superdelates were used in the media to create a sense of inevitability for Clinton. We know that Brazile herself fed Clinton debate questions (one reason why her allegation now is so explosive). We now know that all messaging from the DNC was orchestrated by the Clinton campaign, which obviously affected media coverage of the race. There was a ton of shady shit going on at the local level - like major voter disenfranchisement - and it no longer seems like a conspiracy theory to suggest that such things were being directed from on high.

The primary process should be fair. Normally the cliche is that you want to avoid even the perception of bias because you want voters to trust the process. In this case, the bias (putting it mildly) was real. This is important not just for relitigating the primary, but going forward. Some (not very smart) people attribute Clinton's loss to the 10% of Bernie primary voters who didn't vote for Clinton in the general (even though 24% of Clinton voters voted for McCain in 2008). That number is going to get a lot bigger if primary voters believe that the game is rigged.