GEOGRAPHY OF THE CRAZY: Donna Brazile is stark raving mad!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2017

Part 1—Her frightening role in the scary sale of the frightening Uranium One: As a courtesy, we start today with a pair of key observations:

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Yevtushenko made those controversial claims in his 1933 poem, People. We became aware of the poem in the early 1970s when we read Ivan Illych's 1971 book, Deschooling Society.

We recall nothing else of the book. We've never forgotten its detailed citation of Yevtushenko's poem.

We offer these thoughts as a soothing prologue to today's semi-discussion of Donna Brazile, who has written a new book.

No people are uninteresting, Yevtushenko alleged. Also, though, as it turns out, Donna Brazile is crazy.

We hadn't necessarily known that before, although we'd had the occasional minor impure thought.

Donna Brazile is part of The Crazy! This new fact could be highly instructive for us floundering liberal types. First, though, how do we know that Brazile is nuts?

Simple! We know Donna Brazile is crazy because:

(1) "We understand the English language, it's our mother tongue" (Sam Ervin). But also because:

(2) Prompted by Kevin Drum's UPDATE, we read the front page of yesterday's Washington Post.

At the top of that front page, we encountered a 2400-word news report about Brazile's "explosive" new book. Here's the way that report began, hard-copy headlines included:

RUCKER (11/7/17): Brazile weighed replacing Clinton/
Book details thoughts after nominee fainted

Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated setting in motion a process to replace Hillary Clinton as the party's 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton's fainting spell, in part because Clinton's campaign was "anemic" and had taken on "the odor of failure."

In an explosive new memoir, Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the process of removing Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton's Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.

Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, "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."

Did Donna Brazile "seriously contemplate" dumping Candidate Clinton after her "fainting spell" in September 2016? Did she seriously contemplate dumping Clinton and Tim Kaine, replacing them with Biden and Booker?

We tend to doubt that, but if she did, Donna Brazile is nuts. If she didn't, then she has invented a ludicrous tale, maybe perhaps with the possible thought that an "explosive" claim of this type might produce headlines atop the Post's front page for her exciting new page-turner.

Is Donna Brazile just making this up, perhaps to hype book sales? If so, it wouldn't be the first time that somebody hyped a boring book with an "explosive" claim about the troubling Clinton.

Tomorrow, we'll recall the "explosive" claim Bob Woodward made, or didn't make, in his otherwise deadly 1996 book, The Choice. Woodward quickly began rejecting the way his explosive claim was being interpreted in the press.

According to today's Washington Post, Donna Brazile is now involved in the same old game.

Did Donna Brazile just make this shit up? We'd have to say that's possible! As a courtesy, though, we'll assume that she didn't make this up.

That would mean that Brazile is nuts, crazy, stark raving mad. Consider:

In October 2016, Brazile was canned by CNN for a dishonest act which, according to Rucker, she apparently says she can't remember but also doesn't deny. In that dishonest act, she had tried to help Candidate Clinton prevail over Candidate Sanders in the Democratic nomination race.

According to Rucker, Brazile can't recall committing that act, but she also doesn't deny it. Now we're told that, in September 2016, she contemplating dumping Clinton from the national ticket. This would have required an astounding political action, an action which has never occurred in our nation's political history.

If she really considered doing that, Donna Brazile is nuts. In your other possible choice, her explosive claim is the latest stupid fake story designed to excite us excitable rubes while serving the interests, and/or lining the pockets, of the person who pimped it.

Our political discourse has reeked of such claims for the past twenty-five years. And sure enough! Aother such claim was being discussed in yesterday's Washington Post.

We refer to the frightening claim that Hillary Clinton concocted a scary uranium deal with Those People, the Russkies. More specifically, the Post's chief fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, examined the very scary claim that Clinton gave away twenty percent of the nation's uranium to the aforementioned Russkies in the scary sale of the company, Uranium One.

Kessler examined that ubiquitous claim, and uh-oh! When he finished, he awarded Four Pinocchios to Rep. Devin Nunes and to Tucker Carlson for making that explosive claim about the twenty percent, which he said is more like two. Not that anyone has ever shown that Clinton had anything to do with this apparently trivial deal.

(On this occasion, Kessler made no mention of the New York Times, who transferred this stupid tale from the fever swamps of the crackpot right to our elite mainstream discourse. The famous paper performed this service in an explosive, 4400-word "news report" in April 2015, the latest ridiculous act by the Times which career liberals ignored.)

Was Kessler's assessment beyond reproach? We'll examine that question in the days ahead. But in a nutshell (no pun intended), this is where The Visible Crazy resided in yesterday's Post:

Atop page A1, the latest crazy claim or claims were being fashioned about Clinton. Atop page A4, a crazy claim the Times took mainstream was being debunked again.

Our public discourse has been lousy with crazy claims of this type for the past several decades. Crazy people like Donna Brazile form a very significant part of this crazy history, a history which has left us with Donald J. Trump in the White House.

Atop A1, one crazy claim; atop A4, another! As the week proceeds, these episodes will help us examine the modern geography of The Crazy. Also, the nature of the people who prosper as they sell these explosive claims.

The modern geography of The Crazy is extremely complex. It stretches back through many episodes, through numerous crazy claims.

No people are uninteresting, but many of their claims are fake, self-serving. We liberals have tended to sit on our hands as these crazy claims are advanced, especially when the claims are advanced by the big grinning stars of the mainstream and liberal press corps.

Tomorrow, we'll start with Woodward's crazy claim from The Summer of 96. But oh, the distance we hope to travel before the week is done!

Tomorrow: Robert Woodward's explosive claim about the crazy seance