oversimplification

The problem is easy to spot, when someone else is doing it.

Take a complicated situation. Boil it down to a talking point. The one who stands to benefit won't see anything wrong with that - but the one who loses will see exactly what the problem is.

No, really - if you define "to benefit" or "to lose" to include not just obvious rewards (like winning an election), but rather in terms of furthering one's overall agenda (including things like principles), this is why the Democrats always end up feeding on their own kin at election time.

This is especially obvious right now. Putting aside the obvious (the hostility over which candidate is causing the hostility), it becomes clear on a much higher level that this is a problem from the top down.

Too many Dems in high places do not have strong principles. It's not who they are. It's not how they do business. Their real agenda is weak. They want to win and have proven themselves willing to fudge on the edges. They don't carry with them a strong enough notion of not just getting things done, but doing it the right way.

Some might argue this is the very essence of what makes a person with principle different from the average joe.

One could also argue that this is how politics is played, but that means throwing away one's right to suggest that Democrats are in any way better than any other "power is everything and might makes right" political party.

If you're not for anything, how can you be any different from anyone else?

So, now, the party of "count every vote" screams at people who want Michigan and Florida counted.

So, now, the party that prides itself on fighting discrimination hurls foul gender-based invective at a former First Lady.

Oversimplification is why the Democratic party's policies have failed. Equality was and still is a great goal - an essential goal, I would argue. But the way reforms were designed had a great big flaw: there is no way to adapt what we do to reflect what we have learned about a situation that is human, and therefore complicated. The way the Dems have gone about trying to achieve equality hasn't worked, but, because of the embedded assumptions (such as "if you don't agree with me, you are a ___ist"), nobody can talk about this. Nobody can tell the entire Democratic Party anything - because Donna Brazile is demonstrating (for anyone with lingering doubts) that she only in favor of equality when it benefits "her people".

What's astonishing to me is how that appears to be defined. She is, after all, a top official for the Democratic Party; I would have thought Democrats were "her people".

Not that she's the only one, of course. I just picked her cuz it's easier to reduce everything to one easy-to-vilify symbol.