We TOLD Howard Dean First!

Greta Van Susteren has a question up on her blog, GretaWire, asking if PUMAs are real.  Boy, is she getting an ear/eyeful!  She also has an accompanying video up of Sarah Palin’s speech with John McCain, but nobody’s paying attention to that.  PUMA after PUMA is expressing all the outrage we’ve felt over the way the Democrats have treated us this year.  What’s interesting is that while Hillary Clinton’s name comes up, since she bore the brunt of the abuse, it probably is mentioned no more than the names of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile.  All the pent-up anger and frustration we, and people like us who didn’t even know they were PUMAs, have been feeling, is pouring out from keyboard after keyboard in an unrelenting deluge.

There is this notion being put forth by some in the media, pushed by the DeaNC and the Obamacrats, no doubt, that the PUMA movement is a myth.  Somebody wants people to believe that a few Republicans have been making mischief by infiltrating the Democratic party and agitating the base.  Whoever is trying to peddle this poop knows better.

The way the primaries unfolded didn’t sit right with us voters not jumping on the O train, but we gave the Dems the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe there was something to this guy we weren’t seeing.  But week after week, more and more stink kept rising.  The Rules and Bylaws committee was the last straw.  See, unlike the Obots, we’re not kids.  We see, and we know what we’re looking at.  “Rules are rules,”  “we all agreed” and all that other parental sounding happy crappy is fine and dandy if you don’t know that “the rules” are always fluid and “we all agreed” not to mention that “we all know” there are “rules around the rules.”  We also know fair is fair, and “rules or no rules,” the nomination process between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was not fair.  Two hour private “lunches” at a public meeting on the same day the preferred candidate “sees the light” and dumps his contentious church, for which he is rewarded with delegates he couldn’t possibly have  earned, not being on the ballot, don’t exactly inspire confidence.  But that’s not the point.  We can re-litigate the primaries later, I’m happy to do it.  But right now what I want to address is the notion that the DeaNC and the media are surprised that we exist.

We told Howard Dean! He’s the one who sat up in the RBC meeting and called for “party unity” signaling from the jump that we were going to get screwed.  We knew that going in, but the blatant, dare I say it, “audacity” of these petty criminals trying to “hoodwink” and “bamboozle” people who wrote the game, in broad daylight, no less, was unbelievably appalling.  That was  the moment PUMA was born.  Party Unity My Ass!

On the Confluence, a website founded by Riverdaughter, angry HRC supporters gathered to vent. One of them SM77, christened the movement.  From the Confluence about page:

SM77: Our spicy Latina in Florida gave PUMA a name when she said after the RBC hearing in May: Party Unity My Ass!

The sentiment was already there, however.  All the PUMA movement needed at that point was a name.  And that name went viral.  More than one group co-opted it and adapted it to their vision, and while different groups took different approaches, throughout this loose-knit coalition, the underlying mission was the same: screw you back, DNC!

One of the PUMA groups, PUMA Pac, changed the acronym to mean People United Means Action and, in short order, became a registered pac.  But they didn’t start that way.  The frustrated visitors to their new website wanted to do something so they soon started organizing various missions called “action alerts”  One of the first was an e-mail campaign to Howard Dean. On Jun 5, 2008, this call to action was printed:

All Pumas, please send an email to Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee right now @ howarddean@dnc.org

Tell him that we are Democrats who will not vote for Barack Obama for president. We will not support a “Unity Ticket” with Hillary Clinton as the vice-president. We will not donate one thin dime to the DNC or any of its affiliate organizations until they wake up, listen to the voices of the voters in ALL 50 states, and start distancing themselves from this disastrous nominee.

Subsequent “action alerts” from PUMA Pac and many of the other groups, organizations and websites in, and out, of the Just Say No Deal coalition alerted the heck out of Brazile and Pelosi, too.  And if you check with them, they have their own stories of how they came to be and what they’ve done about their anger.  So, as you can see, the DeaNC knew about PUMA almost as soon as we did.  As well they should.  They started it.  They started us.

And the rest will be history.

PUMA

Just Say No Deal