Summary: Bernard Sanders and his toxic Berniebros are setting up the Democratic Party for another vicious, internecine battle just like the one they inflicted upon the Party in 2016. In 2016, the target of their toxic, misogynistic rage was Hillary Clinton. Now it is Pete Buttigieg. No matter where you go on social media, any news item or mention of Mayor Pete will be polluted by the ineluctable swarm of nasty, hateful, homophobic comments from Sanders supporters. It really is time to put an end to Bernard Sanders’s hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party.
--------------------------------------
As the 2016 Democratic primary got underway, with Hillary Clinton quickly emerging as the prohibitive favorite of the Party, Bernard Sanders and his supporters made it very clear that they weren’t having any of it. On leading social media, whether Facebook or Twitter, the Berniebros unleashed a torrent of toxic, hateful misogyny and dog whistle racism.
Sanders, an ideologue of the “my way or the highway” school, made only minimal efforts to control the bad behavior of his supporters. Even when it had become mathematically impossible for Sanders to secure the Democratic nomination, he and his supporters continued their monthslong temper tantrum. When Hillary administered an epic shellacking to Sanders in primaries throughout the deep South, where, as the sometime First Lady to Bill Clinton, “America’s first black president,” she polled remarkably well among electorates of color, Sanders dismissed those results as being, in effect, just the votes of a bunch of uppity Negroes. When Sanders was called upon to explain how he had been instrumental in trying to poison the small African-American community of Barnwell, South Carolina and the minuscule Latino colonia of Sierra Blanca, Texas with nuclear waste from Vermont, he refused to do so.
When the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton to be its candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Sanders was observed to be visibly pouting, and his supporters staged a walkout and a protest in front of the convention center, where they chanted Trump campaign slogans. Instead of committing wholeheartedly and full-throatedly to support the nominee of the Party, Sanders’s support for Sec. Clinton was pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
The list of Sanders’s crimes against the Democratic Party in 2016 was lengthy and extensive. His supporters hacked a DNC database. When they were caught, and the party imposed mild, tepid, woefully non-deterrent sanctions, the Sanders campaign turned around and sued the DNC and its leadership. Bernard Sanders failed to reprove in any meaningful way his supporters who had made a pig’s breakfast of the Nevada caucuses, threatening death and other serious bodily harm to senior officials of the Nevada Democratic Party. His remonstrance to his supporters was, again, pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
Moreover, as the delegate math made Sanders’s path to the Democratic nomination increasingly untenable, his supporters – with his tacit approval– eagerly fabricated and disseminated what the Germans might call a disinformation Dolchstoßlegende, in other words, a convenient narrative to excuse and exonerate the Sanders campaign for having lost the primary to Hillary Clinton by nearly 4 million votes. This convenient “stab in the back” narrative, accused the DNC and Hillary Clinton supporters of having “stolen” the nomination from Bernard Sanders by every nefarious means available.
This bit of information warfare was eagerly prosecuted by Russian asset Julian Assange through WikiLeaks, a notorious disseminator of Kremlin disinformation. The Dolchstoßlegende of the “stolen primary” was also eagerly and uncritically disseminated by such leftist media outlets as The Nation, the Intercept, Jacobin, and others, including the ridiculous H.A. Goodman writing in the Huffington Post. As much as the forming-at-the-mouth neo-Leninist, neo-Trotskyite militant tendencies of the left rallied to the support of the Burlington Bolshevik, so, too, did the campaign of Donald Trump. Indeed, the extent to which Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers enthusiastically and uncritically availed themselves of Trump talking points against Hillary became something of a scandal within the Democratic Party.
Following the nominating convention at Philadelphia, Sanders’s supporters continued eagerly and uncritically to repeat the Trump/WikiLeaks talking points against Sec. Clinton as if they were gospel. In short, Bernard Sanders and his toxic, redeless, mostly millennial followers did everything they could to harm Hillary Clinton, to harm the Democratic Party, and to make it abundantly clear that Bernard Sanders was, has been, and continues to be, a fifth column operator for Donald Trump.
Now in 2020, not satisfied with having stabbed Hillary Clinton in the back in the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders is trying to do it all over again. This time, however, his target is former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. There is underway, an organized, coordinated, deliberate, open and notorious effort on the part of the Sanders campaign to conduct social media information warfare and agitprop against Mr. Buttigieg.
On every social media thread you can find that even mentions Pete Buttigieg, the hateful, toxic, dog whistle homophobic, obviously-coordinated-by-the-Sanders-campaign attacks are abundant. As in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have eagerly fabricated anew what the Germans would call ein anderer neues Doschstoßlegende, another new, convenient, “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back narrative intended to exonerate or excuse any poorer than expected performance in any given contest in which Sanders is a participant.
For Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers have constructed a mythos of his divine right entitlement to victory in any democratic electoral contest in which his name is on a ballot or a presidential preference card.(referencing, of course, the utterly clusterfucked Iowa caucuses, which ought to be abolished) If Sanders is not victorious in these particular contests, his campaign quickly whips up a set of talking points, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks. The anger of the Sanders campaign at the effrontery of voters who choose other candidates is palpable and Trumpian.
Following the Iowa caucuses, Sanders and his people lashed out at Mayor Pete because Mayor Pete had been an Uppity Enough Homosexual to claim victory, a perfectly reasonable undertaking given how the trendlines and numbers were pointing ineluctably in that direction. The Sanders people threw an earsplitting snit, largely because they had expected to run away with the Iowa caucuses and were pipped at the post by That Uppity Homosexual from South Bend. After all, how dare a “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” intrude on territory reserved by Divine Right for the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik?
Now, with the New Hampshire primary just three days away, we can expect the Sanders people to enable their candidate’s usual narcissistic, Trumpian behavior. We may expect more and nastier attacks on Buttigieg, on Warren, on Biden, and on just about every other Democratic candidate who doesn’t bend the knee and acknowledge the Divine Right of Bernard Sanders to the nomination.
Unfortunately for him, Bernard Sanders is not a Democrat. His disdain for the Democratic Party is a matter of public record. His numbers in Iowa were less than half of his numbers in 2016, and Buttigieg looks to be surging in New Hampshire. If Pete Buttigieg grabs the New Hampshire primary, perhaps Bernie Sanders’s head will explode, and/or the one or two relatively rational people in his campaign will prevail upon him to suspend his campaign rather than continue to act as some kind of fifth column for Donald Trump.
Sadly, that will probably not happen. As toxic as Sanders’s grassroots ground troops are, the inner circle of his campaign is just as bad, if not worse. They are “loyalists” in the worst, most Trumpian sense of that word. They don’t act as guardrails to keep the Independent Vermont senator within the bounds of rational discourse and defensible policy; instead, they enable all of his worst, neo-Leninist, most doctrinaire impulses. Just the thought of someone like Nina Turner occupying a senior post in a Sanders administration is enough to make a lot of Democrats break out in hives.
In short, Bernard Sanders and his neo-Bolshevik campaign are becoming shopworn, tiresome, and a positive danger to the United States.
The Democratic Party should have had enough of Bernard Sanders four years ago. We were damned fools to let this interloper run to be the candidate of a party of which he is not a member. Enough!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is a loyal, i.e. non-Sanders, Democrat and an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council. Mr. Marchand also served for 10 years on the Riverside County Democratic Central committee, a hotbed of constipated ineffectuality. To avoid California’s unbelievably arcane and Byzantine conflict of interest laws, with their often conflicting compliance mandates, he practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Knowing as he does the nastiness and vindictiveness of Bernard Sanders, which are equal in every measure to those of Donald Trump, he expects to be attacked, on digital media, by toxic, pugnacious, petulant, peevish Sanders supporters. Those supporters should be warned, if they descend to the death threats they used during the 2016 Nevada caucuses, Mr. Marchand is armed, cranky, and prepared to be dangerous. The views contained herein are his own, unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
CONSPIRACIES AND CLUSTERFUCKS
Summary: no one’s surprise, the carefully engineered impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump in the Senate ended in the acquittal that Mitch McConnell had intended all along. The “trial,” containing absolutely none of the structural accoutrements of a real trial, such as witnesses and documentary evidence, was a rigged sham, an obvious product of an obvious conspiracy. In the meantime, in Iowa, where, was 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg and Bernard Sanders, with barely a tenth of a percentage point separating them, appear to be in a statistical tie after the debacle of the Iowa Democratic caucuses, an obvious clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Something is clearly wrong in Washington City, and clearly wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party and is ridiculous, anti-democratic, caucus mechanism.
------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City – February 6, 2020. The impeachment saga of Donald Trump ended not with a bang, but with the predictable whimper that all of us had expected. The impeachment “trial,” a trial bereft of any of the normal, structural accoutrements of an authentic legal proceeding, produced exactly the result that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had intended it to produce. The House managers were right to characterize the whole proceedings as a sham, lacking even the most passing resemblance to anything like a fair trial at common law.
No doubt Donald Trump and his organized crime family will take an over-the-top, repellent victory lap when Trump addresses the nation at noon tomorrow. Trump can be expected to demand criminal prosecution of one, some, or all of the House managers, to say nothing of calling full-throatedly for the prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Of course, the Trump White House is already claiming that Trump was fully exonerated in this sham “trial.” Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, acquittal was not surprising. Still, if Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans had wished to run a proceeding that might have had some appearance of legitimacy, they would have been better advised to allow for witnesses and evidence. But they did not. Because they did not allow for witnesses and evidence, they wound up foisting on the American people a spectacle, a piece of theater, “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
Democrats, who have a sorry reputation for being unwilling or unable to unwrap the gifts the Republicans keep presenting us, should pounce on the enormous gift the Republicans gave us with this ridiculous faux trial. Not only should the Democrats use this as a campaign issue against Republicans up and down every ticket, from president to local animal control officer, but Democrats should also make sure that every Republican lawyer in the Senate is the recipient of professional misconduct charges in their jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure for various disciplinary offenses including perjury, subordination, common Barratry, and obstruction of justice. Any ordinary lawyer engaged in the kind of trial-rigging that Mitch McConnell is guilty of having engaged in would merit disbarment. Mitch McConnell be no different; he should be disbarred.
Democrats cannot afford to let this matter lie. Democrats must make this a campaign issue. Mitch McConnell comes up for reelection this November, Democrats must use every instrumentality at their disposal to replace him with Amy McGrath. Moreover, Democrats need to stop worrying about being seen to descend to the Republicans level. We can’t be sucked in to the self-defeating counsels of “when they go low, we go high.”
Instead, we must be prepared to meet the Republicans in the basement with a switchblade. We must take instead the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of hours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of not fighting to the death, of not playing for keeps, of not using every instrumentality at our command, every arrow in our quiver, every round in our chamber.
Of course, while Democrats are meeting “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in the basement with a switchblade, we also need to be purging the senior ranks of the Iowa Democratic Party and stripping Iowa of its so-called first in the nation caucuses. If the impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump was hamstrung from the beginning by obvious conspiracy on the part of the Republicans in the Senate, the Iowa caucuses were a self-inflicted Democratic clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Iowa needs to scrap its caucus system in favor of a true, closed primary. It is difficult to see how the Iowa caucuses can pass even the barest of constitutional muster, representing as they do an across-the-board repudiation of the constitutionally mandated principle of one person one vote enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186.
What’s even worse about the fiascos that were the Iowa caucuses this year was the twofold baleful influence of Bernard Sanders on the caucuses. The first malign effect of Bernard Sanders on the Iowa caucuses was to insist on the addition of new complications in the caucus mechanism in the interests of “transparency,” i.e., to make it easier for Sanders and his pugnacious, belligerent, redeless, college-age millennial followers to intimidate supporters of other candidates. The second baleful action of Bernard Sanders, who as this is being written, is virtually tied with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, was to unleash his vicious followers on Mayor Buttigieg and Mayor Buttigieg’s supporters, disseminating all manner of disinformation and hateful agitprop.
Indeed, the boorish behavior of the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters has been predictable, ineluctable, and typical. As they did in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have manifested a rather Divine Right attitude which essentially postulates that any Sanders victory is a victory for the ages, divinely preordained, and an outward and visible manifestation of Sanders’s entitlement to the Democratic nomination.
In short, Sanders and his followers have constructed an even more disturbing personality cult than that which surrounds Donald Trump. After all, cults of personality tend to be phenomena of the political right, with the possible exceptions of Iosif Visssarionovich Stalin and Mao Zedong. What makes the Bernard Sanders cult of personality so objectionable is its implicit insistence that anyone who does not subscribe to the Sanders cult is a suffering from some kind of profound moral failing.
Thus, the Sandernista agitprop and information warfare against Pete Buttigieg. Indeed, despite the insistence of Bernard Sanders and his cultists, it is more than a little bit clear that Sanders’s attacks against Pete Buttigieg contain a certain tincture of dog whistle homophobia. What is even more objectionable, particularly to those of us who happen to be gay, is how many of the Sanders attacks on Mayor Pete come from apparently self-loathing self identified homosexuals. Indeed, when one sees the social media attacks, ostensibly coming from queerfolk, but couched in the most primitive terms imaginable, one might be excused for saying to these Stockholm syndrome sisters “turn in your gay card, forthwith.”
If Bernard Sanders winds up eking out some infinitesimally narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, it is probably too much to expect him to accept that victory with any kind of grace, let alone any kind of apology to Mayor Pete. Instead, we can expect the usual finger-wagging hoarse-voiced, condescending, pugnacious lecture from Sen. Sanders concerning the awfulness of his opponent and the awfulness of his opponent’s supporters.
For in truth, Bernard Sanders has never learned the first thing about good manners or being gracious no matter whether in defeat or and victory. Bernard Sanders is, unfortunately, a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
And I think it is safe to predict that if Bernard Sanders is successful in a hostile takeover bid of Democratic Party, Donald Trump will eat him for lunch.
#neverbernie.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. After having been zealously attacked for the last four-plus years by the Young Pioneers of the Sanders left, whose jaded jargon sounds like the entrance essays of aspirants for advancement to Komsomol, he is thoroughly tired of the absurdities and bullshit of the Sanders left.
------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City – February 6, 2020. The impeachment saga of Donald Trump ended not with a bang, but with the predictable whimper that all of us had expected. The impeachment “trial,” a trial bereft of any of the normal, structural accoutrements of an authentic legal proceeding, produced exactly the result that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had intended it to produce. The House managers were right to characterize the whole proceedings as a sham, lacking even the most passing resemblance to anything like a fair trial at common law.
No doubt Donald Trump and his organized crime family will take an over-the-top, repellent victory lap when Trump addresses the nation at noon tomorrow. Trump can be expected to demand criminal prosecution of one, some, or all of the House managers, to say nothing of calling full-throatedly for the prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Of course, the Trump White House is already claiming that Trump was fully exonerated in this sham “trial.” Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, acquittal was not surprising. Still, if Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans had wished to run a proceeding that might have had some appearance of legitimacy, they would have been better advised to allow for witnesses and evidence. But they did not. Because they did not allow for witnesses and evidence, they wound up foisting on the American people a spectacle, a piece of theater, “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
Democrats, who have a sorry reputation for being unwilling or unable to unwrap the gifts the Republicans keep presenting us, should pounce on the enormous gift the Republicans gave us with this ridiculous faux trial. Not only should the Democrats use this as a campaign issue against Republicans up and down every ticket, from president to local animal control officer, but Democrats should also make sure that every Republican lawyer in the Senate is the recipient of professional misconduct charges in their jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure for various disciplinary offenses including perjury, subordination, common Barratry, and obstruction of justice. Any ordinary lawyer engaged in the kind of trial-rigging that Mitch McConnell is guilty of having engaged in would merit disbarment. Mitch McConnell be no different; he should be disbarred.
Democrats cannot afford to let this matter lie. Democrats must make this a campaign issue. Mitch McConnell comes up for reelection this November, Democrats must use every instrumentality at their disposal to replace him with Amy McGrath. Moreover, Democrats need to stop worrying about being seen to descend to the Republicans level. We can’t be sucked in to the self-defeating counsels of “when they go low, we go high.”
Instead, we must be prepared to meet the Republicans in the basement with a switchblade. We must take instead the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of hours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of not fighting to the death, of not playing for keeps, of not using every instrumentality at our command, every arrow in our quiver, every round in our chamber.
Of course, while Democrats are meeting “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in the basement with a switchblade, we also need to be purging the senior ranks of the Iowa Democratic Party and stripping Iowa of its so-called first in the nation caucuses. If the impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump was hamstrung from the beginning by obvious conspiracy on the part of the Republicans in the Senate, the Iowa caucuses were a self-inflicted Democratic clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Iowa needs to scrap its caucus system in favor of a true, closed primary. It is difficult to see how the Iowa caucuses can pass even the barest of constitutional muster, representing as they do an across-the-board repudiation of the constitutionally mandated principle of one person one vote enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186.
What’s even worse about the fiascos that were the Iowa caucuses this year was the twofold baleful influence of Bernard Sanders on the caucuses. The first malign effect of Bernard Sanders on the Iowa caucuses was to insist on the addition of new complications in the caucus mechanism in the interests of “transparency,” i.e., to make it easier for Sanders and his pugnacious, belligerent, redeless, college-age millennial followers to intimidate supporters of other candidates. The second baleful action of Bernard Sanders, who as this is being written, is virtually tied with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, was to unleash his vicious followers on Mayor Buttigieg and Mayor Buttigieg’s supporters, disseminating all manner of disinformation and hateful agitprop.
Indeed, the boorish behavior of the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters has been predictable, ineluctable, and typical. As they did in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have manifested a rather Divine Right attitude which essentially postulates that any Sanders victory is a victory for the ages, divinely preordained, and an outward and visible manifestation of Sanders’s entitlement to the Democratic nomination.
In short, Sanders and his followers have constructed an even more disturbing personality cult than that which surrounds Donald Trump. After all, cults of personality tend to be phenomena of the political right, with the possible exceptions of Iosif Visssarionovich Stalin and Mao Zedong. What makes the Bernard Sanders cult of personality so objectionable is its implicit insistence that anyone who does not subscribe to the Sanders cult is a suffering from some kind of profound moral failing.
Thus, the Sandernista agitprop and information warfare against Pete Buttigieg. Indeed, despite the insistence of Bernard Sanders and his cultists, it is more than a little bit clear that Sanders’s attacks against Pete Buttigieg contain a certain tincture of dog whistle homophobia. What is even more objectionable, particularly to those of us who happen to be gay, is how many of the Sanders attacks on Mayor Pete come from apparently self-loathing self identified homosexuals. Indeed, when one sees the social media attacks, ostensibly coming from queerfolk, but couched in the most primitive terms imaginable, one might be excused for saying to these Stockholm syndrome sisters “turn in your gay card, forthwith.”
If Bernard Sanders winds up eking out some infinitesimally narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, it is probably too much to expect him to accept that victory with any kind of grace, let alone any kind of apology to Mayor Pete. Instead, we can expect the usual finger-wagging hoarse-voiced, condescending, pugnacious lecture from Sen. Sanders concerning the awfulness of his opponent and the awfulness of his opponent’s supporters.
For in truth, Bernard Sanders has never learned the first thing about good manners or being gracious no matter whether in defeat or and victory. Bernard Sanders is, unfortunately, a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
And I think it is safe to predict that if Bernard Sanders is successful in a hostile takeover bid of Democratic Party, Donald Trump will eat him for lunch.
#neverbernie.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. After having been zealously attacked for the last four-plus years by the Young Pioneers of the Sanders left, whose jaded jargon sounds like the entrance essays of aspirants for advancement to Komsomol, he is thoroughly tired of the absurdities and bullshit of the Sanders left.
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC FIASCO OF 2020: WHY IT'S TIME TO DETHRONE THE IOWA CAUCUSES AND THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY
Summary: Last night’s Iowa caucuses were a fiasco for the Democratic Party. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in tabulating caucus results turned into a cluster fuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed from numerous Iowa precincts. Already, conspiracy theories are swirling in every direction, and the chattering classes, together with some of the DNC, are beginning to wonder whether the vaunted first-in-the-Nation Iowa caucuses have outlived their usefulness.
-------------------------------------
Cathedral City, February 4, 2020 — last night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated fiasco. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in counting and tabulating the results of the various caucuses around the State of Iowa became a clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed because of software glitches in various apps intended to speed up the transmission of results.
Nearly 24 hours after the hypertrophic, overly ballyhooed Iowa caucuses were supposed to come to an end, there is still no clear notion as to who the winner was.
Nonetheless, the results are available, the night appears to have gone far better than could have been expected for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the gay dude from Indiana with the almost unpronounceable surname. Indeed, according to available results, Buttigieg appears to have commanded more so-called delegate equivalents than the vaunted front runner, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, who trails Buttigieg by a little bit less than two percentage points.
Given that the shtetl Stalinist has been campaigning in Iowa since he shivved Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, Buttigieg’s surprisingly strong performance cannot be sitting well with Bernard Sanders or his campaign. Unconfirmed and sketchily sourced reporting has it that both the Independent Vermont Senator and his senior campaign staff are livid at the apparent trend in the numbers.
Of course, it must be remembered that Sanders and his senior staff, as well as most of his redeless followers have a rather divine right attitude of entitlement in any campaign in which Bernard Sanders is involved. Rather like Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders and his people tend to believe that victory is their birthright at anyone who does not “feel the bern” suffers from some kind of moral shortcoming that automatically deprives them of any right to have an opinion or a point of view.
As the results from the Iowa caucuses continue to trickle in, and it becomes ever more evident that a majority of Iowa Democratic caucus goers just don’t “feel the bern,” Sanders's redeless Twitter and Facebook followers have been fomenting all manner of conspiracy theories that Sanders himself, that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik, was somehow “robbed” of victory in the Iowa caucuses because of some kind of nefarious conspiracy by and on behalf of Pete Buttigieg.
The Sanders conspiracy theory attacks targeting Mayor Pete are all the more reprehensible because they are so Trumpian in their tone and tenor. Though a lot of gay men are rather foolishly rallying behind Sanders, the tone on social media is full of dog whistle homophobia of which the queer nation ought to wake up and take notice. After all, Bernard Sanders is no great friend of the queer nation. Indeed, dig deep enough into Sanders’s past and it’s not hard to find traces of a traditional Marxist critique of queer sexualities and the tacit reinforcement of left-bourgeois heteronormativity, rather like that encountered in the upbringing of such monopolists as Mark Zuckerberg.
Given that Sanders has apparently come in a close second to Mayor Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses, you would think he and his supporters might be grateful to have bamboozled so many Iowa caucus goers. Unfortunately, Sanders, like Trump, suffers from a very severe case of sore winner syndrome.
Predictably, we should have expected such ineluctably churlish behavior from Bernard Sanders. When the Nevada caucuses in 2016 devolved into violence and death threats from Sanders supporters, Sanders was slow to denounce their behavior and his belated, halfhearted denunciation, when it finally came, was so full of deflection, implementation, and Soviet-style whataboutism as to be a useless tissue of prevarications and lies.
Notwithstanding the insistence from both the Trump and Sanders campaigns on propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories, the fact remains that the Iowa Democratic Party conducted one of the most piss poor sets of caucuses since the ridiculous experiment in caucusing began in its present form after the 1972 campaign.
Of course, applying Hanlon’s Razor, we should be reluctant to ascribe to malice — or to malign conspiracies— what can be most easily, and most probably, laid at the door of stupidity on the part of the Iowa Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, the stupidity of the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa was so gross, so reckless, so over-the-top, as to be culpable.
Three steps should be taken without delay. First, the Iowa Democratic Party’s should purge its top leadership and replace them with people who have more of a sense of what the hell is going on. There simply is no excuse, particularly not in a state which prides itself on its first-in-the-nation caucuses, for conducting the caucuses so incompetently and so foolishly. If this had happened in the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, those responsible would been taken out to a stadium somewhere and pistolled publicly in the nape of the neck for their crimes.
Of course – and thankfully- we are not the Soviet Union or the PRC, Donald Trump and his efforts to destroy our democracy notwithstanding. However, what happened in Iowa last night has quite justly got a lot of people in the political class wondering if it is not time to do away with the Iowa caucuses and deprive Iowa, a small, unrepresentative, nondiverse, 90% white, farm state of its status as the “bellwether” in our national presidential campaigns. The states should give serious thought to rotating their primary contests among regions of the country, so that no single small, unrepresentative, nondiverse jurisdiction can have the kind of outsized influence on the presidential elections that Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to garner to themselves by virtue of having a first-in-the-nation presidential contest every four years.
The final step to be taken without delay is quite simply the abolition of the caucus process in every jurisdiction which selects or allocates delegates to the Democratic national convention by way of a caucus. Four years ago, I observed that caucuses are anti-democratic. Caucuses advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Caucuses require an investment of several hours of time, spent in personal attendance at an often rowdy and confrontational gathering of political activists. Because caucuses require attendance during the evening, they have the effect of excluding people who work night shifts, parents trying to take care of small children, elderly people who cannot drive at night, the poor who may lack transport to the caucus location, or the disabled who may not be able to access the caucus site. Thus, an examination of almost any caucus site, particularly in Iowa, will disclose an overwhelmingly white universe of caucus goers.
That is not what the Democratic Party is.
Moreover, caucuses do not permit secret ballots. One caucuses for one’s candidate by going physically to a particular piece of the geography of the caucus room; there is simply no provision for absentee ballots or other accommodation for those who are physically unable to attend the caucus. This facilitates intimidation tactics and belaboring by certain types of activists of a particular perfervid disposition – activists of the type who tend to gravitate toward the Sanders campaign in particular. In short, caucuses create political bedlam of the type beloved of many political activists, but not at all welcome to those who prefer to undertake their politics in a more civilized fashion.
Now contrast a typical candidate selection caucus to a closed Democratic primary election, held on election day, accessible to absentee voters as well, administered not by party apparatchiks but by public election officials, employed by their counties, and answerable to the public in the event or glitches, misfeasance, or malfeasance in the conduct of the election. In a closed Democratic primary, for example, every Democrat may vote in the primary, but only Democrats may vote, providing some degree of security from Republicans, third partisans, or no party preference voters from interfering with the Democratic Party’s own selection of its own candidates. Of course, the same observations apply pari passu to any other party, whether Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or any of the other various third parties out there.
Primaries definitionally are about selecting the candidate whom the party considers should be a standardbearer. Open primaries, including California’s ridiculous “jungle primary,” should be abolished as well as candidate selection caucuses.
Moreover, in addition to getting rid of caucuses, the Democratic Party should impose requirements to put some teeth into the mandate that every state should have a closed primary. For the 2024 elections, the Democratic National Committee should mandate that every state select its Democratic standardbearers or delegates in a close primary in which, again, every Democrat may participate but only Democrats may participate.
The sanction for refusal to adopt the closed primary should be the exclusion of that state’s delegates from the Democratic national convention until the state in question unconditionally agrees to adopt a closed primary. Caucuses, that classist, racist, ableist, enterprise, ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If nothing else, the egregious Mongolian cluster fuck that has been this year’s Iowa caucuses ought to provide the catalyst for dethroning Iowa and New Hampshire from their undeserved primacy, and a further catalyst for doing away with caucuses altogether.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices (after all, the more you practice, the more you might get it right) in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He spent eight years of his life as a city councilmember in Cathedral City, and 10 years of his life as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He leafleted and stuffed envelopes for George McGovern in 1972 at the age of eight. The views contained herein are his own.
-------------------------------------
Cathedral City, February 4, 2020 — last night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated fiasco. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in counting and tabulating the results of the various caucuses around the State of Iowa became a clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed because of software glitches in various apps intended to speed up the transmission of results.
Nearly 24 hours after the hypertrophic, overly ballyhooed Iowa caucuses were supposed to come to an end, there is still no clear notion as to who the winner was.
Nonetheless, the results are available, the night appears to have gone far better than could have been expected for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the gay dude from Indiana with the almost unpronounceable surname. Indeed, according to available results, Buttigieg appears to have commanded more so-called delegate equivalents than the vaunted front runner, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, who trails Buttigieg by a little bit less than two percentage points.
Given that the shtetl Stalinist has been campaigning in Iowa since he shivved Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, Buttigieg’s surprisingly strong performance cannot be sitting well with Bernard Sanders or his campaign. Unconfirmed and sketchily sourced reporting has it that both the Independent Vermont Senator and his senior campaign staff are livid at the apparent trend in the numbers.
Of course, it must be remembered that Sanders and his senior staff, as well as most of his redeless followers have a rather divine right attitude of entitlement in any campaign in which Bernard Sanders is involved. Rather like Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders and his people tend to believe that victory is their birthright at anyone who does not “feel the bern” suffers from some kind of moral shortcoming that automatically deprives them of any right to have an opinion or a point of view.
As the results from the Iowa caucuses continue to trickle in, and it becomes ever more evident that a majority of Iowa Democratic caucus goers just don’t “feel the bern,” Sanders's redeless Twitter and Facebook followers have been fomenting all manner of conspiracy theories that Sanders himself, that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik, was somehow “robbed” of victory in the Iowa caucuses because of some kind of nefarious conspiracy by and on behalf of Pete Buttigieg.
The Sanders conspiracy theory attacks targeting Mayor Pete are all the more reprehensible because they are so Trumpian in their tone and tenor. Though a lot of gay men are rather foolishly rallying behind Sanders, the tone on social media is full of dog whistle homophobia of which the queer nation ought to wake up and take notice. After all, Bernard Sanders is no great friend of the queer nation. Indeed, dig deep enough into Sanders’s past and it’s not hard to find traces of a traditional Marxist critique of queer sexualities and the tacit reinforcement of left-bourgeois heteronormativity, rather like that encountered in the upbringing of such monopolists as Mark Zuckerberg.
Given that Sanders has apparently come in a close second to Mayor Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses, you would think he and his supporters might be grateful to have bamboozled so many Iowa caucus goers. Unfortunately, Sanders, like Trump, suffers from a very severe case of sore winner syndrome.
Predictably, we should have expected such ineluctably churlish behavior from Bernard Sanders. When the Nevada caucuses in 2016 devolved into violence and death threats from Sanders supporters, Sanders was slow to denounce their behavior and his belated, halfhearted denunciation, when it finally came, was so full of deflection, implementation, and Soviet-style whataboutism as to be a useless tissue of prevarications and lies.
Notwithstanding the insistence from both the Trump and Sanders campaigns on propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories, the fact remains that the Iowa Democratic Party conducted one of the most piss poor sets of caucuses since the ridiculous experiment in caucusing began in its present form after the 1972 campaign.
Of course, applying Hanlon’s Razor, we should be reluctant to ascribe to malice — or to malign conspiracies— what can be most easily, and most probably, laid at the door of stupidity on the part of the Iowa Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, the stupidity of the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa was so gross, so reckless, so over-the-top, as to be culpable.
Three steps should be taken without delay. First, the Iowa Democratic Party’s should purge its top leadership and replace them with people who have more of a sense of what the hell is going on. There simply is no excuse, particularly not in a state which prides itself on its first-in-the-nation caucuses, for conducting the caucuses so incompetently and so foolishly. If this had happened in the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, those responsible would been taken out to a stadium somewhere and pistolled publicly in the nape of the neck for their crimes.
Of course – and thankfully- we are not the Soviet Union or the PRC, Donald Trump and his efforts to destroy our democracy notwithstanding. However, what happened in Iowa last night has quite justly got a lot of people in the political class wondering if it is not time to do away with the Iowa caucuses and deprive Iowa, a small, unrepresentative, nondiverse, 90% white, farm state of its status as the “bellwether” in our national presidential campaigns. The states should give serious thought to rotating their primary contests among regions of the country, so that no single small, unrepresentative, nondiverse jurisdiction can have the kind of outsized influence on the presidential elections that Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to garner to themselves by virtue of having a first-in-the-nation presidential contest every four years.
The final step to be taken without delay is quite simply the abolition of the caucus process in every jurisdiction which selects or allocates delegates to the Democratic national convention by way of a caucus. Four years ago, I observed that caucuses are anti-democratic. Caucuses advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Caucuses require an investment of several hours of time, spent in personal attendance at an often rowdy and confrontational gathering of political activists. Because caucuses require attendance during the evening, they have the effect of excluding people who work night shifts, parents trying to take care of small children, elderly people who cannot drive at night, the poor who may lack transport to the caucus location, or the disabled who may not be able to access the caucus site. Thus, an examination of almost any caucus site, particularly in Iowa, will disclose an overwhelmingly white universe of caucus goers.
That is not what the Democratic Party is.
Moreover, caucuses do not permit secret ballots. One caucuses for one’s candidate by going physically to a particular piece of the geography of the caucus room; there is simply no provision for absentee ballots or other accommodation for those who are physically unable to attend the caucus. This facilitates intimidation tactics and belaboring by certain types of activists of a particular perfervid disposition – activists of the type who tend to gravitate toward the Sanders campaign in particular. In short, caucuses create political bedlam of the type beloved of many political activists, but not at all welcome to those who prefer to undertake their politics in a more civilized fashion.
Now contrast a typical candidate selection caucus to a closed Democratic primary election, held on election day, accessible to absentee voters as well, administered not by party apparatchiks but by public election officials, employed by their counties, and answerable to the public in the event or glitches, misfeasance, or malfeasance in the conduct of the election. In a closed Democratic primary, for example, every Democrat may vote in the primary, but only Democrats may vote, providing some degree of security from Republicans, third partisans, or no party preference voters from interfering with the Democratic Party’s own selection of its own candidates. Of course, the same observations apply pari passu to any other party, whether Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or any of the other various third parties out there.
Primaries definitionally are about selecting the candidate whom the party considers should be a standardbearer. Open primaries, including California’s ridiculous “jungle primary,” should be abolished as well as candidate selection caucuses.
Moreover, in addition to getting rid of caucuses, the Democratic Party should impose requirements to put some teeth into the mandate that every state should have a closed primary. For the 2024 elections, the Democratic National Committee should mandate that every state select its Democratic standardbearers or delegates in a close primary in which, again, every Democrat may participate but only Democrats may participate.
The sanction for refusal to adopt the closed primary should be the exclusion of that state’s delegates from the Democratic national convention until the state in question unconditionally agrees to adopt a closed primary. Caucuses, that classist, racist, ableist, enterprise, ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If nothing else, the egregious Mongolian cluster fuck that has been this year’s Iowa caucuses ought to provide the catalyst for dethroning Iowa and New Hampshire from their undeserved primacy, and a further catalyst for doing away with caucuses altogether.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices (after all, the more you practice, the more you might get it right) in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He spent eight years of his life as a city councilmember in Cathedral City, and 10 years of his life as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He leafleted and stuffed envelopes for George McGovern in 1972 at the age of eight. The views contained herein are his own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)