Summary: Though (Full disclosure) I’ve been a supporter of Joe Biden during this bizarre Democratic primary season, I can’t help but take some fairly serious exception to the behavior of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, whose attacks on Pete Buttigieg seemed coordinated, homophobic, and reflective of the Senator’s own deep insecurities.
In addition to being peeved by Senator Sanders’s redeless followers, I’m also undergoing my annual fit of irritation at the many drivers from the Great White North who seem not to realize that in the United States, we still use Imperial units of measure.
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It certainly appears that the campaign of Independent Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders has coordinated a deliberate series of trolling attacks on anyone who does not profess absolute fealty to his Leninist cause.
The prime target of Senator Sanders and his pugnacious, pugilistic, followers appears to be former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose surprising delegate victory in the Iowa caucuses has the Sanders people doing a slow bern.
When one encounters a Facebook posting from the Buttigieg campaign, one does not have to scroll too far to find a pugnacious, chip-on-the-shoulder Sanders troll dropping trou to crap in the punch bowl.
What all the pro-Sanders trolls have in common is a desperate willingness to take offense at anything Mr. Buttigieg says or does. Indeed, if Mayor Pete were to issue an obvious, anodyne statements such as “the sky is above us” or “water is wet,” there would ineluctably appear some angry, pugnacious, pugilistic Sanders supporter with a chip on his/her/it’s shoulder commenting in outraged, umbrageous terms on ostensible behalf of Australia, New Zealand, or other countries of the global South, or affirming, in equally outraged umbrageous and primitive terms the absolute dryness of water.
As I remarked during the 2016 primary, the inability and unwillingness of Bernard Sanders’s supporters to accept even the possibility of compromise.
writing in Esquire.com yesterday, commentator Charles Pierce noted that “Bernie Sanders has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made.” (Emphasis in the original).
For Sanders’s supporters, their pure opinion of themselves acts to insulate themselves from any kind of introspection or self-knowledge whatsoever. Because their opinion of themselves is so “pure,” and because they see their cause as righteously holy, they see themselves as simply not culpable for the enormities of which they are so manifestly guilty.
Four years on, Sanders and his supporters continue to relitigate the “we wuz robbed” stab-in-the-back Dolchstoßlegende according to which the corrupt DNC and That Jewish Woman Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired to strip from Senator Sanders his divine right to the Democratic nomination in 2016. It was, and is, a deplorable, outrageous, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist misogynistic and anti-Semitic narrative. Sanders, who is himself Jewish, should be ashamed of his supporters' use of the Dolchstoßlegende tactic.
Inasmuch as past peccadilloes predict future performance, we may expect a Sanders administration to be just as chaotic and just as dangerous to American national security as that of Donald Trump has been.
For that reason, Democrats dare not proffer the nomination of their party to the quadrennial Democrat demanding their fealty. Because, like the Donald Trump base, the Sanders base is composed of vindictive, vengeful, unhinged people. Just like Sanders himself. The prospect of a militant, Leninist, left-wing version of the Trump administration is simply not one which Americans should tolerate.
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FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CANADIANS, PLEASE DRIVE IMPERIAL
If the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders sets my teeth on edge, so too do the part-time drivers from the Great White North who come every year to our Pleasant Desert, bringing a great deal of work to automotive repair and body shops.
Specifically, I’m pointing the finger of judgment at those numerous Canadian drivers, many of them driving high-end SUVs or sedans with metric/Imperial displays who seem curiously unable or unwilling to wrap their mental arms around the idea that the United States, almost alone in the world, continues to use the Imperial system of measurement that is one of the United Kingdom’s undying legacies to the world.
When the British, and the Americans after them, conquered much of the world, they brought with them what has come to be known as the Imperial system of measurement. This is the inch/foot/mile, fluid ounce/cup/quart/gallon, solid ounce/pound/hundredweight/ton system with which most of us have been familiar since childhood.
Not that there is anything wrong with SI, the Système Internationale, also known as the metric system. It is a legal standard of measure in the United States, and has been since 1895. Nonetheless, the Empire has struck back and Imperial measurements appear to be here to stay.
Unless you are a snowbird from Beautiful British Columbia, the Wild Rose country of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba — where we can tell that Winnipeg is not Paris — Ontario, Québec, where the “je me souviens” license plates remind you of the resentment industry often merchandised by sectionalist politicians of the Parti Québecois, Newfoundland and Labrador, where they seem to resent the way the rest of the world pronounces Newfoundland, or the Maritimes, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, which is still waiting to be towed into the St. Lawrence River, in which case, you are apparently determined to drive stubbornly metric on our Imperial calibrated streets, highways, and thoroughfares
My appeal to our Canadian friends is a simple one. If your speedometer is dual calibrated, make sure that you are looking at the Imperial calibrations. If you have a speedometer where the display switches back and forth between metric and Imperial, please make sure that you have toggled over to the Imperial display. After all, you are in the Empire now. Don’t be puttering along at 25 mph (just over 40 KpH) in a zone where the speed limit is 40 mph. Doing so is an excellent way not only to snag a ticket, but it’s also an excellent way to cause an accident.
Every season, I get at least one client presenting with a case arising from an accident caused, at least in part, by a driver stubbornly refusing to drive Imperial. So, let me repeat my appeal to our Canadian friends: DRIVE IMPERIAL; as much as excessive speed kills, so does dawdling.
DRIVE IMPERIAL!
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral city, where he spent eight years as a member of the city Council. He currently practices law in the Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He's feeling a little peevish today. The opinions expressed herein are his own.
