Summary: As happened in 2016, so-called hardline supporters of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders have been uncritically and unquestioningly availing themselves of the Trump campaign narratives against Bernard Sanders political rival Joe Biden. Their favorite Trumpian trope is that Vice President Biden, who suffered from an appalling stammer/stutter as a child, is somehow losing his marbles. Coming as it does the supporters of one verbally challenged septuagenarian from Queens and easily and uncritically repeated by the followers of another septuagenarian with a Brooklyn accent so thick you can cut it with a knife, such allegations are risible at best and more than a little bit contemptible.
Los Angeles County registrar of voters Dean Logan ought to be fired. The abysmal pig’s breakfast that Los Angeles County inflicted upon us voters by eliminating neighborhood precincts in favor of so-called boating centers goes a long way toward demonstrating that not only are the old ways frequently the best ways, but that the worst possible time for trying to roll out new voting technologies is in the midst of one of the most consequential primaries in recent California history. A pilot project in, say, West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, would have exposed the glitches and not left nearly so many people as were disenfranchised cut off from the vote. Logan should not only be fired, but his metaphorical head should be stuck up on a pike outside the county Hall of Administration.
---------------------------------
The Berniebros, or as Vice President Biden referred to them more politely, and with a certain delicious snark, the Bernie Brothers, have once again demonstrated that the entire Sanders campaign is either woefully tone deaf or a willing fifth column for Donald Trump.
As the campaign has ramped up, Donald Trump has increasingly been trying to horn in on the Democratic primaries with a view to poisoning the well against the Democratic candidate he fears most, Joe Biden.
Not satisfied with earning himself an impeachment, even if he was acquitted by Republican senators in a rigged procedure that will live in infamy, Trump and his redeless, Russophile followers have begun to disseminate a probably Kremlin-originated bit of disinformation that Joe Biden is suffering from a cognitive decline. Put in simple, non-Vulcan English, the Trump types are claiming that Joe Biden is losing his marbles.
Of course, the Trumpist attack, based as it is on Vice President Biden’s acknowledged childhood stammer/stutter is directly akin to Donald Trump’s disgusting November 25, 2015 attack on the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in which Trump mocked Kovaleski for the reporter’s arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. Of course, we cannot expect anything better from Trump than a revolting attack on someone’s disability.
On the other hand, we can, and should, expect a great deal better from any Democratic candidate and that candidate’s supporters. Yet, both the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters have uncritically repeated the unverified, Kremlin-originated claim that Vice President Biden is on the brink of, or actually suffering from, dementia.
This weaponization of Vice President Biden’s childhood speech impediment (and particularly from one Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian from Queens whose vocabulary includes such clunkers as “covfefe” and “hamberders” and another Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian whose woefully uncorrected Brooklyn accent leaves him unable to pronounce the initial H in words like huge or humanitarian) is not only insulting to people who have experience with stuttering, it is also a slap in the face to every American who may be suffering from any disability at all. As a southpaw child, I grappled with a mild form of stuttering. When I injured my left hand during a workout four years ago, and had to try to write with my right hand, my brief experience as a compulsory Northpaw caused that stutter to come roaring back. All this, despite having a faculty for language that produced a 780 verbal (out of 800) on my SAT. Thus, I don’t take attacks on stuttering or stutterers terribly kindly.
Perhaps this explains why I have nothing but disdain for the sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouthed Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders and his supporters. Their willingness to weaponize Vice President Biden’s history of childhood stuttering against him is a slur upon decency, upon morality, upon how we are called on as human beings to treat one another.
Add to their moral failings on that issue, the manifest misogynistic disdain expressed by the senator and his supporters for Massachusetts Senator and former presidential candidate Warren, to say nothing of the nastiness expressed by the Burlington Bolshevik and his supporters for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and it becomes clear that there is absolutely no moral case for supporting Bernard Sanders. We neither need nor want some kind of ersatz October Revolution led by an angry synthetic Leninist and his legions of wannabe Komsomoltsy.
* * * * *
Of course, while Gospodin Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist krewe are eagerly trafficking in Trumpian tropes against the Democratic front runner, they did manage to sell a hell of a lot of Californians a bill of goods. However, in Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters may have been turned away from the polling places in frustration at the gross, possibly criminal, incompetence of Los Angeles County registrar recorder, Dean Logan, and his bureaucrats.
In a misguided effort to “facilitate voting,” Los Angeles County abolished most of its neighborhood voting precincts. No longer could you walk down the block to a polling place in your neighborhood, staffed by your neighbors, and engage in the friendly neighborhood social interactions most of us who were brought up in Los Angeles County associated with voting. By way of example, I cast my 1992 general election vote for Bill Clinton in the parish hall of St. Ambrose church in West Hollywood, a block and a half from where I lived. It was a five-minute walk to my precinct. Now, under Dean Logan’s plan, one has to go to a so-called voting center, often a considerable distance from where one had been accustomed to vote, and there one had to interact with bureaucrats whom one did not know, and attempt to work with technology with which one was not familiar.
Naturally, this so-called “innovation” led to the same kind of pig’s breakfast that prevailed in Palm Beach County, Florida in the general election of 2000, and which enabled George Dubya Bush to steal the election from Al Gore. While the voting in Los Angeles County was not marred by butterfly ballots, which when offered to a heavily retirement age electorate caused frequent cases of what commentators soon christened “electile dysfunction,” it was still marred by hours long lines at polling places, difficult-to-work technology, and frustration levels that caused a lot of people to conclude that they should simply walk away without having exercised their franchise.
The cockup in Los Angeles County was voter suppression made all the worse because it had been occasioned not by some kind of deliberate effort to suppress the vote, but by the arrogance of unelected bureaucrats operating with the kind of mentality that has become all too typical of the Democratic Party: just supply people with the raw data and they will spontaneously perform the appropriate analysis and derive the correct conclusion.
Dean Logan, having made the decision to roll out the new “voting center” plan, and its unproven technology, ought to be fired and unceremoniously marched out of his workplace, preferably in handcuffs, doing a perp walk. At the very least, the new system should have been beta tested in small voting jurisdictions such as West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, San Fernando, or Santa Monica, where any glitches could have been found and corrected. More to the point, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra ought to be looking into Mr. Logan with a view to prosecuting him for having interfered with the voting rights of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of Los Angeles County residents and Angeleños who may have been deterred from exercising their franchise in this most consequential primary election in recent California history. What happened in Los Angeles County was simply unforgivable. Dean Logan's metaphorical head should be on a pike outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration.
In fact, what happened in Los Angeles County merits Legislative intervention to ensure that the new system of so-called voting centers is scrapped or beta tested before being foisted on a county with millions of voters. Los Angeles County needs to return posthaste to neighborhood precincts, where voting can be participated in and understood as an activity to be undertaken with one’s neighbors in a fashion that reinforces extensive democracy, not top-down bureaucracy.
Fire Dean Logan. Abolish voting centers. Restore neighborhood voting.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Additionally, he served for a dozen years, on or off, as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. The views set forth herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.
As used occasionally in this blog, the term “Little Snappers” is a borrowing from the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, who used to let off steam by penning brief concurrences or dissents, usually unpublished, which he called “Little Snappers.” Berger regarded them as devices for maintaining sanity.
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Thursday, March 5, 2020
ELIZABETH WARREN: A NUANCED APPRECIATION
Summary: Elizabeth Warren has withdrawn for the Democratic contest for her Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Her parting is bittersweet, helping clear the field for a binary contest between the pragmatic Joe Biden and the doctrinaire Bernard Sanders. Liz was on the left edge of the field, but she was a happy warrior, unafraid and persistent. Had Joe Biden not been in the race, she would have been my choice, and, I expect, the choice of millions of other voters as well.
“I’ve got a plan for that.”
-Sen. Elizabeth Warren
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
“Curious that the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
-Pope Sixtus V, expressing exasperation about the quarrel between King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of England, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588
“The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
-Centauri Emperor Turhan, Babylon 5, “The Coming of Shadows”
Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 --Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today. Her parting leaves that lolo wahine Tulsi Gabbard (she’s NAILZ!) and two white, septuagenarian men battling it out for the Democratic nomination. Putting Ms. Gabbard aside, for she has not got the slightest chance of clinching the nomination, the Democratic primary winnowing process has produced a stark choice between Joe Biden, a candidate who wants to restore the soul of America, and Bernard Sanders, an ideological, doctrinaire “revolutionary” who wants to bern it all down.
After Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden experienced his own personal Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, roaring back from what everyone thought would be the end of his campaign to retake leadership in the contest, a comeback in which Joe pwned Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, flaming the Burlington Bolshevik to a well done crisp, other Democratic candidates began to see the handwriting on the wall.
Already, prior to Super Tuesday, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg had ended their campaigns and thrown their support behind Vice President Biden. The day after Super Tuesday, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did the same, and it was said at that time that Elizabeth Warren and her senior campaign staff were evaluating her “way forward.” Translated, that meant that the Massachusetts Senator, who had dramatically underperformed in her efforts to seek the Democratic nomination, was considering an exit strategy.
Though, full disclosure, I have been a steadfast supporter of the quondam vice president since he announced early last year, Elizabeth Warren would have been an equally acceptable choice had Joe not been a part of the field. Her cheerful bearing, her confident affect, her upbeat assurances that “I’ve got a plan for that,” all suggested that here was a candidate who had some intellectual rigor, who had well thought out policy positions that were at significant variance from those of the other candidate on the left side of the field, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders.
I have to admit having been somewhat disappointed at her sharp elbowed “wine cave” attack on Pete Buttigieg. I was disappointed not because I felt the attack was an appropriate, but because it seemed so out of character for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us had come to know, for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us were prepared to embrace as a president should fate smile upon her and show her to the White House. I think many of us were disappointed because we saw in that unfortunate “wine cave” attack not only a sign of early worry about the viability of her campaign, but also of a disturbing willingness to adopt the tactics of Bernard Sanders.
Now Bernard Sanders is nothing if not a documented misogynist. From a creepy rate-fantasy essay in 1972 to his insistence just last year to Elizabeth Warren, by the way, that a woman could not be elected President, with its implication that woman should not be elected President, the sad Sanders record of misogyny is plain for the entire body politic to see and to draw conclusions about.
Doubtless, champagne corks are popping in Burlington today now that Sanders’s last rival on the far left in the Democratic Party is out of the race. No doubt the prickly Vermont Senator and his acolytes will be drawing from Warren’s withdrawal whatever minute pearl of consolation they can find from the very rough oyster of the shellacking they took on Super Tuesday. Unfortunately, they will also draw the conclusion that their ugly, slash-and-bern style of campaigning is working.
Of course, this is absolutely the wrong conclusion to have drawn. The conclusion that the Sandernistas ought to have drawn delete from Super Tuesday is that the confrontational, condescending, pugilistic, pugnacious, in-your-face, my-way-or-the-highway style of campaigning of which Bernie Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist, followers are so enamored has created for them a substantial reservoir of ill will, dislike, and disdain which has redounded to the benefit of Joseph R. Biden, Jr..
As Sanders finds his path to the nomination of a party of which he is not a member narrowing as he himself is more thoroughly vetted by Democratic partisans, we may expect his campaign to begin decompensating in real time. In psychology, decompensation “refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance. Some who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may decompensate into persecutory delusions to defend against a troubling reality.” (Wikipedia)
Sanders’s interview yesterday evening with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow demonstrated how quickly and how badly the Vermont Senator is decompensating. What we expect on a regular basis from Donald Trump we are now witnessing on an equally regular basis from Bernard Sanders.
Sanders has prided himself on being an irascible curmudgeon, and an awful lot of people have latched on to his irascible curmudgeonliness as if he were some kind of lovable, if difficult, uncle or grandfather. Others see Senator Sanders as not the lovable curmudgeon, but as the crazy uncle who crashes the family Thanksgiving after having been specifically disinvited. But, what is known about the Independent senator is that he is in fact a doctrinaire ideologue whose ability, and that of his acolytes, to tolerate differing views is every bit as limited as Donald Trump’s.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, always came across as a fighter, but never as a bully. Her ability to yield with grace when confronted by bullies on the Senate floor earned her a great moral victory over Mitch McConnell. His exasperated attempt to put this uppity woman in her place, expressed in his ill considered statement “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” may very well have helped start the Aotsunami, the blue Tidal Wave of Democratic victories of 2018.
Elizabeth Warren met Mitch McConnell with the calm defiance with which Elizabeth Tudor met Philip v. Habsburg, Philip II of Spain. And as the Massachusetts Senator stood up to the Grim Reaper, there were echoes of the annoyance with which Pope Sixtus V demanded to know how “the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
As Elizabeth Warren leaves the campaign, to return to the Senate, where she can be warned, where she can have explanations proffered to her, and, most importantly, where she can persist, the far left of the Democratic Party finds itself pinning its hopes on a man who, as Republican strategist Karl Rove observed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, bears a disturbing resemblance to Henry Wallace, the vice president whom Franklin Roosevelt dropped in 1944 in favor of Harry S. Truman. Wallace ran for President in 1948 and came away with all of 2 1/2% of the vote.
As Winston Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible ifs accumulate. If Elizabeth Warren had been able to make a go of her presidential campaign. If after having been beaten by nearly 4 million votes in the 2016 primary, Bernard Sanders had been purged from the Democratic Party. If, if, if.
Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote some of the best teleplays of the 1990s, expressed the difficulty of our national condition in a line from the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows:” “The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
We find ourselves lost in a terrible in between. We are in danger of losing the America in which we have all been raised, and which in our own ways, we all cherish. All of us understand that there is still time to seize that “one last fragile moment,” to reclaim all that is good, and true, and noble about what Abraham Lincoln once called this “last, best hope of earth.” But we dare not choose either Donald Trump’s authoritarian, crypto-Nazi authoritarianism or the doctrinaire Marxist my-way-or-the-highway, Fidel Castro-adulating approach offered to us by Bernard Sanders. Liz understood that. Joe understands that.
In the binary choice that follows, in which the past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us, Joe Biden has emerged as the man to seize that one last fragile moment. Hopefully his cabinet, if God vouchsafes him this election, will be composed of the superabundantly talented men and women, from every race and nation, every rank and station, every gender and orientation, who made up the most diverse field of Democratic contenders ever to seek the Presidency of the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral city, where he served two terms on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own.
“I’ve got a plan for that.”
-Sen. Elizabeth Warren
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
“Curious that the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
-Pope Sixtus V, expressing exasperation about the quarrel between King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of England, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588
“The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
-Centauri Emperor Turhan, Babylon 5, “The Coming of Shadows”
Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 --Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today. Her parting leaves that lolo wahine Tulsi Gabbard (she’s NAILZ!) and two white, septuagenarian men battling it out for the Democratic nomination. Putting Ms. Gabbard aside, for she has not got the slightest chance of clinching the nomination, the Democratic primary winnowing process has produced a stark choice between Joe Biden, a candidate who wants to restore the soul of America, and Bernard Sanders, an ideological, doctrinaire “revolutionary” who wants to bern it all down.
After Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden experienced his own personal Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, roaring back from what everyone thought would be the end of his campaign to retake leadership in the contest, a comeback in which Joe pwned Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, flaming the Burlington Bolshevik to a well done crisp, other Democratic candidates began to see the handwriting on the wall.
Already, prior to Super Tuesday, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg had ended their campaigns and thrown their support behind Vice President Biden. The day after Super Tuesday, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did the same, and it was said at that time that Elizabeth Warren and her senior campaign staff were evaluating her “way forward.” Translated, that meant that the Massachusetts Senator, who had dramatically underperformed in her efforts to seek the Democratic nomination, was considering an exit strategy.
Though, full disclosure, I have been a steadfast supporter of the quondam vice president since he announced early last year, Elizabeth Warren would have been an equally acceptable choice had Joe not been a part of the field. Her cheerful bearing, her confident affect, her upbeat assurances that “I’ve got a plan for that,” all suggested that here was a candidate who had some intellectual rigor, who had well thought out policy positions that were at significant variance from those of the other candidate on the left side of the field, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders.
I have to admit having been somewhat disappointed at her sharp elbowed “wine cave” attack on Pete Buttigieg. I was disappointed not because I felt the attack was an appropriate, but because it seemed so out of character for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us had come to know, for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us were prepared to embrace as a president should fate smile upon her and show her to the White House. I think many of us were disappointed because we saw in that unfortunate “wine cave” attack not only a sign of early worry about the viability of her campaign, but also of a disturbing willingness to adopt the tactics of Bernard Sanders.
Now Bernard Sanders is nothing if not a documented misogynist. From a creepy rate-fantasy essay in 1972 to his insistence just last year to Elizabeth Warren, by the way, that a woman could not be elected President, with its implication that woman should not be elected President, the sad Sanders record of misogyny is plain for the entire body politic to see and to draw conclusions about.
Doubtless, champagne corks are popping in Burlington today now that Sanders’s last rival on the far left in the Democratic Party is out of the race. No doubt the prickly Vermont Senator and his acolytes will be drawing from Warren’s withdrawal whatever minute pearl of consolation they can find from the very rough oyster of the shellacking they took on Super Tuesday. Unfortunately, they will also draw the conclusion that their ugly, slash-and-bern style of campaigning is working.
Of course, this is absolutely the wrong conclusion to have drawn. The conclusion that the Sandernistas ought to have drawn delete from Super Tuesday is that the confrontational, condescending, pugilistic, pugnacious, in-your-face, my-way-or-the-highway style of campaigning of which Bernie Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist, followers are so enamored has created for them a substantial reservoir of ill will, dislike, and disdain which has redounded to the benefit of Joseph R. Biden, Jr..
As Sanders finds his path to the nomination of a party of which he is not a member narrowing as he himself is more thoroughly vetted by Democratic partisans, we may expect his campaign to begin decompensating in real time. In psychology, decompensation “refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance. Some who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may decompensate into persecutory delusions to defend against a troubling reality.” (Wikipedia)
Sanders’s interview yesterday evening with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow demonstrated how quickly and how badly the Vermont Senator is decompensating. What we expect on a regular basis from Donald Trump we are now witnessing on an equally regular basis from Bernard Sanders.
Sanders has prided himself on being an irascible curmudgeon, and an awful lot of people have latched on to his irascible curmudgeonliness as if he were some kind of lovable, if difficult, uncle or grandfather. Others see Senator Sanders as not the lovable curmudgeon, but as the crazy uncle who crashes the family Thanksgiving after having been specifically disinvited. But, what is known about the Independent senator is that he is in fact a doctrinaire ideologue whose ability, and that of his acolytes, to tolerate differing views is every bit as limited as Donald Trump’s.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, always came across as a fighter, but never as a bully. Her ability to yield with grace when confronted by bullies on the Senate floor earned her a great moral victory over Mitch McConnell. His exasperated attempt to put this uppity woman in her place, expressed in his ill considered statement “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” may very well have helped start the Aotsunami, the blue Tidal Wave of Democratic victories of 2018.
Elizabeth Warren met Mitch McConnell with the calm defiance with which Elizabeth Tudor met Philip v. Habsburg, Philip II of Spain. And as the Massachusetts Senator stood up to the Grim Reaper, there were echoes of the annoyance with which Pope Sixtus V demanded to know how “the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
As Elizabeth Warren leaves the campaign, to return to the Senate, where she can be warned, where she can have explanations proffered to her, and, most importantly, where she can persist, the far left of the Democratic Party finds itself pinning its hopes on a man who, as Republican strategist Karl Rove observed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, bears a disturbing resemblance to Henry Wallace, the vice president whom Franklin Roosevelt dropped in 1944 in favor of Harry S. Truman. Wallace ran for President in 1948 and came away with all of 2 1/2% of the vote.
As Winston Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible ifs accumulate. If Elizabeth Warren had been able to make a go of her presidential campaign. If after having been beaten by nearly 4 million votes in the 2016 primary, Bernard Sanders had been purged from the Democratic Party. If, if, if.
Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote some of the best teleplays of the 1990s, expressed the difficulty of our national condition in a line from the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows:” “The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
We find ourselves lost in a terrible in between. We are in danger of losing the America in which we have all been raised, and which in our own ways, we all cherish. All of us understand that there is still time to seize that “one last fragile moment,” to reclaim all that is good, and true, and noble about what Abraham Lincoln once called this “last, best hope of earth.” But we dare not choose either Donald Trump’s authoritarian, crypto-Nazi authoritarianism or the doctrinaire Marxist my-way-or-the-highway, Fidel Castro-adulating approach offered to us by Bernard Sanders. Liz understood that. Joe understands that.
In the binary choice that follows, in which the past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us, Joe Biden has emerged as the man to seize that one last fragile moment. Hopefully his cabinet, if God vouchsafes him this election, will be composed of the superabundantly talented men and women, from every race and nation, every rank and station, every gender and orientation, who made up the most diverse field of Democratic contenders ever to seek the Presidency of the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral city, where he served two terms on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own.
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
THE “EMPIRE” STRIKES BACK: Joe Biden’s Miracle of the House of Brandenburg
Summary: Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, written off and given up for dead just four days ago, came roaring back to life last night. As a substantial number of pundits and commentators of the chattering class have already observed, Joe dramatically overperformed in the super Tuesday states, even in Texas, which the commentariat had assumed would be blowout Bernard Sanders territory. What a difference a day can make. If yesterday morning Joe’s campaign was preparing for a long night of damage control, this afternoon Joe is, if not the prohibitive favorite, certainly the undisputed front runner in the Democratic primary. Meanwhile, Sanders nation is passing through the first of Elisabeth Kubler- Ross’s five stages of grief, anger and denial.
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Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 – what a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. Yesterday morning, as the Super Tuesday primary got underway, the pundits and commentators of the chattering class had Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign on life support, preparing to administer to it metaphorical last rites. Yet, the anticipated viaticum proved to have been premature.
Capitalizing on the momentum he picked up in his blowout victory in South Carolina, Biden dramatically overperformed in the super Tuesday contests. Indeed, Joe’s performance may be likened to the 18th century Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, that serious of fortuitous events whereby Prussia and King Frederick the Great were saved from a combined Russian and Austrian invasion, and the course of the entire Seven Years War was fundamentally altered. Though uncalled California remains a byword for incompetence and inefficiency in counting its votes, (something for which California Secretary of State Alex Padilla should face serious repercussions at the polls or by way of recall) Joe took ten of the 14 super Tuesday states, including the presumptive Sanders strongholds of Minnesota and Texas. Moreover, even-in slow-to-count-its-ballots California, Joe easily surpassed the 15% threshold required for delegate allocation.
If, during the early hours of yesterday, the Biden campaign was preparing for a long night of damage control, this morning, the landscape appears to have changed considerably. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had positioned himself through the early contests as the moderate alternative to Joe Biden, bowed out of the race this morning and endorsed the former Vice President.
As moderate Democratic candidates have, metaphorically speaking, bent the knee for Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren as the last far left candidate other than Bernard Sanders left in the race is said to be evaluating her future, (read, she is probably trying to negotiate her own departure from the contest) the race seems to be tightening to a two-man contest between two Caucasian septuagenarians.
And while one of the septuagenarians seems to have got his groove back, rejoicing in the recovery of his mojo, the other septuagenarian, that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that mendacious misogynist, that loudmouthed Leninist, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, is growing more shrill, more angry, and more unhinged at the unraveling of his campaign.
While Bernard Sanders contemplates the altogether uncongenial fact that his vaunted youth vote, which he expected to turn out for him in vast numbers, displayed its usual shortsighted indifference to the importance of showing up, preferring instead to wage war behind their keyboards, he, like Donald Trump, appears to be decompensating in real time. And as Sanders engages in Trumpian decompensation, he and his supporters are displaying both anger and denial that the electorates in the super Tuesday states appeared not to have agreed with his position that he is somehow entitled by Divine Right to the Democratic nomination.
Indeed, the Sanders people are already pushing easily debunked conspiracy theories, touting a stab-in-the-back narrative, a Dolchstoßlegende of DNC perfidy that shows disturbing affinities to the one eagerly propagated by the NSDAP against Germany’s Weimar Republic. The two initial stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grieving process, denial and anger, seem to be playing out in their fullest form in the churlish, graceless, intransigent response of Sanders and his campaign.
We are seeing very much a repetition of what happened after super Tuesday in 2016. Hillary Clinton swept the South, making deep inroads into the African-American Democratic primary electorates of the states of the old Confederacy. Then, as now, Sanders, whose inability to reach out to middle-aged and older voters of color has been well documented, dismissed the African-American electorate as part of the so-called establishment, a fact which has not been lost on middle-aged and older African-American voters, many of whom remember how the African-American vote was suppressed and prevented throughout the South during the Jim Crow years.
We are also seeing a repetition of the intransigent 2016 posture of Sanders and his supporters as his path to the nomination, which he had thought would be paved by his successes in small, non-diverse, largely white, caucus states, narrowed as Hillary Clinton pwned his ass in the diverse primary states which make up the backbone of the Democratic electorate.
While the Sanders people have retreated into the same 2016 posture of defiance as Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands continuing the struggle long after the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender order of August, 1945, the Biden campaign has made the same kind of astonishing recovery that the United States made after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Unfortunately, Sanders nation seems incapable of understanding that the dynamic of the primary has changed. He is underperforming his numbers from 2016, and as always, his supporters are alienating potential allies with the intransigence, misogyny, homophobia, and general all-round nastiness of their behavior.
While the cultists and zealots of the Sanders personality cult are waving their arms and stamping their feet and holding their breath till they turn blue, the Empire has struck back.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City - where he served two terms as the city councilmember- and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is not embarrassed to acknowledge that he is ridin’ with Biden, and feels a certain measure of Schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the Burlington Bolshevik and supporters. The opinions herein are his own. He expects to be attacked by Berners, and will use whatever force is necessary to repel the kind of physical attack the Joe Biden was subjected to by angry, vegan Berners during his victory speech last night in Los Angeles.
-------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 – what a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. Yesterday morning, as the Super Tuesday primary got underway, the pundits and commentators of the chattering class had Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign on life support, preparing to administer to it metaphorical last rites. Yet, the anticipated viaticum proved to have been premature.
Capitalizing on the momentum he picked up in his blowout victory in South Carolina, Biden dramatically overperformed in the super Tuesday contests. Indeed, Joe’s performance may be likened to the 18th century Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, that serious of fortuitous events whereby Prussia and King Frederick the Great were saved from a combined Russian and Austrian invasion, and the course of the entire Seven Years War was fundamentally altered. Though uncalled California remains a byword for incompetence and inefficiency in counting its votes, (something for which California Secretary of State Alex Padilla should face serious repercussions at the polls or by way of recall) Joe took ten of the 14 super Tuesday states, including the presumptive Sanders strongholds of Minnesota and Texas. Moreover, even-in slow-to-count-its-ballots California, Joe easily surpassed the 15% threshold required for delegate allocation.
If, during the early hours of yesterday, the Biden campaign was preparing for a long night of damage control, this morning, the landscape appears to have changed considerably. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had positioned himself through the early contests as the moderate alternative to Joe Biden, bowed out of the race this morning and endorsed the former Vice President.
As moderate Democratic candidates have, metaphorically speaking, bent the knee for Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren as the last far left candidate other than Bernard Sanders left in the race is said to be evaluating her future, (read, she is probably trying to negotiate her own departure from the contest) the race seems to be tightening to a two-man contest between two Caucasian septuagenarians.
And while one of the septuagenarians seems to have got his groove back, rejoicing in the recovery of his mojo, the other septuagenarian, that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that mendacious misogynist, that loudmouthed Leninist, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, is growing more shrill, more angry, and more unhinged at the unraveling of his campaign.
While Bernard Sanders contemplates the altogether uncongenial fact that his vaunted youth vote, which he expected to turn out for him in vast numbers, displayed its usual shortsighted indifference to the importance of showing up, preferring instead to wage war behind their keyboards, he, like Donald Trump, appears to be decompensating in real time. And as Sanders engages in Trumpian decompensation, he and his supporters are displaying both anger and denial that the electorates in the super Tuesday states appeared not to have agreed with his position that he is somehow entitled by Divine Right to the Democratic nomination.
Indeed, the Sanders people are already pushing easily debunked conspiracy theories, touting a stab-in-the-back narrative, a Dolchstoßlegende of DNC perfidy that shows disturbing affinities to the one eagerly propagated by the NSDAP against Germany’s Weimar Republic. The two initial stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grieving process, denial and anger, seem to be playing out in their fullest form in the churlish, graceless, intransigent response of Sanders and his campaign.
We are seeing very much a repetition of what happened after super Tuesday in 2016. Hillary Clinton swept the South, making deep inroads into the African-American Democratic primary electorates of the states of the old Confederacy. Then, as now, Sanders, whose inability to reach out to middle-aged and older voters of color has been well documented, dismissed the African-American electorate as part of the so-called establishment, a fact which has not been lost on middle-aged and older African-American voters, many of whom remember how the African-American vote was suppressed and prevented throughout the South during the Jim Crow years.
We are also seeing a repetition of the intransigent 2016 posture of Sanders and his supporters as his path to the nomination, which he had thought would be paved by his successes in small, non-diverse, largely white, caucus states, narrowed as Hillary Clinton pwned his ass in the diverse primary states which make up the backbone of the Democratic electorate.
While the Sanders people have retreated into the same 2016 posture of defiance as Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands continuing the struggle long after the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender order of August, 1945, the Biden campaign has made the same kind of astonishing recovery that the United States made after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Unfortunately, Sanders nation seems incapable of understanding that the dynamic of the primary has changed. He is underperforming his numbers from 2016, and as always, his supporters are alienating potential allies with the intransigence, misogyny, homophobia, and general all-round nastiness of their behavior.
While the cultists and zealots of the Sanders personality cult are waving their arms and stamping their feet and holding their breath till they turn blue, the Empire has struck back.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City - where he served two terms as the city councilmember- and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is not embarrassed to acknowledge that he is ridin’ with Biden, and feels a certain measure of Schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the Burlington Bolshevik and supporters. The opinions herein are his own. He expects to be attacked by Berners, and will use whatever force is necessary to repel the kind of physical attack the Joe Biden was subjected to by angry, vegan Berners during his victory speech last night in Los Angeles.
Monday, March 2, 2020
THE PECULIAR WANT OF DIGNITY, DECENCY, OR GRACE TO BE FOUND IN THE REDELESS, CARGO-SHORTS COMMUNIST FOLLOWERS OF BERNARD SANDERS
Summary: When Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the presidential race yesterday, the reaction from Bernard Sanders and his redeless, cargo shorts communist followers was predictable. Sanders himself delivered a pro forma, anodyne “congratulations” to Mayor Pete on his campaign. His followers were not nearly so gracious. Perhaps it was because they were feeling a little berned at the shellacking the Independent Vermont Senator took in South Carolina, where Joe Biden well and truly pwned his ass. Nonetheless, the commentary from Sanders nation was churlish, childish, and only calculated to add to the reservoir of ill will already facing Sen. Sanders. Of course, the fact that both Mayor Pete and Sen. Amy Klobuchar will be endorsing Joe Biden before today is out will only provide another opportunity for Sanders nation to demonstrate its smallness of mind.
---------------------------------------
Cathedral City, March 2, 2020 — The Democratic center, which a week ago we thought could not hold (pace, William Butler Yeats) against the seeming socialist onslaught of Bernard Sanders, seems to be coalescing against him. After Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar withdrew from the presidential race, both of them made it clear that their endorsement would not be going to Bernard Sanders, but to Joe Biden.
While Sanders still leads Biden by 12 (count ‘em, 12!) whole delegates, he still got his ass pwned in South Carolina. At least for now, Sanders may be the front runner, but he is emphatically not the prohibitive favorite. And that has Sanders nation just doing a massive bern.
When Sanders nation doesn’t get its way, when their Vermont Messiah gets berned, as he did in Iowa, where he came in behind Buttigieg in the delegate count, or pwned as he so unquestionably was by Joe Biden in South Carolina, Sanders nation reacts very badly.
Though Sanders nation vociferously denies the existence of Berniebros, actual empirical evidence of their existence is clear, convincing, and beyond any reasonable doubt. As long ago as early 2016, such leftist luminaries as The Nation’s Joan Walsh were warning voters about the Berniebro phenomenon, calling out both Sanders and his campaign for the intemperate and often abusive language employed by supporters of their Vermont Senator.
Not surprisingly, Sanders nation pilloried Joan Walsh unmercifully for having had the temerity to question their sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist for his ridiculous cult of personality. When Walsh pointed out that Sanders has always had a “tin ear” on matters of gender, Sanders nation proved her case by pouring down upon her torrents of misogynistic vitriol.
Sadly, Sanders nation has only gotten worse over the last four years. Call out Vermont Messiah for his hypocrisy and expect that the votaries of his personality cult will abuse you as being a corrupt neoliberal.
Remind Sanders nation that Hillary Clinton defeated him in the 2016 primary by almost 4m votes, and that she beat Donald Trump in the popular election by almost 3m votes, or when you note that just enough resentful Berniebros voted for Trump in the general election in 2016 to deprive Hillary Clinton of electoral college victories in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and Sanders nation will pour crap on you by every means available.
With Mayor Pete and Sen. Klobuchar out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden, we may confidently expect another tantrum from the Berniebros of Sanders nation. The response of the Party to the misdoings of Bernard Sanders and his cult of personality should be simple and forthright. Democrats should withhold voting for Sanders and loyally stick with Joe Biden.
The Party itself should modify its own rules posthaste to make another hostile takeover bid by Bernard Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts communist followers impossible. Caucuses should be done away with, as should jungle primaries and open primaries. No individual should be permitted to seek the Democratic nomination for president who cannot prove by clear and convincing evidence that he or she has been a Democrat for at least the last 17 years.
These are reforms the Democratic Party should set in train in the spring of 2017. It is a mystery why the DNC has failed to discipline its processes. Yet, at the moment, from somewhere beyond this world, humorist Will Rogers must be smiling as we invoke his devastating sally: “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”
Democrats need to get a lot better organized. Yesterday. They need to reject the well-meaning but foolish counsels of “when they go low, we go high.” Instead, Democrats need to stop believing that fighting dirty makes them illiberal or morally blameworthy. They go low, we meet ‘em in the basement with a switchblade. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue.
Shit’s about to get real. Hopefully Bernard Sanders will discover how real shit is about to get and will himself drop out of the race.
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the Cathedral city city Council. He currently practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage, which just recently turned down an In-N-Out Burger. Having been abused by the redeless votaries of the cult of personality of that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that mendacious misogynist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, Mr. Marchand is all out of fucks to give. He regards Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders as alter egos one to the other, and has nothing but disdain for both of them.
---------------------------------------
Cathedral City, March 2, 2020 — The Democratic center, which a week ago we thought could not hold (pace, William Butler Yeats) against the seeming socialist onslaught of Bernard Sanders, seems to be coalescing against him. After Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar withdrew from the presidential race, both of them made it clear that their endorsement would not be going to Bernard Sanders, but to Joe Biden.
While Sanders still leads Biden by 12 (count ‘em, 12!) whole delegates, he still got his ass pwned in South Carolina. At least for now, Sanders may be the front runner, but he is emphatically not the prohibitive favorite. And that has Sanders nation just doing a massive bern.
When Sanders nation doesn’t get its way, when their Vermont Messiah gets berned, as he did in Iowa, where he came in behind Buttigieg in the delegate count, or pwned as he so unquestionably was by Joe Biden in South Carolina, Sanders nation reacts very badly.
Though Sanders nation vociferously denies the existence of Berniebros, actual empirical evidence of their existence is clear, convincing, and beyond any reasonable doubt. As long ago as early 2016, such leftist luminaries as The Nation’s Joan Walsh were warning voters about the Berniebro phenomenon, calling out both Sanders and his campaign for the intemperate and often abusive language employed by supporters of their Vermont Senator.
Not surprisingly, Sanders nation pilloried Joan Walsh unmercifully for having had the temerity to question their sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist for his ridiculous cult of personality. When Walsh pointed out that Sanders has always had a “tin ear” on matters of gender, Sanders nation proved her case by pouring down upon her torrents of misogynistic vitriol.
Sadly, Sanders nation has only gotten worse over the last four years. Call out Vermont Messiah for his hypocrisy and expect that the votaries of his personality cult will abuse you as being a corrupt neoliberal.
Remind Sanders nation that Hillary Clinton defeated him in the 2016 primary by almost 4m votes, and that she beat Donald Trump in the popular election by almost 3m votes, or when you note that just enough resentful Berniebros voted for Trump in the general election in 2016 to deprive Hillary Clinton of electoral college victories in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and Sanders nation will pour crap on you by every means available.
With Mayor Pete and Sen. Klobuchar out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden, we may confidently expect another tantrum from the Berniebros of Sanders nation. The response of the Party to the misdoings of Bernard Sanders and his cult of personality should be simple and forthright. Democrats should withhold voting for Sanders and loyally stick with Joe Biden.
The Party itself should modify its own rules posthaste to make another hostile takeover bid by Bernard Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts communist followers impossible. Caucuses should be done away with, as should jungle primaries and open primaries. No individual should be permitted to seek the Democratic nomination for president who cannot prove by clear and convincing evidence that he or she has been a Democrat for at least the last 17 years.
These are reforms the Democratic Party should set in train in the spring of 2017. It is a mystery why the DNC has failed to discipline its processes. Yet, at the moment, from somewhere beyond this world, humorist Will Rogers must be smiling as we invoke his devastating sally: “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”
Democrats need to get a lot better organized. Yesterday. They need to reject the well-meaning but foolish counsels of “when they go low, we go high.” Instead, Democrats need to stop believing that fighting dirty makes them illiberal or morally blameworthy. They go low, we meet ‘em in the basement with a switchblade. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue.
Shit’s about to get real. Hopefully Bernard Sanders will discover how real shit is about to get and will himself drop out of the race.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the Cathedral city city Council. He currently practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage, which just recently turned down an In-N-Out Burger. Having been abused by the redeless votaries of the cult of personality of that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that mendacious misogynist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, Mr. Marchand is all out of fucks to give. He regards Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders as alter egos one to the other, and has nothing but disdain for both of them.
THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE, PETE BUTTIGIEG: AN APPRECIATION
Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.
-Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), riffing on George Bernard Shaw
Bugün değil (Not today in Turkish)
- Attributed to Kanuni Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent after the failure of the Ottoman Siege of Malta, 1565
Summary: Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While my head has inclined, and is inclining me, in the direction of the former Vice President Joe Biden, my queer, Anglican, southpaw heart still felt a certain wistful admiration for the quondam South Bend mayor and his altogether amazing campaign for the Presidency of the United States. Realistically, applying the heteronormative calculus of American politics, I should not have thought Pete Buttigieg’s campaign was even possible. But as a queer man, my life is lived in hope. As the motto of the State of South Carolina puts it, Dum Spiro Spero: while I breathe I hope.
----------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, March, 2. 2020 -- Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While his campaign was still active, I could not help but be reminded of the insurgent 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Before he was tragically cut down for the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary, Bobby used to riff on a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” His brother Ted Kennedy, in one of his last great speeches before his death, addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008, revived Bobby’s quotation and added to it an assurance that, nearly a dozen years later, still moves me to tears. “The dream,” Ted Kennedy assured the assembled delegates in Denver that day, “will never die.”
For many of us in this country who have not participated in the traditional white, religiously Protestant Nonconformist, heteronormative paradigm, we have necessarily lived far too long with a dream deferred. Yet for all the deferred dreams we have lived with, we still have lived in hope.
For queerfolk, we lived in hope that in the fullness of time we would be able to live our truth without fear, without discrimination, without persecution, and without being cast as a pernicious, diseased pariah Other.
We lived in hope that living our truth would not be considered some kind of “abominable and detestable crime against nature.”
We lived in hope that the relationships we established might some day enjoy the same legal solicitude and protection as those of our straight neighbors.
Our lives could be summed up by the motto of the Palmetto State of South Carolina: "Dum Spiro Spero," while I breathe, I hope.
Those of us who were Conformist in our religion lived in hope that someday we, too, might not only be able to share the altar rail with our straight coreligionists, but also that we might also be able to enter the threefold sacred ministry and celebrate, alongside our straight fellow children of the Kingdom, the Sacraments of our redemption.
For many of us, our dream of being able to participate as full, first-class citizens in the life of the American Commonwealth or of the Christian Republic was perforce deferred. Yet, following Stonewall in 1969, things began to change. In the words of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1918, “L’edifice commence à craquer!”
If, in 1969, the idea of a known homosexual serving as an elected public official seemed too many to be risible, the passage of less than a generation soon left the proposition of queerfolk in Congress, state legislatures, or city councils altogether unremarkable, as we moved purposefully to assert our indefeasible right of full, first-class participation in the life of the Commonwealth.
Here in Cathedral City, the idea of an openly queer person on the city Council has been a commonplace since the election of the late Greg Pettis in 1994. When I joined him on the city Council in December, 2002, as the second out gay man on the Council, my queer advent was greeted throughout most of the community with a “ho-hum” shrug.
Here in California, that bastion of the so-called Left Coast, the notion of queerfolk serving at all levels of elective office has simply ceased, outside the precincts of the radical Republican right, to be remarkable. And though certain Republicans and certain evangelical pundits may clutch their pearls, foam at the mouth, and otherwise suffer from a case of the vapors, the State has continued to function, and to function well.
Other jurisdictions, too, have been governed by queer chief executives. While Jim McGreevy in New Jersey felt that the exposure of his sexuality militated in favor of his resignation, neither Oregon’s Kate Brown nor Colorado’s Jared Polis have found being bisexual or gay to be any impediment to holding their respective governorships.
Fifty years after Stonewall, queerfolk can be found in local governments, on the judicial bench, in public safety agencies, in the National Guard, and in the federal Armed Forces the length and breadth of the United States.
Yet, it took the American public a little bit longer to get used to the idea of a queer fellow running a serious, substantial, substantive campaign for the Presidency of the United States. When former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg announced his candidacy for President of the United States, it was greeted by many, myself among them, with a certain degree of raised eyebrows and skepticism. I must confess, I wasn’t so much afraid of the idea of a gay man tossing his hat into the presidential ring as I was fearful of the games that might be played Mayor Pete’s Maltese surname. I feared that opponents on both sides of divide would be unable to avoid a middle school temptation to weaponize the name Buttigieg in the ineluctable way of bullies everywhere.
While some indeed sought to turn Mayor Pete’s surname into a weapon to use against him, most notably supporters of Donald Trump and his poisonous alter ego Bernard Sanders, most Democrats and Republicans remained true to their better selves and declined the temptation to engage in such puerile trolling.
Even as I continued, and continue, to support the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden, on the “make decisions with my head” theory that Vice President Biden is a known, experienced quantity, and the perfect antidote to the horrid obese, immoral, treasonable shitgibbon currently occupying the Oval Office, my heart still had a soft spot for Mayor Pete.
While I may be 18 years Pete Buttigieg’s senior, I still consider him very much a man after my own heart. We share certain commonalities. Like many descendents from formerly-British possessions, Malta in his case, Ireland in mine, we both possess what my sainted Irish grandmother might have called “the gift of the gab.” (Who but the Irish, the Indians, and the Maltese could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?) We are both former Roman Catholics who crossed the Thames and found a spiritual home in The Episcopal Church. We are both left-handed (damn southpaws!), and, of course, we’re both as queer as pink ink.
Pete’s effrontery, as it were, in running for President was magnificent. His unwillingness to accept the insistence of the Republicans or of the so-called Democratic Socialists that he stay in "his place" represented, in a sense, the kind of marvelous insubordination that animated the queerfolk who made the Stonewall rebellion.
At Stonewall, a bunch of angry fags and dikes, a congeries of drag queens, Greenwich Village hustlers, and pissed off street kids dared to defy a homophobic NYPD. And in so doing, they made possible everything that has happened since. Stonewall was our queer Lexington and Concord.
The famous Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đjilas observed that “In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.” The moral indignation that found its ur-expression at Stonewall gave rise to an unstoppable civil rights movement.
The horrors of the AIDS epidemic – and the moral failure of the Reagan Administration to act on that epidemic– gave our queer civil rights movement a kind of moral legitimacy akin to that of the African-American civil rights movement, much to the distress of some in that movement who had an altogether territorial appreciation of what it was, and a resistance to acknowledging the possibility that a bunch of queer white guys and gals might also be able to articulate a moral imperative for an equal place in the American Commonwealth.
Indeed, it may well be that part of Mayor Pete’s inability to connect with a Democratic electorate that is increasingly an electorate of color may find roots in that carefully Republican-fostered disdain, the old divide-and-conquer tactic the British used to such baleful effect throughout their empire, including in India, Ireland, and Malta, that still exists within part of the African-American community for non–heteronormative sexuality.
What is altogether less defensible is the behavior of a great many supporters of Bernard Sanders toward Mayor Pete and his campaign. Sanders has a well-deserved reputation for misogyny, that wicked half-sibling of homophobia. Yet Sanders has managed to convince far too many queerfolk that he is somehow an ally, and a staunch ally at that, of America’s queer nation.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though Sanders and his supporters have always like to point a disapproving finger at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton for not “evolving” fast enough on the issue of marriage equality, Bernard Sanders’s record itself shows a less than stellar degree of “purity” on the issue.
Moreover, the vicious, dog whistle homophobic, anti-Buttigieg trolling that Sanders himself appears to have tolerated, nay, encouraged, can never be forgotten nor forgiven. It will be a frosty Friday in May before much of the queer nation can bring itself even to be civil toward Bernard Sanders or his redeless, cargo-shorts communist supporters.
Bernard Sanders and the homophobic right-wingers orbiting Donald Trump notwithstanding, Mayor Pete’s campaign, even if cut short, represented, for queerfolk at least, a bright glimmering of promise, a moment of hope for an inclusive American dream in which “a gay dude from Indiana” and the man to whom he is married, could do more than look at things as they are and ask why. It was a brief shining moment when, through the Buttigieg campaign, we could dream of things that never were, and ask why the hell not?
And the dream will never die.
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a queer fellow who lives in Cathedral City, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He knows what it’s like to have been a queer elected official, having served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council. His death has been prayed for by angry Protestant Nonconformist evangelical preachers. He has been attacked for being queer by former colleagues on the city Council, and lambasted for his sexuality by Sandernista Marxists who take the Marxist-Leninist/Soviet view that non-heteronormative sexualities are nothing more than bourgeois affectations.
Mr. Marchand throws industrial-grade shade at all such people.
The opinions expressed herein are his own.
-Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), riffing on George Bernard Shaw
Bugün değil (Not today in Turkish)
- Attributed to Kanuni Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent after the failure of the Ottoman Siege of Malta, 1565
Summary: Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While my head has inclined, and is inclining me, in the direction of the former Vice President Joe Biden, my queer, Anglican, southpaw heart still felt a certain wistful admiration for the quondam South Bend mayor and his altogether amazing campaign for the Presidency of the United States. Realistically, applying the heteronormative calculus of American politics, I should not have thought Pete Buttigieg’s campaign was even possible. But as a queer man, my life is lived in hope. As the motto of the State of South Carolina puts it, Dum Spiro Spero: while I breathe I hope.
----------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, March, 2. 2020 -- Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While his campaign was still active, I could not help but be reminded of the insurgent 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Before he was tragically cut down for the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary, Bobby used to riff on a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” His brother Ted Kennedy, in one of his last great speeches before his death, addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008, revived Bobby’s quotation and added to it an assurance that, nearly a dozen years later, still moves me to tears. “The dream,” Ted Kennedy assured the assembled delegates in Denver that day, “will never die.”
For many of us in this country who have not participated in the traditional white, religiously Protestant Nonconformist, heteronormative paradigm, we have necessarily lived far too long with a dream deferred. Yet for all the deferred dreams we have lived with, we still have lived in hope.
For queerfolk, we lived in hope that in the fullness of time we would be able to live our truth without fear, without discrimination, without persecution, and without being cast as a pernicious, diseased pariah Other.
We lived in hope that living our truth would not be considered some kind of “abominable and detestable crime against nature.”
We lived in hope that the relationships we established might some day enjoy the same legal solicitude and protection as those of our straight neighbors.
Our lives could be summed up by the motto of the Palmetto State of South Carolina: "Dum Spiro Spero," while I breathe, I hope.
Those of us who were Conformist in our religion lived in hope that someday we, too, might not only be able to share the altar rail with our straight coreligionists, but also that we might also be able to enter the threefold sacred ministry and celebrate, alongside our straight fellow children of the Kingdom, the Sacraments of our redemption.
For many of us, our dream of being able to participate as full, first-class citizens in the life of the American Commonwealth or of the Christian Republic was perforce deferred. Yet, following Stonewall in 1969, things began to change. In the words of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1918, “L’edifice commence à craquer!”
If, in 1969, the idea of a known homosexual serving as an elected public official seemed too many to be risible, the passage of less than a generation soon left the proposition of queerfolk in Congress, state legislatures, or city councils altogether unremarkable, as we moved purposefully to assert our indefeasible right of full, first-class participation in the life of the Commonwealth.
Here in Cathedral City, the idea of an openly queer person on the city Council has been a commonplace since the election of the late Greg Pettis in 1994. When I joined him on the city Council in December, 2002, as the second out gay man on the Council, my queer advent was greeted throughout most of the community with a “ho-hum” shrug.
Here in California, that bastion of the so-called Left Coast, the notion of queerfolk serving at all levels of elective office has simply ceased, outside the precincts of the radical Republican right, to be remarkable. And though certain Republicans and certain evangelical pundits may clutch their pearls, foam at the mouth, and otherwise suffer from a case of the vapors, the State has continued to function, and to function well.
Other jurisdictions, too, have been governed by queer chief executives. While Jim McGreevy in New Jersey felt that the exposure of his sexuality militated in favor of his resignation, neither Oregon’s Kate Brown nor Colorado’s Jared Polis have found being bisexual or gay to be any impediment to holding their respective governorships.
Fifty years after Stonewall, queerfolk can be found in local governments, on the judicial bench, in public safety agencies, in the National Guard, and in the federal Armed Forces the length and breadth of the United States.
Yet, it took the American public a little bit longer to get used to the idea of a queer fellow running a serious, substantial, substantive campaign for the Presidency of the United States. When former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg announced his candidacy for President of the United States, it was greeted by many, myself among them, with a certain degree of raised eyebrows and skepticism. I must confess, I wasn’t so much afraid of the idea of a gay man tossing his hat into the presidential ring as I was fearful of the games that might be played Mayor Pete’s Maltese surname. I feared that opponents on both sides of divide would be unable to avoid a middle school temptation to weaponize the name Buttigieg in the ineluctable way of bullies everywhere.
While some indeed sought to turn Mayor Pete’s surname into a weapon to use against him, most notably supporters of Donald Trump and his poisonous alter ego Bernard Sanders, most Democrats and Republicans remained true to their better selves and declined the temptation to engage in such puerile trolling.
Even as I continued, and continue, to support the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden, on the “make decisions with my head” theory that Vice President Biden is a known, experienced quantity, and the perfect antidote to the horrid obese, immoral, treasonable shitgibbon currently occupying the Oval Office, my heart still had a soft spot for Mayor Pete.
While I may be 18 years Pete Buttigieg’s senior, I still consider him very much a man after my own heart. We share certain commonalities. Like many descendents from formerly-British possessions, Malta in his case, Ireland in mine, we both possess what my sainted Irish grandmother might have called “the gift of the gab.” (Who but the Irish, the Indians, and the Maltese could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?) We are both former Roman Catholics who crossed the Thames and found a spiritual home in The Episcopal Church. We are both left-handed (damn southpaws!), and, of course, we’re both as queer as pink ink.
Pete’s effrontery, as it were, in running for President was magnificent. His unwillingness to accept the insistence of the Republicans or of the so-called Democratic Socialists that he stay in "his place" represented, in a sense, the kind of marvelous insubordination that animated the queerfolk who made the Stonewall rebellion.
At Stonewall, a bunch of angry fags and dikes, a congeries of drag queens, Greenwich Village hustlers, and pissed off street kids dared to defy a homophobic NYPD. And in so doing, they made possible everything that has happened since. Stonewall was our queer Lexington and Concord.
The famous Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đjilas observed that “In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.” The moral indignation that found its ur-expression at Stonewall gave rise to an unstoppable civil rights movement.
The horrors of the AIDS epidemic – and the moral failure of the Reagan Administration to act on that epidemic– gave our queer civil rights movement a kind of moral legitimacy akin to that of the African-American civil rights movement, much to the distress of some in that movement who had an altogether territorial appreciation of what it was, and a resistance to acknowledging the possibility that a bunch of queer white guys and gals might also be able to articulate a moral imperative for an equal place in the American Commonwealth.
Indeed, it may well be that part of Mayor Pete’s inability to connect with a Democratic electorate that is increasingly an electorate of color may find roots in that carefully Republican-fostered disdain, the old divide-and-conquer tactic the British used to such baleful effect throughout their empire, including in India, Ireland, and Malta, that still exists within part of the African-American community for non–heteronormative sexuality.
What is altogether less defensible is the behavior of a great many supporters of Bernard Sanders toward Mayor Pete and his campaign. Sanders has a well-deserved reputation for misogyny, that wicked half-sibling of homophobia. Yet Sanders has managed to convince far too many queerfolk that he is somehow an ally, and a staunch ally at that, of America’s queer nation.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though Sanders and his supporters have always like to point a disapproving finger at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton for not “evolving” fast enough on the issue of marriage equality, Bernard Sanders’s record itself shows a less than stellar degree of “purity” on the issue.
Moreover, the vicious, dog whistle homophobic, anti-Buttigieg trolling that Sanders himself appears to have tolerated, nay, encouraged, can never be forgotten nor forgiven. It will be a frosty Friday in May before much of the queer nation can bring itself even to be civil toward Bernard Sanders or his redeless, cargo-shorts communist supporters.
Bernard Sanders and the homophobic right-wingers orbiting Donald Trump notwithstanding, Mayor Pete’s campaign, even if cut short, represented, for queerfolk at least, a bright glimmering of promise, a moment of hope for an inclusive American dream in which “a gay dude from Indiana” and the man to whom he is married, could do more than look at things as they are and ask why. It was a brief shining moment when, through the Buttigieg campaign, we could dream of things that never were, and ask why the hell not?
And the dream will never die.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a queer fellow who lives in Cathedral City, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He knows what it’s like to have been a queer elected official, having served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council. His death has been prayed for by angry Protestant Nonconformist evangelical preachers. He has been attacked for being queer by former colleagues on the city Council, and lambasted for his sexuality by Sandernista Marxists who take the Marxist-Leninist/Soviet view that non-heteronormative sexualities are nothing more than bourgeois affectations.
Mr. Marchand throws industrial-grade shade at all such people.
The opinions expressed herein are his own.
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