Summary: the election of Donald Trump would represent a national security disaster unparalleled American history. Trump is a Manchurian candidate in the truest sense . His public utterances make as clear as if he had shouted from the housetops his willingness to sell America out to Russia, China, and North Korea. While this conduct may not rise to the constitutional definition of treason, it nevertheless puts his cause and the Republican cause into the realms, at the very least, of constructive treason. Donald Trump’s willingness to cause harm to this country and her national security ought to disqualify him from any office of trust or profit anywhere in the United States, right down to local dog-catcher. Donald Trump is a traitor.
Britain votes today on the fraught question of whether to leave the European Union. The Brexit vote can be expected to have long ranging, potentially disastrous, ramifications for the United Kingdom and for NATO. As always, we should ask who stands to benefit from any shortsighted British decision to leave the EU. The immediate answer is glaringly obvious, Russia and her dictatorial Pres. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be the most immediate winners should Britain leave the EU.
Republican presidential presumptive nominee Donald Trump has made his support for the “leave” side very clear and very public. Trump is almost alone among American political leaders or wannabe leaders in urging a Brexit, and it tends to fall in line with Donald Trump's other pro-Russia, anti-America, views and sentiments.
The Donald and Vladimir Vladimirovich has certainly become a mutual admiration society in recent weeks. It is no secret that the Russian strongman would prefer to deal with a President Trump rather than with a President Clinton. Indeed, reports have emerged from the Kremlin that the Putin regime would regard an election of Hillary Clinton as a casus belli, i.e., a justification for war. Presumably, this is intended to terrorize the American people into voting for gospodin Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump.
We know why Vladimir Vladimirovich prefers Trump. The Donald is so ill-educated in even the rudiments of statecraft, and so thin-skinned, that it would be possible for Vladimir Vladimirovich to lead him by the nose. This of course has been the dream of generations of Soviet and Russian leaders, to have an American president whom they can essentially control. By attempting to intermeddle in the 2016 election, the Kremlin is, to all intents and purposes, undertaking a hostile takeover bid of the highest echelons of the United States government.
Doing so under threat of war if we elect the “wrong” candidate is a kind of blackmail which accomplishes two purposes. First, to the extent that the news of gospodin Putin’s war threat becomes known to the broad American electorate, the bloody mindedness we inherited from the British will assert itself as Americans line up and say “we will not go quietly, we will not be blackmailed or bullied.” The indignation that such Russian intervention in our elections can be expected to stir would be worth at least a million votes to Sec. Clinton’s campaign.
The second purpose gospodin Putin’s threat accomplishes is to drive Trump’s cause, and by extension that of the Republican Party whose nominee he is, fairly definitively into the realms of treason.
Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” The bar for treason is fairly high, which explains why it is the only federal crime which is specifically defined in the Constitution. It was placed there to ward off the kinds of abuses that had crept into the English law of treason, particularly under King Henry VIII, where so much as discussing the physical health of the King could be construed as treason.
But though the constitutional bar is high, prosecutions for treason can and have happened in the United States. There is thus a potentially compelling argument for pursuing Donald Trump on a charge of treason, or at the very least denying him a four year lease on the White House. If levying war against the United States or to hearing to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort is treason, then what can we say about Donald Trump’s policy proposals and prescriptions?
• The Donald has spoken of the desirability of pulling American support from NATO, while at the same time speaking glowingly of Vladimir Putin, who as we know, ardently desires Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States. An American exit from NATO would create as much havoc as a 100 armored division thrust into Germany’s Fulda gap. Does that strike anyone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
• The Donald has also advocated pulling our tripwire military presence from the Republic of Korea. Who benefits from an American pullout from South Korea? The obvious answer is North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. And if we pull out of South Korea, how does Japan defend herself? The Donald would have Japan arm herself of the teeth with nuclear weapons the Japanese have no desire or inclination to possess. Apparently, in his ignorance, The Donald has no recollection of two proper nouns that carry a whole weight of meaning to the people not only of Japan, but also of the world. Those nouns are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is The Donald trying to sell out? Is it South Korea? Is it Japan? Or is it the entire American position in East Asia and the Western Pacific?
• The Donald’s public support for Britain’s departure from the EU also constitutes a material gift of aid and comfort to our enemies. The EU, as currently constituted, has been one of the most effective and helpful tools for rebuilding European civilization after the horrors of World War II that could be devised by the wit or artifice of man. Europe knows, too well, the horrific price of division and competing nationalisms. But again, it’s worth considering who has a vested interest in the breakup of the unified Europe, and that is the Kremlin. During the vote on Scottish secession last year, Russian intervention in favor of the breakaway of the northern kingdom was clear and muscular. From the Kremlin and from state media alike, there emerged a steady drumbeat of Russian criticism of the voting process in the referendum, along with steady Russian claims that the election (which returned a blowout 55-45 majority for keeping the United Kingdom entire) had somehow been “rigged.” This notwithstanding the fact that British elections are a byword for integrity, transparency, and trustworthiness in result. The Kremlin’s interest in sundering the United Kingdom is unambiguously informed by its belief that an independent Scotland would not have been able to control effectively the so-called GIUK gap through which Russian submarines and surface naval assets can pass into the North Atlantic. They are hoping for similar results from a Brexit, reckoning that the strategic calculus can only be favorable to Moscow and harmful to Washington.
Listening to Donald Trump’s policy prescriptions, to the extent that he has made any, is to listen to a whole series of proposals calculated to harm the United States and its national security. Unlike differences over domestic policy, where Donald Trump is also vulnerable to a charge of aiding and abetting terrorism with his ridiculous positions on gun safety legislation, foreign policy proposals which can be expected to do harm to the United States stand in a somewhat different constitutional realm. When a presidential candidate proposes measures or takes positions that cause actual harm or raise the reasonable foreseeability of harm, he is skirting close to treason, if not actually definitively entering the realms of treason.
While basic considerations of due process, derived from centuries of common law experience, declare that a person is innocent until proven guilty, those principles do not apply in a political campaign where the public can judge an un-vetted candidate solely upon the words that come out of his mouth; what you say is your job interview to the 320 million Americans who will be your boss.
By that token, the Donald is flubbing his job interview quite badly. Not only is he flubbing it badly, but he is also giving clear indication that he is in fact a “Manchurian candidate,” whose willingness to sell America down the river to the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans ought to unfit him for any office of trust or profit whatsoever under the United States, or any of them, right down to local dog-catcher.
We cannot afford to elect a potential traitor to the presidency of the United States. All of Trump’s bullshit about Benghazi or “crooked Hillary” notwithstanding, he convicts himself out of the words of his own mouth, if not of treason, certainly of treasonable intent at the very least. Under section 4 of Article II of the Constitution, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If Donald Trump were to be inaugurated, his impeachment for treason should be set in train immediately. Based on his words alone, the Congress would have ample justification to remove him from office.
However, the simplest way to prevent the national trauma of an impeachment is to ensure the Donald Trump never gets to the White House. If redbaiting will keep Donald Trump away from the White House and ensure his defeat at the polls, then let us, as liberals and progressives, not be self-defeatingly unwilling to engage in redbaiting for the sake of the nation.
Donald Trump is a traitor, and that says something non-recommending about his supporters. A preventative and comprehensive prophylaxis is recommended.
-xxx-
Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He expects that if Donald Trump is elected President of the United States he will be obliged to seek political asylum abroad to avoid the insensate and vindictive response of President Trump, who is made it very clear how he proposes to deal with even the slightest criticism. Dublin is looking very attractive right about now.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Sunday, June 12, 2016
AFTER THE ORLANDO MASSACRE: TIME TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH ... AGAIN
Summary: Fifty are dead and a like number are injured in the worst mass shooting in American history, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. At this stage, we are still too early in the process to have a definitive idea what happened. The shooter may, but we don’t know, have had some of allegiance to Daesh, the Islamic death cult known in this country as ISIS or ISIL. Naturally, assholes like Donald Trump and the Westboro Baptist Church have weighed in, and the usual political food fight is just ginning up. But at this stage, it really is too early to draw definitive conclusions. Instead, it’s time for a considerate silence as we try to figure out what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
_____________________________________________
When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left fifty dead and a like number injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting and the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll. But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh, my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as Donald Trump tries to make political capital, as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst mass shooting in American history.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that fifty are dead and a like number have been wounded. We know that a suspected shooter is dead, shot by the police. We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of homophobic Web tidbits and that he apparently professed some sort of allegiance to Daesh, and perhaps more importantly, he was a known domestic abuser. Leaving aside the claim of allegiance to Daesh, which at this point appears to be more a red herring than a serious profession of allegiance to the Islamic death cult, we do know that he was apparently moved to murderous rage by the spectacle of two gay men kissing one another. Just about any queer person can tell you that such behavior screams “closet case.” We should not be surprised, in coming days, to find that the alleged shooter was himself a closeted homosexual. “I want to fuck you, but I’ve got so many hangups that instead of getting naked with you and making love, I prefer to kill you.”
What we think is a more problematic issue. From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, let fly with its usual hateful tweets. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Orlando early this morning, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the fifty victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
_____________________________________________
When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left fifty dead and a like number injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting and the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll. But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh, my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as Donald Trump tries to make political capital, as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst mass shooting in American history.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that fifty are dead and a like number have been wounded. We know that a suspected shooter is dead, shot by the police. We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of homophobic Web tidbits and that he apparently professed some sort of allegiance to Daesh, and perhaps more importantly, he was a known domestic abuser. Leaving aside the claim of allegiance to Daesh, which at this point appears to be more a red herring than a serious profession of allegiance to the Islamic death cult, we do know that he was apparently moved to murderous rage by the spectacle of two gay men kissing one another. Just about any queer person can tell you that such behavior screams “closet case.” We should not be surprised, in coming days, to find that the alleged shooter was himself a closeted homosexual. “I want to fuck you, but I’ve got so many hangups that instead of getting naked with you and making love, I prefer to kill you.”
What we think is a more problematic issue. From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, let fly with its usual hateful tweets. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Orlando early this morning, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the fifty victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
DIXVILLE NOTCH
Summary: The Democratic primary campaign has, to all intents and purposes, come to an end. Militant Sanders supporters notwithstanding, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States. Bernie can either yield gracefully and keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, or he can pander to his supporters and forfeit that chance altogether, becoming a pariah in the Party of which he is a relatively recent member. We need to change the rules of the convention to abolish the racist and antidemocratic caucus mechanism, requiring every state to have a closed primary, and refusing to seat state delegations chosen by caucuses, and we also need to provide for a rule requiring that the Party’s nominee have been a registered Democrat for at least five years. We can’t run the risk of any more hostile takeovers by people who want to bern the party down.
-----------------------------------------------------
About two hours ago, I had my own “Dixville Notch” moment, as I walked into my polling place and discovered that I was the very first voter of the day.
If you are the very first voter, you are responsible for doing a number of things that other voters are not. You have to look at any touchscreens to make sure that they register zero, then you get to look inside the ballot box to make sure it hasn’t been pre-stuffed, after which you have to sign off on the whole thing.
This ritual is intended to make sure that there is no hanky-panky at the precinct, that overzealous supporters of any particular candidate can’t play fast and loose with vote totals.
I behaved myself, of course, and refrained from electioneering; though my allegiance to Hillary Rodham Clinton is an open secret, #imwithher; neither her name nor Bernard Sanders’ name were ever mentioned.
I must confess, the experience of being the very first voter, though new to me, reminded me of why I have made the effort to vote in every election since I turned 18. But this election is more consequential than any I have ever participated in.
As I write, in the early morning hours of June 7, 2016, voters in California will go to the polls. Democrats, or should I say sane Americans, will have a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bernard Sanders. For Sanders, this primary process is approaching endgame. It’s hard to tell who is angrier about that prospect, the Vermont Senator or his more unhinged supporters who see their hopes of a Sanders presidency going south.
The sheer ugliness of Sanders supporters I will leave to another time. What Bernard Sanders confronts right now, however, is one that in California politics is called a “drill,” i.e., having to make a political decision that is bound to piss off a powerful constituency no matter what decision you make. What makes a drill more problematic is that one does not have the traditional French option of deciding not to decide. How Bernard Sanders responds in the next 12 to 24 hours to the news that Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party is the drill.
He can yield gracefully, and in so doing keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, albeit at the acknowledged risk of being called a “sellout” by his more militant supporters. Or, he can continue to be churlish and unyielding, defiant and kamikaze-like, and be a hero to his supporters and a pariah to the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, how Bernie behaves today and tonight will determine whether there is a place for him on the ticket or in a putative Clinton administration. The choice now is his. We can only hope that he makes the right one.
But what we do know is that Democratic Party’s concessions to the insurgent Vermont Senator are probably at an end. Cornel West, the concession appointment to the platform committee, will soon find himself outvoted and outspoken. Barney Frank, whom Sanders tried to have kicked out of his position as cochair of the Rules Committee, is not likely to be in a magnanimous mood now that Senator Sanders has lost. And indeed, now maybe it is time to make some significant rules changes in the way the party nominates its candidate.
These rule changes will not be congenial to Sanders nor will they be congenial to his supporters, And they should not be. The party should not respond well to a hostile takeover bid. First, the ridiculous, borderline racist, anti-democratic caucus process should be done away with entirely. Caucuses are, by well-nigh universal accord, a lousy way to choose delegates. They are intended to advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. They take place largely in heavily white, nondiverse states, which raises the inference that a candidate who builds his strength in the caucus states is trafficking in a kind of racism unbecoming any Democrat. The caucuses it should be replaced immediately, as Minnesota has just done, by honest-to-God primary elections, in which every registered Democrat can vote, and where there is a legitimate secret ballot, so that voters need not fear any retribution for their choice. There have been numerous accounts of Hillary Clinton supporters facing retribution from angry Sanders supporters at caucuses. This must stop.
As much, however, as the caucus system should be replaced by primaries in which every registered Democrat may vote, they should be replaced by closed primaries, in which only registered Democrats may vote. Persons who choose to register no party preference have volitionally opted out of the Democratic process. They have opted to make a very public statement that they are not part of the Democratic Party. Why the hell should so-called independents be allowed a voice in choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party for dogcatcher, let alone President? If, for example, one registers as “no party preference,” one is engaged in a very public repudiation of the Democratic Party and its values. We don’t need such people intruding into our process and skewing our elections for our nominees. After all, what good is partisanship when you allow interlopers to screw up your process.
Hell, you might as well give up on the whole primary process and allow the GOP to select our candidates for us! This is what Bernie Sanders and his militant supporters don’t understand. The other major rules change that should happen is a requirement that someone seeking the Democratic nomination for president demonstrate a history in the Party. I find it an obscenity from a partisan perspective, that Bernie Sanders didn’t register is a Democrat until late last year, and now he wants to be our nominee for the presidency of United States. No, and a thousand times no! The convention should adopt a rule effective in the 2020 campaign requiring that no name may be placed in nomination who has not been a registered Democrat for at least five years, i.e., long enough to have participated in at least the previous election cycle.
Finally, to put some teeth into these rule changes, the convention should adopt a rule, effective in the 2020 election cycle, providing that states which have not discontinued the caucus process and adopted the closed primary will not have their delegations seated at the convention. And to prevent a nonconforming nomination from being made, at the convention, of a candidate who came “late to the party,” any delegate who proposes such a motion should, by operation of law, be deemed immediately to have forfeited his or her credentials as a delegate and be removed from the convention by any means necessary.
Does our process need reform? Yes, it does, but not in the direction Bernie Sanders and his supporters have advocated. If we do as Bernie Sanders and his supporters want, we won’t have a Party left by the time he and his friends have finished Berning it down.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed in this column are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is most definitely with Hillary Clinton.
-----------------------------------------------------
About two hours ago, I had my own “Dixville Notch” moment, as I walked into my polling place and discovered that I was the very first voter of the day.
If you are the very first voter, you are responsible for doing a number of things that other voters are not. You have to look at any touchscreens to make sure that they register zero, then you get to look inside the ballot box to make sure it hasn’t been pre-stuffed, after which you have to sign off on the whole thing.
This ritual is intended to make sure that there is no hanky-panky at the precinct, that overzealous supporters of any particular candidate can’t play fast and loose with vote totals.
I behaved myself, of course, and refrained from electioneering; though my allegiance to Hillary Rodham Clinton is an open secret, #imwithher; neither her name nor Bernard Sanders’ name were ever mentioned.
I must confess, the experience of being the very first voter, though new to me, reminded me of why I have made the effort to vote in every election since I turned 18. But this election is more consequential than any I have ever participated in.
As I write, in the early morning hours of June 7, 2016, voters in California will go to the polls. Democrats, or should I say sane Americans, will have a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bernard Sanders. For Sanders, this primary process is approaching endgame. It’s hard to tell who is angrier about that prospect, the Vermont Senator or his more unhinged supporters who see their hopes of a Sanders presidency going south.
The sheer ugliness of Sanders supporters I will leave to another time. What Bernard Sanders confronts right now, however, is one that in California politics is called a “drill,” i.e., having to make a political decision that is bound to piss off a powerful constituency no matter what decision you make. What makes a drill more problematic is that one does not have the traditional French option of deciding not to decide. How Bernard Sanders responds in the next 12 to 24 hours to the news that Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party is the drill.
He can yield gracefully, and in so doing keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, albeit at the acknowledged risk of being called a “sellout” by his more militant supporters. Or, he can continue to be churlish and unyielding, defiant and kamikaze-like, and be a hero to his supporters and a pariah to the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, how Bernie behaves today and tonight will determine whether there is a place for him on the ticket or in a putative Clinton administration. The choice now is his. We can only hope that he makes the right one.
But what we do know is that Democratic Party’s concessions to the insurgent Vermont Senator are probably at an end. Cornel West, the concession appointment to the platform committee, will soon find himself outvoted and outspoken. Barney Frank, whom Sanders tried to have kicked out of his position as cochair of the Rules Committee, is not likely to be in a magnanimous mood now that Senator Sanders has lost. And indeed, now maybe it is time to make some significant rules changes in the way the party nominates its candidate.
These rule changes will not be congenial to Sanders nor will they be congenial to his supporters, And they should not be. The party should not respond well to a hostile takeover bid. First, the ridiculous, borderline racist, anti-democratic caucus process should be done away with entirely. Caucuses are, by well-nigh universal accord, a lousy way to choose delegates. They are intended to advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. They take place largely in heavily white, nondiverse states, which raises the inference that a candidate who builds his strength in the caucus states is trafficking in a kind of racism unbecoming any Democrat. The caucuses it should be replaced immediately, as Minnesota has just done, by honest-to-God primary elections, in which every registered Democrat can vote, and where there is a legitimate secret ballot, so that voters need not fear any retribution for their choice. There have been numerous accounts of Hillary Clinton supporters facing retribution from angry Sanders supporters at caucuses. This must stop.
As much, however, as the caucus system should be replaced by primaries in which every registered Democrat may vote, they should be replaced by closed primaries, in which only registered Democrats may vote. Persons who choose to register no party preference have volitionally opted out of the Democratic process. They have opted to make a very public statement that they are not part of the Democratic Party. Why the hell should so-called independents be allowed a voice in choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party for dogcatcher, let alone President? If, for example, one registers as “no party preference,” one is engaged in a very public repudiation of the Democratic Party and its values. We don’t need such people intruding into our process and skewing our elections for our nominees. After all, what good is partisanship when you allow interlopers to screw up your process.
Hell, you might as well give up on the whole primary process and allow the GOP to select our candidates for us! This is what Bernie Sanders and his militant supporters don’t understand. The other major rules change that should happen is a requirement that someone seeking the Democratic nomination for president demonstrate a history in the Party. I find it an obscenity from a partisan perspective, that Bernie Sanders didn’t register is a Democrat until late last year, and now he wants to be our nominee for the presidency of United States. No, and a thousand times no! The convention should adopt a rule effective in the 2020 campaign requiring that no name may be placed in nomination who has not been a registered Democrat for at least five years, i.e., long enough to have participated in at least the previous election cycle.
Finally, to put some teeth into these rule changes, the convention should adopt a rule, effective in the 2020 election cycle, providing that states which have not discontinued the caucus process and adopted the closed primary will not have their delegations seated at the convention. And to prevent a nonconforming nomination from being made, at the convention, of a candidate who came “late to the party,” any delegate who proposes such a motion should, by operation of law, be deemed immediately to have forfeited his or her credentials as a delegate and be removed from the convention by any means necessary.
Does our process need reform? Yes, it does, but not in the direction Bernie Sanders and his supporters have advocated. If we do as Bernie Sanders and his supporters want, we won’t have a Party left by the time he and his friends have finished Berning it down.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed in this column are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is most definitely with Hillary Clinton.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
ON THE APPLICABILITY OF THE NINTH CHAPTER OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES TO OUR CURRENT POLITICAL SITUATION
Summary: There has been a certain tendency among ideological purists in the insurgent campaign of Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders to attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for the apparent recency of her support for marriage equality. Apparently, these ideological purists are disconnected from the Scriptures which form so important a part of the Western Canon, and which, in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, recount the story of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.
Yet, none of us can claim to be Simon pure on marriage equality. For most of us, coming around to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be able to tie the knot and have their unions recognized was a fairly heavy lift. It required of all of us, straight or queer, a reevaluation of a lot of heretofore unexamined verities. A great many people in our society have still not come round to the idea that Ruth should be allowed to marry Naomi or the Jonathan and David can be husbands together. To attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for not coming around “soon enough,” is ridiculous, privileged hypocrisy. To attack her because her husband signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is not only privileged, it’s just out and out sexist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A not insignificant number of Bernard Sanders purists, including many privileged young homosexuals who are in a position, thanks to the struggles of their elders and betters, to take their protected status for granted, have taken up the cudgels against Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking her for being “late to the ball”, as it were, on marriage equality. Of course, these are the same purists who attacked President Obama because they didn’t like his timetable for evolution on the issue of marriage equality, either.
I think I’m in a position to speak with some credibility, even authority, on this issue. I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage case. By that, I don’t mean an ordinary straight divorce, I mean that I was one of the first attorneys in California, perhaps the very first, to challenge the validity of California’s gender-specific marriage law.
Early in 1993, I was approached by two young men who had been rebuffed in their attempt to procure a marriage license from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. We discussed the matter, and we decided to challenge the ban. We took a flyer. Our philosophy in so doing was simple. We figured that either one of two things would happen: either the courts would be so startled by our writ petition that they would deny it out of hand, with a one sentence per curiam decision reading simply “the petition is denied.” or, if the court considered our petition sufficiently meritorious, we might be able to sneak through a major breakthrough in the cause a marriage equality.
We were inspired by the recent Hawai’i case of Baehr v. Lewin (1993) 74 Haw. 530, in which the Hawai’i Supreme Court had required the state to demonstrate a compelling government interest for denying the liberty of marital contract to same-sex couples. We took a careful look at the opinion, and we also analyzed the likelihood that the courts might attempt to use our petition to come down with a retrograde, homophobic opinion such as that in Bowers v. Hardwick, (1986) 478 U.S. 186, which had upheld the authority of states to criminalize same-sex intimacy. Knowing as I did the personnel who would probably make up the appellate panel reviewing our petition, I believed the risk was justified by the potential reward.
So, we went ahead and filed our petition. We were expecting a hostile, at best indifferent, reaction from the straight community. What took us rather by surprise was the enormous hostility we encountered from the “official” Gay and Lesbian Movement. My clients and I were shunned by the Official Movement, and essentially cast out into the wilderness. While the Los Angeles Times ran a fairly lengthy and even sympathetic article, we received next to no attention from the queer press. The “Official Lawyers” of the “Official” Homosexual Movement “ordered” me to cease and desist.
I could see two reasons for the hostile reaction of the so-called “Official” Movement. First, all of the “Official Homosexuals” were wrapped up in the battle over the right of queer folk to be cannon fodder, for the right to kill and to be killed while wearing our country’s uniform. It’s curiously ironic, isn’t it, that in America, your first-class citizenship should be a function of your willingness to kill or be killed while wearing the national uniform. Because apparently, the right to be cannon fodder was viewed as being substantially more important than our right to form legally recognized families.
The second reason that I encountered such hostility from the “Official” Movement was simply that the “Official” Movement is very territorial. They didn’t want an unknown like me poaching in territory of which they proposed to take exclusive possession when the moment was right. My clients and I, to the view of the “Official” Movement, were unwelcome, unwanted interlopers. And we were treated as such. We were publicly scoffed at by gay and lesbian Center director Lorri Jean, and by other “Official” homosexuals who took their cue from her; we were attacked, ignored, and written out of the Offical, Canonical, History. Had we been successful, I expect we would still have been revised right out of the Official History.
Of course, it must be conceded that the climate for marriage in 1993 was considerably different than it is today. A great many Americans, both queer and straight, were uncertain about whether the queer nation, let alone American society as a whole, was prepared to assimilate the ramifications of allowing Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David to tie the nuptial knot. Indeed, if you had asked me, when I graduated from law school in 1989, whether I supported marriage equality, my own answer would probably have been a somewhat equivocal “not really.”
My “evolution” on the subject was precipitated not only by my responsibility to my clients, which required that I be able to zealously represent their interests, but also by the fact that a cousin of mine and his same-sex partner (now husband) had adopted a daughter. At the time, second parent adoptions were not an option for them; only one of the two men could legally be the girl’s father, though both men were parents to this girl (now an astonishingly self-possessed young woman) in every way that mattered. But if something untoward were to happen to the girl’s legal father, his partner, also the girl’s father in every way that matters, would have no rights with respect to the child that the law would be compelled to respect or even acknowledge. I wanted to change that.
Those two factors contributed in large part to my own “road to Damascus” moment. I became an advocate for same gender marriage. I remember a conversation I had during this time with a professional colleague who cautioned me that our national conversation on marriage was only beginning. It would be, he suggested, at least ten years before we would see any progress. His estimate turned out to be prescient. Though Vermont opened the door for civil unions in Baker v. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), it would not be until 2003 that Massachusetts would open the way to full marriage equality with the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003) 440 Mass. 309, 798 N.E.2d 941. My colleague’s ten-year prediction had proven eerily correct.
Of course there was backlash and even more there was what Lyndon Johnson famously called frontlash, as states without marriage equality sought to preempt it or prohibit it from taking root within their borders. Indeed, the whole issue of marriage formed a large part of the George W. Bush administration’s pandering approach to social conservatives during his 2004 campaign, though, privately, even the Bush administration gave intimations that it might be prepared to regard civil unions as an acceptable “Plan B” option.
For queerfolk, evolution on marriage came fairly quickly and fairly uniformly. Though certain so-called lesbian separatists and followers of homonormativity opposed marriage because it represented a queer co-optation of a straight institution, the vast majority of America’s queerfolk came round to marriage equality fairly quickly and fairly comprehensively.
But for our straight neighbors, the issue was a little bit more complicated. To bring our straight neighbors around on marriage, we’ve had to make use of the social construct known as “proximity empathy.” Now proximity empathy is based on the idea that to know someone helps break down barriers to acceptance. It is the idea underlying National Coming Out Day; it’s a lot harder to deny the civil rights, the personhood, or the humanity of a queer person if you know one. When your child, your neighbor, your kin, your fellow parishioner, your coworker, your colleague, your you-name-it, comes out to you, it forces you to reassess your prejudices. The example that readily occurs in any discussion of proximity empathy is that of Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose son Will came out as gay while an undergraduate at Yale.
Of course, appeals to proximity empathy don’t sit well with the purity police, and so, we have an awful lot of Bernie Sanders supporters taking up the cudgels against Hillary Clinton because they don’t like the fact that she --and the President-– both very publicly “evolved” on the issue of marriage in rather the same manner as Saul of Tarsus became Paul the God-intoxicated emissary of the Jesus Movement in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. To purists, particularly the Sanders purists, anything less than permanent, early, unequivocal support is unacceptable. This, notwithstanding Senator Sanders’s own equivocations on the issue of marriage equality.
Still, we know the the limitations of the purist mind. We know that to purists, any indication of flexibility, any so-called evolution, is ideologically forbidden. And so we see Sanders trolls posting memes attacking Hillary Clinton for not having been “there” on marriage equality early enough. Add to that the Sanders supporters’ attacks on Hillary Clinton for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and it is easy to see the sexism and male privilege underlying so many of those attacks.
Many of these attacks come from millennial homosexuals who, in California at least, have been able to take for granted their faculty for participating openly in the life of the body politic. These millennial homosexuals have no concept of the time when the mere expression of physical intimacy with a person of one’s own sex could spell ruin.
They have no recollection of the time when California law provided no workplace protection for queerfolk. They don’t remember the demonstrations that took place when Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed California’s first employment nondiscrimination bill for LGBT people. They have no memory of that time in our relatively recent history when you could be denied housing for being queer, or when Megan’s law was being used to harass elderly gay men with ancient criminal records for having held their boyfriend’s hand during the 1940s.
Most of these millennial homosexuals, born in the late 1980s or 1990s, also have no memory of the AIDS epidemic that scarred the lives of a generation of queerfolk. To them, being a twentysomething gay man now has absolutely no resemblance to life if you happened to be a gay man born in the late 50s or early 60s. For those of us who were born in that timeframe, our twenties should have been a time when the world was our oyster, when we had phenomenal sex lives, when we were beautiful, the horizon was limitless, and the candy store was open.
Instead, we who were in our late teens and early 20s in the early 1980s entered adulthood to a reality of friends and lovers getting sick and dying. We attended so many funerals that we could recite from memory the Burial Office. A time that should have been for us a happy time full of promise was instead a Ragnarok, a gray and cheerless time when Fenrir the Wolf had devoured the sun and Valhalla had fallen. All we could say as the crisis began to moderate in the mid-1990s was what which the Abbé Sieyes had said when asked what he had done during the Terror: “j’ai survécu,” I survived.
Today’s millennial homosexuals have been able to do much more than merely survive. In Palm Springs, our millennial homosexuals enjoy a rather privileged existence. It’s hardly surprising that Palm Springs should be the gay playground of choice for millennial homosexuals from the Bay Area and West Hollywood. Yet they have the privilege of not remembering. It’s not a matter of having forgotten; it’s just that they weren’t born then, and they thus have absolutely no basis for comparison.
But we who are closer in age to Hillary Clinton then we are to the millennial homosexuals of Palm Springs understand what it is to evolve. We understand what it is to have buried our friends while reciting from constantly refreshed memory the Burial Office. And perhaps, being closer in age to Hillary Clinton, having seen the bullshit to which she has been subjected, and having put up with our own bullshit, we are a little bit older, a little bit sadder, and a little bit wiser.
And perhaps, just perhaps, as we late 50s and early 60s babies teeter on the brink of old farthood, we’ve learned that Simon purity is not sustainable, that forgiveness is a must, that evolution can happen, that the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles (and the Pauline conversion narrative set forth therein) contains truths we would do well to recall, and that finally, an imperfect friend is a hell of a lot better to have in your corner than a deadly enemy.
-XXX-
The views contained herein are those of the author, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Persons seeking legal advice should consult a licensed practitioner, one of whom of whom this incipient old fart happens to be.
Yet, none of us can claim to be Simon pure on marriage equality. For most of us, coming around to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be able to tie the knot and have their unions recognized was a fairly heavy lift. It required of all of us, straight or queer, a reevaluation of a lot of heretofore unexamined verities. A great many people in our society have still not come round to the idea that Ruth should be allowed to marry Naomi or the Jonathan and David can be husbands together. To attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for not coming around “soon enough,” is ridiculous, privileged hypocrisy. To attack her because her husband signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is not only privileged, it’s just out and out sexist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A not insignificant number of Bernard Sanders purists, including many privileged young homosexuals who are in a position, thanks to the struggles of their elders and betters, to take their protected status for granted, have taken up the cudgels against Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking her for being “late to the ball”, as it were, on marriage equality. Of course, these are the same purists who attacked President Obama because they didn’t like his timetable for evolution on the issue of marriage equality, either.
I think I’m in a position to speak with some credibility, even authority, on this issue. I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage case. By that, I don’t mean an ordinary straight divorce, I mean that I was one of the first attorneys in California, perhaps the very first, to challenge the validity of California’s gender-specific marriage law.
Early in 1993, I was approached by two young men who had been rebuffed in their attempt to procure a marriage license from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. We discussed the matter, and we decided to challenge the ban. We took a flyer. Our philosophy in so doing was simple. We figured that either one of two things would happen: either the courts would be so startled by our writ petition that they would deny it out of hand, with a one sentence per curiam decision reading simply “the petition is denied.” or, if the court considered our petition sufficiently meritorious, we might be able to sneak through a major breakthrough in the cause a marriage equality.
We were inspired by the recent Hawai’i case of Baehr v. Lewin (1993) 74 Haw. 530, in which the Hawai’i Supreme Court had required the state to demonstrate a compelling government interest for denying the liberty of marital contract to same-sex couples. We took a careful look at the opinion, and we also analyzed the likelihood that the courts might attempt to use our petition to come down with a retrograde, homophobic opinion such as that in Bowers v. Hardwick, (1986) 478 U.S. 186, which had upheld the authority of states to criminalize same-sex intimacy. Knowing as I did the personnel who would probably make up the appellate panel reviewing our petition, I believed the risk was justified by the potential reward.
So, we went ahead and filed our petition. We were expecting a hostile, at best indifferent, reaction from the straight community. What took us rather by surprise was the enormous hostility we encountered from the “official” Gay and Lesbian Movement. My clients and I were shunned by the Official Movement, and essentially cast out into the wilderness. While the Los Angeles Times ran a fairly lengthy and even sympathetic article, we received next to no attention from the queer press. The “Official Lawyers” of the “Official” Homosexual Movement “ordered” me to cease and desist.
I could see two reasons for the hostile reaction of the so-called “Official” Movement. First, all of the “Official Homosexuals” were wrapped up in the battle over the right of queer folk to be cannon fodder, for the right to kill and to be killed while wearing our country’s uniform. It’s curiously ironic, isn’t it, that in America, your first-class citizenship should be a function of your willingness to kill or be killed while wearing the national uniform. Because apparently, the right to be cannon fodder was viewed as being substantially more important than our right to form legally recognized families.
The second reason that I encountered such hostility from the “Official” Movement was simply that the “Official” Movement is very territorial. They didn’t want an unknown like me poaching in territory of which they proposed to take exclusive possession when the moment was right. My clients and I, to the view of the “Official” Movement, were unwelcome, unwanted interlopers. And we were treated as such. We were publicly scoffed at by gay and lesbian Center director Lorri Jean, and by other “Official” homosexuals who took their cue from her; we were attacked, ignored, and written out of the Offical, Canonical, History. Had we been successful, I expect we would still have been revised right out of the Official History.
Of course, it must be conceded that the climate for marriage in 1993 was considerably different than it is today. A great many Americans, both queer and straight, were uncertain about whether the queer nation, let alone American society as a whole, was prepared to assimilate the ramifications of allowing Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David to tie the nuptial knot. Indeed, if you had asked me, when I graduated from law school in 1989, whether I supported marriage equality, my own answer would probably have been a somewhat equivocal “not really.”
My “evolution” on the subject was precipitated not only by my responsibility to my clients, which required that I be able to zealously represent their interests, but also by the fact that a cousin of mine and his same-sex partner (now husband) had adopted a daughter. At the time, second parent adoptions were not an option for them; only one of the two men could legally be the girl’s father, though both men were parents to this girl (now an astonishingly self-possessed young woman) in every way that mattered. But if something untoward were to happen to the girl’s legal father, his partner, also the girl’s father in every way that matters, would have no rights with respect to the child that the law would be compelled to respect or even acknowledge. I wanted to change that.
Those two factors contributed in large part to my own “road to Damascus” moment. I became an advocate for same gender marriage. I remember a conversation I had during this time with a professional colleague who cautioned me that our national conversation on marriage was only beginning. It would be, he suggested, at least ten years before we would see any progress. His estimate turned out to be prescient. Though Vermont opened the door for civil unions in Baker v. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), it would not be until 2003 that Massachusetts would open the way to full marriage equality with the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003) 440 Mass. 309, 798 N.E.2d 941. My colleague’s ten-year prediction had proven eerily correct.
Of course there was backlash and even more there was what Lyndon Johnson famously called frontlash, as states without marriage equality sought to preempt it or prohibit it from taking root within their borders. Indeed, the whole issue of marriage formed a large part of the George W. Bush administration’s pandering approach to social conservatives during his 2004 campaign, though, privately, even the Bush administration gave intimations that it might be prepared to regard civil unions as an acceptable “Plan B” option.
For queerfolk, evolution on marriage came fairly quickly and fairly uniformly. Though certain so-called lesbian separatists and followers of homonormativity opposed marriage because it represented a queer co-optation of a straight institution, the vast majority of America’s queerfolk came round to marriage equality fairly quickly and fairly comprehensively.
But for our straight neighbors, the issue was a little bit more complicated. To bring our straight neighbors around on marriage, we’ve had to make use of the social construct known as “proximity empathy.” Now proximity empathy is based on the idea that to know someone helps break down barriers to acceptance. It is the idea underlying National Coming Out Day; it’s a lot harder to deny the civil rights, the personhood, or the humanity of a queer person if you know one. When your child, your neighbor, your kin, your fellow parishioner, your coworker, your colleague, your you-name-it, comes out to you, it forces you to reassess your prejudices. The example that readily occurs in any discussion of proximity empathy is that of Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose son Will came out as gay while an undergraduate at Yale.
Of course, appeals to proximity empathy don’t sit well with the purity police, and so, we have an awful lot of Bernie Sanders supporters taking up the cudgels against Hillary Clinton because they don’t like the fact that she --and the President-– both very publicly “evolved” on the issue of marriage in rather the same manner as Saul of Tarsus became Paul the God-intoxicated emissary of the Jesus Movement in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. To purists, particularly the Sanders purists, anything less than permanent, early, unequivocal support is unacceptable. This, notwithstanding Senator Sanders’s own equivocations on the issue of marriage equality.
Still, we know the the limitations of the purist mind. We know that to purists, any indication of flexibility, any so-called evolution, is ideologically forbidden. And so we see Sanders trolls posting memes attacking Hillary Clinton for not having been “there” on marriage equality early enough. Add to that the Sanders supporters’ attacks on Hillary Clinton for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and it is easy to see the sexism and male privilege underlying so many of those attacks.
Many of these attacks come from millennial homosexuals who, in California at least, have been able to take for granted their faculty for participating openly in the life of the body politic. These millennial homosexuals have no concept of the time when the mere expression of physical intimacy with a person of one’s own sex could spell ruin.
They have no recollection of the time when California law provided no workplace protection for queerfolk. They don’t remember the demonstrations that took place when Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed California’s first employment nondiscrimination bill for LGBT people. They have no memory of that time in our relatively recent history when you could be denied housing for being queer, or when Megan’s law was being used to harass elderly gay men with ancient criminal records for having held their boyfriend’s hand during the 1940s.
Most of these millennial homosexuals, born in the late 1980s or 1990s, also have no memory of the AIDS epidemic that scarred the lives of a generation of queerfolk. To them, being a twentysomething gay man now has absolutely no resemblance to life if you happened to be a gay man born in the late 50s or early 60s. For those of us who were born in that timeframe, our twenties should have been a time when the world was our oyster, when we had phenomenal sex lives, when we were beautiful, the horizon was limitless, and the candy store was open.
Instead, we who were in our late teens and early 20s in the early 1980s entered adulthood to a reality of friends and lovers getting sick and dying. We attended so many funerals that we could recite from memory the Burial Office. A time that should have been for us a happy time full of promise was instead a Ragnarok, a gray and cheerless time when Fenrir the Wolf had devoured the sun and Valhalla had fallen. All we could say as the crisis began to moderate in the mid-1990s was what which the Abbé Sieyes had said when asked what he had done during the Terror: “j’ai survécu,” I survived.
Today’s millennial homosexuals have been able to do much more than merely survive. In Palm Springs, our millennial homosexuals enjoy a rather privileged existence. It’s hardly surprising that Palm Springs should be the gay playground of choice for millennial homosexuals from the Bay Area and West Hollywood. Yet they have the privilege of not remembering. It’s not a matter of having forgotten; it’s just that they weren’t born then, and they thus have absolutely no basis for comparison.
But we who are closer in age to Hillary Clinton then we are to the millennial homosexuals of Palm Springs understand what it is to evolve. We understand what it is to have buried our friends while reciting from constantly refreshed memory the Burial Office. And perhaps, being closer in age to Hillary Clinton, having seen the bullshit to which she has been subjected, and having put up with our own bullshit, we are a little bit older, a little bit sadder, and a little bit wiser.
And perhaps, just perhaps, as we late 50s and early 60s babies teeter on the brink of old farthood, we’ve learned that Simon purity is not sustainable, that forgiveness is a must, that evolution can happen, that the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles (and the Pauline conversion narrative set forth therein) contains truths we would do well to recall, and that finally, an imperfect friend is a hell of a lot better to have in your corner than a deadly enemy.
-XXX-
The views contained herein are those of the author, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Persons seeking legal advice should consult a licensed practitioner, one of whom of whom this incipient old fart happens to be.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
CATCHING THE TITANIC: BERNIE SANDERS COMES TO CATHEDRAL CITY
Summary: Bernie Sanders held a rally in Cathedral city today. Though our local Gannett newspaper has already given it fawning coverage, which supports an inference of less than honorable motivations given the near certainty of their endorsement of Donald Trump in the general election, the rally permits us to draw certain entrances about Senator Sanders’s campaign. Both insurgent campaigns, that of Donald Trump and that of Bernie Sanders, are much alike. Bernie Sanders supporters’ aggressive rudeness has become almost proverbial, while Donald Trump demonstrates that he is a major-league asshole every time he opens his mouth. The Cathedral City rally is too little, too late. Sanders doesn’t have the faculty his opponent does for retail politics, for working an intimate gathering and coming out with new supporters who will carry her message to every corner of the country. Indeed, Sanders’s whole campaign has been curiously tone deaf on issues of race, coming across as ham-fisted and condescending. His choice of surrogates of color is also remarkably poor. The Sanders campaign at this stage has started to resemble the Titanic. Sailing into the open ocean brilliantly illuminated, steaming toward inevitable doom.
Bernie Sanders came to Cathedral City today.
The Desert Sun’s somewhat fawning coverage of the Bernard Sanders rally at Cathedral City’s Big League Dreams sports facility claimed that the rally had drawn “thousands.” My own sources tell me the number was right around 1,000, certainly not the kind of vast number that the Sanders campaign or its eager propagandists might want to put out. Of course, The Desert Sun has not been known to traffic in truthful reporting. Given that the Desert Sun has not endorsed a Democrat for president in recent memory, one may be excused for a cynical view that the Desert Sun’s reportage of the event was designed to bolster Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign in the hopes of setting up a weaker candidate against Donald Trump in the general election. For we know that the Desert Sun will engage in all kinds of contortions of reasoning in order to justify endorsing Donald Trump, as Gannett corporate has no doubt instructed it to do.
It does not matter that, six months out, polling shows Sanders defeating Trump. Sanders has not yet been vetted, and we know that if Sanders is in fact the Democratic nominee he will be walking into a torrent of abuse, redbaiting, and personal invective from Donald Trump and his enablers.
Yet, the irony is how much alike Trump and Sanders really are. Indeed, one observer, writing from the safe vantage point of Ireland, referred to them as “Donald Sanders and Bernard Trump, the Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” of the 2016 presidential season. And indeed, both insurgent campaigns are virtually indistinguishable. Now the truth is, there are some distinct contrasts: Bernie Sanders is more of a gentleman, but to this Hillary Clinton supporter, he fails the character test because of the way in which he enables bad behavior by his supporters. Indeed, the bad behavior of Sanders supporters has become almost proverbial during this campaign. Indeed, in this blog, I commented on this political phenomenon as long ago as June of last year in a piece entitled “Bernie Sanders Woman Problem.” Indeed, the belligerence of the Sanders “True Believers” has been remarked upon in numerous print and digital media outlets since then. So, too, has been the penchant of the Sanders campaign for indulging/engaging in magical thinking.
The Trump campaign differs from that of Bernard Sanders in the most obvious way that Donald Trump is himself a major-league asshole. Indeed, he is so thin-skinned and vindictive an asshole that the inevitable Hillary Clinton attack ads almost begin to write themselves. He is truly a bull who brings his own china shop with them, as his classless performance when he attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susanna Martinez, who has not seen fit to endorse him, demonstrates. Indeed, a great many people, your blogger included, have resolved to quit the United States if he is elected. Though, the truth be told, I am sure, given the vindictively assholish nature of the man, his national security apparatus would aggressively hound every American who does not see fit to live in Donald Trump’s America.
Both insurgent campaigns have made themselves obnoxious to reasonable people. Thus, when Bernie came to Cathedral City, I did not see fit to attend his event. As a committed supporter of Sec. Clinton, I not only did not want to take away some Sanders supporters’ opportunity to hear the Vermont Senator rile the crowd, but I also had no desire to associate with a mob. Now certain Sanders supporters have tried to make much of the fact that Sanders routinely addresses large crowds. Hillary, by contrast, prefers smaller, more intimate gatherings where she can work the magic of one on one or small group outreach, as her husband has been able to do so brilliantly.
Though the Sanders campaign spins the Senator’s faculty for riling up a crowd as sign of his ineluctable greatness and of his divine right entitlement to the nomination, I tend to take issue with such interpretations. For what I divine from Senator Sanders’ preference for a large rallies is a kind of Marxist disdain for the people he’s talking to. It strikes me that Bernie Sanders has great love for “The Masses” in the abstract, but that he doesn’t much care for individuals. As the English writer Edna St. Vincent Millay put it: “I love humanity and hate people.” In short, the senator comes across as a man who tolerates large crowds, but where two or three are gathered together would find it difficult to control his urge to yell “you kids get off my lawn!”
And so the Sanders campaign, with its preference for large set pieces that, in another time, could have been filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite propaganda filmmaker, comes at last to Cathedral City. The Senator will get some fawning coverage from the Desert Sun, as well as from some of the mainstream media. Certain pro-Sanders websites will also fall all over themselves to present this rally as some kind of history-making, Earth-shattering, “how-could-you-not-have-been-there” event. No doubt Sanders True Believers will see it in that light.
But as the Sanders campaign approaches endgame, people should think twice about whether to get on board. Local elected officials should ask themselves whether, if polling data are correct in predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in California, being seen at a Sanders rally might not be political kryptonite. Certainly, councilmember Greg Pettis and Assembly hopeful Greg Rodriguez flirt with Bernard Sanders at their own risk. If they are thinking of supporting the Vermont Senator at this late hour, he should consider the possibility that they are boarding the Titanic at her last port of call before venturing out into the open Atlantic, and whether there are icebergs between Titanic and her destination.
For the Secretary’s lead is well-nigh insurmountable. For Bernard Sanders to stage a comeback and grab the nomination away from Hillary Clinton would involve a series of miraculous events whose likelihood is infinitesimally small. Their likelihood is infinitesimally small in part because Bernard Sanders cannot command the support of the communities of color who will drive the Democratic momentum in this election. Bernie Sanders does well in small, largely white, caucus states. The math shows he does not do nearly so well in a large, diverse, primary states where there are significant communities of color. In trying to discount the legitimacy of Sec. Clinton’s victories in those large, diverse, primary states with significant communities of color, Senator Sanders has displayed a kind of tone deafness that causes many of us to wonder whether he is not in fact dog whistling to that part of the Democratic electorate which doesn’t feel comfortable around people of color.
As I noted in March, in a post entitled “The Unbearable Whiteness of #FeelingtheBern,” the Sanders campaign has been largely a monochromatic, white phenomenon. His surrogates of color have themselves been a lightning rods of controversy, including former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner and perennial academic disturber of the peace Cornel West, who is amusing to listen to but about as congenial as the notorious Ward Churchill, whose airy dismissal of the victims of the 9/11 bombing as “little Eichmanns” earned him a place in infamy. Even when the Sanders campaign attempts to recruit surrogates of color, their efforts seem curiously tone deaf. Writing in the Washington Post on January 22 of this year, columnist Jonathan Capehart observed that “Cornel West hurts Bernie Sanders,” suggesting that the Sanders outreach to the African-American community has been ham-fisted at best and condescending at worst. Readers can follow the link here: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/01/22/how-cornel-west-hurts-bernie-sanders/)
For the reality, uncomfortable as it may be to Senator Sanders’s unbearably white supporters, is that this election will be decided by the communities of color that now represent a plurality of the American electorate. It’s no longer possible to write off African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, first peoples, or queerfolk. Hillary Clinton seems to have got that memo rather better than Bernard Sanders. His visit to Cathedral city is too little, too late, and reflects only his thinly concealed disdain for The Masses on which he stakes the fading hopes of his insurgent campaign.
Bernie Sanders came to Cathedral City today.
The Desert Sun’s somewhat fawning coverage of the Bernard Sanders rally at Cathedral City’s Big League Dreams sports facility claimed that the rally had drawn “thousands.” My own sources tell me the number was right around 1,000, certainly not the kind of vast number that the Sanders campaign or its eager propagandists might want to put out. Of course, The Desert Sun has not been known to traffic in truthful reporting. Given that the Desert Sun has not endorsed a Democrat for president in recent memory, one may be excused for a cynical view that the Desert Sun’s reportage of the event was designed to bolster Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign in the hopes of setting up a weaker candidate against Donald Trump in the general election. For we know that the Desert Sun will engage in all kinds of contortions of reasoning in order to justify endorsing Donald Trump, as Gannett corporate has no doubt instructed it to do.
It does not matter that, six months out, polling shows Sanders defeating Trump. Sanders has not yet been vetted, and we know that if Sanders is in fact the Democratic nominee he will be walking into a torrent of abuse, redbaiting, and personal invective from Donald Trump and his enablers.
Yet, the irony is how much alike Trump and Sanders really are. Indeed, one observer, writing from the safe vantage point of Ireland, referred to them as “Donald Sanders and Bernard Trump, the Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” of the 2016 presidential season. And indeed, both insurgent campaigns are virtually indistinguishable. Now the truth is, there are some distinct contrasts: Bernie Sanders is more of a gentleman, but to this Hillary Clinton supporter, he fails the character test because of the way in which he enables bad behavior by his supporters. Indeed, the bad behavior of Sanders supporters has become almost proverbial during this campaign. Indeed, in this blog, I commented on this political phenomenon as long ago as June of last year in a piece entitled “Bernie Sanders Woman Problem.” Indeed, the belligerence of the Sanders “True Believers” has been remarked upon in numerous print and digital media outlets since then. So, too, has been the penchant of the Sanders campaign for indulging/engaging in magical thinking.
The Trump campaign differs from that of Bernard Sanders in the most obvious way that Donald Trump is himself a major-league asshole. Indeed, he is so thin-skinned and vindictive an asshole that the inevitable Hillary Clinton attack ads almost begin to write themselves. He is truly a bull who brings his own china shop with them, as his classless performance when he attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susanna Martinez, who has not seen fit to endorse him, demonstrates. Indeed, a great many people, your blogger included, have resolved to quit the United States if he is elected. Though, the truth be told, I am sure, given the vindictively assholish nature of the man, his national security apparatus would aggressively hound every American who does not see fit to live in Donald Trump’s America.
Both insurgent campaigns have made themselves obnoxious to reasonable people. Thus, when Bernie came to Cathedral City, I did not see fit to attend his event. As a committed supporter of Sec. Clinton, I not only did not want to take away some Sanders supporters’ opportunity to hear the Vermont Senator rile the crowd, but I also had no desire to associate with a mob. Now certain Sanders supporters have tried to make much of the fact that Sanders routinely addresses large crowds. Hillary, by contrast, prefers smaller, more intimate gatherings where she can work the magic of one on one or small group outreach, as her husband has been able to do so brilliantly.
Though the Sanders campaign spins the Senator’s faculty for riling up a crowd as sign of his ineluctable greatness and of his divine right entitlement to the nomination, I tend to take issue with such interpretations. For what I divine from Senator Sanders’ preference for a large rallies is a kind of Marxist disdain for the people he’s talking to. It strikes me that Bernie Sanders has great love for “The Masses” in the abstract, but that he doesn’t much care for individuals. As the English writer Edna St. Vincent Millay put it: “I love humanity and hate people.” In short, the senator comes across as a man who tolerates large crowds, but where two or three are gathered together would find it difficult to control his urge to yell “you kids get off my lawn!”
And so the Sanders campaign, with its preference for large set pieces that, in another time, could have been filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite propaganda filmmaker, comes at last to Cathedral City. The Senator will get some fawning coverage from the Desert Sun, as well as from some of the mainstream media. Certain pro-Sanders websites will also fall all over themselves to present this rally as some kind of history-making, Earth-shattering, “how-could-you-not-have-been-there” event. No doubt Sanders True Believers will see it in that light.
But as the Sanders campaign approaches endgame, people should think twice about whether to get on board. Local elected officials should ask themselves whether, if polling data are correct in predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in California, being seen at a Sanders rally might not be political kryptonite. Certainly, councilmember Greg Pettis and Assembly hopeful Greg Rodriguez flirt with Bernard Sanders at their own risk. If they are thinking of supporting the Vermont Senator at this late hour, he should consider the possibility that they are boarding the Titanic at her last port of call before venturing out into the open Atlantic, and whether there are icebergs between Titanic and her destination.
For the Secretary’s lead is well-nigh insurmountable. For Bernard Sanders to stage a comeback and grab the nomination away from Hillary Clinton would involve a series of miraculous events whose likelihood is infinitesimally small. Their likelihood is infinitesimally small in part because Bernard Sanders cannot command the support of the communities of color who will drive the Democratic momentum in this election. Bernie Sanders does well in small, largely white, caucus states. The math shows he does not do nearly so well in a large, diverse, primary states where there are significant communities of color. In trying to discount the legitimacy of Sec. Clinton’s victories in those large, diverse, primary states with significant communities of color, Senator Sanders has displayed a kind of tone deafness that causes many of us to wonder whether he is not in fact dog whistling to that part of the Democratic electorate which doesn’t feel comfortable around people of color.
As I noted in March, in a post entitled “The Unbearable Whiteness of #FeelingtheBern,” the Sanders campaign has been largely a monochromatic, white phenomenon. His surrogates of color have themselves been a lightning rods of controversy, including former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner and perennial academic disturber of the peace Cornel West, who is amusing to listen to but about as congenial as the notorious Ward Churchill, whose airy dismissal of the victims of the 9/11 bombing as “little Eichmanns” earned him a place in infamy. Even when the Sanders campaign attempts to recruit surrogates of color, their efforts seem curiously tone deaf. Writing in the Washington Post on January 22 of this year, columnist Jonathan Capehart observed that “Cornel West hurts Bernie Sanders,” suggesting that the Sanders outreach to the African-American community has been ham-fisted at best and condescending at worst. Readers can follow the link here: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/01/22/how-cornel-west-hurts-bernie-sanders/)
For the reality, uncomfortable as it may be to Senator Sanders’s unbearably white supporters, is that this election will be decided by the communities of color that now represent a plurality of the American electorate. It’s no longer possible to write off African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, first peoples, or queerfolk. Hillary Clinton seems to have got that memo rather better than Bernard Sanders. His visit to Cathedral city is too little, too late, and reflects only his thinly concealed disdain for The Masses on which he stakes the fading hopes of his insurgent campaign.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
ENDGAME
Summary: The insurgent campaign of independent socialist Vermont senator Bernard Sanders is reaching endgame. Despite an unsurprising victory in the Oregon primary, the Sanders effort has come to resemble that of Imperial Japan in the spring and summer of 1945. Senator Sanders at this point has two choices. The first choice, and the one desired by some of his more unhinged supporters, is, in effect, to bern the country down and guarantee a Donald Trump presidency. The other, more statesmanlike choice, is to learn from the history of Japan’s Shōwa Emperor and find a way to bow out gracefully, on the best possible terms he can obtain. If a Clinton/Sanders ticket is obtainable, then the moral case for such a ticket is unanswerable.
The Democratic primary campaign is shuffling and shambling toward its untidy conclusion. Hillary Clinton, the uncharismatic but amazingly solid former Secretary of State, has methodically built a winning coalition and now stands within roughly 100 delegates of victory.
By contrast, the insurgent candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, the sometime socialist from Burlington, has not fulfilled much of its early promise. In those early days, it seemed like Bernie had tapped in to the frustrations of many Democrats. But as his campaign progressed, and he racked up the victories in small, largely white states that choose their delegates not in a primary election (like God intended) but through the amazingly undemocratic mechanism of a caucus, his supporters, in their enthusiasm and their messianic sense that Senator Sanders was some kind of Savior, transformed his campaign into an ugly cult of personality.
Their response to any expression of doubt or any expression of support for Sec. Clinton started to resemble that of Daesh, the Islamic terrorist organization most people know as ISIS or ISIL. Their response to any expression of doubt or of support for Sec. Clinton was to treat such expressions of doubt or support for Sec. Clinton as some kind of apostasy. It produced a phenomenon much commented upon in the press, a phenomenon whose sheer thuggishness has largely derailed the Senator’s campaign.
This thuggish behavior manifested itself the better part of a year ago, and this blog may have been prophetic when it warned, as early as last June, the Sanders was beginning to show signs of having a woman problem. The misogyny directed not only toward Sec. Clinton, but toward any woman showing the effrontery to support Sec. Clinton or express doubts about the Sanders campaign, opened up a serious rift within the Democratic Party.
That rift took several forms. One of the most common was the belligerent tendency of Sanders supporters to insistently and loudly discount the legitimacy of any Hillary Clinton victory, trying to tar any such victory with claims of voter suppression or voter fraud. By the same token, Sanders supporters were swift to treat any Sanders victory, even victories in small, nondiverse, mostly white caucus states as earth-shattering, world-changing, demonstrations of the Senator’s essentially divine entitlement to the nomination of a party of which he was not a member until last year. The rift, largely unknown outside of Democratic activists until last week, became visible in Nevada, where Clinton and Sanders supporters almost came to blows at the Nevada Democratic convention.
Death threats, misogynistic rants, the shouting down of Senator Barbara Boxer, and law enforcement responses characterized these events. The fiasco created by Sanders supporters at the Nevada Democratic Convention blew the rift within the party wide-open. It also has Republicans and Trump supporters salivating at the prospect of recruiting Bernie Sanders and his supporters as spoilers for the Republican campaign.
In short, the Democratic primary has begun to resemble the closing stages of the Pacific War, specifically in Tokyo in May and June 1945.
By May and June, 1945, the war had turned decisively against Japan. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, had fallen almost a year prior. Okinawa Prefecture, in far southwestern Japan, was almost gone, and Iwo Jima, and island under the direct jurisdiction of the city of Tokyo, had also fallen. Overhead, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of American aviators, while on the ground, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kumamoto, and other Japanese cities lay helpless under American bombardment as the B-29s roared overhead.
The Japanese public, fed a steady diet of victory propaganda during the war years, had no idea how badly things were going for Japan. They had no idea that “the general war situation had developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” They had no idea that the allied armies were drawing closer to the homeland, and that the Empire could not hold out much longer.
The similarities between the Sanders campaign and the Japanese war effort are close. Both have fallen into a posture of desperation. The Japanese had fallen back on the kamikazes and the Sanders campaign appears to have fallen back on appeals to violence. Both the Japanese and the Sanders campaign have also fallen back up on magical thinking and desperate efforts to quell any speech that does not “support the war effort.” Moreover, both the Japanese and the Sanders campaign have begun to take a dangerously nihilistic view of the situation.
Among the Japanese high command, the mantra “100 million die together,” basically advocating national suicide, while among the Sanders campaign, the approach may not be that of “100 million die together,” but it certainly does seem to be one of “if we can’t have the nomination, we’ll go down and take you down with us.” Indeed, many Sanders diehards have indicated a willingness to vote for Donald Trump rather than support Sec. Clinton. Indeed, several recent articles have noted that, in West Virginia at least, an estimated 40% of Sanders primary voters will vote for Trump in the general.
These are serious figures, and they raise serious questions about the moral compass of some of Bernard Sanders’ more diehard supporters. When Sanders surrogate (and 2000 Ralph Nader surrogate) Susan Sarandon said that she would vote for Trump if Bernard Sanders were not the nominee, she justifiably came in for a great deal of criticism. After all, Sarandon is white, well-connected, and well-off. She’s a part of that privileged Hollywood elite that doesn’t really have to contemplate the consequences of its foolishness.
Many Sanders supporters, particularly millennials, are similarly situated. Either because they have not been well raised or because they lack the experience, many millennials feel themselves privileged to engage in the political self-destruction of supporting Donald Trump if Bernard Sanders is not the Democratic nominee. Like Sarandon, they have too much privilege to understand the importance of empathy. They can’t or won’t understand the ramifications of a Trump victory for Latinos and other communities of color, for women, for queerfolk, for Democrats and those who don’t like Donald Trump in general, for the poor, for Muslims and other religious minorities, and for those who otherwise don’t fit into Donald Trump’s fascist Weltanschauung.
But Bernie, we may hope, still has about him a few vestiges of statesmanship left. Bernie, we may hope, understands that facts are stubborn things. A few weeks ago I suggested that a Clinton Sanders ticket could make a lot of sense, producing an unstoppable political phenomenon. That window of opportunity to remake America is still open, but it is starting to close. Now is not the time for Bernie to impose purity tests that the Clinton campaign may be unwilling or unable to meet. Now is not the time for Sec. Clinton or her supporters to think in terms of retribution.
If The Democracy is to have any realistic prospect of victory this autumn now is the time to explore the possibilities for unity ticket. Both sides will need to climb down from their positions. For Sanders, this will mean abandoning his longshot presidential bid, following in the example of the Shōwa Emperor, and being willing to “endure the unendurable,” acknowledging Hillary Clinton’s primacy while nonetheless trying to engineer his yielding pride of place in a fashion that saves face and otherwise permits him to exit on the best terms he can obtain.
For Sec. Clinton, it will mean finding a place for Bernard Sanders on her team and in her campaign. For her supporters, who have put up with the thuggishness of the Sanders diehards for months, it will mean being willing to be magnanimous and forbearing, of searching within themselves for reserves of forgiveness that may be hard to locate but which will have to be found. It’s a formidable undertaking, and one that will place great demands upon their friendship for, and loyalty to, Sec. Clinton.
Yet, politics, particularly partisan politics, is about loyalty to party, loyalty to partisanship, and loyalty to persons. But more than that, it’s about loyalty to the vision of America that finds its truest expression in the Democratic Party. Ours is not a perfect party, but compared to the Republicans, we are light years ahead. We cannot afford to allow the unity of the Democratic Party to be sacrificed on the altar of foolish personal animosities.
The moral case for a Clinton/Sanders unity ticket becomes stronger as we move toward endgame. As I suggested last time, it may be the only way to heal the rift, seal the breach, and save America from Donald Trump. Indeed, the moral case for a Clinton/Sanders unity ticket is virtually unanswerable.
-xxx-
The Democratic primary campaign is shuffling and shambling toward its untidy conclusion. Hillary Clinton, the uncharismatic but amazingly solid former Secretary of State, has methodically built a winning coalition and now stands within roughly 100 delegates of victory.
By contrast, the insurgent candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, the sometime socialist from Burlington, has not fulfilled much of its early promise. In those early days, it seemed like Bernie had tapped in to the frustrations of many Democrats. But as his campaign progressed, and he racked up the victories in small, largely white states that choose their delegates not in a primary election (like God intended) but through the amazingly undemocratic mechanism of a caucus, his supporters, in their enthusiasm and their messianic sense that Senator Sanders was some kind of Savior, transformed his campaign into an ugly cult of personality.
Their response to any expression of doubt or any expression of support for Sec. Clinton started to resemble that of Daesh, the Islamic terrorist organization most people know as ISIS or ISIL. Their response to any expression of doubt or of support for Sec. Clinton was to treat such expressions of doubt or support for Sec. Clinton as some kind of apostasy. It produced a phenomenon much commented upon in the press, a phenomenon whose sheer thuggishness has largely derailed the Senator’s campaign.
This thuggish behavior manifested itself the better part of a year ago, and this blog may have been prophetic when it warned, as early as last June, the Sanders was beginning to show signs of having a woman problem. The misogyny directed not only toward Sec. Clinton, but toward any woman showing the effrontery to support Sec. Clinton or express doubts about the Sanders campaign, opened up a serious rift within the Democratic Party.
That rift took several forms. One of the most common was the belligerent tendency of Sanders supporters to insistently and loudly discount the legitimacy of any Hillary Clinton victory, trying to tar any such victory with claims of voter suppression or voter fraud. By the same token, Sanders supporters were swift to treat any Sanders victory, even victories in small, nondiverse, mostly white caucus states as earth-shattering, world-changing, demonstrations of the Senator’s essentially divine entitlement to the nomination of a party of which he was not a member until last year. The rift, largely unknown outside of Democratic activists until last week, became visible in Nevada, where Clinton and Sanders supporters almost came to blows at the Nevada Democratic convention.
Death threats, misogynistic rants, the shouting down of Senator Barbara Boxer, and law enforcement responses characterized these events. The fiasco created by Sanders supporters at the Nevada Democratic Convention blew the rift within the party wide-open. It also has Republicans and Trump supporters salivating at the prospect of recruiting Bernie Sanders and his supporters as spoilers for the Republican campaign.
In short, the Democratic primary has begun to resemble the closing stages of the Pacific War, specifically in Tokyo in May and June 1945.
By May and June, 1945, the war had turned decisively against Japan. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, had fallen almost a year prior. Okinawa Prefecture, in far southwestern Japan, was almost gone, and Iwo Jima, and island under the direct jurisdiction of the city of Tokyo, had also fallen. Overhead, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of American aviators, while on the ground, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kumamoto, and other Japanese cities lay helpless under American bombardment as the B-29s roared overhead.
The Japanese public, fed a steady diet of victory propaganda during the war years, had no idea how badly things were going for Japan. They had no idea that “the general war situation had developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” They had no idea that the allied armies were drawing closer to the homeland, and that the Empire could not hold out much longer.
The similarities between the Sanders campaign and the Japanese war effort are close. Both have fallen into a posture of desperation. The Japanese had fallen back on the kamikazes and the Sanders campaign appears to have fallen back on appeals to violence. Both the Japanese and the Sanders campaign have also fallen back up on magical thinking and desperate efforts to quell any speech that does not “support the war effort.” Moreover, both the Japanese and the Sanders campaign have begun to take a dangerously nihilistic view of the situation.
Among the Japanese high command, the mantra “100 million die together,” basically advocating national suicide, while among the Sanders campaign, the approach may not be that of “100 million die together,” but it certainly does seem to be one of “if we can’t have the nomination, we’ll go down and take you down with us.” Indeed, many Sanders diehards have indicated a willingness to vote for Donald Trump rather than support Sec. Clinton. Indeed, several recent articles have noted that, in West Virginia at least, an estimated 40% of Sanders primary voters will vote for Trump in the general.
These are serious figures, and they raise serious questions about the moral compass of some of Bernard Sanders’ more diehard supporters. When Sanders surrogate (and 2000 Ralph Nader surrogate) Susan Sarandon said that she would vote for Trump if Bernard Sanders were not the nominee, she justifiably came in for a great deal of criticism. After all, Sarandon is white, well-connected, and well-off. She’s a part of that privileged Hollywood elite that doesn’t really have to contemplate the consequences of its foolishness.
Many Sanders supporters, particularly millennials, are similarly situated. Either because they have not been well raised or because they lack the experience, many millennials feel themselves privileged to engage in the political self-destruction of supporting Donald Trump if Bernard Sanders is not the Democratic nominee. Like Sarandon, they have too much privilege to understand the importance of empathy. They can’t or won’t understand the ramifications of a Trump victory for Latinos and other communities of color, for women, for queerfolk, for Democrats and those who don’t like Donald Trump in general, for the poor, for Muslims and other religious minorities, and for those who otherwise don’t fit into Donald Trump’s fascist Weltanschauung.
But Bernie, we may hope, still has about him a few vestiges of statesmanship left. Bernie, we may hope, understands that facts are stubborn things. A few weeks ago I suggested that a Clinton Sanders ticket could make a lot of sense, producing an unstoppable political phenomenon. That window of opportunity to remake America is still open, but it is starting to close. Now is not the time for Bernie to impose purity tests that the Clinton campaign may be unwilling or unable to meet. Now is not the time for Sec. Clinton or her supporters to think in terms of retribution.
If The Democracy is to have any realistic prospect of victory this autumn now is the time to explore the possibilities for unity ticket. Both sides will need to climb down from their positions. For Sanders, this will mean abandoning his longshot presidential bid, following in the example of the Shōwa Emperor, and being willing to “endure the unendurable,” acknowledging Hillary Clinton’s primacy while nonetheless trying to engineer his yielding pride of place in a fashion that saves face and otherwise permits him to exit on the best terms he can obtain.
For Sec. Clinton, it will mean finding a place for Bernard Sanders on her team and in her campaign. For her supporters, who have put up with the thuggishness of the Sanders diehards for months, it will mean being willing to be magnanimous and forbearing, of searching within themselves for reserves of forgiveness that may be hard to locate but which will have to be found. It’s a formidable undertaking, and one that will place great demands upon their friendship for, and loyalty to, Sec. Clinton.
Yet, politics, particularly partisan politics, is about loyalty to party, loyalty to partisanship, and loyalty to persons. But more than that, it’s about loyalty to the vision of America that finds its truest expression in the Democratic Party. Ours is not a perfect party, but compared to the Republicans, we are light years ahead. We cannot afford to allow the unity of the Democratic Party to be sacrificed on the altar of foolish personal animosities.
The moral case for a Clinton/Sanders unity ticket becomes stronger as we move toward endgame. As I suggested last time, it may be the only way to heal the rift, seal the breach, and save America from Donald Trump. Indeed, the moral case for a Clinton/Sanders unity ticket is virtually unanswerable.
-xxx-
Saturday, May 7, 2016
ALL HANDS ON DECK!
Summary: having left the door open to a possible Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, Bernie Sanders should not resist a Hillary Clinton embrace. A unity ticket of the two of them could potentially be unstoppable. This is an “all hands on deck” moment for the Democratic Party. The dangerous breach that is opening within our ranks could be sealed and healed with the unity ticket. We must have such a ticket. The risk of allowing Donald Trump to steal the election, or worse, allowing our own democratic incompetence to fumble the election away, is too great. We know what Donald Trump would do this country, and that’s not an acceptable outcome. We can’t let the country go to hell for four years, or bern it down on the off chance that something better might emerge from the wreckage. We have an opportunity to create a coalition that can win 538 electoral votes, sweep all 50 states, and lay the groundwork for permanent progressive majority.
A couple of days ago, Bernie Sanders gave an interview in which he supposedly “left open the door” to accepting a vice presidential slot on a Hillary Clinton ticket. Secretary Clinton should fling open that door, charge through it, and offer Bernie Sanders the vice presidential spot on the ticket.
Structurally, it bears resemblance to Lyndon Johnson’s acceptance of the vice presidential nomination on John F. Kennedy’s ticket in 1960. It’s not that long ago that Lyndon took a meeting with the man he called “Mr. Sam,” Sam Rayburn, the great House Speaker from Texas, and let Mr. Sam talk him into accepting the number two spot on the Kennedy ticket. LBJ’s acceptance of the vice presidential nomination gave the Democrats a measure of unity they had not enjoyed in a number of years. It also delivered the Democratic solid South.
Now, 56 years later, the opportunity presents itself again to forge a unity ticket that can unite North and South, moderates and progressives, young and old, and heal the incipient divisions in the Democratic Party before they assume the proportions of the divisions which currently threaten to break the Republican Party.
By uniting all the various constituencies that form the fractious Democratic Party, we can guarantee ourselves victory in November and possibly lay the foundation for a permanent progressive majority in Washington city. We must make common cause within the Party.
We know that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. We also know that we dare not assume that just because Donald Trump has the intellect of a five-year-old he will be so objectionable to the American public as to be unelectable. The American public has an unfortunate history of electing nincompoops, crooks, and egomaniacs. The American public is quite capable of electing Donald Trump, and we cannot discount the possibility that an election of Donald Trump could mean the end of our system of constitutional government as we have known it these last 220 years.
Nor can we assume that in the event of a close election, the Republican national committee would not do everything in his power to steal the election for Donald Trump. We live in a very dangerous Weimar time in our country’s history. Trump may or may not be equivalent to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or Francisco Franco, but he certainly scares me, even if the fascist dictator he calls to mind isn’t Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco, so much as it is Argentina’s Juan Peron.
I compare Trump to Peron because like the Argentine dictator, Trump has no coherent or consistent ideology. Like Peron, Trump makes it up as he goes along. Like Peron, and unlike the other dictators, Trump possesses a trophy wife whose background is, candidly, somewhat checkered: Melania Trump, meet Eva Duarte de Peron.
Trump, while enjoying all the perquisites of power, will quickly allow it to slip from his hands. America under Trump will be an America in which lobbyists, oligarchs, and short fingered vulgarians will treat the country as a sheep ripe for the shearing, a nation full of easy marks waiting to be ripped off.
Because I think we are better than that and because we deserve better than that, I do not hesitate to express an absolute conviction that this is an “all hands on deck” moment for The Democracy. A Clinton-Sanders unity ticket would not only unite the party, but it would also create unstoppable electoral math momentum. And because we know what horrors await us under Trump presidency, we cannot afford the feckless undergraduate leftist foolishness of believing that a Trump presidency would be acceptable because it would accelerate the coming of some undefined revolution.
There is simply no moral case to make for berning the country down or blowing up our public institutions of self-government on the off chance that something better might arise from the ashes. That kind of nihilistic nonsense must have been okay last year, but it’s not okay today. The stakes are too high, the risks are too great, and the horrors of a Trump presidency too horrible to contemplate.
So yes, it’s. All. Hands. On. Deck.
As my good friend the late George Zander used to put it, “we are in the fight of our political lives.” Whether we are gay or straight, tall or small, pale or polychromatic, make or female, we cannot afford a Trump presidency. The most powerful weapon in our arsenal to avert such a possibility is a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket. Now I know that there will be aggrieved Hillary supporters who will find it difficult to forgive the Senator for some of the excesses of which his supporters are demonstrably guilty. I also know that there are some diehard supporters of the Senator who will scream "sellout!" if the Senator takes second position on a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket. But for those of us who have been activists in Democratic politics for a long time, and have watched Democrats lose elections we should have won because of ego, a breach-healing, balm-of-Gilead, let’s-chop-the Republicans’-nuts-off, winning unity ticket is really the only option that makes any sense.
Bernie having left the door open to a possible unity ticket, Hillary should rip that door off its hinges, charge through it, sweep Bernie Sanders onto the ticket, and charge home to a 538 electoral vote, 50-state, victory this November.
Clinton-Sanders 2016!
A couple of days ago, Bernie Sanders gave an interview in which he supposedly “left open the door” to accepting a vice presidential slot on a Hillary Clinton ticket. Secretary Clinton should fling open that door, charge through it, and offer Bernie Sanders the vice presidential spot on the ticket.
Structurally, it bears resemblance to Lyndon Johnson’s acceptance of the vice presidential nomination on John F. Kennedy’s ticket in 1960. It’s not that long ago that Lyndon took a meeting with the man he called “Mr. Sam,” Sam Rayburn, the great House Speaker from Texas, and let Mr. Sam talk him into accepting the number two spot on the Kennedy ticket. LBJ’s acceptance of the vice presidential nomination gave the Democrats a measure of unity they had not enjoyed in a number of years. It also delivered the Democratic solid South.
Now, 56 years later, the opportunity presents itself again to forge a unity ticket that can unite North and South, moderates and progressives, young and old, and heal the incipient divisions in the Democratic Party before they assume the proportions of the divisions which currently threaten to break the Republican Party.
By uniting all the various constituencies that form the fractious Democratic Party, we can guarantee ourselves victory in November and possibly lay the foundation for a permanent progressive majority in Washington city. We must make common cause within the Party.
We know that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. We also know that we dare not assume that just because Donald Trump has the intellect of a five-year-old he will be so objectionable to the American public as to be unelectable. The American public has an unfortunate history of electing nincompoops, crooks, and egomaniacs. The American public is quite capable of electing Donald Trump, and we cannot discount the possibility that an election of Donald Trump could mean the end of our system of constitutional government as we have known it these last 220 years.
Nor can we assume that in the event of a close election, the Republican national committee would not do everything in his power to steal the election for Donald Trump. We live in a very dangerous Weimar time in our country’s history. Trump may or may not be equivalent to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or Francisco Franco, but he certainly scares me, even if the fascist dictator he calls to mind isn’t Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco, so much as it is Argentina’s Juan Peron.
I compare Trump to Peron because like the Argentine dictator, Trump has no coherent or consistent ideology. Like Peron, Trump makes it up as he goes along. Like Peron, and unlike the other dictators, Trump possesses a trophy wife whose background is, candidly, somewhat checkered: Melania Trump, meet Eva Duarte de Peron.
Trump, while enjoying all the perquisites of power, will quickly allow it to slip from his hands. America under Trump will be an America in which lobbyists, oligarchs, and short fingered vulgarians will treat the country as a sheep ripe for the shearing, a nation full of easy marks waiting to be ripped off.
Because I think we are better than that and because we deserve better than that, I do not hesitate to express an absolute conviction that this is an “all hands on deck” moment for The Democracy. A Clinton-Sanders unity ticket would not only unite the party, but it would also create unstoppable electoral math momentum. And because we know what horrors await us under Trump presidency, we cannot afford the feckless undergraduate leftist foolishness of believing that a Trump presidency would be acceptable because it would accelerate the coming of some undefined revolution.
There is simply no moral case to make for berning the country down or blowing up our public institutions of self-government on the off chance that something better might arise from the ashes. That kind of nihilistic nonsense must have been okay last year, but it’s not okay today. The stakes are too high, the risks are too great, and the horrors of a Trump presidency too horrible to contemplate.
So yes, it’s. All. Hands. On. Deck.
As my good friend the late George Zander used to put it, “we are in the fight of our political lives.” Whether we are gay or straight, tall or small, pale or polychromatic, make or female, we cannot afford a Trump presidency. The most powerful weapon in our arsenal to avert such a possibility is a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket. Now I know that there will be aggrieved Hillary supporters who will find it difficult to forgive the Senator for some of the excesses of which his supporters are demonstrably guilty. I also know that there are some diehard supporters of the Senator who will scream "sellout!" if the Senator takes second position on a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket. But for those of us who have been activists in Democratic politics for a long time, and have watched Democrats lose elections we should have won because of ego, a breach-healing, balm-of-Gilead, let’s-chop-the Republicans’-nuts-off, winning unity ticket is really the only option that makes any sense.
Bernie having left the door open to a possible unity ticket, Hillary should rip that door off its hinges, charge through it, sweep Bernie Sanders onto the ticket, and charge home to a 538 electoral vote, 50-state, victory this November.
Clinton-Sanders 2016!
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