These
are highly unusual and distressing times. There is a loose cannon in
the White House that only half the populations sees. I can't begin to
fathom what the remaining half is looking at.
The
half that sees a raging megalomaniac intent only on bending the country
to his puerile and selfish will wants desperately to remove him from
office.
Unfortunately,
Democrats want so much more than that.
Take
me. I don't particularly cotton to Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg, reason
being they strike me as the same type of centrist, Republican
appeasers we had in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Clinton
removed the effective restraints placed on Wall Street after the
Great Depression and unleashed our corporate banks at the same time
he opened the door to corporate consolidation of our media via the
Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Of
course, this gift-wrapped whoring-out of a major slab of the economy to
swill like Rupert Murdoch, Hank Paulson, Dick Fuld and Vikram Pandit
went largely unnoticed by Republicans, who hurled every epithet
available at the Commander-in-Chief anyway.
Sadly,
this lesson was lost on Obama. Given the opportunity to clean up the
mess of Clinton's deregulation, he mostly declined. Wall Street and
our corporate banks were let off the hook with only a slap on the
wrist and a request to behave.
Naturally,
this too failed to endear him to Republicans, who subjected Obama to
unheard-of levels of obduration and disrespect. It grew so bad I
wrote on this blog that Obama could have invented sex and Republicans
would only say they got screwed.
Acting
like battered spouses by the end of their terms, Clinton and Obama
sought only to avoid pissing-off Republicans lest they be subjected to
another round of conservative rancor.
Which
explains my faint enthusiasm for Biden and Buttigeig.
But
in my dislike of centrist Democrats, I may well be part of Democrat's
problem.
When
I say I want to see Donald Trump and the GOP bitch-slapped into
submission and gutted like a freshly-caught trout, I am acting on a
personal bias that ignores larger issues, like how do we suss out the
candidate who can remove Donald Trump from the White House?
While
my favorite candidate fulfills my angry Democrat fantasy, the
most-effective candidate may well be a centrist named Buttigeig or
Biden or Amy Klobuchar.
And
this is where Democrats face a great big challenge. If my candidate
doesn't get the nod and my desires recede into the background, what
do I do? Dissolve into petulance and sit this election out? Vote for
the Trump-whore out of spite? What?
Democrats need to put aside their personal agendas and vote for the candidate who gets the nomination—even if in
my case they seem unlikely to toss Trump into a meat-grinder. Or a wood chipper.
Democrats need to be Republicans. The party of far-flung diversity needs
to consolidate. It needs to learn how to move en masse. March in lockstep. Act as a
single entity hellbent on achieving one single, solitary goal.
Whether
it's Buttigeig or Bernie Sanders, we need to line up behind them,
endorse them and—most-importantly—vote for them. While the
resultant democracy may not unfold in precisely the fashion we wish
it to, at least there will be one.
The
option is to allow the re-election of Donald Trump, a nakedly greedy, nakedly
corrupt and nakedly megalomaniacal monster. Left to the Man-Child-in-Chief and the spineless sycophants who cower in fear of him, we are
done. Toast. Ready for the fork-stick.
Which
is why Democrats need to unite and vote their collective ass off.
If
this is insufficient motivation, remember we have all complained at
one point or another that too often we end up not voting for someone,
but against them. So if you can't vote for a Democrat, vote
against a Republican.
In
2020, that would be an honor worthy of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
