Our Menu Options Have Changed. Please Listen Carefully.

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.