Fear of Bernie

I find it wildly amusing that Democrats are apparently terrified of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his (gasp) socialism. Never mind that perhaps two out of ten Americans could even explain what socialism is.

To blunt its headlong march across the United States, they last Tuesday turned to former Vice-President Joe Biden and clutch at him like a child does a favorite stuffed animal. “Save us, Joe!”

Kindly ignore the fact that of the six candidates recently pursuing the Democratic nomination, only Biden has an Achilles heel (his son's lucrative position with a Ukrainian energy company) Donald Trump can stand on and mercilessly exploit until November.

But at least we won't be subsumed by Bernie Sanders' socialism.

We can stretch out, fold our hands behind our heads and relax in the radiant warmth of four more years of Donald Trump and his oligarchy's rape and pillage.

I have never desired more-urgently to be wrong.

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.

Why It's Harder to Run As a Democrat

The most-illuminating moment of the first Democratic debate wasn't Kamala Harris' condemnation of Joe Biden's wildly-misunderstood comment about working with segregationists Herman Talmadge and James Eastland, but her response to a moderator's question.

After giving a lengthy explanation of her health care plan, I believe it was Savannah Guthrie who asked Harris how she proposed to pay for it.

Rising to the bait, Harris fired back. She pointedly questioned why no one asked the same of Donald Trump as he was giving away massive amounts of money to the wealthiest portions of our population.

Her reply shed light on a curious phenomenon in present day American politics: Entirely different things are expected of Republicans and Democrats.

Democrats need to bring actual ideas to the table and get buy-in from a bewilderingly diverse electorate. 

Republicans only need to appeal to gun totin' white guys, rich white guys and angry white guys who essentially hate anyone who isn't just like them, be it because of genitalia, country of origin, political belief, sexual orientation or religion.

Republicans need only to bellow louder than the candidate next to them to gain approval. It's a game called How conservative are you?, and the more obnoxious the answer the better.

Aided and abetted by Supreme Court-approved gerrymandering, it's no wonder defectives like Dick Cheney and Donald Trump assumed the presidency. (Oh—you thought George W. Bush was president? Awww. That's cute.) 

For a Republican, acting like the loudest drunk in the bar is a highly-effective campaign strategy.

As he works to undo the damage his feckless trade negotiations with China have wrought and publicly thumbs his nose at concern over Russia's interference in our elections, the Trump-whore tweets.

Yes, besides being the biggest dick in the room, Trump's most consistent personality trait is his Twitter addiction.

As if anyone were interested, Donald weighed-in with his thoughts on the Democratic debate. Among his profundities were “Boring!” and the incredibly ironic “How about taking care of American Citizens (sic) first!?”

Yes, the same guy who engineered the enormous giveaway to the one-percent and its corporations and routinely scales back work place, environmental and economic protections is now worried about American Citizens (sic).

Hmmm. Perhaps the error is ours that we haven't pressed Donald on his definition of Citizens (sic).

So while we tolerate things from Donald Trump even the staunchest of Democrats would have questioned had they originated with Barack Obama, we make Democrats stronger and weaken Republicans when we hold Dems to a higher standard.

Taking the high road inevitably means working at a higher elevation, and as any sentient being understands, the more-challenging the work-out environment the better the results.

We will use that muscle and kick Republican ass in 2020.

Political Science the Square Peg Way

62,985,106. Wow. That's a lot—of anything.

In this case, that would be t-shirts. Yep. T-shirts. The Square Peg is determined to cut through the acrid campaigning already infesting our nation as an election still sixteen months and change away looms like a poisonous, dark cloud.

After months of rigorous scientific research, our staff has determined that the best way to accomplish this is via humor. Mirth. T-shirts.

It is with this in mind that we have placed the largest t-shirt order in history. Too large for any one manufacturer, several firms have stepped up and offered us remarkable volume discounts.

(We would be remiss if we didn't add that without these generous discounts, this project would well nigh be impossible. Especially considering licensing fees, distribution costs, etc.)

OK. On to the project itself.

We aim to distribute over sixty-two million copies of the t-shirt pictured below to each Republican governor, Republican representative, Republican senator and each of the 62,984,828 folk who saw fit to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

Then we propose to send the shirt pictured below to the current occupant of the White House: 

 

Lots of people think we as a nation need to lighten up. The Square Peg is the blog actually doing something about it.

Wait. Who Won?

I'm angry, too.

As angry as the factory workers in Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan who have been reduced to cashiering at Jerry's Food Mart. Yours aren't the only lives which resemble a wool sweater after a turn in the dryer.

The difference between us is that I know where to have a hissy fit—and where not to. And that you don't ever have a hissy fit in a voting booth. Despite our rampant cynicism, elections are far too important to reduce to reality TV-styled entertainment.

Granted, there is a great deal wrong with the United States of America. For instance, there are far too many people struggling in the nation called the wealthiest in human history. 

But that isn't an accident. It's on purpose.

I want you, dear Trump supporter, to tell me what side Republicans took. Did Republicans fight that or enable it? Please tell me why you believe a self-absorbed, narcissistic billionaire like Donald Trump has the slightest interest in you and what remains of your life.

Donald Trump is a businessman. He represents the privileged class which exported your job to Mexico and China and Pakistan and then got a Republican-sponsored tax break for doing so.

What do you have to offer Donald Trump? Your rusted-out Corolla? Your socks? Your employee discount? You voted yesterday. This is today. He got your vote. That is the extent of his interest in you, bro.

You see, our first ADHD president gets bored quickly. Once, he wanted money. He got that. Then he wanted celebrity. He got that. Now, in the immortal words of Huey Lewis & the News, he wants a new drug: power.

And thanks to the peculiarities of the electoral college, he has that.

Donald Trump got that by pushing your buttons. He's the driver who cut you off not once, but three times on the way to work. And by the time you got there, you were so angry you couldn't think straight. Sound familiar?

Granted, Hillary Clinton wasn't an inspiring alternative.

The Democratic National Committee, in their preening obsession to nominate not only the first African-American president but the first female one as well, kicked the better candidate in this race to the curb. Despite the polls which showed he could not only compete head to head with Trump more effectively, but beat him.

And that's on the Dems, one-hundred percent.

But you voted for Trump. Not the DNC. And now we have him.

I know thinking is largely discouraged in twenty-first century America because it takes so long and robs us of our social media time. But have you ever questioned exactly how immigrants 'take' our jobs?

This is the phrase repeated ad infinitum by Donald Trump and other conservatives, and yet as so many of the posts on this blog bear out, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to 'take' anyone's job. Ditto the immigrants (illegal or not) Trump loves to disparage.

That's because jobs aren't taken—they're given. And immigrants were given their jobs. Given their jobs by businessmen engorged by the promise of larger and fatter profits. 

Let's be very, very clear about something—businessmen respect and are loyal to just one thing: money. Profit is their morality. Expanding markets and boosting shareholder value two of their Ten Commandments. 

Money doesn't have borders. Money doesn't have morals. There is no right or wrong, with the possible exception of profit and loss.

It is the nature of the beast.

Despite this, we believe that businessmen in government are a good idea. And wealthy, celebrity businessmen are an even better idea.

Businessmen know how to tell people what to do and when it should be on their desk. Businessmen know how to issue edicts. Businessmen know how to dispense ultimatums. Businessmen know how to point their gaudy, ring-encrusted fingers and sneer “you're fired!”

But a government with three well-defined branches doesn't work that way—at least not yet.

Spotting business opportunities and making money does not a great president make. It makes a successful businessman. If you even need the refresher, the ability to lead is not measured in dollars.

Case in point: Illinois has its own billionaire president. He has succeeded mostly in deepening the already-massive rift between Democrats and Republicans and is about two-dozen zip codes removed from a clue of how to mend it.

Worse, he probably doesn't care.

As wealthy businessmen do, he will attempt to buy control, not earn it. He will spend and spend until he has a Republican majority, the better to enact his toxic agenda until Illinois is a living facsimile of feudalism. 

That is Donald Trump's business plan for the United States.

And you voted for him.

To all you angry, pissed-off male Trumpers, tell me how you justify to your daughters voting for a man who advocates grabbing women by their pus, er, crotches?

And if you're a female Trumper, you have just earned a one-way ticket to the feminist-hell of the nineteenth-century and no longer have a say in political conversations.

Tell me how you explain the actions of the Seattle Seahawks fan who repeatedly screamed at Kathryn Smith, the NFL's first female assistant coach “Hey waitress! Get me a Pepsi!”

You know who he voted for, right?

Let me hazard a guess: that treatment is okay for female Democrats, but if someone were to say that to your wife (I'm probably being generous here) or your daughter, you'd run them over with your F-150.

Can you say schizophrenia? How about mental illness?

All I can say is you voted for him. 

I don't know whether to laugh at or pity you.

You actually believe Donald Trump knows more about ISIS than our military? You've taken to heart his claim that Trump can end the gun violence in Chicago in a week? That he's going to build a wall along our southern border and hand Mexico the bill? 

If so, I'm guessing you're composing your annual letter to Santa right about now.

I laugh that you actually believe Trump is going to make America great again, a pathetic slogan steeped in dewy-eyed nostalgia. It reflects the sad notion that the nineteen-fifties were the apex of human civilization.

Good luck with that. 

And by the way, can we return corporate tax rates to what they were in the nineteen-fifties, too?

I laugh at the farmer on the NBC network news who arrived at the conclusion he wants big government out of his life. Um, does that include agricultural subsidies and price supports, too?

I didn't think so.

Finally, I laugh at Trump himself. Still think it's rigged, Donnie? Still think the so-called liberal media and the political establishment are out to get you? Even after a billion-dollars' worth of free publicity and a perfectly-timed political bombshell?

Naturally, the Clinton majority have questions. Will Donald Trump be good for the country? For me? 

This is akin to asking if Wal-Mart is good for America. 

Wal-Mart is good for Wal-Mart. And rest assured, Donald Trump will be good for Donald Trump. He will use the office as his personal ATM, just like his BFF Vladimir Putin. 

To paraphrase Annette Bening in 1990's The Grifters “Donald Trump is so crooked he could eat soup with a corkscrew.”

Worse, he has lifted the lid of decorum off the United States, and it's mighty hard to see it ever going back on.

And you voted for him.

Myself? I'm just waiting for the 'Don't Blame Me—I Voted for Hillary' bumper stickers.

That and the 2018 mid-terms.

I'd Rather Die Than...

What an election. Passions continue to roil out of all proportion to the difference either of the two nominated candidates would attempt to make in our lives.

On the Democratic side, we have the polished, corporate-approved candidate Hillary Clinton, who is sure not to upset the apple cart. Granted, her campaign swung left, but only because Bernie Sanders was nipping at her heels.

However bitter and cynical my posts make me appear, there is absolutely no way I could ever vote for her opponent and continue to sleep at night. Hillary's staff is likely aware of this, which is reason to wonder how far left she will continue to lean freed of Sanders' influence.

On the Republican side, we have Donald Trump, the reality TV star and billionaire real estate developer. Donald is in love with two things: power and Donald Trump.

His calculations led him to the Republican party, where he has proven all that is required to be that party's nominee is to be the most obnoxious drunk in the bar. Pushing white America's buttons is a time-tested strategy that a sizeable segment of the population will fall for over and over again.

With a platform as devoid of ideas as reality TV is of Proust, his campaign is an agonizing exercise whose sole success is peeling the scabs from America's wounds. I have never been darker nor more cynical than when I say Donald Trump would be the perfect President for twenty-first century America.

In a full-body embrace of the neutral-to-nuclear dynamic, we are collectively shrugging our shoulders at these two when we aren't slinging the verbal equivalent of rotten produce at them. No presidential election has ever featured two more widely-despised (or apathy-inducing) candidates.

Which is why the following was such a breath of fresh air. It is the obituary of a Virginia woman who passed in the middle of last month.

Enjoy.

Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at the age of 68.

In Memoriam

My favorite FDR moment arrived during a speech he gave in New York City just before the 1936 presidential election.

Addressing those who felt his New Deal policies served him better than they did the country, as well as those who simply disliked him on principle, Roosevelt thundered “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

It was one of the strongest, most-galvanizing statements I ever heard a Democrat make. It reeked of defiance and purpose. Hearing it again in the midst of the Obama presidency, it seemed strangely powerful and provoked this question:

Given congressional Republican's abject refusal to even consider anything emanating from his administration, why haven't we heard similar words from the Obama White House?

Yes, Obama has faced protracted and entrenched resistance for most of his presidency. Obama could have invented sex and Republicans would just say they got screwed.

On the other hand, he too often played the role of Republican appeaser rather than the world's most powerful Democrat, and this was true before the GOP's takeover of Congress. Obama never grasped the dynamic at work, and squandered a fortune in political capital in the process.

It's no wonder frustrated Democrats (myself included) flocked to Bernie Sanders.

True, Sanders was soft on guns. And we're only too aware of his oft-ridiculed notion of free college tuition.

Yet Bernie Sanders was the sole candidate addressing the outrages perpetuated by our corporate banks and Wall Street and big business in general. Of the relentless march of corporate greed and its devastating consequences.

Sanders shone a very bright light on the corrosive effects of big money on politics and came thisclose to upending the conventional campaign model. Sanders moved Hillary Clinton's campaign decidedly to the left, which never would have happened otherwise.

He made Clinton a stronger Democratic candidate.

I am deeply saddened his campaign is all but over. He was that rare presidential candidate who inspired something as opposed to merely being the lesser of two evils. He was bold. He was different. He had ideas.

He wasn't the latest media-approved brand name our simple-minded culture could digest. If you believe Donald Trump is a rebel, and that by voting for him you are too, think again. He's a billionaire reality TV star. A celebrity. 

It doesn't get any hoarier. (Pun intended.)

Bernie was our best chance to slow the nation's unquestioning lurch to the right. Our best chance to combat what increasingly appears to be an emerging corporate-run police state, a dystopia fueled by slave labor yielding grotesque wealth for an even more-grotesque sliver of the population.

A nation which cuts the Three Musketeers' ethos of “All for one and one for all” in half.

Let's hope that Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign was a door opening, and not one closing.

A Potpourri of Peevishness

What a month. And that's not even counting the personal drama.

First off, Martin Shkreli has been arrested. Is it really a surprise that a bag of shit from Wall Street would turn a pharmaceutical business into an extortion racket? Or that the hedge fund he once managed wasn't exactly above board?

No wonder Bernie Sanders has an audience.

A year and-a-half after her conviction, the execrable Heather Mack has suddenly remembered why she had her boyfriend whack her mom in the head with a blunt object and stuff her body in a suitcase: mom was stealing her inheritance.

In an attempt to prove she has a particle of humanity left, Mack expressed the wish that in spite of mom's sticky fingers, she hopes the deceased is resting in peace.

Only because of you, Heather. Only because of you.

Then there's the once-honorable college football bowl game.

In the everybody-gets-a-trophy fashion that is, well, fashionable right now, the NCAA seems unable to resist adding a few more every year, even past the point of relevance. (Not that football fans would know the difference.)

Unless you're journeying to one because it's being played in a locale where wind chill is defined as what happens when the air conditioning hits you after you step out of the shower, I pity you.

Finally, is anyone disturbed by the sight of our electronic media further corrupting our electoral process by relentlessly airing the latest episode of What Did Donald Say Today?, as opposed to kinda-sorta discourse on actual issues?

Or coverage of those other candidates from that other party?

The Republican party has willingly turned its nominating process into a circus side show, and I say fine. Great. Whatever. But by breathlessly broadcasting every syllable Trump spews into a TV camera, the media are aiding and abetting his cheapening of the process.

What's that? The ratings and the advertising revenue are off the charts?

Oh, okay.

Leave it to us to put a price on what was once priceless.

The Wrong Men

No one enjoys a good, old-fashioned protest more than I. People not only getting angry, but getting involved and organizing and devoting time to the expression of that discontent is at the very heart of my definition of democracy.

We the people countering a war, Wall Street greed or police brutality forcefully but peacefully is such a powerful thing. I mean, Twitter rants are wonderful, but they're just not the same.

But protests can be misdirected and ill-informed just as often as they're consciousness-raising, life-changing events. Case in point would be the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter interrupting a small public get-together celebrating Social Security and Medicare.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unwittingly became the target of these passionate—but misguided—protesters when they took the stage and demanded those in attendance hold Sanders accountable for police brutality and gentrification and the disparity of Seattle's public schools.

Perhaps they had confused Sanders with Baltimore police chief Anthony Batts or some generic law and order, right-wing Republican. But publicly harassing Sanders on the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death and demanding that he be held accountable?

Wow. Just wow. Guess all us white folk look alike.

If I was only mildly supportive of Black Lives Matter before this event, you can imagine my enthusiasm afterwards. Sorry, but I am not convinced that each and every police shooting of a black person is unjustified or the act of a runaway law enforcement agency drunk on its own authority.

Yes, there is a great deal wrong with the relationship between law enforcement and African-Americans, and only a moron would say otherwise. Yes, it definitely needs an infusion of understanding and mutual respect.

But I would like to see the folk who constitute Black Lives Matter march through the ghetto with their message and confront the gang-bangers, drug dealers and garden variety thugs who kill young black men at a rate that dwarfs that of the police.

Just for starters, I would like to see a gun-toting gang-banger informed that black lives matter. Then we can move on to law enforcement.

People, let's be clear: Michael Brown is not a martyr. And Bernie Sanders is not your enemy.

Caving

Jesus. How do columnists do it?

A column a day. Five a week. Twenty a month. Two-hundred a year. Where do they get the inspiration? The ideas? The angles?

After sloughing off here at The Square Peg the last several years, I was bound and determined to resume my previous output in 2015, a rate which saw me posting five times a month—easy. 

But here it is May 7^th and I have nothing.

What to write about? Baltimore? Bernie Sanders? Nepal? The execrable Heather Mack?

Let me say this about Mack.

Mack is the daughter who offed her mother in Tahiti while the two of them were on vacation attempting to mend their battered relationship. Heather's boyfriend showed up, having arrived unannounced and uninvited on mom's dime. 

After confirming his girlfriend's pregnancy, he bashed in mom's head when the first words out of mom's mouth weren't “When can I host the baby shower?” Then he stuffed her in a suitcase.

In a judgment that scales the Mount Everest of irony, Mack received a light sentence from the Indonesian court because she is, um, well, now a mom herself. I wonder how she'll explain what happened to grandma?

Ah, but that seems so poorly-suited to the sunny and mild weather I've been waiting since November for.

Maybe I'll just go outside, pour a beer and grill a couple of brats. After all, I've already exceeded last year's total.

Right?