You think the Democrat NON-presidential candidates are terrible? (posted 4/17/19)

A couple of days ago I took as my theme the unutterable terribleness of high-profile Democrats who aren’t running for president.

Unfortunately for us all, the Dems running for president may be even more terrible – a feat I would have thought impossible!    But consider:

Al Sharpton is a truly horrible person.  He made his name 30 years ago as a chubby, oleaginous race hustler who created a long and ignominious resume.  Some lowlights:

• he launched his career by helping an unstable teenage girl named Tawana Brawley (she was the 80’s Jussie Smollett) create a racist hate crime hoax that nearly ruined the lives of NYPD cops and a prosecutor
• later he inflamed racial tensions that resulted in riots and the murder of an innocent Hasidic Jew (Sharpton had called Jews “diamond merchants…with blood on their hands”)
• still later he led protests against a Jewish tenant (whom he called “white interloper”) that culminated it an arson and shooting that left 7 employees dead

In the intervening decades he has changed a lot.

In the sense that he’s lost weight.  Other than that, he’s the same creepy, exploitative grifter that he always was.  Given all of that, any decent political party or employer would totally disassociate themselves from him.

Which explains why he was a candidate for president on the Democrat debate stage in 2008, and has had a gig on CNN for years, and is treated like a respectable man of the cloth by the Left, rather than as the withered, vile homunculus that he is.

I don’t care for the guy, is what I’m saying.e.

So of course between April 3-5 – three days which should live in infamy — the leading Democrat presidential candidates all went to Sharpton’s lair at the National Action Network and kissed his ring, in hopes of getting the support of the holder of the “Most Ironic Use of the Title ‘Reverend’ Award.”  (Jesse Jackson took the silver.)   That act alone should disqualify all of them from seeking the highest office in the land.

But there was Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and Skateboarding Doofus (#wemuststartmockinghimtoo), and Spartacus, and the Centenarian Socialist.  Not to mention Hillaries 1 & 2 (Gillibrand and Klobuchar).  Kamala Harris was there too, but some observers think she may have hurt her prospects.  It seems she initially mis-took Sharpton for the equally dessicated sleazeball Willie Brown, and instinctively offered to sleep with him to get his support.  (Even though Sharpton is not married, and therefore not her type.)

Shockingly, in the last week Bernie Sanders may have done something even more egregious than sucking up to Sharpton: admitting that he’s a millionaire.

Since all of Bernie’s socialist followers are the very picture of integrity, they immediately turned on him in fury, demanding that he divest himself of his ill-gotten gains, and give it to the faceless masses whom evil 1%ers like him exploit. Naturally, he did so, apologizing for his greed and withdrawing from public life.

HA!  I kid, of course.  What Bernie actually did is give the most hypocritical justification of financial success since Karl Marx said, “Hey, is it my fault that Freddy Engels’ daddy owned a profitable cotton mill, and he supports me from those profits, so that I don’t have to get a job?”

When a reporter raised the issue of Bernie’s millionaire status, he said the following (and admit it, you’re hearing his ridiculous voice as you read this quote): “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Yes, we know, Bernie, you colossal hypocrite!  We’ve always said that: if you write a best-selling book, or create a useful product, or deliver a useful service, or learn some other valuable skill, you get the chance to be a millionaire.  (I mean, as long as greedy jerks like Bernie Sanders aren’t allowed to gain power and destroy the free market system that allows all of those opportunities.)

But YOU haven’t said that.  You’ve said the opposite of that – that people who earn that much money are evil exploiters who should have their ill-gotten gains taken away from them.  Until you sell a bunch of books to a bunch of dopes who don’t know any better.  Ugh.

 

Which leaves just one Democrat candidate: Mayor Pete.

As you may remember, I was initially willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, when all I knew about him was that he grew up gay, in the Midwest, and had “Butt” in his last name. (And come to think of it, “Peter” as his first name.  Good lord!)  That was enough for me to give him some underdog sympathy.

Don’t get me wrong, he still seemed ridiculously inexperienced.  For most of our nation’s history, presidential contenders were nearly always either military men, or previous governors or VPs.

Then along came Obama, and after 10 minutes in the IL senate, and 7 minutes in the US senate, he became the most powerful man in the world – and world-class example of the Peter Principle in action — as his entry-level executive gig.  After that, it seemed a little silly to object that all of Trump’s executive experience had come in the private sector instead of government.

Which brings us to Baby-Face Pete, whose only executive experience is as mayor.  And not even mayor of a major city.  Running NYC or LA or Chicago might be seen as quasi-equivalent to running a state, given their size and complexity.

But South Bend, Indiana?

Because I take my responsibilities as CORCA seriously, I did a little research on South Bend.  (Cue the 1950’s jumpy-projector educational filmstrip music.)  Located on the St. Joseph River, it’s the county seat of St. Joseph County. With a population of around 100K, it is the fourth largest city in Indiana.  Which, as everybody knows, puts it right behind mighty Evansville – and way ahead of ridiculous Hammond.  (Suck it, Hammond!  South Bend rules!) It has been called “the economic and cultural hub of northern Indiana.”  (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Now I don’t mean to mock Indiana, or midwestern small towns in general.  I grew up in two of them, and I would gladly choose to be governed by any random 300 midwesterners drawn from a phone book than by the elite in Washington DC (to paraphrase the late great William F. Buckley).  And it goes without saying that anyone currently trapped in the grip of leftist tyranny in Illinois has got to be looking with envy on the green grass of Indiana.

But there’s a reason that most of you know of the titanic struggles between cities such as Rome and Carthage, or Athens and Sparta, but not of the fierce rivalry between Evansville and South Bend.  No A-list actor in a big-budget movie has ever held his sword aloft after kicking an envoy from perfidious Hammond into a bottomless well, screaming, “THIS … IS … SOUTH BEND!”

And no one has ever said, “As goes northern Indiana, so goes the world!”

So Mayor Pete is a little light on the resume, and in a normal world, someone would get him in a headlock (and I have not kept up on gay slang, so if that phrase has any alternative meanings, I truly apologize) and advise him to try running for state senate or governor before he shoots for US president.

But what’s worse is that he’s shown himself to be a moral exhibitionist – and, strangely, a judgmental scold — on the issue of sexual preference.

Instead of appreciating the amazingly fast public turn-around on attitudes toward all things gay, Mayor Pete is going full steam ahead (again, that sounds like it might mean something else – damn you, hip gay slang!), and using the cowed public’s deference to gays as a cudgel to attack mild mannered Mike Pence with.

In a smarmy, near-Spartacus-worthy bit of moral self-aggrandizement, Pete picked a fight with Pence – who as far as I can tell has never been anything but courteous and kind to Mayor Pete – by mounting his high horse (everything is gay!) and pronouncing, out of the blue, “If you have a problem with me being gay, you’ve got a problem with my Creator, sir, not with me.”  (Nice over-dramatizing there! What’s next?  Are you going to have your seconds call on his seconds and arrange a duel?)

By pounding this straw man (everything! gay!), Pete is doing the kind of self-righteous pontificating that the left absolutely hates, when the right does it.

Putting all that aside, I hate this wearing your sexual identity on your flouncy, attention-seeking sleeve.

I think I’m fairly representative of most conservatives in this regard.  Whatever my personal feelings one way or another on sexual preferences, I’m pretty laissez faire about the issue in public life.  I don’t much care, and as a proper, reticent Midwesterner, I’d really rather not know ANYTHING about any of my neighbors’ or co-workers’ or elected officials’ sexuality.  (In fact, I’ve been disgusted for my whole life at the thought that my dad ever had sex with my mom.) (And don’t get me started on my grandparents.)

But there’s a particular kind of totalitarian sanctimony about this on the left.  It’s not enough that people tolerate the sexual morays of others – they must be made to approve of and cater to them in all areas of life.  And everyone has to talk about it — in public and all the freaking time!  Why?!

Is there any reason that when I ascended to the lofty position of CORCA, I was required to let CO readers know that I’m a straight male who identifies as a male?  Is it incumbent on me to discuss the fact that while I’m fond of the missionary position, I’m also open to both regular and reverse cowgirl?  Is it anyone else’s business that my non-cheerleading wife owns a cheerleader outfit, or that I’ve recently acquired a Martacus-style Roman centurion costume?

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

And Mayor Pete definitely has!  Keep it to yourself, P-Butt.  (Ouch!  Note to self: CO is better than you are at coming up with whimsical nicknames, so leave that to him.)

So as I look back over the smoking, noxious tire fire that is the Democrat presidential field, I am faced with one obvious conclusion:

I don’t care what anybody says — Michael Avenatti is still in the top tier of Democrat candidates!