Friday, March 5, 2021

Crystal Ball Time: Democratic Party Edition

Editorials are beginning to appear that predict big Democratic Losses in 2022 and 2024. That was probably a good cold bet as soon as it became known that they had succeeded in taking control of the House, the Senate (by the skin of their teeth), and the White House. I don't have the heart to read those editorials, but there are ominous signs in the general news.

Bear in mind that the news is neither all good nor all bad. President Biden is doing a good job of shit-canning the Trump executive actions that were particularly offensive. He has also been quiet about it all, behaving like a real executive. The former, one term president acted like the public-relations manager for a carnival of wrestling strippers. Biden's White House spokesman is a joy to observe, as she thoughtfully answers serious questions while effortlessly swatting down trolls. We are slowly regaining the world's trust, or some of what we lost in the last four years at least. Rejoining the WHO was a no-brainer; the vaccine distribution plan is proceeding; signing back onto the Paris Climate Accords provided some good optics. (For all the good it will do! You would do better to pay attention to the facts on the ground: continuing high emissions levels, the ongoing mass extinction, weird super-storms, changes in ocean temperatures and fluctuations in the Gulf Stream, ridiculous ice melts, various pollution problems, etc.)

Most encouraging for me is that the Democrats in Congress are appearing less inclined to let the Republicans push them around. I'd love to see them take the biggest hammers available and smash every Republican obstruction like they were in a Gallagher routine. “Oh, you want us to read all six hundred pages of the plan in real time? Sure. We'll have a clerk read it into the Congressional Record in another room while we keep doing the people's business.”

If the Democrats ever do anything just because the Congressional Parliamentarian tells them it's polite, I swear by the bowels of Christ that I will find a dog and kick it.

If the Democrat want to accomplish anything they must learn to be ruthless. Bring in outsiders if you must, boys and girls, but start spilling guts under the table. Or be condemned by history for throwing away yet another pretty good opportunity with nothing to show for it.

Oh, the bad. It's not all bad, but some of it's pretty bad.

The editorials notice the encroaching weakness of Democrats in fighting off Republican efforts to control people's ability to vote, their reticence to fight hard for their own nominees, their growing insincerity in really opposing the filibuster. It is beginning to look like the Democrats are reverting to type, getting bluffed out of a poker game where they hold four Queens.

I shudder to bring this up in today's social environment, but many of the editorials mention that the Republicans will bury the Democrats on social issues. Even on simple things like a $15 minimum wage, COVID relief, and a wealth tax, a truly amazing number of Americans take the Republican side in opposing these things. None of those three items would hurt anybody, at least not one individual worker, not one American family. They wouldn't even hurt one rich, super-rich, or hyper-rich American, nor one American corporation. To the Republicans, and their wealthy masters, those are principled positions that must be fought to the last drop of workers' blood. They don't want to give up a penny of “their money.” It's fascinating to watch the Republicans and the wealthy do this. Most Americans by far would be better off financially to see all three of those things passed. The American economy would benefit from them. But Republican propaganda sets even low income Americans against all three. Amazing.

Then we come to the hard part: this incredibly complicated new gender identity minefield.

Up until the late 1960s, we never even knew who was gay. Those guys kept their heads so far down, it looked like up to them. There were one thousand boys in my high school, and we had no idea who was gay. Lesbians were even more invisible. Then, blah, blah, Stonewall, blah, in fairly short order, Americans by the millions realized that gay men and lesbians were everywhere. At work; in the military; on the police force; in every family; everywhere. It was like a little light came on. Oh! Everyone realized that they knew and loved gay people, and I believe that that fact caused them to get over the old prejudice. Sure, there were still homophobes around, and anti-gay violence, including murder, but most of the general population got with the program. Even transgender people became accepted. After all, we had been hearing about that kind of thing for years, and it never seemed to make any trouble. We had all read about Christine Jorgensen, we knew the whole story. She worked as an actress!

Many of us were relieved when society upgraded its software to get over the existence of LGBT communities. I know I was. I had gay friends. It was nice to stop worrying about getting beat up for walking around with them. As we wandered into the Twenty-First Century, the opposition to this expansion of gay rights grew, and along with that came entire new categories of “identities.” Suddenly it all became very confusing. Queer, which had only changed its original meaning fairly recently, has undergone a new change in meaning. I can't figure out what it means now. Non-binary is another tough one. I mean, the basic concept is understandable, but then there turn out to be potentially dozens of variations within the umbrella of “non-binary.”

Christine Jorgensen had been a perfect poster-child for the introduction of the transsexual phenomenon. Born a he, he had been a very good he, he served in the Army after high school. In the mid-1950s he had the reassignment surgery without any fanfare, and then she presented herself as the charming Christine Jorgensen. She certainly looked like a she, and she was obviously very happy about the entire situation. Okay, that made a very nice Life Magazine story.

Opposition to everything increased exponentially while we had President Golden Calf in office. Violent opposition increased across the board. There was an increase in violence racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual. Violence against lesbians, even! Trans-women were just getting killed outright in multiple countries. People were, still are, losing their minds at the thought of a trans-woman using a ladies room! This bundle of social issues had for a while there consisted of abortion rights and gays in the military, adding gay marriage along the line without much opposition, and has now suddenly grown to include about a thousand things.

And let's face it. If you're talking about gays and lesbians, you're talking about a substantial portion of the population. I'm not going to argue for any certain percentage, but it's a lot of people. Bisexuals don't count. They're just homosexuals without the courage of their convictions. Of trannies, genuine transsexuals as opposed to cross-dressers, you're not talking about a lot of people, although the numbers do seem to be expanding. So, gay rights, big group, you get general agreement. Abortion pursuant to Roe v. Wade? Ditto, first trimester, woman's right to choose? Okay. A few reasonable adults want to undergo sex reassignment surgery after carefully going over the whole thing with a psychiatrist and a doctor? Why not. But the whole situation has gotten out of hand.

You know what? I'm not going to go into any more detail. I will admit that the very idea of choosing one's own pronouns strikes me as a clear break with reality, but that's as far as I'm going. As the great man (sarcasm alert) said, “never write anything down.”

This, my friends, is where the Democrats are going to screw the pooch. This is where the Republicans are going to bury them. These non-negotiable demands by newly created sub-groups of sub-groups of only recently recognized minorities in society are going to be the bear-trap that takes the Democrats out of the race. I support the Democrats in their deployment of extreme diversity right out of the gate, that's fine, but if they get pushy about a social agenda that supports every single one of these new gender categories, and uses any pronouns that anyone demands, and God forbid supports gender reassignment for minors, they lose the Senate and maybe even the House in 2022, and the White House in 2024.

You might think that old Fred ain't woke, but you'd be wrong. I'm plenty woke. If I'm not woke enough for you, you're making unreasonable demands on society.

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