It’s true. I know it. I’ve only written about them to criticize. Here’s why …
No one’s reading me, I hope, expecting up to the minute presidential race coverage. If you have a candidate you like, you probably visit their website and read news about them whenever you get a chance, maybe you’ve signed up for their newsletters and comb the other candidates’ remarks looking for sleights against your chosen or reasons to point out their inferiority. Whatever.
When the primaries pick the winner, I plan to support that Democrat. Even if they are the proverbial yellow dog. At that point, I will start giving a damn. In the meantime, I’m more interested in other things, totally flat broke, and outrage fatigued on top of it all.
With a small exception. That yellow dog had better be a Democratic yellow dog. I know we’re not going to get a progressive this time out. That much is painfully clear. But when the frontrunners do something stupid, something that screams Republican-style idiocy to me, I’ll be inclined to say something about it.
Because there’s already a party for warmongering, gay baiting, me-firsting, poor bashing, woman hating, bigot coddling, nature destroying, corporate whoring as an extreme sport, and Constitution shredding; it’s called the Republican Party. If you want to be a member, they’ve got a big tent for greedy, whiny, over-entitled misanthropes of all shapes and sizes and colors. They’re very tolerant of whatever anyone’s particular intolerance is. Bring the Two Minute Hate of your choice and come on in.
And this, this is the very simple thing that my ‘impossible to please’ self would like to ask of our Democratic candidates: Don’t be a frakking Republican.
Is that really so goddam hard? We’ve got a platform, people. We may not be an organized party, but we are literate and communicative, at the least. We have a storied history of sticking up for the common person, admitting when we were wrong and deciding to stick up for even more people, and creating a society wherein actions and not platitudes demonstrate commitment towards the least of those among us. And we talk about this stuff and write it down and everything.
Stop chasing after the votes of the people who are never going to vote for you anyway. Act like you respect the people who’ve built the party whose name you’re asking to carry forward. It’s a literal no-brainer that every Republican has down pat. And I know you’re smarter than them, so don’t expect your excuses to carry any weight with me.
