I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: To what extent do I have to participate in your self image?
--Dave Chappelle
"Our rules specify that when we have a gender non-binary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female and the remaining six officers must be gender-balanced."
--Jaime Harrison Democratic National Committee Chairman
A Real Man
There are so many discussions of how the Democratic Party imploded this year and everyone has his own favorite issue which he is sure is what bothered that Red Wave of voters and swept the Democrats aside.
Mad Dog thinks there were many factors but, like most people he has a prime contender: Gender wokeness.
Among the people Mad Dog sees in his office weekly, there are a substantial number of Hispanics, and virtually every male and most of the females react with something somewhere between repulsion and hilarity at the idea of there being more than two genders, and transgenders look to them like circus freaks. Among the White plaid shirt and suspenders work a day HVAC men, the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, talk of more than two genders sounds like the essence of effete egg heads whose hands are uncalloused and who look down on the working man as too stupid to grasp the reasons why we should announce our pronouns before delivering any kind of public announcement.
We are the party that reads the New Yorker and the New Yorker has sold out to the language police and carries a paragraph like this: "They say that even in times of despair they were able to write, 'My best stuff came out then,' they said, and they know that troubled times beget strong action."
And why does the New Yorker embrace such stuff?
The New Yorker! E.B. White must be rolling over in his grave.
For Mad Dog's money, the breaking point came at the onset of the New Hampshire State Democratic convention, which was held on line during the pandemic and it began with a 15 minute (felt like a century) of Indians (who must be called "Native Americans" as if they arose from the soil of the North American continent and did not cross the Bering Strait and immigrate like everyone else) beating on tom toms while Ray Buckley, the chairman of the State Democratic Committee grinned, channeling Alfred E. Newman, the poster child of Mad Magazine.
Watching liberals grovel before the various groups they thought were under their big tent was enough to turn Mad Dog's stomach.
One thing you can say about Trump, is he was not afraid to offend people. He was, in that, a macho male.
Democrats of all genders are female, soft, compassionate, unwilling to offend, and there's not a Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt among them. Not to say either of those historical fellows is a good model for a Democratic Party. I'd choose a Lincoln maybe. But trying to think of some muscular, virile, confident, White male to lead the charge, Mad Dog has been unable to come up with a single candidate. The last real man we had was Obama.
Conjuring up the image: Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Denzell Washington is one thing.
But what Democratic office holder do we have who would fit into that crowd?
The feisty-est Democrats are Jamie Raskin , Adam Schiff and Jay Pritzker. But none of them are macho men; they are simply good speakers. And none of them stand a chance of become the Democrats' Trump.
So the Democrats have lost the White male mojo, lost the beer and NFL crowd, and have settled in among the Birkenstock and Granola crowd.
There's nothing wrong with being a pink knit hat with ears party, if you can win elections that way.
But, the problem is, you can't.
