Identity Politics

Recently, Mad Dog was told by tweet he was a racist, which surprised him, although, Mad Dog always tries to remain open minded: Maybe, Mad Dog reflected I am at least a little bit racist.

The particular tweet in question arose because Mad Dog had expressed the opinion on Twitter that Mayor Pete, being homosexual, would have difficulty getting support in Black communities, which tend, especially in church going Black communities, to see homosexuality as an affront to God and Christian values. Mad Dog had read about this on line.  But attributing a belief to everyone (or even a preponderance of members) in a group might be, in some way "racist" to the extent that you are generalizing about individuals based on a group identity. 

Having marched for Civil Rights in the 60's and sung "We Shall Overcome" with Blacks and Whites, Mad Dog had not thought of himself as racist, but he can recall listening to Black Panther and Nation of Islam speakers inform him he was racist, and, in fact,  the the worst type of racist because although he pretended to be on the side of Black folks, he was secretly, or maybe subconsciously racist. Would he would allow his daughter to sleep with or marry a Black man? Would Mad Dog move out of a neighborhood if Black folks moved in?  
At the time Mad Dog had neither a daughter nor a neighborhood and he really hadn't thought much about either proposition, but the idea of inter racial sex did not much bother him and at least in college, the neighborhood seemed pretty mixed already.

Mad Dog had not actually given these tests of racism much thought, but as he considered it, he thought, well how free of racism am I?

He was particularly relieved watching "Avenue Q" to discover everyone is a little bit racist. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM

PRINCETON
You see?!

You're a little bit racist.
KATE MONSTER
Well, you're a little bit, too.

PRINCETON
I guess we're both a little bit racist.

KATE MONSTER
Admitting it is not an easy thing to do...

PRINCETON
But I guess it's true

KATE MONSTER
Between me and you, I think

BOTH
Everyone's a little bit
Racist, sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go around committing
Hate crimes.
Look around and
You will find,
No one's really
Color-blind.
Maybe it's a fact
We all should face.
Everyone makes
Judgments...
Based on race.

PRINCETON
Not big judgments, like who to hire or who to buy a newspaper from --

KATE MONSTER
No!

PRINCETON
No, just little judgments like thinking that Mexican busboys
Should learn to speak goddamn English!

KATE MONSTER
Right!

BOTH

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King mentioned the problem of having white "friends" who professed sympathy, but in fact preached patience and inaction to Blacks who sought their rights.  These whites were in some inactive way, back stabbers. Men who take no action can be as guilty as those who throw bricks.

For Malcom X, white people were ipso facto racist by virtue of their skin color which was connected to a tainted soul.

Mad Dog learns, from an irate tweeter, that because Mad Dog believes there is homophobia prevalent in the Black community, he is a racist.

Which caused Mad Dog to ask himself: How does he know about homophobia in the "Black community?"

And what is the "Black community" anyway?

President Trump told Black voters they live in squalor, crime infested inner cities and White Democrats, who claimed to be their friends, left them to fester and die there. So, vote for Trump.

Turns out, most Black Americans actually live in suburbs, if Professor Google is to be believed (Atlantic Monthly.)

But there were neighborhoods in Philadelphia which were almost entirely black and in one such precinct not a single vote for Mitt Romney was recorded when he ran against Barack Obama, as the Philadelphia Enquirer reported. At least one follow up study sent out people to survey the voters in some of these precincts and they could not find a single person who said he voted for Romney. 

"It's one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia, but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch."

We all recognize there are Black voters who will vote for Trump and there are always individual opinions and variations.  There were probably some Jews who supported Hitler for a while. But are you a racist if you ascribe to a group, to Blacks for example, an attitude prevalent in that group, allowing there will be exceptions?

This sort of thinking has been a topic in anthropological circles since Ruth Bennedict and Margaret Mead, where "the stamp of culture" was thought to shape values in individuals, and certainly some patterns of behavior are well known. 
Most Americans would not walk down the street buck naked: They have been conditioned and taught to embrace a stricture against public nudity.
But within groups. how much skin can be displayed and under what circumstances varies by individuals, although we still see discernible differences between groups. 

Neither Black nor White women go topless on public beaches (except at Hampton Beach) but Mad Dog well remembers the signs he saw posted in a predominantly Black high school in Maryland, "No see through blouses allowed." Apparently, teen age girls in that school had posed a problem for their adult supervisors. That was not a racial thing, Mad Dog thought, but a cultural thing. The Black adolescent girls in his upscale suburban high school would never have dreamed of showing up in class in a see-through blouse any more than their white counterparts.

(Of course, there were not more than 30 Black students out of 1500 students at his school and Mad Dog knew only two or three of them.)

So how where did Mad Dog get his idea that Blacks will not vote for Pete Buttigieg because he is homosexual? Well, on line. You have only to Google "Homophobia among American Blacks" and there are scads of articles about this observation, conviction, misconception whatever you believe.

But Mad Dog has attended Black church services occasionally, and he was struck by how very conservative the preachers were. Marital fidelity, chastity, fatherhood, placing family above all personal desires. It is true, Mad Dog has never heard a sermon in a Black Church about homosexuality being an offense against God, but Mad Dog has read about such sermons and he has not  seen denials of this position from Black ministers.

So, if you ascribe a certain belief to a group, are you racist or are you simply looking at data?

Suppose you said all Jews love money and place the pursuit of money ahead of love or patriotism? Well, yes, that might be the voice of bigotry.

Suppose you said, the Jewish vote will support a candidate who is strongest in his support for Israel? Well, that drifts toward a nasty ground. In fact, if you look at the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which may not be majority Jewish but surely has a substantial Jewish population, you find very little support for Israel's great champion in the White House.

Every pundit from Mark Shields to Sean Hannity thinks there are issues which resonant with members of certain groups:  Corn farmers in Iowa do not want to see requirements for corn ethanol in gas rescinded. 

But are Blacks a homogeneous enough group to have any "position" on homosexuality?

Mad Dog suspects subgroups likely do:  Church going Black folks may reject a homosexual Presidential candidate.

But how do we really know? 

My Lai, Hugh Thompson, Eddie Gallagher

My Lai

 P atriotism, heroism, toughness, American exceptionalism have got a lot of ink and on line time lately.

Consider the case of Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta in their actions at the village of My Lai, Vietnam in 1968 and then consider Eddie Gallagher, who President Trump hailed as a true American hero, a tough soldier who fought for freedom and the American way in Iraq.

Charlie Company, led by Captain Ernest Medina and his subordinate Lt. William Calley,  swept through the village of My Lai, which was thought to be at the center of a Viet Cong brigade, but in fact was occupied by mostly women, children, infants and old men.  Calley, who spent much of his time in Vietnam trying to prove his toughness to his captain (Mediina), rounded up villagers, forced them into a drainage ditch just outside the village and started mowing them down with his M-16.

As Calley was murdering women and children in the ditch, a helicopter crew, Hugh Thompson, landed. Thompson demanded to know what Calley was doing and watched, horrified, as he fired into children in the ditch:

Thompson: What's going on here, Lieutenant?

Calley: This is my business.

Thompson: What is this? Who are these people?

Calley: Just following orders.

Thompson: Orders? Whose orders?

Calley: Just following...

Thompson: But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.

Calley: Look Thompson, this is my show. I'm in charge here. It ain't your concern.

Thompson: Yeah, great job.

Calley: You better get back in that chopper and mind your own business.

Thompson: You ain't heard the last of this!

Hugh Thompson

Thompson, not an officer,  got his crew back on the helicopter and started searching for villagers he could save and soon enough saw fleeing villagers pursued across a field by soliders from Charlie company. He landed his helicopter and ordered his two door gunners, Andreotta and Colburn to position themselves between the villagers who were diving into a bunker and the approaching soldiers.  He wasn't sure whether his crew would be willing to fire on American soldiers, but they promptly agreed.  Members of Charlie company approached and later testified they were pretty sure the gunners would have shot them and they backed off.

Lawrence Colburn

The helicopter crew flew as many villagers out of My Lai as they could.
Thompson reported the slaughter by radio up the chain of command and a Col. Barker ordered a cease fire, one of the few higher officers to take action that day to halt the war crime. Thompson reported Calley and Charlie Company to his superior officer who prompted buried the report.  As word filtered up the chain of command, a cover up was promptly initiated and Captain Medina, who had shot the head off a woman as Thompson watched, reported they had killed 123 Viet Cong with "light casualities" among villagers. Over 500 women and children were dead.

When initial reports hit the press, the Army dismissed it as "Communist propaganda."   In 21st century Trump era lingo: "Alternative facts."

Glenn Andreotta

An Army photographer happened to be present that day and eventually he sold his photos to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Some time later, after the story had been buried by the Army chain of command, and Charlie company sent off into the jungle far from reporters or inquiring officers,  a cub reporter heard of the massacre, interviewed whoever he could find, and sent his report to 30 Congressmen and a year later a full investigation by the Army actually did pursue the war crime. Had those photos not been taken. Had those photos not been published, we might never have heard of My Lai.

 Calley was put on trial, convicted but pardoned.  No other soldier or officer was ever punished.


But three American soldiers who had intact consciences tried to intervene, did manage to save some villagers and later had the courage to testify against their fellow soldiers. The "fog of war" argument was dispelled by the very fact that 3 American soldiers were able to do the right thing, the most obvious indictment of all those Americans who murdered defenseless women and children that day. American exceptionalism was nowhere to be seen that day, as those American soldiers looked no different to Vietnamese villagers that day than the German soldiers who locked villagers into churches and burned them down, or who marched people out into the woods, had them dig a ditch and then mowed them down. Just following orders, American style did not look much different from similar crimes American jurists had tried and judged guilty at Nuremberg following the Nazi reign.

All three of these soldiers, who refused to "just follow orders" died of malignancies in their 60's. Colburn was at Thompson's bedside when he died. 

Gallagher celebrating his pardon

When American SEALS testified against Eddie Gallagher for committing murder of innocent civilian girls. No photos of the dead girls were ever published in American papers.

"We're going to take care of our warriors. I will always stick up for our great fighters," Mr. Trump said of Gallagher.  
"He's toxic," a SEAL testified about Gallagher. "He just murdered innocent people."

 President Trump pardoned him. Trump's voters still shout their approval of their strong leader at MAGA rallies today.

Draining the Swamp: Mr. Trump's Anti Government Base

As Mr. Trump tweets daily about draining the swamp and ridding the Justice Department, FBI, Defense Department, Environmental Protection Agency of those deep state, detestable government careerists, Mad Dog wishes Amy Klobuchar would kick into her mean girl mode and remind folks of what their government does for them.
For Mad Dog, two stories spring to mind, although these are not even the most current examples.

Dave Garroway

Mad Dog is old enough to recall the summer terrors invoked by polio.  When he was growing up the two things parents feared most in America was a nuclear war and polio, and of the two, the polio epidemics which tore through communities every summer was the most realized threat.

Swimming pools were closed, public spaces shuttered and everyone lived in fear.
The federal government through a novel approach, founded the March of Dimes to pay for rehabilitation, iron lungs and, most importantly, research into creating a vaccine for the virus. The work went on for 10 years and ultimately a government funded researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, supported through thick and thin by one of Franklin Roosevelt's hand picked men, came up with an effective vaccine.

You can say that private enterprise might have accomplished the same thing, being motivated by profit might have come up with a vaccine, but the fact is, no pharmaceutical company ever did, none seemed to think it was worth the huge investment, or none had the capacity, but for whatever reason, nobody but the government stepped up.

Dave Garroway was a TV personality, host of a morning TV show and some years after Jonas Salk's vaccine had vanquished polio, after the government push to get it tested and approved and distributed, he had the honor of introducing Dr. Salk at a banquet. He told the story of having thought about what he would say for weeks but he had come up with nothing which seemed adequate. 
As he was putting on his bowtie for his tuxedo, his 10 year old son watched him, and knowing the tuxedo meant his father had something special that night, asked what the big deal was.
"Oh," Garroway said, "I'm going to introduce Jonas Salk tonight and it's only a couple of hours and I haven't a clue what to say. I mean, what can you say about Jonas Salk?"
"Who's Jonas Salk?" asked his son.
"He's the man who came up with the polio vaccine. He vanquished polio."
"But, Dad," the son asked, "What's polio?"
Garroway looked out over his audience two hours later and said, "Can you imagine any ten year old boy in America of our generation who would never have heard of polio?"
I would bet that's the best introduction Jonas Salk ever got.

And that was a triumph of government as complicated as the Manhattan project and it benefited far more living people on this planet.

Anthony Fauci, MD

Then there was the Tony Fauci story:  Tony Fauci, MD has been the head of the National of Institutes of Health the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease for almost 40 years.  In the early 1980's when AIDS was ravaging the country, in particular the homosexual communities, it was his institute which got the job of figuring out what this virus was and how to treat it.
His NIAID funded and organized the lab work to identify the virus and his folks took care of AIDS patients at the Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

One day, Dr. Faucil arrived at Building 31 on the NIH campus and was confronted by a group of 30 demonstrators with picket signs and he looked at them curiously as he passed by and into the building. 

When he got upstairs he asked his secretary who the demonstrators were and what they were protesting.
"Well, Dr. Fauci, they are a group called 'Act Up' and they are picketing and protesting you."
Fauci was dumstruck. He told his secretary to send someone down and get those people up to see him and he cleared out his biggest conference room to hold them.

The demonstrators were startled to find themselves invited in and amazed to be speaking with the famous,  important and powerful Dr. Fauci himself, not some administrator or press secretary.  But Tony Fauci had grown up in an apartment over his father's pharmacy in Bensonhurst and he had worked construction and actually built the medical library at the medical school he would later attend and he studied in that very library. 
Nobody was beneath him. He wanted to hear the complaints.

"Nobody cares about AIDS," a protester told him. "It's a gay disease, sent to punish gays for their evil ways. It's not worth your time or spending government money on and we are dying. And nobody's doing a fucking thing about it and we pay taxes, too. And we are people."

"Well," Fauci replied. "This comes as great surprise to me. We are working long hours in a number of labs to identify the virus. And right across the street, you see that building? That's the Clinical Center. We've got a 40 bed intensive care unit over there, struck down by AIDS, and three shifts of nurses are coming to work every day to care for those patients. Some of those ladies have kids. They all know the risks but they come in every day. If you want to come across the street with me, I'll introduce you to the doctors and the nurses. Then you can tell me if you think nobody in this government cares about this disease, that nobody is trying to do anything about it."

A stunned silence filled the room and eventually someone got up and said, "Thank you, Dr. Fauci," and they left.

There are some people for whom no effort by their government is ever enough. They say they want the government to keeps its dirty hands off their Medicare and they say Social Security payments are too small.

But there are government employees at Walter Reed and at VA hospitals taking care of veterans who've had their legs blown off, government employees jumping into a vortex of swirling maelstrom during hurricanes to rescue sailors, government employees fighting forest fires, setting up shelters after floods with FEMA.

And mostly all you hear about them is complaints.

The fact is, if you have a President who sees nothing of value in what the government does, eventually this will become a self fulfilling prophesy. 

It doesn't have to be this way. 
There are a lot of good people who can do good things from government offices, if we only help them do it.

How the Dems Bring On Defeat: Or Why the Dems Deserve to Lose

This morning Mad Dog found his way to Manchester, but that was the easy part. 
He was headed to a caucus, which is the first step toward selecting delegates to this summer's national Democratic convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but the meeting was held in a small theater/pub called Chunky's Cinema, not to be confused with Chucky Cheese, where Mad Dog found himself wandering around, asking if anyone knew about the Democratic party meeting, only to be met with blank stares.

Eventually, by stopping and asking enough locals, "Oh, you mean Chunky's!" Mad Dog staggered into the theater.

He was there to vote for Erica DeVries, a Hampton Democrat, who has been talking up Amy Klobuchar for months, and who would be an Amy delegate to the convention, God willing, and if the creeks don't rise.

Ms. DeVries is disciplined, understated, tolerant of the grumpy old men who frequent the Hampton Dems meetings and she is persistent. She says just enough and with enough intellectual sparkle to motivate Mad Dog to drive 40 miles to find Chunky Cinema aka Chunky Cheese.

The meeting began with the clerk reading off the official Democrat Party statement of rules and procedures for the voting. About sixteen candidates were vying for eight spots, but then came the crunch, caucus voters were allowed to vote for only four males and then for four females. Any caucus voter with the temerity to vote for five men or for five women and three of the other gender would see his or her ballot disqualified, destroyed, burned and fed to the iguana lizard Chunky keeps in the lobby next to the popcorn.

Now caucus rhymes with "raucous" but the folks in this room were anything but; in fact, they sat there silently nodding ascent to the rules as laid out.

Mad Dog, of course, felt his blood boil and at the moment when the clerk asked if there were any questions, he leaped to his feet, waving his arms madly. 
This is the question Mad Dog wanted to ask, that question you formulate in the car, driving home, the thing you should have said instead of the incoherent rant which explodes from your mouth like a horrid belch:

Madame secretary, clerk, I rise to ask this question as a Democrat who has been proud to be part of this party because of what it has stood for since at least the 1960's. Martin Luther King said he yearned for the day his three little daughters would be judged by the content of their characters rather than by the color of their skin. Today, I imagine he would hear what we've just heard in this room and ask, "Why is a vote disqualified because we have judged someone by his or her gender, rather than by the content of their character?

That is not what issued forth from Mad Dog's mouth, which was closer to:
By whose authority are we told that we should hold against a candidate a characteristic which he or she cannot change? Why is gender a qualification or a disqualification?

Silence ensued, as the clerk shuffled through her papers at length and finally said she could not find an answer to Mad Dog's questions in the papers she had given which set for the official Democratic Party gospel.  This provoked Mad Dog even more and he roared, "Well, maybe someone else in this room can explain this outrage!"

"Well, we want our delegates to look like our people," the clerk hazarded.

Mad Dog, with a mighty exertion of uncharacteristic self control did not shout, but mumbled to Pat Bushwick, a New Hampshire House of Representatives delegate seated next to him, "Well, if we wanted that we'd restrict our delegates to old white men, and may a few old women."

This idea of an individual being nothing more than a representative of some group is the Achilles heel of Democrats.  As speeches by the candidates for delegate proceeded, Mad Dog scratched off his list anyone who said, "Oh, I'm a [insert race, country of origin, profession, son of] so, for me, this is personal."

God almighty! Must Democrats always describe themselves as a member of some (preferably disadvantaged or formerly reviled) group?  

Why not simply say: Look, it doesn't matter who my parents were, or what trials I've been through, or how much chemotherapy I've received or whether I'm tall or short or male or female or blue eyed or brown eyed. What matters is my ideas. And my big idea is that Trump is that demon in the soul of America. He calls out the rage, the hate and the fear in ourselves. Amy Klobuchar calls out our better angels. She's not calling for a revolution and that's good because most people aren't looking for a revolution; they'll be simply satisfied with pushing the reset button and getting rid of Trump.

Which, is pretty much what Erica said, at least the last two sentences.

And that's all Democrats need to do. We don't need to "look" like America. What does America look like anyway? Who has the presumption to try to arrange on stage "representative" Americans. 

Marketing is fine for election ads, but when we talk to each other, we need to hear ideas and whether these come from the mouths of some old white male gomer or from some young Black female, it should not and does not matter.

We are not Hollywood producers, picking out types from the photo arrays in the casting department's books. We are looking for something you cannot see on TV or on Twitter. We are looking for actual ideas.

This is why Adam Schiff is so effective. He is an ordinary looking fellow.  He is not a female person of color and he does not tell you to agree with him because he's from a background like yours.  He simply proposes ideas and he has faith that you are smart enough to respond to the idea, not the advertising. 

Mr. Schiff and Ms. DeVries have not spoken of some ideas which have troubled Mad Dog lately, but they are the sorts who would be receptive to talking about them.
For example: What is a country, anyway?  Is it the lands, the borders, the laws, the people? 
Another question: When the founding fathers built the experimental vehicle for the government of this country did they have democracy in mind? That is, did they want "the people" to control the government and the economy or did they want only the right sort of people to rule?

To Mad Dog at least, it appears the founding fathers were very fearful of the people, the rabble, mob rule by passions rather than aristocrats with large plantations or farms.

Obadiah Youngblood, study for "North Hampton Salt Marshes"

To this end, they built the Electoral College. And they made sure each parcel of land would count as much as how many people might live there. So empty Wyoming has two Senators, the same number as populous New York or California.

By 2040 70% of Americans will live in the biggest 15 states. The other 30% will be spread out over the other 35 states. That means that 70% of the PEOPLE will be represented by 30 Senators, while the 30% left in those empty states will have 70 Senators voting for their interests in the US Senate.
Tumble weed and prairie get more votes than human beings in Philadelphia.
And, of course, since the Senate controls the Supreme Court, the Court is controlled by those empty spacers.

Obadiah Youngblood, Water Street Bridge, Exeter

This means that going forward the election of minority Presidents, who lose the popular vote will not be the exception, but the rule.

Plaice Cove, Hampton

Those are ideas to think about. And it shouldn't matter whether the representative you choose to represent you is male or female, Black or White, tall or short, blue eyed or brown eyed, gay or straight, first generation or the descendant of Mayflower pilgrims.

So when the Democratic Party mandates an affirmative action rule for selection of the delegates to its national convention it abrogates its basic principles. In the case of college admissions, one might argue we are righting a system which manifestly resulted in the exclusion of colored folk from college, but Mad Dog's memory of Democratic national conventions is there were plenty of women and colored folk on screen.  

Ezra Klein's blog about identity politics begins to shimmer in Mad Dog's mind's eye: We may be up against a Trump base which is all about white, native, Christian identity, but the way to defeat this is not to embrace an identity test of our own, but to open our arms to people whom we judge by the content of their characters, period.

It's the ideas which count, not the optics.

The Structural Flaw Of Our US Constitution

Ezra Klein published a really succinct, lucid and important article in the NY Times explaining the dilemma which faces the Democratic Party today.

The Republicans are a cohesive, homogeneous army of older, rural white men and women who can take concerted action and win elections, whereas the Democrats are a coalition of people who are unlike one another.

But beyond that, the founding fathers were not sold on democracy and put in place structures to prevent rule by popular will.

As he points out by 2040 70% of the US population will live in the 15 largest states and be represented by 30 US Senators, while 30% of the population in the remaining states will be represented by 70 Senators. If those numbers sent your head spinning, think of it this way: One third of the nation, mostly rural, white and conservation will have an unbreakable lock on the US Senate to make it serve their narrow interests.

And that means the Supreme Court will be locked into a conservative mindset.

And the Electoral College, which reflects the same geography and tumble weed over population, will ensure that "Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more vote than the Democrats..Down that road lies true political crisis.

In the past, Mad Dog has half seriously suggested we divide the nation into the Coasts and some selected states like Minnesota and Colorado and New Mexico and allow the Confederacy and Cowboy states to form their own slave owning states. 

But, as Klein suggests the truth is even the Blue states are liberal, urban patches with Alabama in between. Pennsylvania is the prototype--but Virginia, California, Washington and Oregon follow the same pattern. 

Business is doing well in America. Tech is doing well. Finance, too. But politics is rushing headlong into oblivion.

Elizabeth Warren and Sophistry

When Elizabeth Warren launched her prepared slam in the Democratic debate, that the males on the stage had lost a total of 10 elections, whereas she and Amy Klobuchar had lost none, Mad Dog groaned.

Of course, Warren got a laugh and multiple pundits declared she won the debate with that (excuse the expression) trump line. People Mad Dog respects, were, inexplicably delighted with this crack.

But Mad Dog was confused, perplexed, astonished:  Elizabeth Warren has run only twice.  She won a grand total of two elections.

How many times have Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg stood before the public and run?

What Warren was doing was dealing in percentages rather than absolute numbers.

This is like the baseball rookie who gets two base hits his first two times at bat and is batting 1.000 and claims he's a better, more successful hitter than Ted Williams who only bats 0.400.

Hampshire College issued a bumper sticker which said: "Hampshire College Football: Undefeated Since 1969." Of course, Hampshire College has no football team.

Or, as Cederic Daniels' wife told him in "The Wire":  "You cannot lose if you do not play."

But of course, that wasn't the worst moment for Senator Warren that night: She refused to take Senator Sanders' prof-erred hand at the end of the debate.

As many ways as Mad Dog has  tried to assess this the only conceivable interpretation is that Senator Warren knew/believed Bernie Sanders had said a woman could not/would not be able to win a Presidential election in the current climate of 2018 when he was speaking. 

Mad Dog would like to know
1/ Were Warren and Sanders the only people present for this exchange?
2/ Did Sanders set up any ground rules on which he relied before speaking, such as: "This is not for public consumption," or "I'll deny this if you ever said I said it, but the truth is..." ?
3/ Why Warren would bring up a two year old comment as if it represented Sanders thinking today?

The same argument applied, in my mind, to the attack on Brett Kavanaugh for being a dissolute, depraved 17 year old, as if once you are a drunken frat boy, you can never change your life, behavior, attitudes once you pass through your 30's and 40's and "mature."

Mad Dog may  not vote for Mr. Sanders in the primary because:
1/ He is too old
2/ Everything emanating from Washington DC about Sanders suggests his office was so disorganized as to be dysfunctional; he never listens, only speechifies at his colleagues and so is ineffective 

But Mad Dog, who once was enamored of Ms. Warren finds he cannot vote for her either, because: 
1. She has shown herself to be too rigid and unwilling to answer the basic question: Why not agree to Medicare for All Who Want It if that is all the Congress will give you?
Why not say, "Look, I'd like MFA but I'd accept, a first step in that direction, if people are not yet convinced they'd be better off with the government than with their current union negotiated deals?
2. She has appeared sanctimonious over Mr. Sanders impolitic remark about the challenge of electing a woman President.  Or, worse yet, she may have violated a confidence and then been unwilling to forgive a lie.

Either way, Mad Dog has scratched Warren, Sanders off his list.
Pete is off because he cannot win as a gay, and has not won as a gay in Indiana.
There, I said it, and I will not disavow it. He'd be my choice, but as far as I can tell, he'd lose the majority of Black voters and likely a good part of the Rust Belt.
Biden is off because, even if his stammer is the explanation, he appears too infirm and mentally dull.
Styer is a non entity rich guy who hasn't paid his dues and we already have one of those in the White House.

Which leaves Amy Klobuchar, who may be a little too Bella Abzug, may not be a winning personality, but she might be tough enough to face down Mafia Don. 

Deconstructing Trump

Reading "A Hill To Die On," the part about Paul Ryan's story prompted me to Google Ryan--where-is-he-now?  

Apparently, he moved his family to a Washington, D.C. suburb, and got himself a pay off as a member of Fox board of directors. 

The usual story.  Twenty years in Congress and they put you on the day shift, with a pay off from the guys who run things. For a lot of men who are from small towns and feel insignificant, they get accustomed to all the ego stroking in Washington, DC and they stay there, even after they retire or are defeated.  How you gonna keep them on the farm once they've see DC?

But what I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, was the story of Ryan's conflict with Trump.  Trump would call him several times a day when Ryan was Speaker, but when a story came out in some Washington insider book quoting Ryan as saying Trump knows nothing about how government works, Trump responded: Ryan was a "lame duck failure" and "They gave me standing O's in the Great State of Wisconsin and booed him off the stage."

Well, same old same old Trump.
But then I thought: What was Trump referring to?

A little more Googling and it turns out Ryan had criticized Trump for his belligerence on the campaign trail, for stoking passions rather than dealing in ideas, in March, 2016 at a Wisconsin rally and got booed.  In October, in Ryan's hometown, Trump mentioned his name, at a Trump rally, and boos rang out.

I'm not even sure if this is the whole story, but the whole story is nothing that has to do with anything Trump says. It's just the daily Tweet barrage. You don't think about any of it; you just let it wash over you. It's the pubescent kid trying to establish he is the big dog, belittling a rival.

What was Trump actually doing?

A/ Trump was saying "people in Wisconsin" liked him better than they liked Ryan.
     --"They" liked me but booed him.
B/ Trump was saying that antipathy toward Ryan was deserved.
     --He's a failure
C/ Trump was saying his own popularity was deserved.
     --"They" gave me standing ovations.

Of course, the first question is: Did any of this really happen?
And the answer is, yes, Ryan did hear some boos, but also applause, in his March appearance on stage. And yes, there were some boos from the Trump rally audience in October at the mention of Ryan's name.
Nothing close to being "booed off the stage." But such exaggeration is always greeted with laughter by Trump's supporters. "Given 'em Hell, Donald!"

And what of the "they"? 
Who, exactly is "they"?  Is they all the people in Wisconsin? Just people of voting age? Just people who actually vote? Or just people who come to political rallies, or in the second instance, in October, Trump fans who come to Trump rallies? 

The Trump "they" is that diffuse idea of "everybody." 

Now you've got the equivalence of the audience as the general public, as a rowdy crowd as the voice of the people.

"They" are the people who enjoy watching Trump beat on somebody.

Well, there were always crowds at lynchings, crowds at the guillotine. 

There is one thing Trump was proved right about: When Ryan exhorted the folks in that Wisconsin "Fall fest" event to reject Trump's vitriol and to think about "ideas" instead, he was politically wrong.  Trump was tapping into anger, diffuse, inchoate anger among folks in the Rust Belt and Ryan was telling them to cool off when their passions were running high.

A lot of this is done on instinct, and neither Ryan nor Trump could likely offer much of an analysis. 
Trump could read a crowd and Ryan could not.

The question for 2020 is whether that crowd in front of you represents what most of the folks out there think.