Heart-Bern and the Vulgarian

February 9, 2016

il_570xN.535435305_spjsThinly-overcast with some faded sunshine this Tuesday afternoon on California’s north coast as we continue with some warmth, too.
Not like yesterday, where we reached 80 degrees in my neighborhood about the noon hour, but still warm enough to have windows open to the air. All along the north coast temperature records were set on Monday, my spot being the top — Lost Coast Outpost has details.

And today,  the New Hampshire primary as the 2016 presidential race supposedly gets serious and counting, with a Bernie Sanders upheaval in the making.

(Illustration found here).

Eight years later and apparently another youth-fueled yes-we-can program. Sanders’ big weapon, like President Obama in those days of yore, is college kids.
A performance during a recent speech a private liberal-arts college in New Hampshire — via The Atlantic this morning:

A sly, unusual smile crossed his face. “I feel like a rock-n-roll star!” he exclaimed, taking off his jacket and tossing it to a startled youth behind him.
He pantomimed tearing off his sweater, too, prompting a fresh chant of “Ber-nie! Ber-nie!”
Then he grinned sheepishly.
“All right, nothing else is coming off,” he said, and continued to the next topic — the sins of Walmart.
The kids are for Bernie.

And the background:

It has its own buzzwords, inscrutable to older generations of liberals: white privilege, rape culture, microaggressions, safe spaces.
It has marched against its proximate oppressors, university administrations, and gotten college presidents fired; it has demanded apologies for the sins of the past; it seeks to exorcise the ghosts of Woodrow Wilson and John Calhoun.
At a rally against police violence at Dartmouth in November, a protester screamed at a frightened girl, “Fuck your white tears!”
They are the children of the children of the ’60s, and they are tired of being talked over and ignored.
They are rebelling against the establishment, just as their grandparents did—only now, their grandparents are the establishment against which they’re rebelling.
They are the most liberal generation in American history, and they want their due.
Into this simmering mix has come Bernie Sanders, an old-fashioned class warrior with no particular ear for the new slang.
He has sometimes gotten it wrong, but he is trying to learn.
The new campus left has adopted him as its champion, and now he is riding the wave it has created.

Sanders carries strong polling numbers into the primary, but there’s only one real poll…
And despite a big winter storm rolling across the region, from news accounts, ‘Vote turnout in New Hampshire is VERY Strong.’
In the process, tiny Dixville Notch, NH, voted first way-early this morning, and had 100-percent participation. They cast four votes for Sanders, none for Hillary Clinton, and on the GOP nut-choice side, John Kasich nabbed three, while The Donald received 2 votes — the other dipshits, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Jeb! not a thing.
They still have a few hours and rest of the state, so what’s the deal?

The deal is the continuing horror of The Donald — he blubbered a word rarely spoken in decent society.
This morning from Vox:

There’s no way to skirt the word used to describe Ted Cruz at a Donald Trump rally last night: pussy.
Trump was criticizing the Texas senator’s unwillingness to support widespread uses of torture when a woman in the audience called Cruz, Trump’s chief rival for more conservative voters, a “pussy.”
Then, amazingly, Donald Trump repeated it so the entire crowd could hear.
“She said — I never expect to hear that from you again!,” he told the crowd, in mock disapproval.
“She said: ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible.”

(The woman, later tracked down by Mic, said Trump has “the balls the size of watermelons, whereas [Cruz’s] got the balls of little grapes.”)
The exchange went viral on social media, but many news outlets — perhaps finding the language too reprehensible to print or broadcast — skipped the story entirely.
The FCC, which regulates “indecent material” on broadcast radio and television, does not generally permit the word pussy to be aired between 6 am and 10 pm.
That means that though a broadcaster can publish a story containing the word online, it can’t do the same on its main network, which has a far broader reach.

Frighteningly vile, and this is a guy who could be the next POTUS. Since 1960 and JFK, I’ve lived through 14 presidential elections — LBJ/Goldwater, Nixon/Humphrey/Wallace, Nixon/McGovern, Carter/Ford, Reagan/Carter/Anderson, Reagan/Mondale, HW Bush/Dukakis, Clinton/HW Bush/Perot, Clinton/Dole/Perot/Nader, GW Bush/Gore/Nader, GW Bush/Kerry, Obama/McCain, Obama/Rommney…
Yet there’s never been a contest where one side was/is as completely horrible, in every way, as in the current version. The 2016 Republican party from top-to-bottom, inside-out, nationally, and all the-way-down to the municipal level, is nothing more than a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Scary, too, is the people responding.
Lawyer and writer Jill Filipovic at Time this evening has a good essay on The Donald and his vulgar, asshole-motif, highlighting the problem with our phony, white facade of history, Americana in the nowadays — key point:

That’s what Donald Trump embodies, and what he promises to bestow.
It’s why his gaffes never quite seem to derail him — crude displays of male entitlement don’t hurt you when you’re running on crude male entitlement.
It’s why his own history of multiple divorces and marriages to models and bankruptcies and gold-plated everything don’t make Republican voters conclude that he’s immoral or decadent or wasteful or foolish.
Trump’s ethos is simple: He does whatever the hell he wants and he never has to say he’s sorry.
If that’s not the dream of the adolescent American male, what is?

Read the whole piece…euphemistically well worth it.

This is one-crazy-ass world, huh?

And added this to underscore the scary — from HuffPost: ‘New Hampshire Republican primary voters on Tuesday made official their choice for president of the United States: real estate mogul and reality television star Donald J. Trump.’
And, too: ‘New Hampshire’s Democratic primary voters confirmed Tuesday that they do, in fact, want a self-described democratic socialist as their party’s presidential nominee.’

And we’re off…

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