The political assassination of Elizabeth Warren has begun. I read the other day about a “concern” some Democrats have that she’s just Hillary Clinton II.
Dig this graf from a recent article in The Atlantic:
As always happens with front-runners, Warren has become a target. She’s considered less shiny than some of the newer firebrands, who have themselves become the anti-establishment. Operatives working for several other Democratic candidates about to make their own announcements have insisted she’s the Hillary Clinton of 2020—and not in a complimentary way. They describe her as overly cautious and cold, carefully curating her “authentic” moments and struggling to escape a relatively small issue—her claim of American Indian heritage—that’s threatened to overtake her entire candidacy. Her big speech just after Thanksgiving on “a foreign policy that works for all Americans” sounded a whole lot like Clinton’s focus-grouped emphasis on “everyday Americans,” several operatives argue. She even has Bernie Sanders threatening to run to her left.
Warren
Other articles and blog posts cite some kind of innate “dislikability” in Warren, similar to H. Clinton’s. The best retort I saw re: that charge went something like, She’s running for president, not prom queen.
Before everybody gets panicky, let’s recall that presidential candidates and their rivals have battered each other in the run-up to their respective nominations since…, well, the time of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In that sense, internecine warfare has been built in to the American political DNA. In fact, the practice was played to a perverse perfection in 2016 when candidate Donald Trump called intra-party opponents like Rick Perry and Ben Carson every name in the book. Next thing anybody knew, President Gag was naming them his Cabinet secretaries.
Anyway, should E. Warren end up the Dem nominee for president, I will vote for her. I will do that no matter what faux pas she has committed in the past, no matter what isolated policy position she has ever held in opposition to mine, no matter what slur or insult has ever slipped out of her mouth either inadvertently or on purpose, and no matter any minor financial venial sin she has ever committed.
I say that because no matter whether she runs against Donald Trump or Mike Pence or any other Republican, she will be the better choice considering my personal philosophies and desires. It’s that goddamned simple.
Donald Trump is not only a bad man, he’s a sick man. Mike Pence is an obsessive, woman-fearing god-ist. And the rest of the Republicans are part of a political party that has, since the rise of Barry Goldwater and the dawn of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, appealed to the fears and hatreds of white people. If you disagree with this assessment, the onus is on you to disprove it. And you can’t.
Don’t forget, also, that the Republicans since the time of Saint Ronald have stood in rock-solid opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. I repeat for the 9,623rd time, any party that wants to deny full rights to one half the citizenry will never get my vote even for dog catcher for pity’s sake.
Need another reason why I’ll vote for any Democrat over a Republican for president? Okay. The party espouses “trickle down” economics, the most insulting money philosophy ever conceived of by agents of Satan to fool the populace into thinking they’ll somehow get a fair shake. Just think of it — the aforementioned Holy Reagan conjured an economic policy, the name of which brings to mind fat pigs zealously guarding their pails of slop filled to the brim and squealing that you ought to be happy with the odd drips that may, just may, happen to spill over from time to time. Any voter who feels well-treated with that imagery should be pictured next to the dictionary definition of the word masochist.
I will toss my happy support behind any Democratic candidate who runs in the 2020 presidential election.
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Credit The Council
A little late on this one but, nevertheless, warranted. Kudos to the Bloomington city council for nixing the idea of building a brand-spanking new 4th St. parking garage, complete w/ up to 200 more spaces. The council in December voted unanimously to repair the current structure.
The 4th Street Parking Garage.
The repair option will buy a few extra years of life for the garage. It’ll eventually have to be replaced. Built in 1986, it was expected to last 50 years. That should have meant the thing would be in service until the year 2036, by which time we’ll be zipping around the city with our own personal jetpacks (yeah, sure).
The garage, in any case, is falling apart and several million bucks’ll have to be spent to make sure the thing doesn’t collapse. This raises the question of why the garage has become virtually unusable sans major repairs in only 33 years. I realize these things don’t come with lifetime warrantees but I’d be damned sure I wouldn’t use whichever construction company built the garage for any other future projects around town. There’s been talk that no one expected the garage to be used so much by people who, ‘y’know, have wanted to park their cars there since the days of Mayor Tomi Allison. I find that kind of talk spurious. You build something, you’d better expect it to be utilized to its full capacity. If I buy a washing machine, I don’t expect Sears to tell me I should only have done the laundry once a month when it breaks down after couple of years. Then again, Sears is just about going out of business these days so who knows how dependable its washers are.
Bloomington, I trust, is not about to go out of business. And when the time comes for the city to put up another parking garage at, say, $50 mill, it had better last as long as the builder says it will.
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