The Young Ladies Love Bernie

Opinion | thepilot.com:


So Bernie Sanders, the rumpled old senator from Vermont, has defeated the former heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the New Hampshire primary. This was not totally unexpected; as I mentioned last week, Bernie’s practically home folks in the Granite State, and he’d been leading the polls there by double digits in the past few weeks.

Secretary Clinton can also comfort herself with the fact that she holds commanding leads in polling in the more racially diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina, which are coming up.

One surprising thing that’s developed over the last few weeks, however, has revealed something that might be an Achilles heel for the former secretary of state: Bernie Sanders is eating her lunch when it comes to younger voters, particularly young female voters.

In Iowa, Sanders beat Clinton 84 to 14 percent among Democratic caucus-goers age 18 to 29, according to a recent report on the “PBS NewsHour.” Perhaps even more surprising is Sanders’ support among young women: A poll sponsored by that liberal rag The Wall Street Journal found Sanders leading 64 percent to 35 percent among Democratic women younger than 45 in New Hampshire.

The reaction of some well-known female Clinton supporters could be described as “frustrated.” It could be described better as “cranky.” Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, 81, told Bill Maher that young women only supported Bernie to meet guys: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie,” she said.

It was a statement she later retracted and apologized for, possibly after she remembered that being condescending and dismissive of women, whatever their age, ill becomes a feminist icon. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a pioneer in her own right, told an audience, “Always remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Being scolded and told they’re going to hell for not backing Hillary went over about as well as you’d expect among young women.

“I'm frustrated and outraged by being constantly attacked by older feminists for my refusal to vote according to my gender,” UConn sophomore Ariana Javidi told CNN. Thirty-year-old “lifestyle blogger” Vera Ezimora agreed: “I don’t think that being a female and not voting for Hillary means you’re a bad person.”

Meanwhile, Sanders moved quickly to address an issue that might cause him his own problems with young female voters, namely the small but noisy cohort of young male supporters, the so-called “Bernie Bros,” who take to the Internet to go after Clinton and her supporters using their own condescending, sexist and occasionally downright vile language.

I can’t really quote any of it in this family newspaper, but just think of some of the things the Republican frontrunner has said about various women and you’ll get the gist.

Bernie, however, was having none of that.  "We don’t want that crap,” he bluntly told CNN. “Look, anybody who is supporting me that is doing the sexist things is — we don’t want them. I don’t want them. That is not what this campaign is about.”

Indeed. Attributing support for Sanders or for Clinton to one’s gender is the kind of shallow and one-dimensional thinking that should be left to the Republicans. There are some real differences in the two candidates that have nothing to do with gender.

Hillary’s biggest problem with young people, for example, is that they’re tired of her brand of Middle Way, “triangulated,” timid and mild progressivism. Barack Obama got young voters to the polls and himself to the White House by making bold proposals and saying, “Yes, we can.” Hillary looks at the ideas put forth by Bernie Sanders, such as free college tuition and single payer health care, and goes, “No, you can’t.” That’s not a winning message among young people, and it has nothing to do with X and Y chromosomes.

Did Obama accomplish everything he said he was going to do? No, but he accomplished a heck of a lot more than the naysayers on both the Republican and Democratic parties told them he could. Now Hillary Clinton says she wants to preserve the gains that Obama’s boldness helped make. All well and good, and that’s the reason I’ll vote for her if she does become the nominee.

But a lot of people, male and female, young firebrands and old curmudgeonly lefties like me and Bernie Sanders, still aspire to more.

The Joy of the Heist

I'm guest blogging at  Elizabeth A. White's blog today on how and why I came to write ICE CHEST. C'mon by!

Trying to Make Sense of Iowa

 thepilot.com, Sunday Feb 7, 2016:

After months of hype and hoopla, after endless hours of bickering and balderdash, the first primary-ish contest of the 2016 elections is over.

The aftermath of the Iowa Caucuses provided political junkies with some surprises and caused the rest of the country (aka “the sane people”) to experience the terrifying realization that this horror show that’s been playing out on their TVs and the Internet for the past several months isn’t over. It has, in fact, just begun.

At least there was some winnowing of the crowded field of candidates, even if it there weren’t as many casualties as we might have hoped.

Before midnight, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (or as I affectionately refer to him, “Who?”) finally experienced a moment of clarity and dropped out of the race. He was soon followed on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who’ll probably be either returning to a spot on Fox News or touring with Ted Nugent; and by Rand Paul.

One of the night’s big surprises was the upset victory of former Canadian Ted Cruz over Donald Trump. Guess running away from a female anchor because she was mean to him didn’t work as well as Trump thought.

Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told “The PBS Newshour” that the victory happened because Cruz was “the original outsider, the proven outsider” in the race, despite being a sitting member of Washington’s most elite club, the United States Senate.

Perhaps Mr. Tyler is confusing “outsider” with “outcast,” because the general consensus is that the majority of the people who have known Cruz personally, in or out of Washington, utterly loathe him. Forget working “across the aisle” — this guy can’t even work with his own party. How he expects to get anything done as president under these circumstances is a mystery.

The near-universal detestation of Sen. Green Eggs and Ham among his party’s establishment gave fellow senator Marco Rubio, who came in third, his opening to position himself as the non-crazy candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton.

Rubio, however, is vulnerable on the Republican hot-button issue of immigration, since he supported an immigration reform bill that was called “amnesty” by people who have no idea what that word actually means. Unfortunately, that group includes the entire right wing of the Republican Party.

It also apparently included Marco Rubio, as Fox News’s Megyn Kelly pointed out in the Trumpless Republican debate when she played a clip of Rubio saying, “An earned path to citizenship is basically code for amnesty” two years before supporting a bill that called for just such an earned path to citizenship. Pressed by Ms. Kelly, poor Marco was reduced to babbling, “I do not support amnesty, I do not support amnesty” over and over.

Ms. Kelly also pointed out that Mr. Cruz has a similar problem because he introduced an amendment to the bill that wouldn’t allow citizenship, but would allow some sort of legal status. In a party where hatred of immigrants is a litmus test, these may prove to be crippling flaws.

The night’s biggest surprise, however, came on the Democratic side, where Sen. Bernie Sanders narrowed Hillary Clinton’s once double-digit poll advantages to the point where some precincts had to be decided by coin toss. (Yes, that’s a thing in Iowa. Caucuses are weird.)

According to the Des Moines Register, the final tallies netted Clinton 49.8 percent of “state delegate equivalents” on Monday, while Sanders claimed 49.6 percent of “delegate equivalents.” Please don’t ask me to explain “state delegate equivalents.” I’ve been trying to read the caucus rules, and my eyes are still bleeding. Just take my word for it that the Clinton lead was unexpectedly razor-thin.

How did it happen? Was it Clinton fatigue? Were Iowa voters worried about the “damn emails” story blowing up in the general election? Or did the Sanders campaign manage to excite Iowa Democrats who’ve been disgruntled for years with the timid Republican Lite stance of the party establishment and are willing to embrace an honest-to-God liberal who doesn’t feel the need to “triangulate” their positions or apologize for caring about things like income inequality and Wall Street malfeasance?

Now the campaigns and the eyes of the nation (well, some of them) move to New Hampshire, where Sanders is expected to win the Democratic primary handily, since he’s practically home folks.

After that, however, things get a little dicier for Bernie. South Carolina and Nevada are widely regarded as a lock for Clinton, due to the large minority turnout in both of those states. But then again, there was a time when Iowa was a lock for Clinton, too. Stay tuned …

Just What IS Conservatism, Anyway? Even They Don't Seem To Know

 thepilot.com

She’s baaaaack. And some conservatives aren’t as happy as you might expect.

Political humorists recently broke into hosannas of delirious joy at the return of the Mama Grizzly herself, the half-term governor of Alaska, the one, the only, Sarah Palin.

The Quitta from Wasilla recently made a surprise appearance at a rally in Iowa to endorse the current flag-bearer for her patented politics of resentment, Donald J. Trump.

Let me just say, her speech did not disappoint those of us looking forward to the return of authentic Palin gibberish:

“We’re talking about no more Reaganesque power that comes from strength. Power through strength. Well, then, we’re talking about our very existence, so no, we’re not going to chill. In fact, it’s time to drill, baby, drill down, and hold these folks accountable.”

It goes on like this for pages. It’s classic Palin word salad, a barely coherent torrent of buzzwords, talking points, dog-whistles and callbacks to imagined slights. Perhaps the funniest thing about Tina Fey’s inevitable lampoon of Palin’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” was that many of the biggest laugh lines were lifted verbatim from Palin’s actual speech.

But Trump and Palin’s audience lapped up the original and hooted for more. They seem to adore the illusion of authenticity provided by talented hucksters who dispense with speechwriters and just come out and spout whatever nonsense they think will sell. Who cares that they make no freaking sense? At least they ain’t using no teleprompter, am I right? Haw! Teleprompter! Like Obummer!

This sort of thing is starting to worry those on the right who would like to tell us that “conservatism” is an actual intellectual movement based around rational ideas of small government and lower taxes, rather than the roiling, white-hot ball of xenophobia, bigotry, rage and fear that Trump calls “conservatism.”

The concern has grown to the point where a recent cover story in National Review was titled “Against Trump.” In that issue, various right-wing “thinkers” lined up to take their shots at their party’s frontrunner.

Glenn Beck (the reason I just surrounded the word “thinkers” with quotes) pointed out Trump’s vocal support for Barack Obama’s much-despised yet highly effective stimulus package. The Cato Institute’s David Boaz worried about the cult of personality around Trump, calling him “the American Mussolini … concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.”

Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative magazine The Federalist, wrote that “conservatives should reject Trump’s hollow, Euro-style identity politics.”

Problem is, for some people, “conservatism” means exactly “identity politics.” It’s all about Us vs. Them. It’s about “Taking Our Country Back” (from Those People). It’s about the “Real America” (which is not where Those People live).

The GOP calls itself the conservative party, but then it nominates the poster girl for “Euro-style white Christian identity politics” to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. When it started to go south, alleged conservatives like Bill Kristol (who, lest we forget, is always wrong) continued to defend her even as she dragged the party down to a humiliating defeat.

As for Mr. Boaz’s concerns that Trump isn’t a real conservative because he might “concentrate power in the White House” — well, when you have hosts on Fox News swooning over murdering imperialist autocrats like Vladimir Putin because, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, he “makes a decision and he executes it, quickly, then everybody reacts … that’s what you call a leader” — well, then, it’s hard to really know what the conservatives’ beef is with Trump’s alleged prospective consolidation of power.

The response of Gov. Palin to the concerns of those who are supposedly her fellow travelers? “Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh, tell somebody like Phyllis Schlafly — she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter — tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right.”

The biggest problem with American conservatives in the past few years is that they’ve passively allowed their brand to be used by people like Palin, Trump, Giuliani, et al., who use the word to describe a philosophy of autocracy, paranoia, resentment and exclusion of everyone not like them. Now, it seems, they’re trying to push back, but it may be too little, too late.

If Donald Trump is allowed to take the Republican nomination and run as a conservative candidate, then “conservatism” will be a dirty word in this country for the next hundred years. And it will have deserved its fate.

State of the Union: Not As Bad As They'd Have You Believe.

 thepilot.com:

This past Tuesday, President Barack Obama enraged the American right wing by going on national television and pointing out that the United States of America isn’t the barren, benighted hellscape of economic misery and brutal political repression that they make it out to be.

After being introduced by Paul Ryan, the reluctant speaker of the House, the president began his final State of the Union address by talking about the things that have gone right on his watch:

We’ve recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. Our automakers have had a better year than any year in their history. Millions more Americans have access to needed health care they weren’t previously able to get. Millions more Americans than before are “able to marry the person they love.” And, he said with a grin, “gas under two dollars ain’t bad either.”

The president even praised the reluctant speaker for not shutting the government down. The RS’s response was to sit there, stone-faced, as he did for most of the speech.

This may have seemed a trifle ungracious, but I just figured that the RS was trying to get his mojo back with the Teahadists who have been shrieking for his head since he declined to destroy the country in the name of saving it.

Actually, “stone-faced” was pretty much the entire GOP response during the speech. Republicans wouldn’t even applaud the usually dependable crowd pleaser about how “the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” They wouldn’t applaud the president saying we need to “hunt ISIS down and destroy them.”

They wouldn’t even applaud a proposal for a massive effort to cure cancer. Is the GOP so anti-Obama that they’ve actually become pro-cancer? I’m not saying they are, mind you, but as the folks at Fox News say, it “raises questions.”

Pessimism and doomsaying, it seems, have become the Republican brand. Their front- runner’s latest book is even called “Crippled America,” and his campaign theme is “America is losing everywhere.” (Funny, I remember when such talk was regarded as treason.)

Over the last seven years, the right has gone from sneering, “What has Obama accomplished?” to bitterly attempting to downplay everything he actually has accomplished.

They’ve held dozens of totally symbolic votes, for instance, to repeal Obamacare, that “job-killing takeover of the health care system” that didn’t take anything over and, judging from the low unemployment rate, doesn’t seem to have killed very many jobs.

There have been so many successful Democratic initiatives described as “job killers” that it’s a miracle anyone’s working at all, if the Republicans are to be believed. (Let me just suggest that perhaps they’re not.)

At least in the short run, pessimism appears to be good marketing. Gloom and doom seem to be striking a chord among far too many Americans.

A startling Pew Research study from last year shows that whoever they are — old or young, black or white, Republican or Democrat — more Americans will tell you that their side is losing than will tell you they’re winning. Another poll last year found that 75 percent of the Americans polled said, “The American dream is suffering.”

But in the long term, Americans are not born pessimists. In the second poll I just cited, fully 72 percent of the people who said the American Dream is “suffering” said they themselves were happy with their own lives and were either “living the American Dream or expect to.” That’s extraordinary.

If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that the person who brings us the most hope and the most optimistic view of America is the one we eventually choose to lead us. Remember, if you will, Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Remember Clinton’s “I still believe in a place called Hope.” Remember George Dubbya’s “A More Hopeful America.” And of course, remember Obama’s “Hope and Change.”

Those phrases were (and still are) widely mocked — by the people who lost to the candidates who embraced them. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming electoral slugfest would do well to remember that.

When the president ends his speech by saying, “I stand here confident that the state of our Union is strong,” and your only answer is, “Oh, no, it’s not,” then you are not, my friend, pursuing a winning strategy. Nor, more important, are you pursuing one that will lead to a better America.

Another Great ICE CHEST Review!

Thanks to Rosi Hollenbeck of Manhattan Book Review for this fantastic review of ICE CHEST:


"J. D. Rhoades has written a whip-smart and really funny crime novel. Where characters could easily fall into stereotypes, Rhoades finds ways to make them fresh. The dialogue is snappy and entirely believable. There are twists and turns galore and enough heroes to populate a war movie. If you only read one crime novel this year, make it this one. You will be entirely entertained."