The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

It's an old Arab proverb used to justify alliances with people you shouldn't join forces with: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

I fell victim to that proverb in 2016.

The millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders and the dozens of us who supported Martin O'Malley did not obviously agree on the same candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign.  We also didn't agree on the same things all of the time - in fact, given O'Malley's pragmatism and Sanders' radicalism, we sometimes couldn't agree on what to do about something about an issue even while agreeing that something had to be done about it.  But because we had a common adversary in Hillary Clinton, we stood together against her.

When O'Malley was eliminated from the 2016 presidential primaries, however, I didn't follow the lead of other O'Malley supporters who decided to go all in for Hillary because they thought she was the safer choice.  To me, Hillary was still the enemy.  I walked backward into the Sanders camp and without much enthusiasm, but I was seriously thinking of voting for him in the 2016 New Jersey primary until it became apparent that it was ridiculous to register as a Democrat to vote for an independent in the Democratic presidential primary - especially when Hillary was all but guaranteed the nomination by the time the New Jersey primary was held.  I sat out the primary and supported no one.  When Hillary became the presumptive nominee, I did what the Bernie bros did - I backed the Greens' Jill Stein for President and called for the Greens or a new party to replace the Democrats.  I made good on my promise to vote to Dr. Stein to get back at Hillary Clinton, her enabler Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and everyone else who tied a symbolic rock to Martin O'Malley's ankle so as to avenge my candidate.  Hey, so what, it wasn't like Trump was going to win, right?

But Trump did win, though Hillary carried my state of New Jersey, and here's where we are now.  The progressive movement is a joke.  Progressives did nothing to build a new party around their values in the past three years; they only caused more trouble for the Democrats.  Sanders ran for President as a Democrat again despite the fact that he is not a party member.  Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are gone, and Democratic National Committee Tom Perez let the presidential primaries go on without a finger on the scale . . . and Joe Biden emerged as the presumptive nominee after a fairly fought and difficult contest - a contest which Biden almost sank to oblivion in.  And there's a pandemic going on.

At this point, Bernie bros have shown their true colors.  Having taken a verbal flamethrower to not just Biden but to all of the Democratic presidential candidates  not named Bernard by their mothers, they've since taken to ridiculing Biden for his stutter, mocking him as being a daffy old creep, and now pushing a sexual-assault charge that has more holes than Swiss cheese.  They've conveniently ignored his liberal record as a U.S. Senator and the context of some of his more controversial Senate votes and tried to smear him as an unfit candidate, calling on him to step aside so the runner-up can take his place.  Guess who the runner-up is.

Never mind that Sanders has endorsed Biden, trusts him, and is urging his supporters to vote for him rather than go third party in November because of the need to defeat Trump.  Good luck with that, Bernie.

I'm not voting Green in 2020 even if Biden is projected to win 90 percent of the vote in New Jersey and doesn't need me.  Because I am not with the Bernie bros this time.  Bernie bros, the enemies of my enemy in 2016, are no friends of mine.  I have come to understand that they have no interest in compromising, cooperation, or any other activity a political system admittedly in need of reform requires in order to achieve the big-picture goal of getting your side to win the White House. Bernie bros refuse to accept their candidate's loss and work with the Democrats to get Trump out.  They want everything their way - no compromise, no concessions, no give and take - at a time when it is politically unfeasible.  They have no tolerance for anyone who disagrees with them and they are willing to destroy the Democrats for not being pure enough on the issues at the risk of helping Trump.  They're a bunch of mean-spirited spoiled brats. They're a cult.  They're, as I like to say, the Islamic State of political fandom.  And I'm sick to death of having to deal with them.  In 2016, at the Democratic convention, Sarah Silverman said they were being ridiculous over their refusal to support anyone other than Sanders.  Now they're just being petulant.

And they would have treated Martin O'Malley with the same displeasure, distrust, and hatred they've shown to Biden had O'Malley ever become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in either 2016 or 2020.  They would have played up the charge that he had a love child with a black TV newswoman, a charge ten times as implausible as the charges against Biden.  They would have bashed his criminal justice record as mayor of Baltimore.  And I know this because, it turns out, they considered O'Malley a joke in 2016 as much as Hillary Clinton supporters did.  Both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns were united in their disrespect for O'Malley, which only clinches for me the following conclusion.  The enemy of the enemy is not your friend. The enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

Hillary Clinton may have been an adversary to me, but Hillary is no longer a concern.  Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.  Joe Biden is not my enemy.  He is my candidate.  Go with Joe.  

Taking His Hardball and Going Home

Last week, I wrote on this blog that it was time for MSNBC's Chris Matthews to retire after he compared Bernie Bros to the Wehrmacht.  This past Monday, he did just that.  I'm glad to see that Matthews discovered my blog and took my advice.

Okay, Matthews, whom I've always had a love-hate attitude toward, likely never even saw my blog, unless he Googled himself and went through all 170 million results.  But he did in fact retire, thanks not only to his Sanders gaffe but also for a bunch of comments he made to women.  This past Friday, he had to deal with a magazine GQ column from journalist Laura Bassett, who charged that Matthews complimented her appearance by rhetorically asking, "Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?"  At a cocktail party from a single man, that comment might have been appropriate.  But when the supposedly happily married Matthews made that comment to Bassett  just before a televised discussion with her about sexual-assault allegations against Trump . . . uh, yeah, that was more than a little awkward.  In fact, Bassett added for good measure that Matthews "has a pattern of making comments about women's appearances in demeaning ways."

For the record, Bassett is an attractive woman, but that's all I'll say about that.  I may have already said too much.

While all this was going on, Matthews mistook Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina Democrat running for the U.S. Senate there, with Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott, also of South Carolina. Both men are black.  Both of them are also bald, but any fool can tell them apart.  Black people do not all look alike, of course, and Matthews' mistake would have been understandable if this had been a Julie Wolfe-Esmé Marshall situation (two models who look so much alike that when I met Julie Wolfe, I began to tell her that she looked like Esmé Marshall only to have Ms. Wolfe finish my sentence for me), or even if it were a Dom DeLuise-Chef Paul Prudhomme situation.  It was nothing of the sort.

So, on Monday night, after opening his show "Hardball," Matthews - who does not look like Dom DeLuise or Chef Paul Prudhomme - announced his retirement on the air.  And while he finished his sentences - especially the one about how it was time for a new generation more in step with the times to take over at MSNBC and the one about how he was sorry for his demeaning comments about women (none of which involve Julie Wolfe or Esmé Marshall) - he did not finish the hour of his show.  After "Hardball" returned from its first commercial break, Steve Kornacki was sitting in Matthews' place looking as stunned as everyone watching at home must have been.  And so an era ends.  We'll have to wait for a new era to begin; a rotation of different hosts - including, I suspect, the insufferable Joy Reid - will fill in the 7 PM Eastern hour until a permanent host can be found.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Maybe we should have known something was up when Matthews did not take part in MSNBC's coverage of the South Carolina primary this past Saturday, reducing the gaffe-machine squad to just Joe Biden (who urged people to support Jaime Harrison's presidential bid).

Sorry to see you go, Chris.  Well, not really, especially after that remark on Election Night 2012 about how you were glad we had Hurricane Sandy the week before because it brought about opportunities for good politics.

Hopefully, Joy Reid will follow Matthews out the door sooner or later, and maybe also Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd).

The Bernie Perplex

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign is down to two candidates - Bernie Sanders and everyone else.

I should be for Sanders, because he supports single-payer health care, taxing the rich to the level they were taxed at back in the 1950s, and pushing a moon-shot-type program to move to renewable energy.  But I, like many others, fear he can't beat Trump  because he's too far to the left.  A lot of people are afraid that, as President,  he'd spend too much money on free amenities and give away the store.  But Sanders' supporters don't want to hear that.  They are as loyal to him as the MAGA crowd is to Trump, they nitpick to death every flaw of Sanders' opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, and they go nuclear on anyone who doesn't like him.  Even Michael Jackson fans - the Islamic State of celebrity fandom - aren't as brutal to their idol's detractors.

The zealotry exuded by Bernie bros is getting pretty scary, but after what happened to Sanders in 2016, it's understandable. After all, he got screwed by Hillary Clinton supporters back then, but Hillbots screwed Martin O'Malley, too, and I'm doubly pissed off about that because Bernie bros disrespected and laughed off O'Malley as much as Hillbots did. We onetime O'Malley supporters, who did not in fact have meetings in a broom closet, are still smarting over that, and we have long memories and short fuses. We were angry at both camps, and we're not happy to see Bernie bros carrying on again like they did four years ago. It's worse than 2016.  I mean, how do you reason with guys who taunt Joe Biden by bringing a fake coffin to a Biden fundraiser?

Or those attacks on culinary workers in Nevada?

Okay, I'm going to conclude this blog entry from the perspective that it is unfair to paint Sanders supporters with a broad brush, and that not all Sanders supporters are jerks, and the Sanders supporters I know wouldn't do a thing like this.  So here it is:  Sanders currently leads Trump in head-to-head poll match-ups, he has momentum, and he's right on most of the issues.  And even though a comparison of his policies to Roosevelt's New Deal proposals in the 1932 presidential campaign is probably a nervous one at best, given that the economy in 2020 is far different than what it was in 1932, when one out of four people were unemployed but we still had a strong industrial base, I'll take at face value the idea that Bernie can defeat Trump in November as the Democratic presidential nominee, which is what my Sanders-supporter friends have been telling me.

Okay, my Sanders-supporter friends, I'll accept your arguments.  I'll accept the idea that Sanders, as the Democratic presidential nominees,  can defeat Trump.  But if he is the nominee, you'd better be right about this!