Politically Incorrect

Right now I'm experiencing big-time schadenfreude as fans of bigmouth rapper Kanye West try to get their jaws off the floor.  As part of his promotion for his latest record, West, long famous for sticking it to the honky by attacking George Walker Bush as a racist on live TV, or declaring rap to be the new rock and roll and sitting back as his fans defended attacks on his musical ability from David Crosby and Michael McDonald by counterattacking them, just praised the honkiest honky of them all.  He actually praised Donald Trump.

For only the second time in my life, I'm applauding West for his actions, this time for defying political correctness and ethnic tribalism.  (The first time I applauded him was when he was on that live-TV telethon for Katrina victims and declared, "George Bush doesn't care about black people.")  He's a black man who digs Trump, and his fans and his politically liberal defenders in the pop press are aghast that he could endorse a man famous for his racially charged rhetoric. Like, how could he do such a thing?  Well, fellow liberals, we're supposed to be for freedom of expression and we're supposed to be resisting assaults on rights to free speech - and now it doesn't feel so good when someone you admire disappoints you and disgusts you by voicing an opinion you don't agree with - especially after you tried to shut up and shut down white guys who think "rap music" is an oxymoron when they had a problem handling Kanye West.

And just remember, I don't like Trump either.  I don't like Kanye, for that matter.  And I still think rap is not music - I happen to be listening to Gordon Lightfoot as I type this - but Mr. West has the freedom to say what he wants as well as the freedom to be a jerk.

Ditto Joy Reid. The MSNBC host, known for shaming and ridiculing anyone who disagrees with her identity-politics-driven world view with a smug stupidity that defines people of her ilk, had been caught having made homophobic insinuations against Democratic U.S. Representative and former Republican Florida governor Charlie Crist (who may or may not be gay) a few months ago, and she apologized. Now some homophobic writings from her blog, written back sometime around 2006, have surfaced and embarrassed her. Reid snapped that the blog posts weren't hers, saying that someone must have hacked into her blog and tampered with it by writing those awful things about gays to make her look bad.  Although she never took responsibility for writing them, many so-called liberals accepted her "apology." MSNBC has stood by her, as have folks like Dan Savage, who would rather play guessing games about Charlie Crist's sexual orientation than address Reid's lies. "I, a known homosexual, would like to offer Reid an olive branch, because the thing is, she's right. Despite his two heterosexual marriages, Charlie Crist could definitely be gay," Savage wrote. "It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to see Crist at a Key West drag brunch."  Savage went on to say that people evolve, and he added that whether Joy Reid was a homophobe once before, it doesn't matter now, since she's not a homophobe today.

Uh, Dan, I don't care if Crist is gay.  I don't care if Joy Reid has evolved (her cavalier dismissal of anyone who has an opinion contrary to her own clearly demonstrates that she hasn't evolved enough).  But that is not the issue! She lied about never having been a homophobe and not having written those blog posts!  There is no evidence that her blog was ever hacked!  She's as much a practitioner of fake news as anyone on Fox News, but we can't say that about her because she's so good at making conservatives feel uncomfortable and because she's on our team? 

Ha ha, I'm not on anyone's team.  I'm too hip for the Republicans and too square for the Democrats.  After all, I like Gordon Lightfoot.

I used to like Joy Reid, but her superiority complex and her holier-than-thou attitude wore thin with me.  I'd once put her picture on my beautiful-women picture blog. After this incident, someone went into my blog and replaced Joy Reid's picture with pictures of a model who happens to have the same last name.

That someone was me.   See, I take responsibility for what I write. I express regret for something I put out and have second thoughts about later.  Also, I don't mind or care if something I write on this blog will tick off someone I'm supposed to agree with on everything.  I know that attitude won't make me many friends, but as a Martin O'Malley supporter, I already know what it's like to be an outcast. :-p

Savage Analysis

Noted gay activist Dan Savage made a rather nonsensical comment about what the Democrats ought to do to recover in 2018 and 2020. He said that they should concentrate on the diverse urban populations in the cities where their base is, instead of white working-class and rural voters.  He opined that even the most Democratic states are predominantly Republican outside the urban areas - including his adopted home state of Washington - and the Republican voters can never be won over.

Savage, as usual, doesn't know what he's talking about.   In no way am I suggesting that Democrats should ignore the multiracial, multi-ethnic urban faithful, and I agree with Savage that they should get more people in urban areas to vote.  However, writing off the white vote in rural and blue-collar communities is political suicide.  Republican policies have screwed these people over so often, they should be voting for someone other than the GOP, and the Democrats will only make the same mistake that Hillary Clinton made in trying to win without them while sticking with a careful, inoffensive centrist posture.  Bear in mind that Barack Obama won many of the white voters of rural and working-class backgrounds in 2008 and 2012, the same voters that Donald Trump won in 2016.  They'll vote Democratic again if they think the party shows concern for their interests, as Trump did during the 2016 presidential campaign.  Trump's performance among those voters helped him  capture three key states - Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin - that got him the White House.  (Trump only needed one or two of these states to win; the Democrats had to get them all.)  Hillary Clinton, who became synonymous with every bad stereotype about white bourgeois liberals, didn't think that a population segment ticked off with the decline of manufacturing jobs and the lack of economic opportunity was worth going after.

And not all of these people voted for Trump.  As many pundits noted, a lot of them simply didn't vote at all.  There was no one who spoke to them; Trump offered nothing but vulgar bluster, and Hillary spent her time cavorting with pop stars.  A progressive message could work with these voters, but they're only getting swayed right and center. 

Democrats have to go after white working-class and rural voters - but not at the expense of their urban, multi-ethnic base.  And truth be told, they have to concentrate on working-class and rural voters of all races, creeds and colors, because a black farmer in Mississippi  and a Latino construction worker in Ohio are left out just as much as their white counterparts by the Democratic Party.  Democrats have scored some impressive victories in down-ballot races, recently, taking two Republican seats in the Oklahoma state legislature, but they have to do more of that going forward - and start talking more to voters left out by the party establishment's centrist wet dreams.    If the Democrats blow key elections coming in the immediate future, it will be the party leaders who end up being all wet.