11/24/24

  THE SEASON OF STUPID

THIS IS THE TIME IN AN ELECTION YEAR when people, myself included, say stupid things.
     Summer is history, and if Donald Trump has his way, it won't be back.
     This is a time of  skeletal tree branches, rotting leafs and four-o’clock sundowns, hinting at what's to come on Jan. 20, when Trump takes over.
     There are about two months of official democracy remaining before the avalanche of Trump’s authoritarian winter sweeps across the continent, suffocating whatever is good about the United States.
     One of the agonies of this waiting period is listening to lectures about what went wrong – not from the winners, who are still planning their MAGA re-education centers – but from the losers, our own comrades.
     How could we have been so witless, the Democratic ask.
     How could we have been so deaf, so arrogant, so elitist that we lost our connection to the hard-working working-families, the economic innocents cheated out of a carton of inflated eggs, while their small towns were overrun by pet-devouring immigrants?
     Why have we Democrats become so alienated from those authentic Americans, leaving them little choice but to seek guidance from the king of common sense, Donald John Trump? 

SETH MOULTON

 ONE EXAMPLE OF STUPID came from Seth Moulton, a Democratic Massachusetts congressman, whose star-studded resume includes degrees from Harvard and medals from his service as a Marine during four tours in Iraq.   
       The day after the election, The New York Times sought out Democratic heavies for some quickie insights as to the party’s devastating loss. Here’s what Moulton said:     

 Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.

     Captain Moulton had scouted out the enemy and reported the chilling results to the American people:
     Oversized transgender freaks have been roaming America’s athletic fields alongside authentically gendered daughters, whom we’ve left undefended and endangered, because adult enablers from the Democratic left have censored sensible, kitchen-table conversations on this and other  hot-potatoes.
     If only the Democrats hadn’t been burdened by those gender changelings, to say nothing weighted down by those other pesky issues, like police brutality and climate change, that have absolutely nothing to do with what authentic Americans really care about, like the price of eggs.
      In the days following his Times statement, Moulton had a chance  to acknowledge the absurdity  of laying the blame for Trump’s victory at the feet of transgender children, a fragile fraction of the U.S. population that Trump’s goons traumatized in millions-of-dollars worth of campaign ads.
     Instead, Moulton positioned himself as a champion of intraparty free-speech and  as a savant-emissary to practical, hard-working-America. In a clarifying statement the next day, he said:    

      I stand firmly in my belief for the need for competitive women’s sports to put limits on the participation of those with the unfair physical advantages that come with being born male. I am also a strong supporter of the civil rights of all Americans, including transgender rights. I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens.
     These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them. Yet there are many who, shouting from the extreme left corners of social media, believe I have failed the unspoken Democratic Party purity test. We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue.
     We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop. Let’s have these debates now, determine a new strategy for our party since our existing one failed, and then unite to oppose the Trump agenda wherever it imperils American values.    

     Notice that Moulton dropped in that line repudiating the thrust his Times' statement: “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue.” But that was overshadowed by his overall charge that lefty purists had squashed honest discussion and therefore distanced the party from mainstream America.
     What should he have said? First, he owed transgender individuals – especially youngsters – an apology.
     'My stupid. I fell into the Republican trap of picking on a vulnerable group of children, whose desperate search for gender identity can literally cost their lives.'
     Secondly, he should have followed that by saying the only thing we all know for certain about why Trump won is that none of us actually knows the answer.
    
EVIL FORCES WERE AFOOT on Nov. 5, and my best guess now is that nothing could have stopped them. Like Seth Moulton and everyone else distraught by the election results, I have no proof as to why that happened, just sorrow.
     Personally, I don’t buy the economic excuse – that, battered by inflation, voters turned on the incumbent party. Nearly as many voters supported Kamala Harris, but I guess they were immune from inflation – maybe coastal elites know where to shop for cheap eggs.
     What I don’t understand is why Democrats seem angrier at each other than at the people who voted Donald Trump into the White House and who handed Republicans control of the Senate and House.
     The result will be a storm of terror and hate unlike the worst fire and brimstone descriptions in the Bible, and it’s entirely the fault of the Trump voters.

• Trump voters put the planet on a death watch, because Trump will accelerate climate change; Trump voters upended the lives of millions of immigrants, their families and their children, who live in fear they’ll be deported – and thousands will be.
• Trump voters dispatched a recovering economy to the tariff poor house; Trump voters abolished the concept of fairness, as a criminalized Department of Injustice will use the law as a club to attack Trump’s enemies.
• Trump voters reactivated the GOP’s enduring dream of taking money from the poor – food stamps and Medicaid – and pass it to the rich as lower taxes; Trump voters set back women’s rights to medical care and equal status.
• Trump voters cleared the way for  U.S. soldiers to confront protesters - be they their neighbors, cousins and friends - with deadly force, having left dissenters few options beyond taking to the streets.

A LITTLE MORE ABOUT TRANSGENDER MATTERS.
     I don’t know a lot about the subject. What I’ve read is that a slice of the population is betrayed by a confounding quirk of nature. At some point in their lives, some girls realize their bodies have lied to them, and that they are boys; the same with some males, who  identify as females. The journey to balance the scales is fraught and perilous, but can be successful and life-affirming.
     Do female athletes face unfair competition from some transitioned males? Maybe, but  hormone treatments that they may take, and which some sports associations require, can narrow the differences.
     Because the numbers of transgender persons are relatively small, and their athletic cohort is even smaller, the chances that Seth Moulton’s daughters will be run down by such a contestant are small.
      But transgender players do show up on female teams – and there is hell to pay when the culture warriors sink their teeth into the actual human beings involved.    

THE SAN JOSE SPARTANS volleyball team, including the transgender player, whom the Washington Post isn't naming. CREDIT: San Jose State University website

  The Washington Post has a distressing and complicated story this week about the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State University, where one player has been identified as transgender, and the resulting controversy has seen five other teams refuse to play against the squad.
     The issue turned so ugly that a San Jose co-captain is part of a lawsuit seeking to have her transgender teammate banned, the filings saying the player had unfairly displaced other players; the captain even claimed the teammate conspired unsuccessfully to injure her.
     There are differing views as to the potential danger and competitive disadvantage posed by that  player, whom the Post didn't identified because the player hasn’t talked about her background. An official of one volleyball team wrote this about competing against San Jose:   

  I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.

SARAH MC BRIDE

     The San Jose website lists the player as 6-feet, 1-inches tall, which at first seems male-advantaged; but of the 19 players, seven women are 6-feet or more, including one who is 6-feet, 3-inches.

THE MISCHIEF THAT COMES from exploiting transgender issues has sprung up in the Capitol, where the country’s first elected transgender Congresswoman, Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, has been cornered in one of the GOP’s favorite battlespaces, the bathroom.
      GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has demanded McBride be barred from women’s bathrooms; Speaker Mike Johnson is delighted by the idea of restricting bathrooms, a move that will affect trans Capitol staffers and visitors.
      McBride says she’ll follow the House rules. But that’s made her a target of transgender advocates, who say that she has let down the cause, betraying less powerful and more vulnerable people whom McBride should be championing.

ADMITTING THAT I’M AT A LOSS as to why Trump won and what to do about it, here is what I hope, at a minimum, will happen:
     I  want Democrats to defend vulnerable groups, always, and to reject scapegoating or abandoning individuals as tactic to win the hearts and minds of voters.
     Lots of people, like Congressman Moulton, have taken to blaming Democrats for losing the election because they’ve lost touch with voters’ prejudices, which I find to be both unkind and unlikely.
     I wish the critics would save a little of their fury for the real villains, the Trump voters.
     It’s the Trump voters who have condemned themselves and the rest of us to years of treachery and cruelty that represent America at her very worst.
     The Season of Stupid can’t end soon enough.

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