I was kind of excited about Mayor Pete with the unpronounceable last name. He seemed like a breath of fresh air. Then he started talking about issues with free college and I thought, oh well, no one's perfect. Then, he said this:"I think the sense of anger and disaffection that comes from seeing that the numbers are fine, like unemployment's low, like all that, like you said GDP is growing and yet a lot of neighborhoods and families are living like this recovery never even happened. They're stuck," Buttigieg told high school Democrats in Nashua, N.H., on Friday. "It just kind of turns you against the system in general and then you're more likely to want to vote to blow up the system, which could lead you to somebody like Bernie and it could lead you to somebody like Trump. That's how we got where we are."
Of course there is anger and dissatisfaction. Of course the recovery is nonsense, and of course it's easy to turn against an unfair system. Right after that, though, Mayor Pete loses me pretty thoroughly. If you're dissatisfied, you "want to blow up the system." I'm not sure exactly what that means.
I'm a Bernie supporter, and I want what a lot of Bernie supporters want. I want health care for all Americans. I want Americans to have a living wage. I want college available to all who can benefit from it, and yes, that means free at state-sponsored schools. I don't want young people committing suicide over college debt. Another thing I want is to stop having that painted as ultra-left or radical. That's ridiculous. Just about every other developed country on earth has those things.
It's more offensive than I can express to be compared with people running around in MAGA hats, people who tolerate Trump's selfishness and narcissism. I'm not gonna go out and say every Trump supporter is a racist, but it's a pretty good bet that every racist is a Trump supporter. Sure they're angry. But what do they want? They want a president who will look at a nazi rally and say there are good people on both sides. Well, there aren't.
I've seen a lot of people I respect rationalizing this. Oh, he's just saying there's anger and frustration on both sides. Hey, there was anger and frustration on both sides of the nazi rally too. The thing is, I wouldn't compare the nazis to the people who opposed them. I further wouldn't compare Bernie supporters to Trump supporters. I find Trump's positions reprehensible, disgusting, disgraceful. He's stacking the Supreme Court with people who want to kill union, and he'd be more than happy to outlaw picketing.
If Mayor Pete were not suggesting that Bernie is extremist, at the very least, then he's a very poor speaker of English. Is he just trying to be cute, and put that out there as though that were not a clear and obvious implication? It's hard to say, as I'm not a mind-reader. (Maybe it's some big DNC strategy, or a balloon or something. My own congressional rep, Kathleen Rice, just compared Trump and AOC, something I find equally offensive and ignorant.)
I'm sufficiently offended that there is no way on earth I'd vote for Mayor Pete in a primary. So far the only Democrat for whom I'd vote under no circumstance whatsoever is Cory Booker, who's Betsy DeVos in a tie, but Mayor Pete is cutting it very, very close.
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