I’m as pissed as any woman on this site that once again a very good woman has to bow out to make way for a mediocre white man. Not like we haven’t seen this before in every boardroom, place of worship, and high office.
But before the last white woman had to leave, so did very good women and men of color — Harris, Booker, Yang — many simply for lack of funds. (Bloomberg talked a big game about financing our folks, but he could have kept Kamala in the race with his couch-change. Just sayin’.) Pete Buttigieg, the first LGBTQ candidate, conceded, and so did other white folks, male and female.
And in the end? We have an old white man. So safe. So regressive.
But there is sound medical sense in the choice here.
For people who’ve been paying attention, our entire country has endured four years of trauma at the hands of vile white men and their Vichy allies (misogynist women, racist POC, homophobic LGBTQs happy to take the GOP shilling to be a figurehead), openly looting our country, disregarding the Constitution, poisoning the judicial well, and letting the rest fall apart from neglect as the world burns and pestilence sweeps across the globe, to the point that every day has unfolded a new horror from this maladministration. Now that the vile people have declared each other Not Guilty of blatantly unConstitutional acts, they are openly working to steal the election in November 2020. We will require a massive push to vote to excise the worst of the offenders from office, starting with the rotting orange at the top.
And immediately after that, when we’ve put a stop to 4 years of hourly assaults on the rule of law, decency and democracy?
Here’s the thing. I’m old enough to have gone through two routine colonoscopies, both of which involved polyp removal. When you’ve undergone even minor surgery such as said polyp excisions during a routine colonoscopy, your instructions after your fasting and purging and the doctor’s work do not include “Be sure to bolt down as much rich food and chili peppers as you can right away.” Doctor’s instructions say “bland food at first.” Plain oatmeal, for example; it’s boring but nourishing, and will do the job, and get your digestive system back on line to resume your chile verde or veggie biryani when your body has recovered from the trauma.
Joe Biden? Is our country’s bowl of oatmeal. The black voters who made that difference in Texas and South Carolina on Super Tuesday know it. And maybe even he knows it.
What we need is a BORING administration — where we can go a week at a time not thinking about who’s in charge of running the country as we descend from the nonstop stress and pressure of four years of trying to keep up with a shit-storm. Yes, Biden’s decisions and nominations will not be as liberal as we want — but they will also not be as blatantly incompetent or openly, contemptuously criminal as the ones we have to deal with now.
Cartoonist Matt Bors once portrayed Democratic voters as slobbering little girls who happily bolted down plain lukewarm porridge. Well goddamn it, we NEED plain porridge right now.
(If anyone’s actually interested, I do have Alton Brown’s fabulous recipe for Irish pinhead oatmeal and can share it below.)