Democracy Dies in Darkness? Democracy Dies in Des Moines

Feminist icon and 45th governor of Alabama Lurleen Wallace

With 62% in, Buttigieg seems to be edging out Sanders in Iowa.

I had predicted a blowout for Sanders.

On the other hand, the delay in counting the vote, makes the results look dubious. That, and the poll just before the vote that was pulled; and the other polls showing Sanders way up, and Buttigieg flagging.

We know the backrooms would prefer a Buttigieg win. We know the Dem establishment’s history of stacking decks against Sanders. We know the Dem establishment is prepared to rig the process, because they did in 2016.

It is generally better to assume typical human incompetence before suspecting active malice. And yet, the series of circumstances seems implausible. It seems odd that, if the app was not working, it was not possible to fall back to the system they had always used, and accept results by phone. It seems odd that, a day later, they could report only 62% of the vote, with no update since. Anywhere else, such a delay would mean only one thing: they need the time to doctor the results.

Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself, and Pete Buttigieg did not win the Iowa caucuses.

But let’s pretend he did.

Conventional wisdom is that Iowa usually leaves only three viable candidates. I think that is true this time. Buttigieg has overtaken Biden and Klobuchar as the establishment favourite. They are probably done.

Sanders has established himself as leader on the left. Warren may hang on to try her luck in New Hampshire.

The other candidate still viable is Michael Bloomberg. He avoids the cut by not being present.

Buttigieg has a puny resume; and this is a weak, dubious win. Bloomberg probably has a shot at challenging him for the anti-Sanders vote once his weakness sinks in.

In the meantime, the media operatives have their lede. They are making much of Buttigieg’s supposed win as historic, in overcoming or suggesting the end of public prejudice against gays. “The first openly gay candidate to win Iowa.”

I think this is fake news. Buttigieg’s qualifications as a presidential candidate are absurdly slight. Mayor of South Bend? Being gay is almost his only qualification for the job. If we won, he won BECAUSE he is gay, not in spite of it.

And this continues a familiar pattern.

Barack Obama was conspicuously underqualified as a first-term senator when he won Iowa and the nomination in 2008. People voted for him because of the colour of his skin—as Biden noted at the time.

Hillary Clinton had, on paper, qualifications to justify her selection in 2016. On the other hand, hailing her as the prospective “first female president” was another gimmick. She would be far from the first wife or a former politician to stroll into office on his coattails. Nobody hailed it as historic when Lurleen Wallace succeeded her husband George as Alabama governor back in 1967. Or when Isabel Peron succeeded her husband Juan as Argentine president in 1974. She succeeded not despite being a woman, but because she was a wife.

The moral of it all is that there is no discrimination against gays, or blacks, or women. They are systematically favoured now by the establishment, and have been for some time.

On the other hand, nobody makes anything of the fact that, if Bernie won, he would be the first Jewish president.

Certainly not the Sanders campaign. They know if they did, it would lose, not gain, votes.

Pete Buttigieg's Christmas

The Flight into Egypt

Pete Buttigieg has gotten a lot of criticism for his Christmas tweet:

“Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas.”

Others quickly pointed out that there is no indication in the Gospel that Jesus’s birth family was either rich or poor. And Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem not as refugees, but to register for a census.

And why can’t he use the name “Jesus”?

It seemed to me initially obvious that Buttigieg was way off; I am surprised to see that some have also defended his tweet.

Peter Wever at The Week, for example, responds “it's hard to see how a carpenter from an otherwise insignificant village in Galilee would be well-off.”

I suppose that depends on what counts for you as “well-off.” A carpenter from a small town in America today can do well enough. He’s just not going to make the Fortune 500.

But it seems to me the bottom line is that, if it were somehow significant to the narrative that Jesus was either rich or poor, that fact would have been noted in the Gospels.

Jack Jenkins responds that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were indeed refugees at a later point, the flight into Egypt.

JMJ do seem to fit the meaning of “refugee” in informal usage during the flight into Egypt; but not the legal definition. Because they did not leave their home country—Judea, Galilee, and Egypt were all provinces of the Roman Empire. It would be like fleeing from Georgia to Ohio. As many blacks did during “Jim Crow” days.

This does not look to me like a plausible interpretation of what Buttigieg wrote, however. He was speaking of how Jesus came into this world, not of subsequent events.

So it seems to me there are two possibilities here: either Buttigieg does not have a very clear idea of the New Testament; or he is distorting it to suit a political agenda.

Either way, it does not mark him as a serious Christian.

This would not matter, except that he has made his Christianity a central feature of his campaign, arguing that he can win Christian votes away from the right.

A tweet like this seems to make this less likely, by showing how superficial his avowed Christianity actually is.

There may be a constituency, on the other hand, of those who are not themselves serious Christians, but who would still like to be reassured that their political beliefs do not run counter to it. This, after all, is presumably why we hear ahistorical assertions that, say, Jesus was black, or a communist, or a political revolutionary.

Buttigieg Calls out Trump as a Crypto-Atheist

Dark horse of the same colour.

Pete Buttigieg, the current dark horse darling of the Democrats, who always love a dark horse, is making media now by criticizing Donald Trump on religious grounds.

“I just don’t understand how you can be as worshipful of your own self as he is and be prepared to humble yourself before God,” Buttigieg is quoted as saying.

“I’ve never seen him humble himself before anyone.”

“When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works,” Buttigieg said.

“And what we have now is this exaltation of wealth and power, almost for its own sake, that in my reading of Scripture couldn’t be more contrary to the message of Christianity.”

Some will say that Buttigieg has no moral standing to judge Trump—“judge not, lest ye be judged.” Moreover, he is openly gay, apparently a violation of Christian ethics.

But I do not think this criticism holds. Buttigieg is Episcopalian--Anglican. By the current mores of his denomination, his homosexual marriage is fine, and sacramentally consecrated.

And we do in fact have both the right and the obligation to judge. The prohibition in the New Testament is against being hypocritical—against setting higher moral standard for others than for yourself. Those of us who oppose murder or rape are quite prepared to declare murderers or rapists morally wrong, and try to stop them. Not to do so is truly immoral.

So Buttigieg’s charges must be evaluated in their merits.

He is also perfectly right that concern for the poor and outcast easily trumps, in moral terms, concern over anyone else’s sexuality. Concern for the poor is a moral obligation.

I don’t think anyone who is themselves religious is under any illusions, either, that Trump is a very religious guy. The issue instead is whether voting for him is good or bad for religious and moral values, in comparison to the alternatives. Which, last time, were Hillary Clinton. A different candidate with different policy views might easily make that calculation different.

Which means that Buttigieg’s line of attack here makes good superficial sense.

Trump does seem to model the sin of pride. This is hardly in itself a good thing, and it is a bad thing in particular in a public official who is, at least in part, a model for general behavior. Confucius made this point: setting a good example is a vital part of good government.

However, most if not all of Trump’s pride seems to be an affectation, a matter of branding, not necessarily a real personal attribute. His main source of income is licensing his name. So as a comment on his own personal morality, it looks pretty bogus.

Moreover, Buttigieg is dangerously misrepresenting what pride really involves. William Blake put it well with his adage, “Humble before God, not before men.” Pride is the refusal to submit to the authority of God. It has nothing to do with showing humility or submission toward earthly authority. If it did, who could be more easily accused of the sin of pride than Jesus Christ? Any of the Christian martyrs, similarly, could easily be accused of “arrogance” or “pride” for insisting on doing what they believed was right instead of bending the knee to this or that pagan emperor.

That sounds very much like Trump: he does what he thinks is right, regardless of the flak.

In making this claim against Trump, therefore, Buttigieg begins to look sinister. It seems to presuppose atheism on his own part.

As for defending the poor, contrary to Buttigieg’s assertion, this is what got Trump elected: the notion among the poor themselves that he was their defender against an uncaring elite. Demonstrably, too, the poor in particular are doing better since Trump got elected: unemployment is down, the economy is up. Trump may or may not be responsible for this, but he can hardly be charged on this evidence with not caring for the poor.

As for defending the immigrant, Trump is on record as being in favour of more immigration. Polls also show he is quite popular among immigrants, and his popularity here is growing. They apparently see him as defending their interests. He opposes illegal immigration, or chaotic, random immigration, which is not the same thing as opposing immigration. Those who suffer most immediately from illegal immigration are, after all, legal immigrants and those who wish to become legal immigrants.

By this point Buttigieg seems guilty of insincerity, dishonesty. Not on the side of the angels.

As for defending the outcast and those left behind by how society works more generally, the obvious example of this is abortion: the widespread killing of the most vulnerable, who have no voice. Any other considerations in this particular regard seem to pale before this. Is Buttigieg prepared to come out firmly against abortion?

Can he, conversely, point to any action by Trump that seemed to target the disadvantaged? He cites no examples, so we have nothing to examine or analyse. This looks like a kind of admission in itself that the claim is purely rhetorical, not real.

As for concern for prisoners and those unjustly accused, Trump seems to have a good record here. His Department of Education has cracked down on the abuse of due process in the case of campus accusations of rape and sexual harassment—overturning a Democratic/Obama administration initiative. More broadly, the Trump administration has been on a drive to reduce government regulations. Fewer laws, fewer crimes, fewer prisoners, so to speak. The left, at the same time, has been on their out-of-control #MeToo witch hunt.

What can Buttigieg have in mind on the other side of the ledger? Again, he does not say, which does not encourage us to take his assertion seriously. How about the death penalty? He could have some moral standing here if he came out against the death penalty. But no Democrat will, or has, since Mario Cuomo. Any prisoners can, literally, so far as they are concerned, go hang.

As for “the exaltation of wealth and power for its own sake,” how in Buttigieg’s mind does that fit with laying on an official White House meal of pizza and Big Macs? Trump makes a show of his personal wealth—that’s branding, again, so far as anyone can see. But he ran against the powers that be: to “drain the swamp.”

Buttigieg is not a stupid man. This suggests that he is not a moral one. Anyone expecting some fresh “new politics” from this quarter—the inevitable hope for these dark horse Democrats among the simple naïve helots of the left—is being conned. Yet again.