Roy Exum
Kirsten Gillibrand, a 50-year-old senator (D-NY), is attractive and smart. She is also an ugly, foul-mouthed example of what the once functional Democratic Party is becoming. Much like the universally-disliked Nancy Pelosi and misguided Bernie Sanders, she seems determined to help push more Americans toward the Republican Party before the mid-term elections next summer.
On June 9, less than a week ago, she stood before a crowd at the Personal Democracy Forum at New York University and not many will remember what she said.
That’s because what the crowd wanted to hear was over-shadowed by what it did not. Here are three lines from the mother of two:
-- "If we are not helping people, we should go the f**k home," she said.
-- "Has he (Trump) kept any of these promises? No. F**k no," she also said.
-- Later in an on-stage interview she tossed out that Trump was "b****ing about the media."
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I am hardly a prude and my mouth can get salty but, my goodness, never in a public forum. Gillibrand has a duty to honor the decorum of the office. She also should be able to articulate her thoughts without skewing them with words she would never want her children to hear coming from their mother.
What’s just as mind boggling is Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez has made a fecal word part of his rhetoric where he goes: “The GOP doesn’t give a s*** about people.” As a matter of fact, Perez is so delighted with the line that anyone can now go to the DNC website and buy a T-shirt that has in bold letters, “Democrats Give A S**t About People.” I’m not a good one to tell you where to wear something like that but it’s not a stretch to warn that in some communities it will get you arrested for public profanity.
I can cite page and verse where crude and vulgar has never worked in any situation. Tim Dickinson just wrote an article in Rolling Stone entitled “Can the Democrats Fix the Party?” He quotes Perez as saying it will be a “turn-around job” but it appears to be the party leaders are on a dead-end street. Look at these two paragraphs from Dickinson’s story:
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“The Democratic Party is in the worst shape of its modern history. The presidency of Barack Obama papered over the fact that the party was being hollowed out from below. Over Obama's two terms, Democrats ceded 13 governorships to the GOP and stumbled from controlling six in 10 state legislatures to now barely one in three. Across federal and state government, Democrats have lost close to 1,000 seats. There are only six states where Democrats control both the legislature and the governor's mansion.
“More troubling,” Dickinson adds, “Even amid the great upwelling of anti-Trump resistance, Democratic favorability ratings have continued to tumble since Election Day – to just 40 percent in a May Gallup poll. ‘Our negatives are almost as high as Trump's, as far as party goes," says Rep. Tim Ryan, a rugged Ohio Democrat serving Youngstown. Ryan led an unsuccessful 63-vote insurgency against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in November because, he says, ‘We weren't winning.’"
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Bernie Sanders, who is proudly Jewish, made a huge blunder last week when he was questioning Russell Vought, who was being vetted as the Deputy Secretary in the Office for Budget and Management. He insinuated Vought was a bigot. As a matter of fact, Sanders doesn’t think Christians are fit to serve in government because they’re all bigots. Basic Christian theology, in Sanders’s view, “is indefensible, it is hateful, it is Islamophobic, and it is an insult to over a billion Muslims all over the world.”
The truth is that Sanders badly violated Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids any religious challenge to those seeking public office. But in calling all Christians bigots at a time when people feel their religious rights are being taken away, the 75-year-old Sanders also wounded the Democratic Party badly.
With relatively no marked influence in 24 states and growing, the Democrats seem bent on self-destruction and this is hardly the time with Trump’s ratings so low. The Republicans are scrambling but when you put ugly cuss words out openly on the street and coat them with unprecedented anger, it is easy to understand why, in the 2016 election, Trump carried 2,622 of America’s counties while Hillary Clinton won 490. Just watch, next May the Democrats will cuss worse than ever after the votes are counted across America.
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TODAY IS FLAG DAY
Make sure you fly our flag in its full glory today because it is Flag Day. On June 14, 1777, a resolution from the Second Continental Congress decreed we should have a flag with 13 stripes, alternate red and white, that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” In the late 1800s, a movement to have a Flag Day started in Pennsylvania and William Kerr worked for 67 years to build support for Flag Day. In 1949, President Harry Truman signed a permanent observance into law.
royexum@aol.com