It has suddenly become clear that, for the most part, there is no appreciable difference between America's Democrats and the majority of Republicans: both are wedded to and will defend to the last, the dying Empire.
How do I know this? Because one and only one of the 24 Democrats running for the presidential nomination of 2020 is in the direct line of Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama and far enough above them to be a future Abe Lincoln. In a thirty-five minute foreign policy speech the mayor of a middle American city showed a mastery of both grass roots aspirations and almost rock solid understanding of the world American has insisted on leading straight down a rabbit hole.
And yet, after announcing it all day, MSNBC showed the speech for about five minutes, then switched to analyzing it rather than following it! Wall to wall coverage of Joe Biden's hyped up efforts to appear presidential while stumbling through brief appearances is the order of the day of America's vaunted 'free' press: the Democratic Party's determination to keep Barack Obama's seventy-six year old Vice President who is running for the top spot for the third time, front and center of the media's attention is nothing short of obscene. The treatment it meted out to Bernie Sanders in 2016 which, rather than Russian 'interference in our Democracy' made Donald Trump president pales in comparison to what it's doing to the only candidate who is offering Americans a chance to climb out of its rabbit hole.
Even the music played while the crowd waited for the candidate broke with tradition: instead of marching bands or rock music over raucous expectation, 'Mayor Pete' offered the Tchaikovsky violin concerto followed by heroic music, to which the audience listened quietly. Buttigieg of the difficult to pronounce Maltese name and still looking like a teen-ager in suit and tie proceeded to set forth the foreign policy that Americans have been waiting for since the Vietnam War his time in Afghanistan (like that of Tulsi Gabbard), serving as extra bona fides, in case his Oxford and Rhodes Scholarships left some fearing his 'National Security for a New Era' might be too intellectual.
Well, intellectual it certainly was, underscoring like nothing else could, the know-nothing policies that have been fashioned by a president who thinks the moon is part of Mars and blood-thirsty advisors who like him have never seen the inside of a barracks.
Buttigieg doesn't do things halfway: he chose as his venue the Indiana University's foreign affairs program, introduced by a female future immigration lawyer from French Guyana and former representative Lee Hamilton, (one of several foreign policy aces who commended an article I wrote during a stint at the US State Department that suggested ways to improve US-Soviet affairs).
Alluding to the ignorance of most government officials, Buttigieg referred to 'the difference between Normandy (where US military landed) and Saigon' (whence US diplomats fled), before proceeding to outline a foreign policy that repeatedly drew expressions of surprised, enthusiastic relief from the audience. Pointedly referring to 'democratic capitalism' at a time when many of his competitors are trying to gain recognition for democratic socialism, Mayor Pete, as he is referred to, declared flat out that the US would not pay for Israel to annex the West Bank, backing a two-state solution for the Palestinians and referring to Gaza as a humanitarian disaster.
In what was perhaps a nod to President's Putin and Xi's calls for a multi-polar world (which Trump cannot mention because he would be incapable of explaining it), Pete appears determined to "improve the climate of global cooperation", channeling FDR's fourth-term Vice President, the progressive Henry Wallace, who called for 'a foreign policy of he common man' before Truman took over upon FDR's tragic death, ready to initiate the policy of 'containment' that has been America's watchword toward the Soviet Union and Russia ever since.
Buttigieg's condition for signing on to American 'exceptionalism' is that it be 'not just any America, but America at its best'. Joe Biden has yet to spell out a foreign policy, thus the 'media of record' ignored that of the most promising candidate on the Democratic roster. Nothing has changed since George McGovern ran in 1972.
