Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

House Party

As the first of 12 presidential debates blows in at mid-week like an evil patch of bad summer weather, twenty candidates vie for the position of Ole Massa on the Democratic Party plantation, and the air is gravid with bad vibes.

One highly-favored entry, Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) of charming South Bend, Indiana, stepped into (and tripped over) a big fresh patty of mule poop over the weekend at a “town hall” meeting that was called to address the June 16 shooting of one Eric Logan, 54, by a police officer dispatched to check out “a suspicious individual going through cars” at 2:30 a.m. The officer said the suspect came at him with a knife. The officer failed to switch on his body-cam, or so the police department said. Conclusions were jumped to. Then, in the wee hours just before Mayor Pete’s June 24 town hall, another black man was killed and 10 other people wounded in the shoot-up of a watering hole called Kelly’s Pub.

God knows what that was about — no police were involved in the shoot-up — but Mayor Pete caught the blame for it, of course, and the Sunday town hall meeting turned into a shriek-in by outraged “community” members. He was hardly allowed to admit his failures, issue apologies, and promise to do better. After the ordeal, Mayor Pete struggled to hold in his tears talking to the media. No doubt he will be pressured to keep ‘splainin’ these matters until either his campaign folds up its tent or he is anointed at the national convention in Milwaukee.

Leader-of-the-Pack (in the polls, anyway) Joe Biden steeped into it perhaps even deeper than Mayor Pete last week when he bragged about how well he was able to work with the old southern segregationist fossils, Herman Talmadge (GA) and James O. Eastland (MS), who were still around in the senate when “Uncle Joe” first came on the scene decades ago. “We didn’t agree on much,” the former Veep said, “but we got things done.” What’s more, the candidate averred, going perhaps a bridge too far, Senator Eastland “never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son,’” as if Mr. Biden might have been mistaken for a waiter in the senators’ dining room, with its old fashioned-ways and renowned bean soup.

Senator Cory Booker (NJ), a.k.a. “Spartacus,” aiming to “speak truth to power,” as gladiators are wont to do, jumped on the remarks as “hurtful and harmful to African Americans.” Mr. Biden, something of a political fossil himself now, shot back that Senator Booker should apologize to him for imputing he had racist proclivities. The rest of the pack joined the feeding frenzy. Bernie Sanders backed up Mr. Booker’s call for a Biden apology. Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA), criticizing her leading rival said, “I’m not here to criticize other Democrats, but it’s never okay to celebrate segregationists. Never.” Senator Kamala Harris piled on, calling Mr. Biden “misinformed and wrong.”

The week’s doings left the impression that the Democratic Party has turned into one big race hustle, with reparations for slavery as the centerpiece on the banquet table and recriminations for “white privilege” as the main course. Senator Warren added a gender hustle amuse bouche to the menu over the weekend with demands for “reparations for gay and lesbian couples” who had to file income taxes as individuals in the pre-gay-marriage days.

African Americans comprise about 12.3 percent of the US population and about 4.5 percent “identify as” LGBTetc. The Hispanic demographic is 18.1 percent and the Democratic Party has already got them covered with its official opposition to the immigration laws - though there is evidence that Hispanic US citizen-voters are not uniformly on-board with that pander.

Now the party will be hard put to come up with some goodies for the rest of the US population. But it appears that it has only punishments and persecutions in mind for them. This may be the way the world ends for the party first consolidated by Andy Jackson, the old white slavemaster rascal, whose sins were later redressed with the election of Barack Obama.

Hustling their way to an election disaster in 2020, they play right into the small-ish hands of Mr. Trump, the Golden Golem of Greatness.