I might be coming to this a bit late, as it was a minor blowup last week, but something ought to be said about it before we Normals (hat tip: Kurt Schlichter) are so browbeaten on the subject that we’re no longer allowed to have a postion.

1. Rush Limbaugh said nothing wrong about Pete Buttigieg, and go to hell if you think otherwise.

It’s long past time someone took an actual stand on this issue, but no, it is not appropriate for a gay man to engage in gratuitous, in-your-face public displays of affection with another man when said gay man is running for president and thus purports to assume leadership of the government of the world’s most preeminent nation.

Sorry, but it isn’t.

It wouldn’t be appropriate for a straight man to act that way with his wife in public. People would say, “Get a room.” There is a reason why Joe Biden created such a problem for himself by so commonly getting handsy with various females finding themselves in his public clutches; when you’re engaged in presidential politics or other fora in which the nation’s leadership is in the lurch, you’re supposed to maintain a level of decorum indicative of good judgment.

And you can call it whatever you want, but if you want to be an openly gay man with, by the way, a thoroughly and completely barren resume for the job of president of the United States of America, you had better manage to escape notice for these kinds of behaviors.

Which Pete Buttigieg not only fails to do, but he also flaunts his transgressions of the public standard and does so in a manner suggesting that your objection to it is evidence of your bigotry and homophobia.

No, Pete, it isn’t bigotry. It’s standards.

America hasn’t elected an openly gay president, though it’s quite possible America has had a gay president or two. The past ones got elected because they exercised enough decorum as to make their sexuality a non-issue, or at minimum a minor issue.

Buttigieg’s entire value proposition is that he’s a gay man who cavorts with another gay man in a gay marriage, and if you don’t like it that’s your problem. Ask him what else he’s done to deserve the keys to the nuclear football and his answer is he drove someone around Afghanistan for six weeks and then spent a few years as mayor of a college town of 101,000 people.

Everything about Pete Buttigieg isn’t just laughable; it’s obnoxious. Any American with half a brain and a quarter of the standards we should require of our voters would look at his presentation and shoot him down on general principle. Appearing in photos sharing a swingset with another man as though he was a sophomore in high school isn’t an accident, by the way. As Paul Kengor astutely noted, this is essentially a psy-op on the American people by a man whose father was the president of the International Gramsci Society, a Marxist organization dedicated to the teachings of a man whose intellectual contribution was to note that if the norms and traditions of a civilization can be destroyed, then next to fall would be its government and way of life — and suggested this would be a good thing.

Limbaugh didn’t even say any of this. He just questioned whether Buttigieg could sell it to Democrat primary voters, many of whom tend to the more traditional cultural preferences. And for that small transgression Limbaugh was branded a bigot. By Buttigieg himself, by the way, who goes around looking for homophobes behind every curtain.

Well, if you can’t criticize Pete Buttigieg because he’s gay, then you can’t criticize Rush Limbaugh because he has stage four lung cancer. If we’re going to play Who’s the Victim here, I’m betting on Limbaugh and I’m saying Buttigieg is bigoted against cancer patients.

If we’re going to be that stupid, then everybody gets a bite. And we can go back to the idiocy of thinking the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, of all places, is qualified to be president on the simple basis of what his sexual urges are.

2. What the heck is Bret Stephens on about?

To say this is unimpressive is to give it too much credit:

Which brings me to what is perhaps the biggest whisper network of all: the one involving inner flashes of sympathy, frequently tipping into support at the ballot box, for President Trump. Plenty of people are aware of this phenomenon: One recent academic study noted that so-called secret voters supported Trump over Hillary Clinton by a two-to-one (54 percent to 27 percent) margin in 2016. That statistic should be every bit as alarming to Democrats this time around, not least because it suggests that polls may be dramatically underweighting the scale of Trump’s support. Yet beyond the question of why people might want to conceal their voting preferences — reputation management, social harmony, and so on — it’s worth asking whether the very fact that a vote for Trump was supposed to be shameful is also what made it so attractive. After all, forbidden fruit is appealing not because it is fruit, but because it is forbidden. For every voter who pulled the lever for Trump out of sympathy for his views, how many others did so out of disdain for the army of snickering moralists (at the time including me) telling them that a vote for Trump was unpardonable? My hunch: probably enough to make the difference in the states that made the difference. I would also guess that the number has only grown as the censorious left has become more aggressive and promiscuous in its condemnations.

There might be a grain of truth in the idea that a vote for Trump for a lot of people might have been a middle finger to the elites. It certainly was. But was that the only reason? Trump’s opponent was Hillary Clinton, for heaven’s sake, and the elites lectured everyone in the country that she was the designated proper choice. How do you not catch a middle finger when that’s what you’re trying to sell?

By the way, the public seems to be a lot more positive about Trump than the Never Trumpers like Bret Stephens and Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, who beclown themselves again and again with petty criticisms they never dared to venture forth with when Barack Obama was president.

3. Barack, you didn’t build that.

By the way, have you noticed that Obama, clearly sick of his irrelevance, is now attempting to glom on to the Trump economy and claim it as his own?

The current president hammered the former president on Twitter for it, and good for him for doing so.

Arguing economics with a core Obama supporter, though, is like trying to talk to a cockroach: it’s quite unproductive. You’ll likely catch some sort of comparison like Obama’s GDP growth number after 36 months in office was better than Trump’s, though Obama had dumped $1 trillion out of helicopters on state and local governments, and Obama took office after a sharp recession, when the economy will always rebound. If you know anything about economics and economic history, you’ll know that an economy left to its own devices after a recession will encounter a period of growth, and oftentimes the sharper the recession the better the rebound.

Trump, on the other hand, inherited a stifled economy from Obama and has kept it growing even though the usual business cycle would have suggested a recession by now. Certainly the financial press, or at least the Democrat-leaning members of it, have been predicting that recession since Trump took office.

By now anyone with a “D” next to their name should be disqualified from talking about economics. That includes Obama, who has already proven his worth, or lack thereof, in this regard.

4. Mini Mike, Gaffemaster

It seems that the “moderate” lane in the Democrats’ primary is reserved for candidates incapable of avoiding saying things to make ordinary people lose confidence in their abilities. Joe Biden proved that long ago, and he’s now all but gone from the scene. His support, such as it is, is now being assumed to be headed Mike Bloomberg’s way, but it’s clear Bloomberg isn’t any smarter a politician than Biden is.

Bloomberg managed to wipe out any chance that he could win any Midwest states when it came out that he thinks farmers are morons and has said so publicly, and after he’s been outed saying that blacks and Hispanics aren’t capable of acting properly in the workplace, it wouldn’t seem like he’s got much cache in those communities. Bloomberg has been busily buying up black politicians, but at some point it starts to be a drag on one’s credibility to have taken the Little King’s coin when said Little King isn’t outwardly respectful toward those sharing your phenotype.

On the other hand, if you begin to accept that the Dems are simply fated to lose in November, go ahead and take Mini Mike’s money and let him be the fool who gets annihilated in November. Most of them are in politics to get paid anyway, and he’s paying. The question is whether or not black and Hispanic voters will follow these politicians. If they don’t, and a rupture in ethnic support for that party should happen, we could see a major reorientation of American politics.

5. Somebody ought to charge Chris Murphy with a Logan Act violation.

If not worse.

For Chris Murphy, the clownish Democrat senator from Connecticut, to have admitted to meeting in Munich with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif without so much as even letting the State Department know about it is a pretty big deal.

This is the same Chris Murphy who went on a jihad about Mike Flynn in 2017 over the latter’s having had a phone call with his Russian counterpart just before he was to take office. Now he’s going to fly across the ocean to meet with the Iranians? And nobody knows why or what for?

Yes, yes. We’re not allowed to question the actions or motives of Democrats. At this point there’s no need to question them, because their track record says it all.

This is beyond irritating, and it’s time some scalps are taken for activity like Murphy’s stupid, if not sinister, cavorting with the ayatollahs.