Motus Mentis

In his Notes On Democracy, H. L. Mencken said of the American politician the following thing:

He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense.

One of the lowest aspects of Democratic Party politics in our time (and that’s no small thing, given the benthic abysses the party has descended to in recent years) is that among the many flavors of boot-polish any aspiring Democrat must taste on his way up is that of the execrable race-hustler Al Sharpton. The latest to do so is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, one Peter Buttigieg — a charismatic and articulate young man who hopes that his homosexuality will trump his sex and race in the Intersectionality Olympics that our politics and culture have become. Mr. Buttigieg crawled to a soul-food restaurant today in Harlem to perform the requisite salaams and obeisances.

Given that none of us would ever have heard of Mr. Buttigieg were he not homosexual, Mr. Sharpton took care to feign the appropriate sort of ideological virtue. According to The Hill, he emitted the following puff of gas:

“This question of the religious right and homophobia, some of it in our community. It’s our responsibility. We need to deal with homophobia in the black community.”

I read the item carefully to see if it might quote an earlier remark by Mr. Sharpton that, given the context, seemed apposite, but it wasn’t there:

“We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it…”

Anyway, I hope they had a pleasant lunch. I’ve been to Sylvia’s, where the rendezvous took place, and the food is delicious. I imagine also that the Grandma Julia’s Fruit Punch would be the perfect complement to the chicken-and-waffles and a dab of Shinola.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Mayor Buttigieg is the darling of the media this month, his magistracy of South Bend has hardly been a thing he’d want voters to pay much attention to. To learn more about that, you might enjoy reading a recent item from Daniel Greenfield, entitled Mayor Buttigieg Runs For President While His City Bleeds. It’s not easy to top Chicago’s homicide rate, but Mr. Buttigieg is a can-do kind of guy:

By 2017, shootings had risen 20% on Mayor Buttigieg’s watch. Rapes increased 27% and aggravated assaults rose from 183 in 2013, the year before Buttigieg took office, to a stunning 563 assaults.

Read the article to learn more. At the very least, it seems that a look at South Bend should make us think more deeply about whether we really want to promote this man to the highest executive office in the free world.

But then again, I mustn’t be too harsh. After all, he’s gay! And he speaks Norwegian! And that nice Al Sharpton seems to like him.