Next Up: Transgender Women Journalists for Joe!

Bernie Angry. Bernie Smash!

Forget the Happy Warrior. Enter the Crabby Warrior.

By Jennifer Finney Boylan

NYT Contributing Opinion Writer

I stood before a mailbox in Manhattan, holding my absentee ballot for the Maine primary. Bernie angry, I thought happily. Bernie smash.  And I wasn’t even voting for him.  No, my vote had gone to Elizabeth Warren*, who from the beginning of the campaign had impressed me with her optimism. Watching Ms. Warren, I got the sense that even the long slog of a presidential run could be done with good humor and exuberance. ...

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Senator Bernie Sanders is not a Happy Warrior. A warrior, definitely. Happy? Not so much. ...

The Trump era has left so many people feeling just like this — angry all the time, so infuriated by the cruelty and the lies that we forget that the process of taking him down ought to fill us with joy. 

Excerpting the Marvel comics movies from the comics he likely grew up on (before he became a transgender woman), Finney-Boylan spent the winter luxuriating in superhero movie-watching, which she finds inspiring this political season:

To quote Molly Ivins again, “Keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

Hulk smash. But optimism and hope smash too. Why should we not be happy warriors, even as we prepare to battle our archnemesis?  You only live a short time. Enjoy every fleeting moment.

Girls! ... they wanna have fun.
Oh, girls just wanna have fun! 
~Lauper, Cindy. 

 

Thing is, Finney-Boylan grew up a very very very wealthy little boy.  He was able to marry, sire two sons, and pay for (or have covered) operations and procedures that makes his body now resemble a woman's.  There's debate now whether such ch-ch-ch-changes make such a person a "woman", equal in voice, status and societal worth as a biological woman. The verdict is still out...

 

Bruni is gay with a wealthy father... Finney-Boylan transgender with the family wealth, and wife still remaining (and one of the sons, like dad, became a transgender woman too!) ...   

 

Is this really what the new Dems have become?  An identity-politics party that has simply lost touch with American workers in the middle class?  How will absorbing these relative newcomers -- and their interest in minority special needs -- into the new democrat party create needed economic change, or better the country? At least, as a rich man himself, Trump tries...

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Girls Just Want To Have Fun

I come home in the morning light...

My mother says, "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh mother dear, we're not the fortunate ones
and girls, they wanna have fun.
Oh girls just want to have fun!

The phone rings in the middle of the night...
My father yells, "What you gonna do with your life?"
Oh daddy dear, you know you're still number one
But girls, they wanna have fun.

Oh girls just want to have fun.
That's all they really want... Some fun!
 When the working day is done...

Oh girls, they wanna have fun!
Girls just wanna have fun.

* Yes, I know Finney-Boylan voted for Elizabeth Warren. She told us.  But we all know now that was a throw-away vote.  Warren is no longer in contention.  It's Biden v. Bernie now, and Finney-Boylan mocks Sanders, while Bruni plumps for Joe.  Bad cop/good cop, with the transgender woman in the former role and the gay man in the latter.

Whatever happened to Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins' women's columnist voices, though neither really articulates the economic realities of working women** either at this point in their careers...

*** Which appear to be superficially limited today in the mainstream media, and the new Dem party, into  paid family leave, abortion on demand, and continually promoting the idea that women indeed "can have it all."  That's like representing a caricature of women, what men think they need...

No wonder Dems keep missing the mark...

No real skin in the game. No consequences for losing.

Just... fun! 

"You're only dancing on this earth for a short time..." (Stevens, Cat.)

I'm so blessed that my 88-year-old immigrant father -- or my ran-the-household mother for that matter -- was a realist in life, and never tried to feed me that line. (That kind of fun is for the people with money falling out their pockets... Which isn't the majority of the country...  For what it's worth.)