He came seemingly out of nowhere. He’s a 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a military veteran, a married gay man, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President. When he first announced his candidacy, my first reaction was, “who?” But Pete Buttigieg is more than just a millennial egomaniac who considers himself entitled to the nation’s highest office (yeah, I’m looking at you, Beto), and we should ignore him at our own risk.

Buttigieg is no ordinary candidate. He doesn’t seem to be a social justice warrior flogging his gayness for all it’s worth. On his website, the last paragraph discreetly mentions his husband Chasten and their two rescue dogs. He’s not in your face about his gayness, and he likes Chick-fil-A, while social justice zealots work to shun and bar the restaurant from as many places as possible, because the owner once said he believes in traditional marriage.

Chick-fil-A is associated with two things: chicken sandwiches and millions of dollars in donations to conservative organizations that oppose gay marriage. Some people won’t eat at Chick-fil-A for that reason, but Buttigieg appears not to be one of them, telling the show hosts that while he doesn’t approve of Chick-fil-A corporate’s politics, “I kind of approve of their chicken.” The Associated Press reports Buttigieg then suggested he could be the one to broker “a peace deal” between the LGBTQ community and Chick-fil-A: “So maybe if nothing else I can build that bridge. Maybe I’ll become in a position to broker that peace deal.”

Yummy, yummy hate chicken!

Buttigieg is a millennial, and unlike Beto O’Rourke, who is a table-dancing empty suit working to parlay his loss to Ted Cruz for the US Senate despite buttloads of money from big Democrat donors, into a presidential run via contrived theatrics, ennui-ridden antics, and occasional dental visits, Buttigieg actually won the mayoral post in South Bend twice, so he has more executive experience than Beto on any given day.

Buttigieg has more actual gravitas than Barack Obama did. He’s a military veteran – a Navy intelligence officer who has deployed to Afghanistan. He taught himself to speak Norwegian and is also conversational in Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, and French.

And despite the fact that most of his ideas are utter shit, he can sell them with passion and eloquence.

He wants gun control – specifically “universal background checks,” which will do nothing to prevent crime and will only serve to ban private gun sales and make self defense tools more cost prohibitive for the poor.

He thinks climate change is a national security threat, demonstrating once again that would-be tyrants can and will use “national security” to push any bad, tyrannical, costly policy.

And, of course, like all good socialists, he believes in a single payer health care system.

He claims that the Democratic party is somehow the party of “freedom,” and he acknowledges that his political opponents on the right also treasure freedom, but he believes in freedom TO, while we believe in freedom FROM.

We care about freedom FROM regulation, he claims, as if the government is the only thing that can make us unfree.

Your neighbor and your cable company can make you unfree, Buttigieg claims.

Um, what?

If your neighbor somehow imprisons you in his basement at the point of a gun, he is committing a crime. We have laws to deal with that.

If your cable company violates a contract, you can take it to court or switch to another provider. You have freedom of choice.

If they’re telling you who you ought to marry, your county clerk can make you unfree.

Guess Mayor Pete forgot that a county clerk is a local government official.

You’re not free if you’re afraid to start a small business because leaving your job would mean losing your health care.

Actually you are free to make that choice. Irrational fear of losing your health care (even though health care and health insurance are far from being the same) doesn’t mean a loss of freedom.

Losing that choice by being herded into a government-run system does.

You’re not free if there’s a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and officers who are sworn to keep you safe.

Police officers are not sworn to keep you safe. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court in Warren v. DC held that “the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists.”

And even if there was a specific oath that police officers take to keep you safe, and they regularly violate it, why would you want to give them a monopoly on force while you limit the right of these same persons of color to exercise their right to keep and bear arms?

You are not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians in Washington.

Hear that, America? Killing your kid is now a “reproductive choice,” even at the moment said infant is parting the beef curtains and making its way out of mom.

Everything that Buttigieg seems to believe we have the freedom TO have or do either has to be provided by someone else at the point of a government gun or we already have the right to do.

But that doesn’t matter, because he captures the room. He speaks right to the audience without histrionic table dances or crazy arm gestures. He’s young, educated, and eloquent, and he’s gaining popularity, just as wrinkled old Uncle Joe Biden is taken to task for being creepy.

And he’s unafraid to say what needed to be said, eviscerating even the most sacred of cows: Hillary Clinton, saying exactly what my husband has been saying for several years: you cannot win a general election simply by pointing out how terrible the other guy is.

“Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.” He added, “At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did.”

[…]

More recently, Buttigieg weighed in on the 2016 election cycle and said in an interview with “The Breakfast Club,” a New York City-based radio show, “We spent, I think, way too much time on our side talking about him.” He added, “Our whole message was don’t vote for him because he is terrible. And even because he is, that is not a message.”

This threw Clinton acolytes into a tizzy. Clinton Spokesman Nick Merrill slammed Buttigieg for the truth.

This is indefensible. @HillaryClinton ran on a belief in this country & the most progressive platform in modern political history. Trump ran on pessimism, racism, false promises, & vitriol. Interpret that how you want, but there are 66,000,000 people who disagree. Good luck. https://t.co/N3yRgHPVDL

— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) March 30, 2019

Meanwhile, others shifted into attack mode. Apparently Buttigieg is just not intersectional or gay enough, because he doesn’t rub his dick in America’s face, making him too white and too male.

Yet some liberal voices are now discounting Buttigieg’s sexual orientation (“still a white man”), or at least diminishing the historic discrimination gays have faced as compared with women and people of color (“most of the time gender and race are way heavier burdens than sexual orientation in the professional and political environment,” and “there was a time when it was illegal for us to marry interracially, women and POC could not even own property but a gay white man could”). For those critics, his race and gender negate the little credit they accord him for being gay.

All of this seems like an attempt to write Buttigieg off as “just another white guy,” standing in the way of more diverse candidates. It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause.

When the Daily Beast condemns the “Oppression Olympics,” you know the psychosis is real.

The left is realizing that Buttigieg may represent a real threat to the wide field of nutjobs already running for the Democratic nomination. Elizabeth Warren‘s fake Native American act is making her a laughing stock. Fartacus is fantasizing about a White House wedding to his actress girlfriend like a squealing teenage girl. Biden is creepy. Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand are both hypocrites on sexual harassment. Beto and his spirit fingers are a vapid, tedious sack of derp.

The list of the freakish and weird running for President is long and distinguished, and in that pile of merde, Buttigieg stands out as the sanest, most qualified candidate.

Don’t underestimate him. Barack Obama came out of nowhere too.

Now if I could just stop seeing “Buttplug” every time I read his name!

Featured photo by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. (License; cropped)