A guy whom I’ve counted my closest male friend since the latter nineties has recently deplored Biden’s press secretary. I should mention that he styles himself a leftist, and certainly votes that way, but he also follows Fox News and listens to rightwing talk radio because, he tells me “You have to know what these people are thinking!” Me, I think that their “thoughts” are poisoning his own. His issue with Biden’s spokeswoman? “She’s a black lesbian! That’s just going to turn off the average voter! It’s just more ‘diversity hiring’ for the ‘woke’ crowd!” I suggested that perhaps she was hired because she was qualified. “Doesn’t matter if she’s qualified! It looks bad to the idiots who follow Fox News!”

Frankly, Biden could hire back Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or take on Kellyanne Conway as his flack and I suspect that the number of Fox viewers who’d switch their allegiance could be counted on the low one-figure. But my chum is convinced that Karine Jean-Pierre’s (regarding whose sexual preferences I’d been hitherto unaware) assumption of the post is “shoving it down the throat” of “normal” Americans, and will alienate swing voters and cost us the next election.

Me, I think my pal is projecting his own prejudices, being psychologically incapable of owing up to these, onto a safely alien “Fox News” demographic to which he can reassign his own retrograde views without prejudice to his “progressive” self-identification. Too bad, but at least, unlike his Texas kin, he doesn’t vote that way.

cordially,