I've commented on the premeditatedly corrupt candidate-selection process within which CD3 bloggers, activists and media collude. A 90-minute debate was arranged, in part to reveal key distinctions separating the two boring candidates on the issues.
As it turns out, no one cares about the large issues distinctions separating Barnes and Sund. Mainstream reporting and blogging on the event noted no stunningly stupid candidate responses--not because none came forth--but in compliance with an implicit rule for Respectable Club membership: Only fanatics and cranks parse candidate-statement specifics.
'Endorsements' then take a just-so story form; issues are an afterthought. The criteria employed, in arriving at the invariably hero-worshipping endorsements, are not transparent or even stated.
Purporting to accept my challenge, Brad Gangnon has endorsed Sharon Sund. Gangnon is a director of Stonewall DFL who participated in successive 'screenings' of Barnes and Sund. Both Barnes and Sund were assessed equally positively by said process. And yet Gangnon is supporting Sund instead of Barnes in large measure due to her more convincing sincerity on gay issues:
...something magical happened during Sharon's screening. She stopped speaking to us as a candidate and began speaking to us, as people, from her heart. Sharon told the story from the "It Gets Better" video, with one striking difference.At the debate we observed the candidates take sharply divergent positions here and there. And yet Gangnon--claiming to be taking a sober issues-focused tack--has issued an endorsement as cheesy as the rest: Looking at an issues-cluster upon which Barnes and Sund do not have any known difference, he decides to stack-rank them on sincerity.
Gangnon goes on to make a number of perfunctory, unverifiable identity-politics claims on Sund's behalf--Sharon has been sexually harassed, but she is not bitter, we are artlessly reassured--and she's a 'scientist.' (Where can we see her most-cited peer-reviewed publication, pray?)
At the end of his Sund 'endorsement,' Gangnon dryly mentions, 'I previously served as Sharon's campaign manager and am a senior adviser to the campaign.' Ka-ching.
Gangnon claims Sund is a 'true progressive,' though I've several times mentioned Sund's foray into lunacy at the debate--when she blamed the rise in gas prices upon an international anti-Obama conspiracy. Did Gangnon consider that answer indicative of progressivism?
