Yeah, I’m still here. I’ve been avoiding the constant election blogging, mostly due to time constraints, as well as a desire for my own sanity. I am sure Ron Paul is still going to pull it off.
But seriously, I’m pretty sure Obama’s going to win. Certainly not because he is a fantastic president – he isn’t, although it’s amazing he has survived the insane teabaggery and detached reality that now personifies the radical right. It’s because Romney is so much of a blatant dick that all of the spin in the world can’t hide it.
Now, of course, being a dick is an asset within the GOP. Their platform, their people, their apparatus, it’s all based on being as much of a dick as humanly possible, and thus, appealing to the most dickish people in the country. But I don’t think that’s enough to get him over the top. It was easier for Bush, namely because a lot of people could relate to the moronic nature of the guy, but now that most Americans have finally cleaned the shit out of their 9-11 diapers, the fear factor is not what it used to be, outside of the mouthbreather GOP base.
I think what’s galling me is on my own side, there’s still a certain contingency of the BUT DRONES AND WALL STREET crowd. Which, in some sort of twisted logic, comes down to “there’s no difference between the two.” I don’t disagree with the drones/Wall Street criticism. But there’s so much more than that.
What a blind, superficial (and condescending when they accuse anyone with a bit more nuanced perspective as being just another tool for the system), and frankly, stupid conclusion. Supreme Court. War with Iran. War on Women, Gays, the Poor and Not-White People. And more than anything else, for me, is Romney does and has to pander to the most dickish, anti-intellectual segment of the population (what we would have called “Palinesque” a few years ago), as that’s really the only way the GOP has any shot at anything. Unacceptable. Period. Even Chomsky realizes this.
One does not have to be “for” drones, Wall Street or any of that other stuff to simply realize there are two choices. No, Anderson, Stein, Goode, and Johnson have no chance in hell of anything, of even moving the dialogue at this point, so get over yourself. I’m voting against Romney – that’s the way I’m looking at it. Sure, some of you will respond with the “how cynical-lesser-of-two-evils-blah-blah-DRONES-blah-voting-is-not-ever-going-to-change-anything”, but kindly shut the fuck up, shove that sentiment up your purist ass and spare me. I’ve heard it all before, and I even agree with a lot of it. Elections DO matter. They may not in the sense of bringing on the radical changes that I’d like to see, but consider how, for example, we probably wouldn’t had to deal with 9-11 (and the resulting wars and stupidity) had we had a president that took the memos seriously and wasn’t worried more about prosecuting pornographers and bong salesmen.
I’m certainly not dismissing the anarchist arguments about the importance of organizing; I most certainly agree and support those actions to the fullest. But this doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and this election will have consequences, as they all do. I’m going to close with that great article by Charles Pierce that’s making the rounds, it sums it up quite nicely for me:
It is vitally important that the Republican party be kept away from as much power as possible until the party regains its senses again. It is not just important to the advance of progressive goals, thought it is. It is not just important to maintain the modicum of social justice that it has taken eighty years to build into the institutions of our government, though it is. It is important, too, that that you vote for one of these men based on whom else, exactly, he owes. Who is it that’s going to come with the fiddler to collect when you get what you’ve bargained for?
Barack Obama owes more than I’d like him to owe to the Wall Street crowd. He probably at this point owes a little more than I’d like him to owe to the military. The rest he owes to the millions of people who elected him in 2008 — especially to those people whose enthusiasm I neither shared nor really understood — and he will owe them even more if they come out and pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him this time around. He may sell them out — and, yes, I understand if you wanted to add “again” to that statement — but they are not likely to revenge themselves against the country if he does and, even if they decided to, they don’t have the power to do much but yell at the right buildings.
On the other hand, Willard Romney owes even more to the Wall Street crowd, and he owes even more to the military, but he also owes everything he is politically to the snake-handlers and the Bible-bangers, to the Creationist morons and to the people who stalk doctors and glue their heads to the clinic doors, to the reckless plutocrats and to the vote-suppressors, to the Randian fantasts and libertarian fakers, to the closeted and not-so-closeted racists who have been so empowered by the party that has given them a home, to the enemies of science and to the enemies of reason, to the devil’s bargain of obvious tactical deceit and to the devil’s honoraria of dark, anonymous money, and, ultimately, to those shadowy places in himself wherein Romney sold out who he might actually be to his overweening ambition. It is a fearsome bill to come due for any man, let alone one as mendaciously malleable as the Republican nominee. Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.
Indeed. Shit or get off the pot.
crossposted at five before chaos