Obligs:
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I mean, really. I’m sure many of us wish for something like a Warren/Abrams kind of ticket but we have what we have - which if victorious be infinitely better than the alternative.
We also have a real chance at taking the Senate and keeping control of the House which could lead to real change and real good for the country (but I’m not holding my breath for anything moving forward if we lose the Senate and/or House).
The stakes are just too high here. If people stay home or vote third party in protest, we risk the status quo at best. I sure as fuck don’t want that as our best case scenario. Fuck, the bar has become so low it’s basically buried into the ground.
Wait, so to these people being a cop is now a bad thing? I just can’t keep up anymore.
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Not to mention that the next 4 years will bring between 1 and 3 USSC appointments. If that is not motivation to vote, I have nothing that will work.
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It is, if it’ll induce the Dems to bring out the circular firing squad.
That’s all that matters. Consistency isn’t important to the authoritarian mind.
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Neither would be my first or even 21st choice, but I would stroll naked through a swarm of COVID-spreading murder hornets to vote for them
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I’m sure that’s in the works, coupled with some executive order regarding voter ID.
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And the GOP would be screaming bloody murder over the hundreds of Americans who had been allowed to die through government misfeasance.
So you’re right, there really isn’t Biden Derangement Syndrome, but if you’re implying that Clinton deserved it, she didn’t.
The problem comes when we think of a vote for a candidate as a perk for that candidate, and decide we don’t want to reward that individual. We should vote to reward ourselves, vote for the person who will help (or least hurt) the country. This requires a bit of a shift in the burden of responsibility: it is no longer the candidate’s responsibility to earn our vote, but our responsibility to vote for the best of the people on offer. Clinton wasn’t punished by the people who chose to not vote for her; the rest of us were. Clinton is doing fine.
And of course, whoever wins the work is not yet done. As Chomsky recently said:
The left position has always been: You’re working all the time, and every once in a while there’s an event called an election. This should take you away from real politics for 10 or 15 minutes. Then you go back to work.
[…]
Take Biden’s campaign positions. Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things like climate. It’s far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they’re being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others.
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I heard a joke the other day:
Covid is Trump’s Benghazi.
Under Clinton, there would only be four dead.
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Consistently inconsistent.
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I mean FFS the Benghazi investigation lasted years, had dozens of hearings, and had hundreds of hours of testimony and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it. The whole thing was just a massively orchestrated political smear job on Clinton and Obama. The truth was a much more banal case of American government employees and PMCs in a hostile country that fell victim to a highly coordinated attack by a very determined aggressor.
All you need to do to prove Trump’s negligence is use his own very public words and actions as evidence to his criminally negligent behavior.
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Like Calvinball, but with fascists.
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Since the death count would have been minimal, I think they’d be upset because the “economy is wrecked” and “we didn’t need a four month shutdown.”
It’s like you have too many deaths on a road, so you set the speed limit at 35mph. Six months later they try to impeach you because you set a road to 35mph when there haven’t been any deaths in six months.
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When I worked in safety training, we eventually put some numbers on the wall in our intake area to help shorten arguments. They were long-term injury and fatality rates for each of the industrial sites that ran all their outside contractors through our classes. We could then point to a chart on the wall and say things like “Since that paper mill started requiring this training, we’ve saved four limbs and two lives; we just don’t know whose.”
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Great Chomsky interview.
There’s kind of an instant gratification culture. I worked for Bernie Sanders, he didn’t win. I’m going home. That’s not the way political change takes place. It takes place step by step, small changes to bigger ones, and so on.
The absence of a continued left tradition in the United States is very harmful in this respect. Everything starts new. Things begin, they’re important, they dissipate.
Serious organizers in poor communities understand that the first thing they have to do is break through the sense of hopelessness. And there are ways of doing that.
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I like this part. Don’t withhold your vote until you see a better candidate, use your voice to pressure your candidate to be better.
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Absolutely. These two are third way conservatives, and we need to keep constant pressure on them if we’re going to expect anything positive from them. The saving grace, though, is that they seem like people who will respond to that pressure, at least to some degree.
One easy thing? Respond to the text and Facebook spam from the Biden campaign- Tell them you’re waiting until AOC (or Bernie, or Tlaib, or whomever) officially endorses them. Let them know your support only extends as far as the degree to which they actively bring in progressive voices.
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