The Monster In Me

One of the first times I learned I was a fraud and a monster as a blogger was back 1,500 years ago when I opted to support the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama over the candidacy of Senator Hillary Clinton.

At the time I said that I would, of course, support Senator Clinton in the general election if she emerged as the candidate, but not in the primary.  I did a lot of posts, graphics, and so forth.

Probably even said "fuck" once or twice.

Which of course meant that I was a clearly a misogynist, the dupe of the something-or-other Chicago something and several other horribles. (Sorry that don't remember every detail, but it sure was a lot of fun! Also I'm still waiting for that damning "Whitey tape". Did I miss it? I know I missed "The Love Guru", so it's guess it's possible.)

At the time I said -- repeatedly and to no effect -- that I would support Senator Clinton in the general elections because presidential elections always comes down to a choice between two deeply flawed major candidates.  Each deeply flawed candidate will garner tens of millions of votes in 50 states, while a scattering of minor candidates will pull in a fraction of a fraction here and there.  But because we have a winner-take-all system -- which no amount of wishful thinking will make otherwise -- sometimes those few million or few thousand or few hundred votes are just enough to permit the candidate the protesters hate and fear the most to win.

Ironic, no?

Easier by far to insist that there is no difference in any way whatsoever on any issue of importance between the two major Parties or their candidates and then blast away in every direction.  Anyone who has been around the block more than once knows this is a cheap, lazy fraud, but it is also an easy fraud to perpetrate because both of the deeply flawed candidates major party candidate will almost inevitably be products of the American political system -- both recipients of bushels of tainted corporate dough, both dogged by positions and compromises their supporters will gag on.

Just as it is would be easy and accurate to say that there isn't a dime's worth of difference or distance between the Earth and Mars...so long as you compare them using your naked eye from the vantage point of Alpha Centauri.

Or if you are a noble-public-advocate-turned-egomaniac-spoiler-for-hire named Ralph Nader.

Or if you are a Republican-who-tried-to-overthrow-the-Clinton-Administration-by-criminalizing-blowjobs-turned-Libertarian named Bob Bar.

 


Or if you are an oozing-racist-slug-turned-Paleolibertarian named George Wallace.


Me, I'm just a regular, grubby carbon-based life form.  I go around the Sun once a year and the difference between a "habitable" and an "uninhabitable" planet is extremely important to me.

For example, I'd like to keep Social Security and Medicare intact forever because more and more of us will get old while fewer and fewer of us will get rich.  I'd like to keep programs for the poor -- from Head Start to WIC to Medicaid -- intact forever because the poor will be with us always.  I'd like developers and drillers to keep their fracking hands off of my national parks and forests.  I'd like well-educated professionals to be paid excellent, tax-payer funded salaries by the government to make sure no quick gigabuck artists can get away with poisoning my water, air, food, medicine and planet. I'd like women to go right on owning their own bodies.

It's a long list of things I would like to continue to have, and which one Party has pledged itself -- openly and publicly -- to taking away from me by election, litigation or fraud.  One Party, which loathes me so profoundly for merely existing and believing what I believe that it built an entire, vertically-integrated industry around hating me and telling me exactly how hostile their coming fascist state will be to me, 24/7/365 from coast-to-coast, at the tops of their lungs for the last 30 years.  One Party which has done more premeditated violence to our capacity for self-government in a shorter period than I would have ever believed possible back in the good old days when I blew my vote out the airlock by giving it to John Anderson.

And once they finish doing have said they will do to my country, I don't really give a fuck whether what's left is called a College of Corporations, a theocracy or a Libertarian Thunderdome where what they do to women or minorities or gays in Alabama or South Carolina or Arizona is supposed to be none of my fucking business because I have a 217 area code.

Because it won't be my country anymore.

Of course it's hardly my country now, but unless you are a member of the Professional Indignation Caucus, there is still a big of difference between "dead" and "mostly dead".

Then again, I am a hardened, serial offending recidivist who has already been convicted by the Supreme Bloviet of counterrevolutionary obstreperism and deviationist stoogery so many times it barely registers anymore.

Hell, Dick Cheney is probably standing over my shoulder right now, dictating this to me, spelling errors and all.

So what do I know.