It’s true. I know it. I’ve only written about them to criticize. Here’s why …
No one’s reading me, I hope, expecting up to the minute presidential race coverage. If you have a candidate you like, you probably visit their website and read news about them whenever you get a chance, maybe you’ve signed up for their newsletters and comb the other candidates’ remarks looking for sleights against your chosen or reasons to point out their inferiority. Whatever.
When the primaries pick the winner, I plan to support that Democrat. Even if they are the proverbial yellow dog. At that point, I will start giving a damn. In the meantime, I’m more interested in other things, totally flat broke, and outrage fatigued on top of it all.
With a small exception. That yellow dog had better be a Democratic yellow dog. I know we’re not going to get a progressive this time out. That much is painfully clear. But when the frontrunners do something stupid, something that screams Republican-style idiocy to me, I’ll be inclined to say something about it.
Because there’s already a party for warmongering, gay baiting, me-firsting, poor bashing, woman hating, bigot coddling, nature destroying, corporate whoring as an extreme sport, and Constitution shredding; it’s called the Republican Party. If you want to be a member, they’ve got a big tent for greedy, whiny, over-entitled misanthropes of all shapes and sizes and colors. They’re very tolerant of whatever anyone’s particular intolerance is. Bring the Two Minute Hate of your choice and come on in.
And this, this is the very simple thing that my ‘impossible to please’ self would like to ask of our Democratic candidates: Don’t be a frakking Republican.
Is that really so goddam hard? We’ve got a platform, people. We may not be an organized party, but we are literate and communicative, at the least. We have a storied history of sticking up for the common person, admitting when we were wrong and deciding to stick up for even more people, and creating a society wherein actions and not platitudes demonstrate commitment towards the least of those among us. And we talk about this stuff and write it down and everything.
Stop chasing after the votes of the people who are never going to vote for you anyway. Act like you respect the people who’ve built the party whose name you’re asking to carry forward. It’s a literal no-brainer that every Republican has down pat. And I know you’re smarter than them, so don’t expect your excuses to carry any weight with me.
The current establishment of the Democratic Party is more aligned with business interests and corporate lobbyists than with the interests of the people who have traditionally voted for them. Not with respect to every politician, but with enough of them, and particularly the Dem leadership in Congress and the likely Presidential candidate. In addition, almost the entire class of political and campaign consultants are dyed in the wool DLC hacks. Therefore, I don’t expect to see much change in the way they approach elections. There current strategy seems to be “Vote for us because we won’t fuck things up as bad as the Republicans did under Bush.” That and “Bush is a bad man, and he’s to blame for Iraq (though we can’t do anything to stop him).” Hardly the approach that is likely to inspire their base supporters to rally to the cause next year.
Because there’s already a party for warmongering, gay baiting, me-firsting, poor bashing, woman hating, bigot coddling, nature destroying, corporate whoring as an extreme sport, and Constitution shredding; it’s called the Republican Party. If you want to be a member, they’ve got a big tent for greedy, whiny, over-entitled misanthropes of all shapes and sizes and colors.
I wish this was tattooed on the foreheads of everyone inside the Beltway.
Wow! Couldn’t have said it better. That last paragraph ought to be read by every Dem candidate in the country.
this was intended as humor, but I’m afraid it was not:
After the worst foreign policy disaster in our history, oil about 100 bucks a gallon, polar ice disappearing and the burning of the US Constitution in the fuckin’ White House fireplace.
Do you imagine a better opportunity somewhere down the road?
I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not we need one, it’s whether or not we’ve got one to hand.
boofuckinghoo
“When the primaries pick the winner, I plan to support that Democrat. Even if they are the proverbial yellow dog. At that point, I will start giving a damn. In the meantime, I’m more interested in other things, totally flat broke, and outrage fatigued on top of it all.“
spare me the histrionics…you’ve got a hell of a lot of company…45,000,000 and counting…but you haven’t got the time to be involved until after the primaries pick the winner?
wtf?!
you’re the classic definition of if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem…and this didn’t help…(ha!)
so, why don’t you just go back into whatever happy place you came from and wait until someone else decides that you’ll have to hold your nose and vote, again, for the lesser of two evils, eh.
l think you’ve got a terminal case of
flame away…or better yet, get with the fucking program, or get the hell out of the way….your patronizing tripe boors me.
l’m outta here…l’ve got work to do, hopefully contributing to giving your sorry ass a real alternative at the ballot box.
lTMF’sA
First, I’m just one person and I don’t usually write about election politics until within a few months or less of the vote. I mostly haven’t done so since 2004. I write about plenty of other things and am not a one person news bureau on whom the masses depend for all their election information.
Second, I’m not thrilled about these people. I like them better than the Republicans. You want me to really ‘help’? Would you like me to detail all the things about them that irritate the bejesus out of me?
Well, I started to do that, but I won’t. Let me instead make this clear: If I thought that one of these people would really fix the problem more than the others and had a chance of winning, I’d do something to help them. I don’t believe that’s the case. I’m not going to start believing it because you think I’m a happy histrionic.
I think that the only contribution I’m capable of sincerely making is that of patriotic dissent from within. And if dissent is patriotic for an American, it’s patriotic for a Democrat. So there.