"The Lesser Of Two Evils"...Why, Obama Isn't That Bad!

[8bitagent]

As we march closer to the November charade, I'm sure a lot of you are already seeing a lot of your friends and co-workers making it clear how we can't let Romney win and how
we need to all pull for Obama. I tell feminists, scholars, and everyone the same thing: How is voting for one wall street baby killer over another any better?
"But I can point out all sorts of differences of why Mitt would be horrible for America!" Same argument I hear from communists as to why "Stalin wasn't such a bad guy, compared to you know who".
Just because one leader is slightly less evil than another, why does that make them good? As if, to the innocent children being blown to smithereens in the Middle East by US/NATO weaponry, it makes a difference if the war is made by a younger charismatic lawyer over an out of touch businessman.

Mainstream news reports, and in fact the White House wants us to know how:

- Obama went out of his way to not only make endless drone attacks a top charter(and really, obsessive fetish) as of day one in office, he authorized the changing of the definition of "civilian casualty"...making it so even civilians are "potential terrorists"
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012 ... snews&lite

- The bigoted right wing calls Obama a liar, but mostly for fake fictitious reasons. When Obama says there's been surprisingly "low civilian casualties" in the drone strikes, he's a bold faced liar.
As well as when he says he'll police Wall Street. He filled top cabinet positions with Wall Street goons.

- One such drone attack killed a bunch of people(including teenagers) protesting a drone strike that killed a bunch of people the week prior(including children)

- Obama has authorized laws that have aggressively sought after whistleblowers

- The Obama administration not only did not close Gitmo, they spent a ton of money to pour into it, blocked an innocent man from being released(recently found dead in his cell) and expanded torturous outsourced black sites across the world.

- Obama has a kill list he gets every Tuesday. One of the people he killed was a nerdy American teenager, a good son who happened to be the son of Anwar Awlaki. (the guy the Pentagon had over for lunch a few months after 9/11) If Bush openly admitted having a kill list, liberals would be up in arms and you would never hear the end of it

- It's been reported policy for the US to engage in "secondary strikes", whereby ANY onlookers/rescuers/people passing by the scene of a fresh drone attack are opened up against with a second strike. This is pretty much a war crime. But it's totally cool, cuz' Hopemunculus isn't Bush.

- Liberals keep talking about Obama ending the Iraq war(which Bush would have done anyways, just given it was suppose to wind down by then) yet ignore how he dramatically escalated the Afghan war to the point where the majority of US deaths have occurred since his presidency(up to 2000+ deaths of US alone)

- Obama uses neocon Cheney language re: al Qaeda to support endless war, yet allows the West and their Saudi pals to get involved in destabilization and invasion efforts that seem to use
al Qaeda and sunni jihadist networks as proxies.

- As horrible as Bush was, we didn't see toddlers and elderly being molested at airports en masse. We didn't see the effort to shut down all medical marijuana as Obama has done.

It's like because Obama supports gay and women rights(something everyone should support anyways), I'm suppose to overlook everything else?
Hell Dick Cheney and Guiliani are gay rights supporters, and I sure as heck don't like them.

[Nordic]

- It's been reported policy for the US to engage in "secondary strikes", whereby ANY onlookers/rescuers/people passing by the scene of a fresh drone attack are opened up against with a second strike. This is pretty much a war crime. But it's totally cool, cuz' Hopemunculus isn't Bush.

That's not just a war crime, it's pure TERRORISM. You know, in all caps.

It's the most cowardly, serial-killer type of pure mass murder there is.

And this man has the nerve to run for President. And his own party lets him.

Fuck them all.

[justdrew]

because everything you don't like about him, will only be worse with the other guy.

I do not understand why that is such a hard concept to grasp. and yet, yeah, it's crazy that that's the only choice we get. but in the end, it's down to the total lack of a huge movement for sensible policy, most people vote for who their dad taught them to vote for and that's it, then there's some who are easily lead by their preferred media (cable, radio, religion, etc). meanwhile the "two" establishments get closer and closer in their positions and behavior, the only difference being little signifiers to tell the two apart.

I can't support the idea of "let's let it get as bad as possible so people will have to react"
they might react, might make it worse, probably won't react until it's life-and-death-on-the-street-where-they-live, so allowing the "bad cop" to win I don't find a good idea.

but whatever, do what ya gotta do

[Nordic]

I do not understand why that is such a hard concept to grasp.

It's not a hard concept to grasp.

What SEEMS to be a hard concept to GRASP is how anyone would willingly participate in such a fucking CON GAME.

It's 100% controlled by them. Not you. Not me. Not anybody but THEM.

So why participate?

Seriously, how many kids have Romney slaughtered? Yet anyway? Obama is way ahead of him in the "EVIL" department.

Why is it such a hard concept to grasp that the entire thing is one big fist up your ass making you pull one of their two levers?

It's a RIGGED GAME.

The whole psyops of it is that it's "our democracy". That we somehow have this big event every four years, like the Olympics, where we get to show our independence, our strength, and vote for a "Representative" who will then Represent us.

But that's not what really happens. You know it. So why do you think you have to participate?

Because the media has fucking CONDITIONED you into thinking you HAVE TO.

It's conditioned you into thinking that this is your only bit of political power. And that you HAVE TO ACCEPT the RESULT because that's Democracy, and that's "FAIR" somehow.

Well it's not. Elections aren't gonna change jack shit. Especially when they control who both candidates are, and they control the fucking voting machines.

It's a goddamn farce, but people are fucking DESPERATE CRAZY to go vote for the "lesser of two evils" thinking that will actually do something, and they can then breathe a sigh of relief and say "wow, at least that other creep didn't win! Damn, we did it! Hee haw!"

Why is that such a hard concept to grasp. Ignore the fucking election. It's a WASTE OF TIME. It's a MIND FUCK.

You want to change things, get out and throw your bodies on the gears of the machinery. Nothing else will work.

[justdrew]

You want to change things, get out and throw your bodies on the gears of the machinery. Nothing else will work.

ok, but you go first

in what way is it rigged though? I think the votes do decide which of them wins, I do not think some shadow council has already decided who will win the numerical vote count. Yes, "they" are ok with it either way, and yeah, that's rigged, any candidate not acceptable by the joint-establishment will be wiped out in the media, we've seen that, repeatedly... but why would one party constantly be seen working over time to rig the vote do so if it were already rigged? Unless that's part of the theater too. Maybe. Beyond that it's down to the question of certainty, I tend to agree with you, it's all a sham, but in the end I could be wrong. Even if it is theater, it can be fun to wander on stage and piss off the "bad guy" characters, the cast is the audience and the audience the cast.

(trying not to: )

[Nordic]

It's rigged every step of the way. The two parties control everything. So who controls the two parties?

Nobody gets to be on a ballot with an R or a D after their name unless they've gone been recruited, vetted, tested, and probably inadvertently provided some juicy shit to blackmail them with if things get ugly.

The Powers That Be don't believe in Democracy, and they aren't exactly interested in leaving anything important up to chance.

Why should they?

It's cheaper and easier to give the population the illusion of Democracy than it is to have a dictator run things with an iron fist. They can keep having this charade where we change out the "head guy" every few years, and if the players turn out to be bad actors and a little too big for their britches, as in the case of Cheney/Bush, well people just say "gosh, we'll just vote him out at the next election". In which case they serve up a GREAT con man like Obama.

The whole thing is as real as Professional Wrestling.

[8bitagent]

because everything you don't like about him, will only be worse with the other guy.

I do not understand why that is such a hard concept to grasp.

Awesome, I say bring it. A part of all of ya must be just a tiny bit curious what a Romney dominion would be like, right?
I just want to vomit from all the smug smarmy fake liberal "please vote for Obama, it's super important you do...heres a picture of a woman to guilt trip you into doing so"
posts I see everywhere.

[8bitagent]

@Nordic: Absolutely rigged. Margin for error and the occasional folly? sure.

But people are kidding themselves if shit like, "Obama just got Osama!" wasn't scripted for some time going.

[semiconscious]

The whole thing is as real as Professional Wrestling.

/ thread

no matter how much you wish it wasn't so...

[8bitagent]

The whole thing is as real as Professional Wrestling.

/ thread

no matter how much you wish it wasn't so...

I hate to admit it, but in the 80's through early 2000's I was a *huge* fan of professional wrestling on tv. And it definitely resembles the sort of storytelling techniques we'd see each week.
Treating the audience like they have short term memory, often "faces" and "heels" switch sides. With "al Qaeda" being both foe and friend(Libya, Iran, Syria), predictable plotlines,
over the top bad guys, etc. And of course the biggest thing to hit wrasslin in the 90's was the 'new world order'

[IanEye]

*



Well, there’s fistfights in the kitchen - They’re enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in - Even he’s gotta take a side
Even the butler - He’s got something to prove

Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you don’t move?


*

[IanEye]

*



You
You took me in
You loved me then
You didn’t waste time

I
I never took much
I never asked for your crutch
Now don’t ask for mine

*

[semiconscious]

The whole thing is as real as Professional Wrestling.

/ thread

no matter how much you wish it wasn't so...

I hate to admit it, but in the 80's through early 2000's I was a *huge* fan of professional wrestling on tv. And it definitely resembles the sort of storytelling techniques we'd see each week.
Treating the audience like they have short term memory, often "faces" and "heels" switch sides. With "al Qaeda" being both foe and friend(Libya, Iran, Syria), predictable plotlines,
over the top bad guys, etc. And of course the biggest thing to hit wrasslin in the 90's was the 'new world order'

frighteningly so . it's like wwf provided the template for what's now regarded (at least in the u.s.) as 'politics'...

[Wombaticus Rex]

Awesome, I say bring it. A part of all of ya must be just a tiny bit curious what a Romney dominion would be like, right?

You're no Homer Simpson, though.

That man is an American success story precisely because he is such a vapid & cheerful moron.

In terms of the total range of political options, from Borg singularity heat death to total Anarchist utopian love-fest, yeah, it's a vanishingly small sliver of difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

But I also know most people here could recite the incantation of American Economic Doom -- the very real calculus of "How Am I Going To Feed My Kids" constant panic that one hell of a lot of human beings in this country are living with. We all know Obama will not unveil a new New Deal in his second term, but he does represent a broader and more funded social safety net than Mitt Ryan will. So, it's a tiny sliver, but there are millions of Americans in there.

This "lesser of two evils" shit is always presented as a sheep conformity issue, and I wish you'd realize it can also be a matter of simple empathy.

[dada]

Empathy for victims of American terrorism vs empathy for victims of economic terrorism. Not really much of a choice. I see what you're saying though, Wombat. Both sides think the other side is stupid, but both can be acting out of empathy. On the other and, both can be acting out of fear. I guess I do make a judgement that acting out of empathy is better than acting out of fear. Everyone has their biases, it seems.

There's an Arundhati Roy quote, where she says something like don't waste time on the voting process, just take one second to go vote or not vote or whatever you decide to do, and then get back to the important business of fighting empire. That's why as much as I like the boycott the vote thing, I can't get into it, it's just another time sink. If you're not going to vote, don't vote, that's all. I just don't have it in me to win hearts and minds for any party, even the don't vote party.

Though I have to say, I read something funny on the stupid facebook the other day. In trying to justify their Obama support, someone was explaining that they'd rather lose eight fingers (Obama) than all ten (Romney.) The best part was that it was in response to a boycott the vote picture of Abbie Hoffman giving the finger, so I got to say "Abbie's got one finger for you!"

Stupid facebook.