The 2012 "Election" thread

[Nordic]

That's why he's even more despicable than Bush of Cheney.

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

That's why he's even more despicable than Bush of Cheney.

I feel the same way and would like to add the sainted, grandfatherly Ron Paul to this.
I know of so many young kids, mostly on the web, who are being utterly deceived into thinking that Paul is some liberty loving reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson!
Here is one thing the Bible had right I think - those who knowingly deceive and corrupt young people-any people really - the fist in the velvet glove are worse than say the money-lender, whoremaster, slave trader etc.
iow folks one doesn't expect any good out of to begin with.

on edit : Obama has also trashed any moral high ground the left had before. NDAA 2012, drones, Libya, prosecution of Wall St actually less than Bush era, and so on.
Now the right will just call us a bunch of slimy hypocrites if Romney gets in and anyone complains of any wrongdoing.

[Belligerent Savant]

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That's why he's even more despicable than Bush or Cheney.

Exactly right.

Interesting follow-up to that Atlantic piece --

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ma/263057/

My recent article, "Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama," is one of dozens I've written in the last several years criticizing President Obama for violating civil liberties, expanding executive power, and waging a secretive drone war that presumes all unidentified males killed are "militants." Why did it receive more attention, by many orders of magnitude, than any of those articles? One significant reason is that partisan Democrats reliably pay attention to every issue that might impact Obama's chances at the ballot box -- and frequently ignore many important issues that won't. Write that the president is killing hundreds of innocent foreigners, or routinely spying without warrants on millions of innocent Americans, or setting the reckless precedent that one man can secretly order extrajudicial killings on his word alone, and relatively few people pay attention. Add the notion that those failures should cost Obama votes and perhaps a million people will read it! Scores of partisan Democrats responded using language much angrier than any they've ever marshaled against the problematic policies under discussion. The experience reinforced my belief that causes are best advanced by signalling to politicians and their partisans that specific behavior will end up costing them winnable votes.

That strategy can backfire for some. In 1992, George H.W. Bush lost his reelection attempt in part because he broke his "no-new-taxes pledge," causing parts of his own coalition to turn against him. Some suggested that he should face a primary challenger, others that Ross Perot might be preferable. These voters were among the reasons that Bill Clinton, a politician even worse on taxes by their lights, was able to win.

Then again, Clinton begot Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of 1994, and the uncompromising conservative position on taxes spurred a generation of Republican politicians to embrace right-wing orthodoxy on the issue. Tax cuts were George W. Bush's first priority. GOP congressional candidates submit en masse to Grover Norquist's pledge. In this year's GOP primary, supposed fiscal conservatives gathered on a debate stage all declared that they'd reject a deficit-reduction plan with 10 times as much in spending cuts as tax hikes. Electoral strategy played a secondary role in my piece; but since many of the negative responses have insisted that civil libertarians withholding votes from the party they prefer is naive, I'd just point out that every issue group is sometimes forced to play hardball with the party that more naturally represents it, despite the risks, or else they're perpetually taken for granted; and that any sophisticated assessment of political strategy must look farther out than one election.

That said, I don't really care if you vote for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein. I didn't explain my theory of dealbreakers in hopes of changing the outcome on November 6. My goal is to spur readers to confront the problematic policies and attitudes that have taken hold here since the September 11 terrorist attacks, and that will persist in 2013 regardless of who occupies the White House. Americans have always reacted to foreign threats in ways that they later regarded to be reckless or overzealous infringements on civil liberties. Our history includes the Alien and Sedition Acts, Woodrow Wilson's World War I-era abominations, FDR's execrable treatment of Japanese Americans, and Joseph McCarthy's Cold War witch-hunt. In the past, there's always been a reaction against wartime excesses. Barack Obama, who campaigned on restoring core American values, looked to preside over the latest. Having won, he continued nearly every problematic Bush-era abuse of liberty, save direct torture of prisoners, which he ended but declined to prosecute. A bipartisan consensus is forming around these radical policies. Challenging that consensus is urgent, for if they persist as long as terrorism remains a threat, they'll persist forever. This is far more consequential than the outcome of one election.

Contrary to the assumptions of my critics, I've written extensively about this fight among Republicans, chronicling the primary efforts of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson and following Senator Rand Paul's effort to build a GOP constituency around the Bill of Rights, anti-interventionism, and fiscal conservatism. I have no use for politicians at the opposite pole of the Republican Party. Anyone with a principled commitment to natural rights and limited government should shun them. And I hope I can one day persuade many Republicans to adjust their behavior accordingly. To do so is certainly consistent with the values that many of them claim to hold dear.

To vote Romney is not.

In the Age of Obama, I find that Democrats -- especially self-described liberals and progressives -- are acting in ways that don't accord with the core values they previously espoused.

My piece spurred a lot of discussion about theories of voting. I explained that, for me, "some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying .... If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care."

In other words, certain things are just dealbreakers.

A lot of people wrote in agreement. Some thought it incumbent on them to vote their conscience. Others saw dealbreakers as an exercise in shaping norms. If Mitt Romney took the debate stage and used the 'n'-word to describe his opponent he would lose a substantial portion of his supporters, and in abandoning him, they'd be reinforcing the norm that virulent racism is beyond the pale in American politics -- a norm whose existence is far more important, in the long term, than the result of any single presidential election, especially given the narrow U.S. political spectrum.

Many more correspondents disagreed with the notion of dealbreakers. They insisted that it's irrational to have them in a two-party system, where the proper way to vote is to choose the least bad option.

Although that isn't my theory of voting, it is a perfectly defensible one. My problem is that I just don't believe very many Democrats actually hold it. As I noted at the beginning of my piece, "Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand."

On email and Twitter, I tried to press respondents on this point with a hypothetical. Say that President Obama (who they regard to be the superior candidate on a wide array of crucial issues) was caught on a series of videotapes (surreptitiously recorded in the Oval Office) repeatedly using anti-Hispanic slurs to refer to Mexican Americans, musing that his personal dislike of Mexicans motivated the record number that he deported, and noting that while he'd never transgress against the law by unlawfully targeting Mexican Americans, he sure does hate them.

It proved a clarifying hypothetical.

A few people stuck to their utilitarian theory of voting. For example, faced with a Twitter length version of the hypothetical, Chris Hayes avowed that he would still vote for the lesser of two evils, noting he was proud that The Nation condemned FDR's WWII-era treatment of Japanese Americans, but that its editors probably still voted for the man, and in hindsight were right to do so. It should be noted that doing so did not result in a subsequent internment of an ethnic minority in wartime, and from a liberal perspective, FDR's other achievements made life better for millions.

I respect Hayes' position, even though I don't share it.

But he was very much an exception. When pressed, most people who responded to my piece by touting a utilitarian model of voting couldn't bring themselves to apply it if it benefited an anti-Mexican racist who took pleasure in deporting illegal immigrants. Take the talented Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect, who wrote one of the most thoughtful critiques of my piece. He responded to my hypothetical by saying that he'd stay home rather than vote for Pretend Racist Obama or his opponent, acknowledging that his answer was "in tension" with his critique of my article. I pressed Brad DeLong, another critic, to answer the hypothetical. He proved understandably evasive.

I don't blame anyone for being uncertain about these very difficult questions -- I am not sure about the dealbreaker model myself -- and I don't presume anything more specific about the beliefs of the aforementioned individuals than what is explicitly reflected in their words. Taken in sum, however, the number of people who argued for utilitarian voting, only to reverse themselves when faced with Pretend Racist Obama, suggests at least some of them hold what I think is an indefensible set of beliefs. I can respect consistent utilitarian voting, especially from people like Hayes, who are reliable critics of all the transgressions that I spend my time railing against.

But if you tell me that uttering anti-Hispanic slurs while deporting illegal aliens is a dealbreaker (as it would be for me), while the combination of extrajudicial assassinations, indefinite detention, warrantless spying, dead Pakistani innocents, and waging war without Congressional approval isn't a dealbreaker ... well, I'd suggest that no one can defend holding both of those views at once.

As yet, no one has tried.

You see, theories of voting aren't the point here.

They never were.

The point is that without quite realizing it, a lot of progressives and liberals are undervaluing the importance of these issues. With regard to my hypothetical, this is partly because there is a bigger taboo against using racial slurs than there is against killing innocent foreigners. I think a lot of my interlocutors were loath to say that they'd vote for Pretend Racist Obama, despite his racial slurs, even if his policies were better overall because they could imagine the outraged reaction from Latino friends, colleagues, and activists. How would they defend a vote for Pretend Racist Obama to an offended Mexican American, or to an apology demand from the National Council of La Raza?

Neither the left-of-center coalition nor the social circles of its various members include many Pakistani families from North Warzistan. Saying the deaths of innocent children there is wrong and regrettable, but not a dealbreaker, is a much more comfortable thing to do on a typical left-leaning blog than saying you'd vote for a president despite the fact that he uses vile anti-Mexican slurs.

But our hypothetical needn't concern racial slurs.

If Obama was caught cutting a deficit-reduction deal with Republicans that involved a promise to appoint a pro-life Democrat to the Supreme Court, or if he proposed a law banning gays from adopting kids, liberals and progressives would abandon him in droves (which is exactly why he'd never do either of those things, nor would any Democrat). Certainly the left would object much more loudly and strenuously than they have to his War on Terror excesses. Judging once again from recent conversations, progressives can't deny that the blowback from a pro-life-judge deal or an anti-gay-adoption bill would far surpass the pushback Obama has gotten on civil liberties. They can't deny that either act would cause many on the left to withhold their votes in protest. And yet they're uncomfortable arguing that those transgressions against their beliefs would be more problematic than racially profiling, indefinitely detaining and even killing Muslim Americans without trial, all of which go on now under Obama.

Numerous Muslim American emailers shared their discomfort with the apparent priorities of many liberals and progressives.

Said one:
As a Muslim, when I hear my largely liberal co-workers talk about the election and the various reasons why Romney is no good, I wonder why they harp on such pointless stuff but don't spare even a moment for the innocent people Obama is killing and terrorizing. And I try not to dwell on what that says about their subconscious view of the worth of Muslim lives.
On the subject of Muslim Americans, let me be the first to acknowledge that Democrats, as bad as they are, clearly edge out Republicans, given that the latter party contains a faction that is persuaded the U.S. is under threat of sharia law and that Muslims should be constrained in where they can build mosques. Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg at least stood up for their right to build the so-called Ground Zero mosque in New York, even as he sent secret squads of municipal police to spy on innocent Muslim Americans far outside the boundaries of his jurisdiction.

He should still be criticized mercilessly for the latter act.

Unfortunately, as I've documented, mainstream media publications routinely write narratives of Obama's first term as if the numerous, radical transgressions don't even exist. And as Freddie de Boer notes, recounting his numerous efforts to raise these issues on left-wing blogs (emphasis added), "Try and insert some anti-drone sentiment into the comments. Believe me, I've tried. The result is total, immediate, and angry dismissal. Always. These ideas are not permitted. For all the talk of 'lesser evils,' you are far more likely to find conventional liberals defending the drone program than speaking of it as evil at all. This is the most elementary, most important point of all: there is no internal pressure for Democrats to reform ..." For the blogs he discusses, this is only slight hyperbole.

It's worth noting some of the exceptions. Chris Hayes, Glenn Greenwald, Adam Serwer, Jane Mayer, Marcy Wheeler, and Jeremy Scahill (among other journalists), numerous academics, the ACLU, and the Center of Constitutional Rights are just some of the left-leaning voices who discern the importance of these issues and act accordingly. The fact that there is more institutional support for reform on the left is one reason the turn the Democratic Party has taken is so alarming.

A final observation about that turn: A surprising number of partisan Democrats reacted to my piece by speculating that I must be a secret Republican operative, doing the bidding of Mitt Romney and the far right wing. Others insisted that my motive was Web traffic or flaunting my moral rectitude. It is one thing to argue that Obama is worth supporting despite his shortcomings. Given the gravity of those shortcomings, it is quite another to presume that anyone who disagrees must have clandestine motives. The inability to imagine non-cynical reasons for opposing Obama is itself a sad commentary on how little these issues mean to some of the president's most zealous partisan supporters.

[JackRiddler]

As usual, total focus on Obama. No focus on the actual politics at play in the nation.

There is a massive voter suppression and election fraud crusade underway in states controlled by Republican governors. Why? What advantage do they see, since Obama after all is identical?

The US government has been producing bloody wars around the world, open and covert, for all of the 67 years since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has become increasingly systematized and today largely runs by algorithm. Ending this system is important enough that one needs to understand it and promote political constellations that weaken it. Instead you distort it. To call the present civilian administrator the most reprehensible of all of them is ignorant of history and the facts. To make him into the primary symbol of the war-generating system is basically to campaign for the Republicans -- those who have provided most of the revolutions in extending the war system. Those who don't pretend to be for peace in an ideal world, but whose ideal world involves more war. How clean our consciences will feel, once we have the neocons back in power, so that everyone to the left of center can unite in hating them. Obama won't weaken the war system but the chances for YOU to help do so are greater under him -- greater than the zero you will get with the return of the neocons.

It seems to me for all the emotional rhetoric and dead baby pictures you don't really care about the thousands of dead babies yet to come -- the ones in Iran, a war that Obama (and the "sane" faction of the power elite) have so far avoided, and that Romney has practically promised as Bibi's post-election gift.

For all your persistent "Obama Baby Killer Is the Worst Hitler Ever" talk, you never address why the Republicans are going to such all-out lengths to steal elections. I've only asked about 30 times. Why are they given life-support by the corporate media whenever they need it, without which they'd be in a permanent minority? What do the Republicans think is the difference between them and the Democrats?

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[Belligerent Savant]

For all your persistent "Obama Baby Killer Is the Worst Hitler Ever" talk, you never address why the Republicans are going to such all-out lengths to steal elections. I've only asked about 30 times. Why are they given life-support by the corporate media whenever they need it, without which they'd be in a permanent minority? What do the Republicans think is the difference between them and the Democrats?

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I don't recall even an inkling of an insinuation correlating Obama with "Hitler". That said, it is somewhat apt at least in the sense that they were/are both beholden to their handlers.

And to succinctly summarize my thoughts on Republican attempts to steal elections and/or the corporate media's 'protection' of said party: I don't quite see it as the corporate-media protecting the Republicans as much as they are protecting the F'ing overall STATUS QUO [or rather, following a script that essentially maintains the status quo].

Just part of an ongoing fictional series of storylines/ongoing control systems that are otherwise presented as our 2-party system.

That's not to say there aren't players within both factions that are fully invested and dedicated towards whatever ends they strive to meet, and surely each faction loathes the other and view themselves are opposing forces.
But in the end, regardless of outcome, the interests that matter WILL be met. And only the 0.0000001% will benefit.

[Iamwhomiam]

Thanks for posting the article, Nordic. Sometimes voting for someone is simply voting against another.

Neon wrote:
{SIGH}

I guess I'm in.

I'll drag my sorry carcass down to the polls one more time to vote against what I see as a complete monstrosity in Mittler/Eddie Munster. There may be *some* good in the Obama camp--while there most definitely *is not* with the other guys.

And I'm swayed by the argument that we need all the time we can get.

That's why I'm voting for Obama. (bold ^^) I am seriously disillusioned by the deeds of our first African-American president, but I'm voting against Romney. Besides, I doubt if I ever could vote for a Republican.

Now I'd normally praise anyone voting for a third party candidate as a vote of conscience, but today there is absolutely no hope for any to become elected and it seems that if a miracle did happen that they were to be elected, no one is considering that they'd be in a worse position than Obama was when he first took office. Perhaps they'd have one supporter in the entire Congress, Bernie Sanders, so not only would they now be the leader of the Evil American Empire, but they'd be nearly powerless to effect any change whatsoever. Then you could blame them for the actions of our military warriors.

Look at it however you'd like, vote for big up-front and in your face evil Romney or the rather subdued evil of Obama. Vote for a third party candidate or a write-in and you increase the chance big evil will win. Considering the topics discussed at length here and the length of time folks have been here, I'm rather surprised by what's being posted by several. And disappointed.

We've never had a more important election and all past races are irrelevant. What's important now is not to give up. And in this one particular case, at least as I see it, voting against Obama is in effect giving up. And at the same time giving Romney a boost up.

[dada]

Hack the vote. Now there's a platform I could get behind. Though I guess that could lead right down the fascist lockdown path as well.

In my mind everything keeps coming back to control of the media, as stupid as that seems. Or maybe not the media, but the message, wherever it comes from. Who's captured the imagination. I don't know. Really, I don't.

[JackRiddler]

Out of respect for the ninakat farewell thread, I'll quote this here:

Granted, the current debate here about voting was the catalyst in pushing me to finally depart. I'm probably too much of an idealist, but I do yearn for a place where the debate is over and the consensus is clear about who and what the enemies of life on earth really are. I expected to find that consensus here, which was naive of me. No, I'm not talking about groupthink, nor was I expecting everyone to agree on how to move forward. But expecting any solutions at the national political level is delusional and destructive, despite the intentions of those who believe otherwise.

I think there is a rough but clear consensus here that war, greed and instrumental acceptance of inhumanity are the biggest enemies to (human and most multicellular) life on earth. That doesn't mean those who don't adopt an anti-voting stance support war, or support the present forms of government. Claiming it is so invites resistance. (If voting strategically is "complicity" in the war machine, then it is less so than driving or paying federal taxes, which are also debatable.) I expect no solutions on the "national political level" and if this is being projected on to me, then I am dismayed. And if, then I am exasperated at how many times I say otherwise and yet it's still projected. I expect that the "national political level" is a form of weather that will nevertheless affect solutions on the ground, so I have my preferences (out of the limited options) for what that weather should be like. And I think that's a lot less "conservative" than seeking to play no part whatsoever in that level.

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[Laodicean]

[Laodicean]

[Nordic]

Jack, you really want to stoop to THAT low level of Godwin's Straw Man? Please. Shakespeare would be SO disappointed in you and might even ask you quit using his image in your avatar.

That being said, Linh Dinh is someone who actually gets it. One of my favorite writers.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/ ... for-death/

Criminal v. Criminal

Voting for Death

by LINH DINH

America, you have become a nation of enablers and apologists for tyranny and mass murder. You condemn the Nazi and gulag guards of times past even as you celebrate your own mercenaries and torturers, even as you explain away, if not outright cheer, the unspeakable crimes committed by your sons and daughters. You don’t care who you kill, as long as your soldiers are paid, and your munitions, bomb and tank factories are humming.

Safely ensconced in academic luna parks, your leading intellectuals lean slightly right or left, but never enough to rock this blazing gunboat, lest they sour the cocktail parties or, god forbid, have their tenure revoked. Mouths stuffed with antipasti, they’re expert at sidestepping Israel’s prolific crimes, 9/11, Bin Laden’s faux death or the parasitic Federal Reserve, and as another joke election nears, they’re all gung ho about candidates who back illegal wars and banking frauds, since each is supposedly the lesser of two evils.

For the past five presidential elections, winning candidates have won 52.9%, 50.7%, 47.9%, 49.2% and 43% of the popular votes respectively, so there hasn’t been an overwhelming mandate for any of them, but with the runner ups from the other major party often close behind, and in 2000, actually ahead in the popular vote count, the two-party system has gotten a stranglehold on our public life and pocketbooks. As for our senators, only two are not Democrat or Republican. An American election, then, is basically a rigged referendum for this thoroughly corrupt and murderous system, and simply by voting, you will give it the green light to go on killing and looting. Every four years, we’re railroaded into sanctioning endless war and bottomless corruption. If disappointed, we’re then steered by our brainwashing and dumbing down media to a near clone of our current rapist.

The Good Old Party spooks the upper and middle classes by threatening, If you don’t vote for us, the Dems will take your hard-earned cash and give it to the freeloaders, crackheads and other miscellaneous losers, while the Democrats, in turn, scare the lower rungs by snarling, If you don’t vote for us, the Republicans will let your retired, diapered ass rot under a bridge, on a piece of cardboard, but lordy, lordy, lordy, it is already happening, but let us not sweat the details.

It is fitting that as our most important vote has become nearly meaningless, we’re offered myriad opportunities to vote for all sorts of irrelevant acts and personalities, from singing oafs to dancing buffoons, to steroid-charged sluggers. Americans have never voted so much for so little.

Each party paints the other as the greater evil, though both are equally whorish to a military banking complex that has wrought so much grief and destruction worldwide, including here. As they offshore your job, they may toss you a free cell phone or allow you to wed your same sex lover, but isn’t time, seriously, we demand that our money be spent responsibly, for our benefits? But no, we can only beg for small change, instead of real ones, and must vote, again, for proven liars and criminals, and hope, against all evidence, that they won’t impale us this time. So how does it feel to have so much evil, deceit and betrayal hardening through the entire length of your being? But what’s worst about this is that you yourself have allowed it to happen, have enabled it, if only symbolically, by voting for one of the two parties that are pro war and pro corruption. They will likely get 99% of your votes, in fact, so America will have endorsed overwhelmingly, again, an openly criminal agenda, and the world will again be aghast.

With his cartoon dynamite, Netanyahu’s recent UN speech brings to mind Powell and his phony chart before the Iraq invasion, but Bush at least tried to convince that a war was necessary, whereas Obama hasn’t even bother. Ignoring congress and the American public, he simply ordered a massive bombing campaign against Libya, which he mockingly dubbed a “kinetic military action,” unleashed lesser strikes against Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, and sent terroristic proxies into Syria, all without significant protest from our dozing public or groveling intelligentsia.

Pumped with nonstop propaganda from our corporate media in this mad house of mirrors, we neither see nor care how others perceive us, for even as international protests mount, our flags burnt, our soldiers killed by supposed allies and poll after poll shows us among the most despised nations on earth, we still believe we’re loved and admired worldwide. Our politicians are only too glad to pander to this vanity. Romney, “We have a moral responsibility to keep America the strongest nation on earth, the hope of the earth, the shining city on the hill.” Obama, “Never bet against the United States. The United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs.” Only children believe in everlasting anything, but that’s how our daddy and mommy politicians talk to us these days.

So the world will again be aghast, as will posterity, unless we can prove that we’re not behind the winning criminal. Already, nearly half of Americans don’t cast ballots in any election, but we must make this abstention purposeful, as a clear sign of protest and not an act of apathy. The world must see that Americans aren’t all deranged and hypnotized as those who cheer and vote for one lying criminal after another. We’re better than this, so let’s prove it. Imagine thousands in public places, declaring, “NOT IN OUR NAME!” The sooner we can effect a divorce between us and our rogue government, the sooner we can get rid of it. If nothing else, to resist this electoral farce is to wash our hands, partially, at least, of the innocent blood being spilled. It is the only moral decision.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

[JackRiddler]

Mouths stuffed with antipasti

Yeah, nothing tendentious about this fine piece of writing. Which relates as a response to anything I've said here in no way. Just like your ostensible responses - no relation, just repetition of the same tired guilt-trip about voting. You're also right that Dinh's not Shakespeare. More shit-stirring by you. Now kindly lay the fuck off my avatar. I will honor whomever I wish as I wish. You got a problem, you want to project? Send an alert for unauthorized use of the Bard's picture.

[Bruce Dazzling]

This is a friendly, preemptive reminder stay on topic. If you'd like to continue your discussion of avatars, please do so via PM.

[IanEye]

"oh sure, you shut down the discussion about avatars just when it was getting interesting.
well, why wouldn't you when you have an avatar that has a cabbage for a head?!?"

[Iamwhomiam]

Gee, Bruce, lighten up.

It's not like we're discussing the fate of the world here...