Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It's getting to be about that time in the electoral cycle, when the usual Nader-baiting groundhogs pop up from their holes to gaze at their navels and stroke their chins. The quadrennial Passion Play of the Gorestoßlegende, with its ever-rotating cast of sanctimonious characters, thunders on.

There's no debating these people, anymore than you can persuade a Drumpfkin of his folly. But the fact of the matter is that more Florida Democrats defected for Bush than for Nader in 2000. They keep overlooking this, erm, inconvenient truth (see what I did there?), and it's not hard to see why.

American Horror Story: Convention

If I ever get worried that I might occasionally get too over-the-top in my insults and pointed jeremiads against various assholes, all I have to do is keep in mind that there are true freaks out there. What do you even say to someone who emails a delegate that they're praying for said delegate to get prostate cancer because they might support Cruz instead of Drumpf at the convention? What the hell is wrong with these idiots?

Bonus points to Bobo Brooks, of all people, from a March column:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

This is why, while I actually agree with Drumpf's assertions about his flock being dispossessed and left behind, and sympathize with the lost dreams of said flock, it's possible to feel only so much empathy for them. They voted for the politicians that did this to them, over and over again, for decades, generations. They were fine with selling out someone else's future somewhere else, so long as they got to keep their McJobs stamping overpriced widgets.

Approval Process

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Purity Bawl

Since it's an election year, it's time for the regularly scheduled plaint of the Thanksralphers, that migratory flock of folks whose bleats and peregrinations have somehow never quite clued them to a small but vital fact -- that Democrats don't lose because of third-party perfidy, but because too many of "their" voters end up voting Republican.

It's been repeated countless times in this here blog, but if the stupid "Mumia sweatshirt" schtick still merits play, then this does too:  in the 2000 electoral debacle, twelve times as many registered Democrats in Florida voted for George W. Bush as voted for Ralph Nader. Hokay? The Thanksralphers and DFH-punchers can ignore that all they want -- and they clearly want, since it's been twelve years and I'll be damned if I've ever seen any Dem animosity toward those party-jumpers -- but like gravity and evolution, this is a true fact whether or not people believe it or act on it.

I've come to believe that the folks who continue to indulge in meaningless Nader-baiting have simply made an easier strategic decision for themselves. It's easier to titty-twist the minuscule number of "purists" who supposedly insist on absolute ideological rigidity, than to take a serious look at the much greater number of people who, for whatever reasons, jump over to the other major party.

Or the even larger number of people who look at a corrupt system run by and for the wealthy and connected, understand intuitively that neither party gives a red-hot monkey-fuck about them, and stays home. It's all well and good to insist that even if one is getting by and not in need of assistance, they should at least vote with compassion for those less fortunate, who are in need of this or that government assistance. But uh, if one is looking at, say, literally spending the rest of their natural life paying interest on $200 textbooks because the higher education system is a fucking racket, that person may have different priorities in the voting booth besides ensuring that the alcoholic vagrant shitting on the downtown sidewalk has adequate health care.

There is certainly a difference between the two parties, operationally and policy-wise. These differences have become larger and more apparent due to the polarizing nature of the teabaggers, and their effect on the Republican party. As much of a disappointment as Obama has been to lefties and progressives, I don't think anyone would argue the point that his strategies and outcomes would have been vastly different with a better Congress and Supreme Court. Still probably would have been dickless incrementalism, because that is all our owners will permit, but the intransigence and idiotic obstructionism of the 'baggers has certainly worsened an already bad situation.

But the real problem here is the idea that anyone's vote is "owed" to a political party, as opposed to the party having to make its case for earning your vote. It's dangerous and undemocratic, it has led to the current situation, where the parties are owned and operated by corporate interests, and simply take your vote for granted, promising everything and delivering jack shit.

Hey, whatever floats people's boats, I guess. I could just live without the smug, sneering, condescending attitude that permeates these sorts things, expending far more energy and effort lecturing a tiny portion of voters on their sincere (if perhaps somewhat misguided or impractical) principles, than on the vastly greater numbers who jump over to the other side without a care in the world.

It's important for everyone to keep in mind that politicians, good or bad, are reflective of their constituencies. Somebody keeps voting -- on purpose, even -- for dipshits like Louie Gohmert and Jim Inhofe. Those people are the goddamned problem, not the handful of supposed purity trolls.

Wasted Motion

Again, just an observation on who's throwing the election and whom to blame:  Jill Stein is polling at a statistically insignificant rate, even more so in swing states, whilst spoiled dingbats and butthurt crackers are apparently going for Rmoney en masse. I am willing to bet my next paycheck that, should Vulture/Voucher manage to squeeze this one out of their poopchutes, not one of the swing state losses will be able to be blamed on the DFHs, and all of them will be because of the party jumpers. Bet your last dollar on that, friends 'n' neighbors.

As I've pointed out too many times in the past with the N8r b8rs (now in their second decade!), the problem here is not so much who gets stuck with the blame, it's the inevitable practical ramifications of the scapegoating. American political parties these days move to the right when they lose the presidential election, that is the intent and design of the ratchet/pawl system we have. Scapegoating the DFHs simply gives automatic cover to ratcheting the Democrats, whether that takes the form of further capitulation to extreme-right jabber, or putting up "more electable" candidates in the snake-handler states.

Moreover, it absolves them from having to look at the real reason why they lost in the first place. With Gore in 2000, there were so many factors, only the most unself-aware partisan could have singled out Nader not just as the proximal cause, but as the only cause. With Obama, the cause for the supposed mass defection is said to be that Rmoney will be better on jobs, even though he has yet to say exactly how he'll create decent jobs here, even though he made his fortune creating jobs overseas.

So are DFHs also responsible for that much greater degree of mass cognitive dissonance, of collective stupidity? Of course not. But until we either make voting mandatory and on Saturday, like in Australia, and mandate a short, publicly-financed campaign to take all the pelf out of the perpetual-campaign system, they'll keep getting scapegoated. Failing that, we need to start finding ways, individually and collectively, to start divesting ourselves from this system that shackles us to lifetimes of wage slavery and debt peonage.

Goring the Ox

The more I've heard this "at least Saint Algore would've kept us out of Iraq" stuff over the years, the less convincing I find it. Let's at least accept as a given that Gore and his security team would have been astute enough to not blithely ignore a memo telegraphing the culprit and mode of 9/11; i.e., it would have either been prevented or (if you're a LIHOP) not allowed to happen.

(Forget the MIHOP theories; these people couldn't put their fingers together in the dark, much less steer remote-controlled jets into skyscrapers. Still, there are at least as many CYA actions as one might find around the JFK assassination, thus lending empathy if not actual credibility to the more lurid speculations out there. People may be speculating a bit too wildly, but they are probably correct in assuming that they have not been told much of the truth at all.)

Anyway, so no 9/11 perhaps, but that does not automatically translate to no war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The Taliban, aided by Pakistan's ISI, were in the process of committing a great many serious human rights violations in any case, well before 9/11. The country was being seriously destabilized, per Pakistan's express desires, as it regards Afghanistan as a convenient buffer state against India. It was a humanitarian crisis waiting to happen, and Gore is exactly the type who would have looked for his own private Kosovo with which to bolster his own humanitarian cred.

As for Iraq, the Clinton administration had ramped up its bombing and strafing runs there in its waning months, and had been studiously indifferent to the damage wrought by sanctions throughout the '90s. Whatever poll ratings Fatboy had managed to retain, it was more from popular revulsion at his hypocritical accusers, rather than any naturally accruing goodwill. He had little or no political capital left with which to operate outside the constraints of the Delay/Gingrich douchebags in Congress.

And that's what a hobbled-from-the-gate Gore would have been dealt anyway, had he chosen to fight a little harder for what was his. Look what insufferable winners the Baker junta turned out to be; what kind of sore losers are they? It would have been a contested victory by a candidate who lost his home state by 4%, paired up with a hostile Congress that would have scapegoated him at every opportunity because that's what they do. And Gore is exactly the type of bien pensant doofus to let himself get rolled into a bad idea for putatively humanitarian reasons.

Of course, a Gore administration would not have gone to war the way the Cheney administration did, especially without having 9/11 as a pretext. It wouldn't have been poaching laundered documents from Italian intelligence to frame Saddam Hussein, or trotting Colin Powell in front of the UN to conjure specters of havoc wrought by remote control airplanes launching out of Basra. It would have been more artfully done, to be sure. With a Chimpco production, the assumption was that the Iraqis would shower us with flowers 'n' candy; with the Gorons, we would have been the ones with treats.

But even the "success" of Kosovo is heavily qualified, with a young, underemployed, seething populace still torn by ethnic strife, no economy to speak of, and an enormous US base plopped in the center of things. It seems to be a great transition point for the trafficking of heroin and girls, but other than that, not so much.

The great thing about speculative history is that anyone can pull pretty much anything out of their ass. I don't know that Gore would have invaded Afghanistan and/or Iraq anymore than they know that he wouldn't have. But conditions in each situation were such that he could have found cause or pretext to do so, and Lieberman has proven to be a complete fucking weasel. There's no point in trying to make one side or the other attempt to prove a negative, but their unconditional presumption of impossibility is really something to behold, given Gore's own track record, and that of the administration he served.

Been close to eight interminable years of this N8r-b8ting schtick, and not once have I ever seen a tacit admission or even acknowledgement of some inescapable facts: that with Gore as president, you would also have had a dickhead like Lieberman as VP; that Gore was a bad candidate with a worse campaign, and would have entered office with absolutely zero juice and a motivated, hostile, radical congress to contend with; and most importantly, that many more registered Democrats voted for George Fucking Walker Bush than their anointed saint.

I Can Haz Dummycrats?

For what it's worth, it seems highly doubtful that these numbers will hold -- or are even fundamentally true.

Clinton supporters appear to be somewhat more reactive than Obama supporters. Twenty-eight percent of the former indicate that if Clinton is not the nominee -- and Obama is -- they would support McCain. That compares to 19% of Obama supporters who would support McCain if Obama is not the nominee -- and Clinton is.

But allowing for the likelihood that there is at least some truth to this, it behooves every faithful Dem with their god-bothering Thanksralph! plaint these past seven-plus years to keep each other in check now. Because scarcely a month after announcing his tilt at the windmill, Nader is all but forgotten. He will not remotely be a factor in any state. But even a vote for Nader would at least be a direct expression of principle. I have no idea what the hell a Clinton or Obama supporter going for McCain is thinking about anything. It is literally the dumbest fucking thing they could do, politically, intellectually.

The perfidious dipshits who plan on stamping their wittle feet if they don't get their preferred nom are invited to kindly go fuck themselves for a good long time. Anybody who claims to hate this war, to be tired of the malicious incompetence and indifference of the current junta, to desire improvement in practically every quality-of-life factor, cannot be an actual Democrat and then decide to vote for John McCain. Period. No exceptions. You have abdicated your responsibility to pay attention, and thus your right to be part of a rational debate.

McCain has made it clear that he is Bush without the MBA, Cheney with a couple of borscht-belt zingers. And to his credit, he has been quite upfront about all that. So there's no excuse for any of this "McCain Democrat" horseshit. It couldn't be any clearer. I cringe at the idea of another eight or even four years of the Clintons and their tedious games of triangulation and gutless parodies of idealism. And as well-intentioned as Obama appears to be, he needs to acquire some brawling skills if he's going to survive the big boys' game.

And really, neither Democrat is going to "fix" or "change" all that much, because Americans haven't quite hit rock-bottom enough to get their heads out of their asses. They still think someone can come along and return things to what they were. Eight years of magical thinking and brain-dead stupidity can have that collective effect.

But neither Clinton nor Obama, whatever their respective weaknesses, is nearly as likely to continue digging this hole and servicing the clump of superstitious goons that holds this country in political and intellectual stasis, whereas McCain has made it abundantly clear that he'd be perfectly happy to do exactly that. You want Fred Thompson on the Supreme Court and Chuck Norris for Secretary of Defense, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of State, then McCain's probably your guy. Cartoon people for a cartoon agenda.

Otherwise, these self-indulgent idiots need to grow the fuck up and pay attention to what each candidate actually stands for, not what you wish they stood for. The problem with democracy, American democracy in particular, is that too many individuals are under the impression their vote is some sort of idealized affirmation of how they see themselves, rather than a response to how things are, and how issues can be addressed.

Chapter and Verse

Esteemed reader thedevilzone points to this interesting poll which might tend to undermine certain catechisms of the Gospel According to Thanksralph!!1!1:

McCain leads both Obama and Clinton in potential general-election match ups with either candidate in the all-important swing state of FloridaAmerica's Syphilletic Wang, according to a Mason-Dixon poll out today.

McCain leads Obama 47%-37% and Clinton 49%-40%. The Arizona senator leads the Democrats across the board. About 80% of Republicans are behind McCain. Only 66% of Democrats are behind Obama and 72% are backing Clinton in one-one-one match-ups with McCain. Currently, 17% of Democrats indicate that in a match up with Obama, they'd support McCain; 16% say so in a match up with Clinton. Seventeen percent of Dems also say they are undecided in a match up with Obama; 13% say so with regard to McCain-Clinton.

Obviously, there are a few questions about the poll results, not even taking methodology (which varies by company) into account. It's March, the Donkles are looking more and more like they're headed to a contentious, brokered convention, and Floridiansinbred Wangeroos have their skidmarked overalls in a wad over how their efforts to move up their primary got tossed.

The primary system is an evil joke anyway, a chorus of "everybody louder than everybody else" assholes all jockeying to Be Special, or they'll boil your bunny or something. (Well, it's Florida, so they'll probably sodomize the poor creature first.) But obviously there's so much more money in protracting this tedious charade, so it's only going to get worse with each quadrennial circle-jerk.

At any rate, should this not belie the heartfelt calls-to-arms with which Teh N8rites are besieged? Of course not, since common sense is anything but, and the N8r h8r premises are based on faulty assumptions (particularly that Nader voters were even going to vote at all, much less vote specifically Democratic). They slap down the "where ya gonna go" faction while genuflecting -- or saying nothing at all -- to the most perfidious of electoral slivers, the "swing" voter.

A "swing" voter in this particular election is either a liar or a fool, and probably a lot of both. Look, the Democratic candidates, whatever their faults, have been very clear that they are repudiating this administration and everything about it. (Whether their actions can be predicted to match their lofty rhetoric is a different point.) McCain has quite openly embraced the current regime, will not only change nothing but promises to continue it, and since he admittedly knows squat about economic policy, is basically going to be Fredo without that coveted Harvard Em Bee Ay.

There is no "swing", there's just self-indulgent assholes who find Hillary Clinton off-putting, and think the ballot box is there to validate their fucking feewings, and thus once again find an excuse to cast their vote out of spite.

Special family fun bonus: because I always enjoy incoherent caterwauling, I thought I'd highlight this gem from the comments at that link (1:26 PM):

To act as if MACAIN would send soldiers like himself off to die and abandon them whatever the history of the dems and repubs being misled by BUSH is against reason .HE WAS IN A NORTH VIETNAMESE PRISON CAMP he knows what its all about sacrifice .OBAMMA says he will attack PACKISTAN AFGANISTAN AND REENTER IRAQ all with out ever fighting in a war rather easy to talk the talk when never knowing the consequnces of your actions little man go to the back of the class and let a hero work things out.MACAIN will surely get dems votes as well as his share of disgusted dems OBAMMA will not get the repubs in the general they stick together look how they still support BUSH 63%

Indeed. One hopes that if "OBAMMA" defeats "MACAIN", cooler heads will prevail and he can be trusted not to attack, um, "PACKISTAN" (which is apparently next to "DUFFELBAGISTAN"). I mean, I guess it's better for illiterate yokels to loudly transcribe the voices in their heads; at least they're taking a break from impregnating their cousins. But if they're to going to invent their own factoids, can it at least not read like a bar scene from My Name Is Earl?

Unsafe At Any Spin

So Pumpkinhead hands his show over to Nader this morning to indulge the latter's increasingly malignant narcissism, and predictably folks run to the backyard to dig up their Ralph bone and gnaw on it for the week, which is about how long this will be remotely a news item.

I've rehashed this ad nauseam, but what the hell: Ralph's quest to theoretically heighten the contradictions had some validity in '96 and 2000, but no longer. All the cranky-old-man schtick that gets flung at McCain goes as well for Nader, who is 1½ years older than Straight Talk, but that's really the least of it. Nader did a decent job of maintaining reasonable gadfly viability in the nineties, but now seems to just pop out of his hole every four years to fuck with the process, and as his .38% showing in '04 proves, he can't even do that anymore.

It's just disappointing that Nader feels the need to be part of the circus he spent so many years decrying, because that's really all he's doing here. But in the political sense, if anything it's a boon -- he will probably galvanize the Democratic apparatchiks more forcefully in general, and perhaps they'll bank some of their Nader rage for, you know, Straight Talk McCain. And if the Republicans want to waste money funneling cash to front groups for Nader, let them.

No one's going to vote for Ralph this year, so again, people might want to get off their crosses and be aware that this time around, if Hillary or Obama cannot sufficiently draw serious distinctions between themselves and McCain (and there are plenty of genuine distinctions, don't get me wrong, but there are also plenty of retards who are unable to get that, which explains why so many more registered Democrats voted for Bush than for Nader in 2000), there won't be any protest vote to whine about for the next decade. People just won't bother.

That's the biggest untapped pool out there anyway -- the non-voters who refrain not because they're too stupid or lazy, but because they are frustrated with choosing between someone bought by the telecom lobby, and someone bought by the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies.

Maybe if the pelf were taken out of it, and the lobbyists and horse-race announcers were forced to find real work instead of contriving and milking a permanent campaign season, more people would feel like their government actually works for them, instead of around them. I think if there were a referendum for Russert and Tweety and the rest of the assorted weasels and loobyists to spend the rest of their lives asking us if we want fries with that, it would pass roughly 99-1%.

Runaway Ralph

Hoo boy. Here we go again:

Ralph Nader has formed a presidential exploratory committee, and said in an interview Wednesday that he will launch another presidential bid if he's convinced he can raise enough money to appear on the vast majority of state ballots this fall.

Nader, who ran as an independent candidate in each of the past three presidential elections, told ABCNews.com that he will run in 2008 if he is convinced over the next month that he would be able to raise $10 million over the course of the campaign — and attract enough lawyers willing to work free of charge to get his name on state ballots.

If Nader is serious about meeting his own pre-requisites, then it seems very unlikely that he'll go through with it. No matter; we're in for another round of folks gnashing their teeth and getting their tits in an uproar over Big Bad Ralph interfering in, um, the democratic process. It's a perfect complement to Nader's increasingly malignant, incoherent narcissism. Edwards probably wouldn't have had anything to do with him, but surely Kucinich would have welcomed any practical help and support Nader might have mustered. That doesn't seem to be part of Ralph's agenda.

But no matter. Come summer, if we are faced with a nearly indistinguishable contest of Hillary vs. McCain, and Ralph keeps buzzing around, we'll get the usual litany of how if we really cared about the possibility of avoiding the more regressive agenda, we'd just suck it up and vote for Miss Thang, even if we still have no idea exactly what she'll actually stand and fight for (how 'bout Kyl-Lieberman 2: Tehran Boogaloo), and what she'll have to break out her trusty political anemometer for to divine which way the winds are tacking. On the other hand, McCain will be perfectly clear, even when he's pulling shit out of his ass, thus attracting far more fence-sitters.

But people will still find a way to blame Nader, or blame Diebold, or whatever. It's easier than admitting that maybe the system has failed utterly. Because even if Hillary wins, as with the Big Demo Wave of '06, a lot of people will be left holding their dicks and wondering where the promised follow-through is. It's in your hand, bub. You're lookin' at it.