BNMW (Blue No Matter Who) #1 writes: “All you progressives with your nose in the air, oh I won’t vote for Biden, Bernie should be the nominee. Blah, blah, blah, same as 2016 when you said, I won’t vote for Hillary, Bernie should be the nominee.
“You self-righteous people, and I would like to use a different word than people but I don’t want to get in any trouble, are condemning America to another 4 years of Trump. We have a 2 party system so voting Green doesn’t mean anything either. You are wasting your vote. It may make you feel better that you stood by your principles and in your mind, you can feel superior to the rest of us, but you are not helping America in any way, shape, or form. I don’t think Biden is the best but he is better than Trump so I am voting for Biden.”
JO’D responds: Welcome to our community, but I’m afraid you’re not making the best first impression, starting off by insulting “all (us) progressives” and implying that we’re being… snobby? Lofty? Superior?
If you wish to treat us respectfully, you might consider looking into our arguments that Biden vs. Trump is an absolute toss-up, in terms of which is more evil.
For one thing, Biden is a lifelong racist who has not just made offensive comments (a la Trump), but who has also advanced policies that have exploded mass-incarceration, aka The New Jim Crow.
(It was Democrat Bill Clinton who more than doubled the U.S. prison population with his “tough on crime” policies — which he first signaled on the campaign trail in 1992 when he raced back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally-retarded black man.)
And Biden, an original signatory of PNAC (Project for a New American Century) has zealously backed the neoconservative agenda that has delivered a modern holocaust to millions of Middle Easterners, predominately Arab Muslim civilians: https://invitation2artivism.org/minimizing-genocide/
Meanwhile, the genocide has dramatically slowed under Trump, who is hated by the neocons — the modern successors of the Nazis who’ve been embraced by the Democrats since Bush/Cheney left office: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/11/as-democratic-elites-reunite-with-neocons-the-partys-voters-are-becoming-far-more-militaristic-and-pro-war-than-republicans/
Let that sink in: The most genocidal faction since the Third Reich, the blood-soaked neocons, positively loathe Donald Trump, because (unlike the Clintons, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) Trump has refused to let them run his foreign policy outright.
While it’s true that Trump hired the man in the first place, he did nothing but fight with John Bolton — one of the most notorious neocon war criminals behind the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Bolton’s Democrat-celebrated book makes clear, he was frustrated that he couldn’t get Trump to start any new wars, the way his predecessors did.
So, when it comes to foreign policy, the Orange Troll everyone was calling “Hitler” a few years ago, has turned out to be Nelson frikkin’ Mandela compared to his Democratic and Republican predecessors!
Combined, Clinton, Bush, and Obama killed between 2.7 and 4.3 million human beings, nearly all of whom were Muslim civilians, women and children. Under Trump, that number has shrunk to less than a hundred thousand killed, as the neocon agenda has largely stalled.
(Somehow, affluent, white Democrats manage to turn a blind eye to that genocide while cheering for the people who helped launch it — people like the Clintons and Joe Biden, whose massive war crimes make Trump’s destruction of Raqqa and Mosul look like minor infractions, by comparison.)
Beyond that, Biden was VP under President Obama, who deported more immigrants than all 20th-century presidents combined (~3 million) and caged children by the thousands.
Trump has a long way to go before catching up to the man that immigrants’ rights groups dubbed “The Deporter in Chief.”
Obama also let Wall Street administer its own bailout. They continued targeting black and Hispanic populations and illegally “robo-signed” millions of them out of their homes, wiping out the post-Civil Rights Era economic gains of black households.
(When Trump tops Obama in that category, do let me know.)
The list of relevant examples supporting the case that Trump is arguably the “lesser of two evils” is an extraordinarily long one, but you should trust that people like Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Glen Ford, and a lot of well-informed progressives aren’t blithely making the argument that Biden could prove to be every bit as dangerous as Trump has — or considerably more dangerous (as Obama proved to be more dangerous than Bush: normalizing torture, assassination, domestic propaganda, jackbooted crushing of peaceful protest, warrantless vacuum-surveillance of everyone, support for terrorists in the Middle East and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, hunting journalists and whistleblowers like enemies of the state, and more… all while becoming the #1 president in U.S. history when it comes to increasing domestic oil production, opening the Arctic to drilling, exporting fracking across the globe, and nullifying the Paris Climate Accords, nixing legal carbon limits and liability for polluters).
Maybe, just maybe, “all (us) progressives” are fairly thoughtful people, motivated by facts, history, and principle. Maybe we’re not willing to vote for either racist, misogynist/rapist, warmongering sack of shit… and maybe that makes your vote the wasted one: freely given to one of the only human beings in the world who represents Trumpism as much or more than Trump.
Maybe, just maybe, Black Agenda Report’s Editor in Chief, Mr. Ford, is onto something when he says that Democrats aren’t “the lesser” but “the more effective” EVIL.
They are, after all, the ones who have succeeded in pushing the far-right’s neo-fascist agenda the furthest. Republican presidents keep fucking it up. Democrats, conversely, have made torture, etc. the new norm, retiring the rule of law for good.
Progressive #2 responds: “(BNMW #1’s) terse, insult ridden comment didn’t deserve your excellent, informative reply. But I’m glad you did. It’ll come in handy to wise up other LOTE voters…”
BNMW #2 writes: “I’m simply amazed by the idiotic attacks against Solomon and Chomsky under a valuable, much-needed article. Trump, by rejecting science for self-serving reasons, has NEEDLESSLY let at least 100,000 people die in a pandemic. He’s also made the unprecedented fascist statement that he won’t accept the results of this election, showing a willingness to risk massive bloodshed–perhaps even civil war–to cling to power. And he just appointed war criminal Elliot Abrams as special envoy to Iran–hardly consistent with peaceful intentions. What the hell does it RATIONALLY take to convince you emotional Never Biden folks that Trump is an unprecedented danger who MUST go?”
JO’D responds: BNMW #2, you wrote, “He’s also made the unprecedented fascist statement that he won’t accept the results of this election…”
Yes, Trump made a statement. He makes a lot of them. They usually contradict his previous statements, as he’s all over the place.
Meanwhile, in reality, it is the Democratic Party and fascist U.S. political establishment — and their subservient corporate media — that have spent the last four years refusing to accept the results of the 2016 election.
Rather than embracing Candidate Trump’s anti-war, anti-“trade” pact, pro-entitlements, pro-universal healthcare rhetoric and putting pressure on him to deliver, they’ve opted for a deep state conspiracy theory and made common cause with the very worst of the Bush/Cheney-era neocons.
As a result, they’ve torn our society in two and launched a new Cold War based on utter fabrications created during the 2016 campaign cycle: Russiagate, which has been 100% debunked at this point: no collusion (no contacts, even); no efforts on the part of official/unofficial Russia to interfere with the 2016 election; no evidence, per Crowdstrike, that the DNC/Podesta data was ever extracted, in the first place; no hacked power grids; no hacked C-Span feed; “Russian” bots that turned out to be American-made and deployed to frame the Russkies; and more (as documented by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Glenn Greenwald, and Izzy Award winners, Matt Taibbi and Aaron Mate, who were so honored for their Russiagate-skeptical reporting).
You keep insisting that genuine liberals should all fall in line behind one of the worst, most destructive, most bigoted ultra-conservatives of the last few decades. But why should we vote for a Democrat whose record in office is far more Trump-like than Trump’s own?
Hint: One of these men has had a hand in the murder of millions of human beings and the mass-incarceration of African-Americans, whereas the other has not (in fact, he’s resisted the neocons and begun rolling back The New Jim Crow with his First Step Act).
How can you feel so certain that your endorsement of a serially bigoted, genocidal rapist is the “moral” or “rational” position?
BNMW #2 writes: “There’s no evidence whatsoever that he’s just following Obama’s example. Obama DID help to crush Occupy–but after it had been in existence for quite a while. Also, he DID pay lip service to its aims–as Trump NEVER did with BLM. Also, Obama worked on the sly through fusion centers; Trump openly and brazenly applied the fascist jackboot. Someone who’s open about it feels beyond accountability (except to his bloodthirsty, gun-toting base) and is OBVIOUSLY willing to be much more extreme about crushing dissent–even to enlist his base in doing so. This extremism is reflected in Trump’s unprecedented statement that he might not accept the results of the election. Neither Obama nor Biden would go full fascist in this way–largely because they answer to a much saner base that includes MANY progressives.”
JO’D responds: (BNMW #2) writes: “Trump openly and brazenly applied the fascist jackboot.”
As did Obama, who effectively ended the First Amendment’s protection of peaceful assembly and protest. With regard to Occupy Wall Street, Obama allowed U.S. police to mace students in the face, entrap peaceful protesters and journalists by the hundreds, fire tear gas canisters at point blank range, hospitalizing peaceful protesters, burn our libraries to the ground — and finally, he coordinated an illegal, federally-directed, multi-city crackdown across the nation to violently dismantle our camps. And he used non-uniformed private contractors as a part of this effort.
What has Trump done that exceeds Obama’s jackbooted response? Nothing. He’s merely matched it.
(And you’ll note that, in making my point, I didn’t even have to get into Obama’s unconscionably brutal treatment of Water Protectors among the Standing Rock Sioux, Native Americans trying to prevent the building of a dangerous pipeline over one of the continent’s most important aquifers.)
BNMW #2 writes: “Trump, by contrast with Biden, is likely to have a death toll exceeding both World Wars and the Holocaust combined, due to his beyond-criminal climate policy. Moreover, he’ll have done more than lend a hand; it will have under his command as president. As is to be expected, you completely ignore this genocide-in-the-works.
“And concerning the election, Trump DIDN’T just make a statement; even facing an election, he was willing to use federal agents as his personal army against dissent. You’re also discounting Trump’s motivations: 1) losing is what he dreads most and 2) he faces not just the lifelong stigma of being a loser (‘the worst president ever’), but many criminal prosecutions if he loses. His motivation to stay president is STRONG and DESPERATE.
“I disagree with nothing you’ve said about Russiagate; in fact, one quarrel I’d have with Norman Soloman and many progressives is that they haven’t made it anything like the grievance against Democrats it DESERVES to be. That still doesn’t make them more dangerous than Trump.”
Progressive #3 responds to BNMW #2: “Obama believed in science and yet he took credit for growing the oil and gas industry by 88% over 8 years. That’s just in the U.S. – he was also selling fracking abroad. Methane output has skyrocketed in recent years, in part due to fracking. For that matter, the oil and gas industry executives ‘believe in science’ too. The planet is run by political leaders who ‘believe in science’, and yet most of humanity is still headed right off a cliff.
“Trump, on the other hand, persists in a moronic climate change denial, even as much of his base constituency realize it’s a serious problem. Fewer people deny the need to act on climate at the organizational, local and state levels when the federal government is so clearly out of touch with reality.
“Look beyond the rhetoric.”
JO’D responds (to BNMW #2): (BNMW #2) writes: “I disagree with nothing you’ve said about Russiagate; in fact, one quarrel I’d have with Norman Soloman and many progressives is that they haven’t made it anything like the grievance against Democrats is DESERVES to be. That still doesn’t make them more dangerous than Trump.”
Thanks for this, but the Democrats being the driving force taking us to the brink of a third World War might actually make them “more dangerous than Trump.” Russiagate was particularly irresponsible and reckless since it empowered the neocons and corporate media to constantly harangue Trump from the right — demanding that he act more hawkish.
How insane and evil is it, exactly, to take an unbalanced, amoral clown like Trump — and urge him toward WORLD WAR III on the basis of utter fabrications, simply because one sees political advantage in it?
That’s what the Democrats have done, and it’s beyond evil. It’s sheer lunacy.
Also, Trump’s climate policies are hardly any more destructive than President Obama’s were.
Obama was the #1 president in U.S. history in terms of increasing domestic oil production. He aggressively exported fracking, a uniquely dangerous accelerator of climate change, across the globe. He opened the Arctic for drilling (the first president to do so), which scientists and activists like Bill McKibben have declared “off-limits” if the biosphere is to have any hope of surviving. He brutalized peaceful Native Americans protesting dangerous pipelines. He coddled and rewarded British Petroleum after they befouled the Gulf of Mexico. And he effectively vetoed legal carbon limits and polluter liability, making the Paris Climate Accords a toothless placebo.
Considering these facts, President Obama is arguably more responsible for the imminent collapse of the biosphere than Donald Trump, because: A) he did more harm and broke more new ground in humanity’s assault on the planet; and B) the center-left and faux-liberal class celebrated him as he did so, imagining that he was some kind of “environmentalist.”
At least, with Trump in office, the mainstream is paying attention and protesting Trump’s continuation of his predecessors’ wholesale assault on Earth’s life-giving systems.
(BNMW #2) responds: “Obama had a MIXED record on climate, as I’m sure major activists like McKibben and Naomi Klein will tell you. Trump’s recorded has been UNMIXED–one of pure, reckless destruction, as if he has a personal vendetta against climate science. It’s one thing to believe in that science (and answer to a base that believes in that science even more strongly) while being compromised by corruption. It’s quite another to be utterly corrupt and HATE climate science, while being egged on by a base that hates it as much as you do. Learn the difference!
“Trump simply sees China as a more important enemy than Russia and seems, if anything, more willing to start a nuclear war. His nuclear budget and testing–as well as his disgust with nuclear arms agreements–speak volumes.”
JO’D responds: Trump’s “nuclear budget” is basically the same as Obama’s: a one-trillion-dollar investment in the “modernization” of our nuclear weapons arsenal, including billions for the development of “usable” nukes (an obscenity).
And you didn’t respond to my point that Trump has merely continued the climate policies of his predecessors, whereas Obama exploded previous restraints and forged previously unthinkable climate-destroying policies.
Obama dramatically broke new ground, causing Bill McKibben to say his actions “undermined” his climate rhetoric, and “no one can really listen to what he’s saying.”
In Paris, Obama gave the cancer patient a placebo, and everyone relaxed, thinking that some meaningful action had been taken. It hadn’t. The patient is dying.
Trump, however, offers no placebos, only more of the same — but without the Democrats’ smoke and mirrors — so we resist him. Which is more than the Blue No Matter Who crowd ever did with Obama. Rather, they elected to champion one of the most steadfast, canny proponents of fascism in American history, the president who gave away the store — when he had a “Blue” super-majority — to Wall Street oligarchs, neocons, climate destroyers, and outright, torturing, journalist-hunting, society-surveilling, warmongering fascists.
(BNMW #2) responds: “When the push and shove are as dangerous as Trump, it’s rational to yield our votes–though NEVER our support. I actually wanted Bernie or Bust to play electoral chicken with Clinton, making a set of demands and keeping her in suspense about whether we’d vote for her if she didn’t meet the demands. Some were pre-election demands, like openly and repeatedly denouncing the TransPacific Partnership. With the pre-election demands, she simply couldn’t cheat. My strategy would have been difficult to execute, but it was all we could RATIONALLY do to exert pressure once Trump became the nominee.
“But I was voted down, by the BoB board, which I think made BoB irrelevant by not using suspense over our votes to press demands. At least we would have stayed in the news, and not made ourselves look crazy by helping to elect Trump.”
JO’D responds: Only the notion that Bernie boosters “helped elect Trump” is a malicious lie promulgated by the corporate media and Democratic Party.
In truth, Bernie voters largely fell in line. Ultimately, nearly nine out of ten of us ended up voting for Sec. “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton out of fear of Trump (not me — I found it impossible to cast my vote for either racist, warmongering, corrupt fascist, so I voted for Dr. Jill Stein).
Compare that number to the percentage of Clinton voters in 2008 who refused to vote for Barack Obama and instead became “PUMAs” (Party Unity My Ass!) and “Democrats for McCain!”
That number is 25%.
Yes, one in four Clinton voters in 2008’s Democratic Primary ended up voting for McCain/Palin. How appalling is that?
Progressive #4 cites JO’D saying “the notion that Bernie boosters ‘helped elect Trump’ is a malicious lie promulgated by the corporate media and Democratic Party…In truth, Bernie voters largely fell in line.”
(Adding): “Yes, as I’ve noted quite a few times: The Sanders-to-Trump switch voters were not progressive Sanders supporters; they were conservative Democrats – drawn to Sanders’ economic populism until he was out, after which they went for Trump’s bogus economic populism and racism:
“Re the conservative Democrats who voted for Trump in swing states:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/24/16194086/bernie-trump-voters-study
“Re the Obama financial crisis bailout and Trump’s bogus economic populism that – together – got the US Trump: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/the-biggest-legacy-of-the-financial-crisis-is-the-trump-presidency
(BNMW #2) writes: “But I’m NOT talking simply about “Bernie boosters” (whatever that means). I’m talking specifically about the Bernie or Bust movement, which was a minority-but-meaningful subset of Bernie supporters; the Bernie or Bust pledge had over 100,000 signers.
“Multiple factors had a role in Trump beating Clinton, but there were certainly enough Bernie or Busters for the movement to be one of them. Of course the Dem establishment deliberately (and predictably) exaggerated the role of Bernie or Bust, but my point is that the movement, by not following my advice, made itself vulnerable to that smear. In fact, I seem to recall that Victor Tiffany at one point tried to prove BoB was largely responsible for Clinton’s loss. Electing Trump is NOT something a movement seeking moral credibility wants on its resume!”
JO’D responds: (BNMW #2) writes: “Electing Trump is NOT something a movement seeking moral credibility wants on its resume!”
But we didn’t “elect Trump” and should vehemently deny that deeply dishonest, bullying claim.
Let’s be clear: Trump voters and the electoral college elected Trump. (Along with the Clintons, I suppose, who first encouraged Trump to run, then deployed their allies in the media to favor Trump over the rest of the GOP presidential field, on the theory that he would be “easiest to beat” — their fatally stupid “Pied Piper” strategy.)
The “Lesser Of Two Evils” (LOTE) voters who relentlessly try to shame us into voting for the GOP’s ever-faithful partners did their level best to elect Sec. Hillary Clinton! Only they failed, sparing the world a second Clinton presidency (a second round of colossal victories for the far-right, victories that no Republican could possibly manage: the TPP, WWIII, more drilling in the Arctic, privatized Social Security?).
Meanwhile, Bernie boosters (in politics, a “booster” is a supporter) did our best to elect one of the only politicians in America who is not a deeply corrupt lunatic — only we did so in a primary rigged by the worst of the worst: https://invitation2artivism.org/the-immediate-issue-here-is-a-million-black-and-brown-and-asian-americans-losing-their-votes/
So, don’t let these fear-driven supporters of tyranny, racism, and global destruction bully you with their ridiculous lies.
There’s no shame whatsoever in denying our vote to a neo-McCarthyite Dick Cheney clone who promised a third world war — with her “No-Fly Zones” in Syria, saber-rattling against Iran, unhinged accusations against Russia, and her vow to continue Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” (ringing China with U.S. military bases, missiles, and warships, while pushing the TPP, designed to isolate China economically and politically… as if that were possible in today’s world).
Most importantly, don’t let these brainwashed, fascism-“lite” championing cretins make you feel like you did something wrong if you voted for Dr. Jill Stein in 2016. Third parties hold out the only hope of pulling the country back from this pernicious, apocalypse-delivering duopoly (the two-party shuffle that turns out to be nothing but empty theater, a dog and pony show, where the dog and the pony are secretly best friends and work for the same oligarchs and genocidal imperialists butchering people by the millions and collapsing the biosphere).
Indeed, it was the fear-driven, unthinking Clinton voter who panicked and ended up betraying every progressive, humanistic value they professed to hold when they voted for an unabashed warmonger and unwavering career agent of our lawless, deeply racist, right-wing oligarchy: Sec. Clinton (a member of the neocon vanguard since the 1990s, with her hand in the genocide of 2.7-4.3 million Middle Easterners, predominately Arab Muslim civilians).
The people who voted for sociopathic monsters like Trump and Clinton are the ones who should be ashamed and on the defensive. They’re the ones who should be offering apologies.