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I sorta had a feeling you wouldn't make even the slightest effort to defend that bullshit you had said.
No, politicians are not at all your friends. What you mean when you say "support" for Biden or that Biden betrayed us, or that thing shills sometimes say about "falling in line behind" the Democrats and how they don't want to do it, is very weird to me.
Nobody in politics is your friend. The government is just a big, corrupt, very dangerous machine. It runs on money and propaganda and defense contractors, and sometimes good things come out of it and sometimes bad things, and Biden is one little cog in that machine. That's why I'm comfortable saying good things that Biden did, or that he's doing a very bad thing by enabling a genocide -- I'm not viewing either of those as a statement of my "allegiance." It's just, like, hey I am a free person and here is how I am viewing the world and what the truth is.
Ralph Nader did an excellent interview talking about productive ways to push the Democrats to the left, and how upset he was at Democratic voters who were throwing away an opportunity to get some concessions from the Biden administration in exchange for their vote. His viewpoint makes a ton of sense to me.
Your viewpoint -- sort of based on emotion, this sort of teenager mentality like "YOU'RE DEAD TO ME NOW I'LL CALL UNCLE TRUMP TO COME OVER AND BURN THE HOUSE DOWN BECAUSE WHO CARES YOU BROKE MY HEART" coupled with a lot of the sins you're accusing him of actually being things he didn't do, is just weird. Like, if you want to push Biden left, fuckin go for it man. Sounds great. But if you've decided that if Trump comes to power and nukes Iran and makes being gay illegal and puts all the Hispanics in camps and cancels the next election, that's just the price the country will pay because Biden said this wrong thing about racism and it was so hurtful to you and he's definitely a bad person and that good person / bad person is even relevant to how to vote, then okay sure. I won't tell you not to. But I don't think you should pretend that I'm the one treating my politicians in a strange parasocial non sensible way.
Lawrence O'Donnell said it best in this extremely hard to find video because they keep scrubbing it from YouTube...
https://youtu.be/FqRNnIMDkUY
Edit:
He's apparently an idiot, since every time Democrats haven't won, the entire country has been dragged right.
Immigration is an interesting example of this. Funny enough, when Democrats were in power, policy trended further and further left with amnesty for dreamers and accepting refugees. After losing in 2016, the Democrat position has moved towards stronger enforcement and border security.
If Lawrence has not changed his mind since then, he's a giant fucking idiot who doesn't see reality. The problem with not voting for Democrats is that it means Republicans win, and they have a habit of moving all issues to the right.
You want the party to move left? Elect more progressives. Understand why voters are picking moderates over progressives in primaries, and course correct. It isn't dark money, because there's been plenty of that thrown around, and fake progressives have had more on hand versus their primary opponents.
Yeah. It's a big shame. I read Lawrence O'Donnell's book about 1968. It's so fucking sad. I couldn't finish.
And then, even with all the justification all the progressives had for quitting from the political system -- basically on par with if the US was directly sending 19-year-old US citizens over to Gaza and having them blow up hospitals and get their balls shot off, or if Biden himself were approving of the brutalizing of protestors, like sending them to the hospital with nightstick fractures and covered in blood, not "just" pepper spraying them and putting cuffs on them -- I feel like you can draw this absolutely direct line from 1968 and the disillusionment that stemmed from it into the grim nightmare politics that took over in America, because only the assholes were still voting, from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton until now we have just a wreckage of a system that someone from the 60s wouldn't even recognize.
Basically I feel like 2016 was a repetition of that same betrayal, and I'm really hoping that 2024 isn't a repetition of the same fascist takeover that's enabled by it, because now we're much much closer to the edge. Daniel Ellsberg said that all the things Nixon did to him that formed one piece of his collapse and fall when they came to light, they're all legal now.
I think something we often forget is that people can have spot on analysis and very intellectual takes in the past, but it doesn't necessarily mean their modern takes are also good. Sometimes that's an inherent thing too because of changing times. People who criticized US actions in the cold war were likely right -- but a lot of them have adopted the imperialist position today that Ukraine belongs to Russia and it should be a pawn between NATO and Russia, instead of a self sovereign country that makes its own decisions.
Makes you wonder a bit how things will develop in the future, but I digress.
Hey, don't bring history and facts into this, you're gonna scare ozma!
And then...
https://readsludge.com/2024/03/27/biden-re-election-benefits-from-dark-money-he-says-erodes-public-trust/
Gosh, you mean that he's playing by the rules that the republicans have put in place and not unilaterally disarming? How scandalous.
They should flush the entire "money is speech" concept, but until we can replace most of the SC with people who don't suck, we work with what we got.
Oddly, sort of related to some of these same complainers sitting out 2016. Weird how elections can have consequences.
"Don't threaten me with the supreme court!"
"Omg why did Biden let Roe get overturned?"
I think there's probably a tendency for a lot of well meaning people to blame Democrats because their civics knowledge is less than comprehensive. And I don't blame them entirely for that, our education system isn't great.
Back in the Clinton/Bush era 20 years ago when he said that, I actually think it made quite a bit of sense. The Democrats were a lot more corporate-friendly (dropping corporate tax instead of raising it like Biden did, boosting the WTO instead of telling them to go fuck themselves like Biden did), and the Republicans weren't trying to kill their political opponents or put minority groups into literal concentration camps.
I'm not even gonna comment on "'they' keep scrubbing it from YouTube."
I'm starting to believe you're secretly David Brock running a new PAC.