Bloody Hell Tbogg, if I can remember my wordpress password long enough to log in can’t you put in the effort to pretend to be happy to keep me as a faithful reader? I began reading your site among the first I ever read on the internet. You are like the weird brother I actually have. Don’t ever change and don’t ever leave.

I think its funny that the fist pictured in the poster is so obviously not actually clenched–[fights off desire to make joke about limp wrists].

aimai

Rogers Rules of Order say you can’ t hold your Gay Meeting without a Gay Agenda published and distributed before the meeting. I simply can’t discuss an agenda I haven’t seen. When will our homosexual overlords take responsibility for these simple duties?

Hey!

aimai

Tbogg, after reading through the trolling on this site I finally eliminated a few blogs from my blogreading list because who needs these assholes?

But what I really wanted to say is that I think your basic point needs correcting:

Waiting for a third party or arguing about how no one should in good conscience elect a dem is “like wishing cancer on everyone else in the US so that you can lose a few pounds.”

Because that’s what it amounts to. The trolls who are making this argument do so from the position that they themselves will probably be no worse off–after all “both sides do it” and “there’s no one else.” But the rest of us: women who would lose Roe v. Wade and perhaps contraception, college students, grandma and grandpa, immigrants–they all will get the cancer.

aimai

Beautifully put, MrsTbogg, I couldn’t agree more.

Also I want to point out that this same debate played out when Obama “traded” the bush tax cut extension to get unemployment relief for the 99 weekers. Purity trolls shrieked about how he was failing in brinksmanship. The difference between being the President and being a kibbitzer is that if I argue that the President should let unemployed people starve to death and he doesn’t do it I can still blame the President, but if I’m the President and I let unemployed peopel starve to death I’ve just let people starve to death. One of us has agency and has to use it, every day. The other of us–the back seat bitchers–are simply grandstanding and refusing to make hard choices which will help some and hurt others every time. That’s the nature of hard choices. And that’s the nature of power.

Obama has not always done what I would have done in a policy sense, or in a strategic sense (given that we sometimes share the same policy goals) but he has done more for the causes I prefer to see advanced than either a Republican or a fantasy perfect “progressive” who didn’t get his hands dirty enough to get elected ever would have.

aimai

I’d like to think these are all trolls but people who I otherwise respect over at Alicublog sing the same damned song, and they share it with Digby, who I really do respect. It makes me sick to my stomach to read this bitter-pseudo leftist dead ender shit. Here’s why:

There is no real, serious, alternative to Democratic politics and politicians in this country. Hasn’t been for a long time and never will be at the rate the intellectual left is going. These people are not door knocking. They haven’t supported the unions which is the only organized labor group. They aren’t creating new organized voting groups. Hell, they aren’t even playing identity politics with the identities we have out there.

What we have to vote on is a Democratic candidate as opposed to a Republican candidate. That’s it. That’s the choice. Someone whose party and whose history and whose stated policies are slightly more conducive to our happiness and success as a people and as a planet vs. someone whose etc..etc…etc… are entirely inimical to our happiness and success. That’s the choice.

Its not imaginary Obama tucking you in at night and prosecuting the monsters under the bed vs the white version of Obama doing it. Its Obama and (some) of the Democratic representatives fighting sucessfully and unsucessfully to put out the raging fire left by Bush, to get some kind of health insurance for 40 million uninsured, to preserve medicare, medicaid, and SS and those other guys who will withdraw to gated communities and watch it all burn down.

That’s the choice. Unfortunately the job of President of the United States also includes Cin C, managing the wars we are already in, protecting aspects of our world domination plan, and continuing to clean up the uncleanable uppable mess that Bush left. It does not include re-writing all the laws on financial regulation unilaterally–see “bicameral legislating body, history of” and “Executive branch, powers of.”

There’s no doubt that a small but vocal number of left of center voters are extremely dissapointed and for some reason kind of personally humiliated to be associated with the Dems and with Obama. For some reason they are as hysterically opposed to Obama and the Dems doing well as a tea party dude or dudette. I think its because they are existentially humiliated by the fact that this fucking centrist “bush’s third term” guy is doing well despite their refusal to back him, that he isn’t sufficiently grateful for their advice and time, that he isn’t sufficiently revolutionary and yet he won the Presidency, and that despite his many mistakes he has done more to put this country on a path to full health care than previous Democratic Presidents ever dreamed of managing.

Obama isn’t perfect but damn, I’m proud of him and Michelle and the work they have done every day for the country against a tidal wave of shit and disrespect. I’m proud to be voting for him again and as for those who won’t–fuck off and vote third party. Your candidate will get what they deserve which reflects the bizarre and masturbatory focus of the purity police: basically no votes. Instead of reconsidering how out of touch your message and your messengers are you will come back to bitch that the Democrats didn’t pay any attention to you. Hopefully we’ll still have a country by then if the rest of us ignore you and still turn out to support our viable candidates.

aimai