“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
“Because our country is misruled by a retarded sociopath who doesn’t care if we live or die.”
“Oh.”
Wednesday morning, April 9 – Passover – Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. Supposedly he is “negotiating” with Joe Biden, but has not endorsed him. Nevertheless with all other candidates out, Biden, former Senator and Vice President, is the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Look, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise in the long run. Not just because Sanders was too easily baited and branded as a “socialist” when that word doesn’t mean the same thing to most Americans that it seems to mean to him. But the reason for that common impression is that America is, on the whole, conservative. Not in the “we hate abortion and gays” sense but in the broader sense of a play-it-safe, work-within-the-system temperament. And sad to say, most Americans seem to prefer a male President to a female one, an older presidential candidate to a younger one, an Anglo-Protestant or Irish Catholic to an atheist or ethnic Jew, and somebody who thinks that America is a fundamentally good place that just needs to be kept on track as opposed to a radical who just wants to burn the motherfucker down.
This isn’t like 2016. If you don’t like Joe Biden, you can’t say you didn’t have enough choices. But voters in the main rounds didn’t like what they got. Kamala Harris? Too pushy, too hard on criminal suspects “of color.” Elizabeth Warren? Too lecturing, too vague. Pete Buttigieg? Too young, too gay. Amy Klobuchar? Too Klobuchar.
And yet, the Left is not happy. They say Joe Biden is “sundowning.” He’s got all kinds of baggage from his time in the Senate, including grilling Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Trumpniks are still going to shout “BURISMA” like it’s a magic word that strikes you with lightning and gives you superpowers. And, supposedly, along with all Biden’s documented cases of inappropriate touching of women, there is a former Biden Senate aide, Tara Reade, who is now saying that in one of their office meetings he pushed her up against the wall and went up her skirt, penetrating her with his fingers. Reade is a Sanders supporter who told reporters she was “deliberately holding interviews only with left-wing outlets” and her story is considered a “credible accusation” mainly by the hard Left, the Trump Right, Reason Magazine, and other people who have a vested interest in making Shinola out of shit.
Y’all notice that this “credible accusation” was never brought up until Biden secured the nomination?
Y’all realize that Trump had two years of Republican control in the Senate AND the House, and they could’ve used that time to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden to their hearts’ content, and it was only after they lost the House and Biden was announcing a presidential run that Hunter Biden working for Burisma became the biggest, most scandalous injustice of 2019? (Y’know, OTHER than Trump getting impeached over it?)
And even this week when Sanders made his announcement, Trump pandered to you, going “OH poor Bernie!! He woulda gotten the nomination, but the system is RIGGED!”
This is why liberals fail. You keep reading the Republicans’ script and thinking it’s yours.
“The system is rigged”? Yeah, I’ve been telling you, the system IS rigged, but that’s NOT why Bernie lost.
I mean, all’y’all saying “I’m only voting Bernie in the general”, if more of you had bothered to show up for the primaries in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, maybe Bernie would be going to the general. Just saying.
As it is, when you threaten not to vote in November, the mainstream liberals and NeverTrumpers will look at you and go, “it’s not like you’re voting in enough numbers now.”
I mean kids, if being a senile potential rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job automatically disqualifies one to be president, you may want to sit down in a strong chair while I explain who the president is now.
Because who the president is now, and what the Banana Republican Party is now, is bearing on our current situation.
The day before, Tuesday, was the primary for Wisconsin. Even given that people were telling Bernie to drop out, the vote needed to be held because this is actually a state election in which one of the state Supreme Court races is at stake. But coronavirus has shut down a lot of states, and a lot of state Democratic parties had agreed to postpone their primaries. There is already talk of making the Democratic National Convention virtual. Earlier this year, Mike Dewine, the pro-life, conservative Republican Governor of Ohio, had postponed their primary at the last minute, and that created a certain amount of controversy. So in Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Tommy Evers agreed with the Republican-controlled legislature that the state contest would proceed as scheduled. But that was before people got a grip on how bad coronavirus was and why social distancing was necessary. So Evers tried to postpone the election, the legislature refused to let him, and they took the case to the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court (who have a justice race on the ballot).
The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. The Governor immediately took the case to the US Supreme Court, and the Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. In addition, SCOTUS decided that there would be no extension for absentee ballots.
Mr. Trump was asked about this in one of his lookit-me-I’m-the-president press conferences, where a reporter asked, “You voted by mail in Florida’s election, last month, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” he replied. “I can vote by mail.”
“How do you reconcile with that?”
“Because I’m allowed to,” Trump said.
Incidentally, Trump also announced that the federal government is ending support for national coronavirus testing as of April 10. Good Friday. [NPR just announced that the government is reversing course on this and continuing the program after all.]
Now, it’s gonna be bad enough with the Supreme Court as a 5-4 majority of relatively young and healthy conservative justices for the foreseeable future, but it is getting increasingly obvious that they will take up and throw down decisions with little regard for how partisan or ridiculous they look, precisely because they are the ultimate constitutional authority. Under John Roberts – who is relatively sane – the Court is getting that much more into enforcing the Trumpnik line of We Can Do Whatever We Want To This Country, Just Because We Can. You let Trump win a second term, he WILL get at least one more justice appointed and the results will be that much more ridiculous, and all the “anti-socialists” who mourned how the Chavistas used the courts to twist Venezuela into their image will suddenly define their take on this attitude as “strict constructionism.” And all the liberals who told us the Constitution is a “living document” that changes according to political norms will find out why others told them that was a bad idea.
And as with Brett Kavanaugh, you can bet that any sexual assault accusations against the Republican nominee will be taken a lot less seriously than Democrats are taking accusations against Biden.
What was all this jazz about “Vote Blue, No Matter Who”?
What was this about “Not Me. US”?
You “progressives” are no more serious about “no matter who” than the mainstream Democrats were when it looked like Bernie was gonna win this. I mean, I’d voted for Bernie in the caucus. Both this one and the last one. And I told people how bogus it was that some mainstream liberals were thinking it would be better to throw the election to Trump rather than let a self-declared socialist become president. But now that Bernie voters are in that position, they think Biden is no better than Trump.
I mean, everybody was asking how Biden was getting so much of the older black vote. Because those people remember Nixon, they remember real segregation, and they know what the stakes are, you entitled prigs. You let Trump get re-elected, he’s gonna make Nixon look like a fuckin’ hippie.
But now that the stakes are more obvious than ever, you “progressives” are telling the rest of us that you’re not going to vote for the designated NotTrump candidate, because you think he’s not worth forcing on the country – knowing that you’re forcing four more years of Trump by default?
Really?
REALLY?
NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY I’M A LIBERTARIAN, YOU DIPSHITS??
Anybody who thinks Joe Biden isn’t good enough for them, you have lost all right to talk shit to me about voting for Gary Johnson in 2016. EVER again.
Cause I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the results to the country, I would regret it more, except that my state ended up going to Hillary without my vote. The reason she lost with a majority of gross votes is because the Electoral College measures results state-by-state, and that’s where third-party votes or “I’m just gonna sit this one out” made a difference in states that Hillary “should’ve” won but didn’t. I don’t think the results will be quite the same this time, cause we now KNOW what we’ve got to lose, and I don’t think that Biden will let Pennsylvania, at least, go for granted.
I do know that the same people who wailed about the Electoral College in 2000 had sixteen years to anticipate Bush v. Gore repeating itself, and they failed to press for the necessary reforms. Not necessarily killing the Electoral College altogether, which is near-impossible and might not be advisable for federalist reasons. But at the very least, working within each state to make the results proportionate within the state, not winner-take-all, and not tied to party affiliation, which would actually be closer to the original intent. No, like “third” parties, Democrats put all their chips on an all-powerful presidency without dealing with the lower levels of government, and now that the presidency and the courts are in the hands of the enemy, Democrats are getting marginalized just like the third parties.
See, Democrats, this is why people don’t want to deal with you, even lots of people on the Left. It’s bad enough to be self-righteous, but self-righteousness is tolerable if you actually know what you’re doing. If you don’t, where do you get off being self-righteous?
What we need is a straight-out reform of the political system, and since Banana Republicans want to make this country more of a Banana Republic, we need Democrats to do what we want. We need ranked-choice voting. We need mail-in and absentee voting. If it’s good enough for our troops, it should be good enough for civilians. We need, ultimately, to nationalize voting in the same way that we have a national post office, so that you don’t have one community with state-of-the-art polling technology and a neighborhood station versus another community where you have to drive miles to vote at Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.
No one has trusted you to do any of this, because you didn’t do it when you had the chance. Third-party people told you that we needed to reform elections, and you went, “Oh, don’t worry. Just give us the government, and then we’ll listen to you. Maybe.” Well, we can’t wait anymore, because if it isn’t blindingly obvious to you (and it isn’t, cause you’re Democrats) the Republicans will not give you another chance at power if you don’t win this year. They have the White House, they have the Senate, they have more and more of the courts, and anything the House wants is gonna be flat-out ignored by Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell. You will still be allowed to exist, like a pet bird or house servant in the manor, but the people you claim to champion will be ground deeper and deeper into the dirt.
So here you are, Democrats. You want the rest of us to goosestep in line behind the political hack? You want “Vote Blue, No Matter Who?” Well, FUCK YOU, cause you’re stuck with it now. You’re going to go out and vote for Joe Biden along with black voters and NeverTrump right-wingers and the rest of NotTrump America who cannot wait four more years for your perfect candidate that you will probably not even nominate anyway. You are going to get Biden over.
And then you are going to LISTEN TO US for a change.
Otherwise don’t cry to us when Jerry Falwell Jr. crowns Donald Trump Jr. king.