Sure, I'll Vote for Obama on Tuesday

Come on, I was just kidding.  Jill Stein?  Ha!  I've got to be kidding myself.

Look, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  We all know that.  I have been brought around.  Not, mind you, by Obama himself.  He's the same as he ever was, a rather opportunistic shredder of the Bill of Rights who can claim, along with George W. Bush, that he was there when the Constitutional lights went out.  The NDAA-driven indefinite detention, deprivation of counsel, even murder of American citizens by Presidential fiat?  Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan with a 2% accuracy and effectiveness in killing the terrorists we're mass producing by....drone strikes?

Voting your conscience in modern America is terribly self-indulgent, however.  It's kind of intellectually fussy.  In a country which has fundamentally lost its mind (as this one certainly has), one must vote for the candidates of the psychopathic party which is closer to the psychopathology you favor.  I know, in my heart of hearts, that the good and noble Barack Obama only engages in systematic unconstitutional and even illegal acts (of war, of violations of civil rights) simply because he needs to convince a sufficient number of uninformed and deranged fellow Americans that he has what it takes to be the leader of an insane country.  I think he's done that.

Right Wing lunacy, on the other hand, guided mostly by an obese and moronic monstrosity whose cerebrum was turned to lemon-flavored Jell-O long ago by chronic, massive Oxycontin abuse, is way too dangerous.  Voting for Romney increases the chances that a Republican mob will seize total power and institute a kind of American Fourth Reich.

The Republicans have become completely, freaking nuts, their ideology shaped by vast conspiracy-theory nonsense, theocratic yearning, anti-scientific obscurantism, and racial and misogynistic hatreds.  Nothing whatsoever should be done to help them.  In such circumstances, consistency doesn't matter.  Only survival does.

Four more years!  Of something or other.

Pensées dans l'isoloir

Everything just sounds more deeply philosophical in French.  It translates as "thoughts in the voting booth," and concerns that quiet moment, when one is all by oneself facing the ballot, and your brave and independent pronouncements about voting for a third party candidate are at last put to the real test.

So much to think about.  So many pensées.  Have I made myself a victim of my own "false equivalence," that easy cop-out favored by the Mainstream Media (those sycophants you often call the Lamestream Media in your snarky moments)?  Is it just too easy to say that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are indistinguishable politically, that voting for the lesser of two evils is nevertheless voting for evil, that third parties with actual real, helpful ideas can never break through to relevance and power if election after pitiful election we keep saying to ourselves, not this time, there is simply too much at stake?

Certainly these are conundra worthy of Voltaire and Descartes.  


One begins with the electoral facts.  California's 55 electoral votes are cast on a winner-take-all basis. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that anyone other than Barack Obama is going to win the Golden State.  Plus, I know that my vote is worth 25% of the vote of a pickup-driving cowboy from Laramie, Wyoming.  Wyoming has the constitutional minimum of 3 electoral votes (matching its two senators and one congressman) with a population of 563,000.  California's 55 electoral votes are based on a population of 37 million, roughly 74 times larger than Wyoming.  Yet the electoral votes are only 18 times as many.  Since we do not have direct election of Presidents by popular vote in this country, my vote is not what it appears to be in the first place.  It's a diluted ballot that I cast; thus, as far as symbolic votes for third party candidates are concerned, California is a nice safe haven to exercise one's conscience (and if it's not safe, whoever in the United States indulges himself in an act of conscience?  Certainly almost no one in the White House or Congress.)


There is a good reason that the Obama and Romney campaigns do not waste their money running expensive TV ads in California.  I hear about these "hard hitting" ads in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but I never have my focus on "Big Bang Theory" disturbed by actual viewing.


Thus, a voter in California who worries a lot about how he votes, as a matter of reality, is engaging in a form of electoral grandiosity.  The die is cast; the fix is in.  Maybe the national polls talk about "razor thin" margins for Obama, a lead within the "margin of error," it's currently "neck and neck" at 47% all (that was actually the last number I heard - rather ironic, because I imagine, Venn Diagram-speaking, that there is a huge overlap between that 47% and the 47% that Romney despises).


I can assure you, however, that the campaign honchos do not look at those national polls.  They're irrelevant.  Ohio and Florida, Ohio & Florida, Ohio/Florida: color in the rest of the states red or blue, and just hold the elections in Ohio and Florida.  I'd hate to be a voter in Ohio: I'd be so tense every four years.  Here I take my place among the voters of a state with one of the worst-performing educational systems in the country (its glory days as No. 1 long past), casting my vote upon a sea of votes from millions and millions of uninformed, functionally illiterate, easily-manipulated (remember Proposition 8, anyone?) fellow citizens.  Please: give myself a break.


On the merits: I would rather see Obama win, and I'm fairly sure he will.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, however, believe any longer in the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  That is not false equivalence; it's just the way it is.  For a person like me, a "process liberal" as opposed to a "substantive liberal," my enthusiasm for the voting franchise took a major hit during the Misrule of George W. Bush, and virtually all of Bush's most repugnant, anti-Constitutional positions have been continued, and even expanded by Barack Obama.  (I don't know if you've noticed, but Barack is just not real original.)  Both parties appear content with the awful ruling in the Citizens United case.  Mr. Obama peeped about it in one State of the Union address, and that was it.  The big telecom companies were just granted final immunity by the Supreme Court from their complicity in all of the warrantless wiretapping of the Bush (and Obama, of course) years.


On and on.  Both candidates are warmongers, both will overspend on the defense budget forever, both will kowtow and cater to the interests of Wall Street over Main Street (it's where the campaign cash is).


But, but...yes, I know what you're going to say.  What about abortion and gay marriage?  What about those Supreme Court appointments?  This is the ratio decidendi (basis of decision) of all elections, isn't it?  This is actually what the Presidential election is about: not tax policy (the President doesn't decide tax policy, the Congress does); not the "war on terror" (there's no difference); not the "budget" or deficit (the Obama Administration doesn't even propose budgets anymore); not environmental issues (both candidates are against the Earth); not nothin'.  Abortion, and in recent years, gay marriage.


Look, I wrote a screed on the effect of overturning Roe vs. Wade a long time ago.  Such a ruling does not mean that abortion is everywhere illegal in the United States.  It just means that you can't get an abortion in a Red State. So weigh that in the balance.  You have to travel from Texas to California.  My mother did that (not to get an abortion - to get the hell out of Texas).  Texas is a good place to get out of, for whatever reason.  


Should the rise of actual alternatives to the Two Party Duopoly system, with its thorough corruption and ossified inability to adapt to a changing world, be forever held hostage so that women in an unfortunate situation do not have to travel from Texas to California?  Nothing is perfect in this world, after all.  Perhaps we could organize the modern equivalent of the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad for women who need to travel to escape the ideological slavery of their judgmental, religious fellow citizens.  That, in fact, would be an excellent plank in a Third Party Platform. You have to take a few chances to get anywhere.

What if we didn't have Roe versus Wade?

Criticisms of Barack Obama seem to come in two distinct styles. From the Right, particularly the radio voices which provide the Loony Bin Conservatives with their Weltanschauung, are the usual totally unhinged, clinically insane descriptions of Obama as a Hitlerian Socialist, whatever that is, bent on forcing collectivizaton of the people, herding everyone into FEMA Death Camps, and giving over what little the federal government has left to a cabal of Wall Street Bankers who go to dinner parties with him in Manhattan. Weirdly enough, this is not in any sense an exaggeration of the tone.

From the liberal side of politics, the criticisms focus on Obama's relentless double-crossing of the people who elected him; his abysmal record of refusing to take any kind of prosecutorial action against the thieves and grifters of those same people in his dinner parties at Robert, the trendy Manhattan eatery where he raises money; his free pass to the war criminals and torturers of the previous administration; and his worse-than-Bush record on civil liberties and transparency in government. One could go on and point out his doubling-down on the most pointless and absurd war in American history, the invasion of Afghanistan and our residence there for the past ten years to avenge attacks emanating from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula - but it all just becomes words.

The question is what to do about it. Despite the increasingly faint-hearted "support" Obama draws from die-hard Democratic partisans, I think he's been a colossal disappointment, almost surreal, movie-like, "Manchurian Candidate" in scope, but there he still is, and he'll be on the ticket next year for the Democrats, matched up against either a guy who believes in a fable about Jesus Christ visiting Native Americans in the Missouri area (according to Joseph Smith's reading of gibberish through the portal of a Magic Box), or a C+ student from Texas A&M who makes George W. Bush look like Charles Van Doren.

So then what? One liberal trope an apostate is immediately hit with, of course, is always the same: what happens to the "composition" of the Supreme Court if we put someone like Rick Perry in the White House? My first reaction is that we'll have much bigger problems than the composition of the Supreme Court in that bizarre eventuality, but the composition of the Supreme Court will suffer yet more, to the extent that a court which agrees that corporations should be allowed to control political elections entirely can get any worse. But certainly one casualty of a court which finally tips over to the definite 5-4 or 6-3 Cro-Magnon majority necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade is that a woman's right to choose what to do with a pregnancy during the first two trimesters may very well lose its federal guarantee.

I wrote a blog a while back on the subject of Wade reversal, and pointed out that if a future Supreme Court decision decided that the "zone of privacy" reasoning which supports Roe vs. Wade was a bunch of liberal nonsense, that such a ruling would not mean that abortion would automatically be illegal, nationwide, the following day. Far from it. Such a decision would mean that the states were not prevented from enacting laws to limit or eliminate abortion, but it would not compel the states to criminalize abortion. The distinction is very important.

I have long thought that the abortion decision rested on a very slender reed, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion per se is certainly not mentioned in the Constitution (one would not expect it to be), but more fundamentally the "zone of privacy" implied in the Ninth Amendment in the Bill or Rights is also a legal concoction, and it is on this construct that Roe vs. Wade is built. The Ninth Amendment only says,

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Did the people retain the right of abortion when the Constitution was enacted? I don't want to sound like Antonin Scalia (ever), but it is a stretch. Of course, did the people retain the right of back-door sex and other fun bedroom activities all protected as well by the Ninth Amendment's "zone of privacy" (Griswold vs. Connecticut, 1965)? It all depends on whose ox is being gored, or whose....never mind.

Further, Justice Harry Blackmun's neat and tidy analysis based on trimesters and viability has also been superseded by the current state of gestational science. Be that as it may: provided the Supreme Court simply left it at that, reversing Roe vs. Wade on its own terms, and the Clowns of Capitol Hill did not rush into the vacuum thus created and attempt to pass a federal criminal law banning abortion, then those states favorably disposed to choice issues would provide abortions; and those states which are inclined to believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and will only be around a little while longer until things heat up in Israel can do what they want at last, and we all know what that is. Perhaps a happier country all the way around, for as long as it lasts (the country, I mean). Indeed, abortion has been such a polarizing issue (like forever) in this country, that a state-by-state decision through local plebiscites might accomplish both the goal of local self-determination and a goad to the realization among the states that, you know, we just really don't have that much in common anymore, but we'll always cherish our initial misconceptions about each other. What a relief, however, if the issue of court-packing could finally stop distorting national elections, and we could all blissfully accept that we were throwing away our vote because we just can't stand voting for someone we don't really enthusiastically support simply because the other guy will appoint another Luddite to the high bench and disrupt the delicate Roe balance.

Looked at that way, maybe the Ransom Note approach to presidential elections could be altered somewhat. Forget the Supreme Court; they've certainly forgotten you, my fellow American commoners. If you want to vote for Roseanne Barr, who's running for president (of both the USA and Israel, simultaneously) on a platform of replacing fiat currency with a barter system based on vegetables, restoration of the guillotine as punishment for the obscenely rich, and a return to an agrarian economy in America, then you can do so with a fairly clear conscience, simply remembering that if you want to have liberal rights in the state where you live, you'll have to work for them at that level. Which, now that you mention it, is where there's a chance you could actually affect the outcome.

Will the Democrats Replace Obama in 2012?

Pretty catchy title, I think, the kind real columnists use. First of all, I want to go on record as saying I'm going out of the Obama-bashing business. No more. It's one of my New Year's Resolutions. I'm motivated by something that Scout said about Boo Radley; it's like killing a mockingbird. I can be as decent as Scout, I think (although that's tough, come to think of it). Barack's problem is that he's just not up to the job. Call it anything you like, inexperience, naivete, constitutional inability to be tough when tough is needed, fundamental confusion about what a chief executive is supposed to do - whatever, it's obvious the media got carried away in 2008 with the chance to elect either the first minority or the first woman President, and did not pay enough attention to the very specific attributes of the candidates in question, focusing solely on the "narrative line" and newsworthiness of this novelty. It was just too good for the networks and news outlets to pass up, and thus, once again, we got sold a bill of goods. There is a very real difference between an Image and an Actual Person, because it's the second version of reality that actually shows up in the Oval Office later, not the Virtual Hologram. There's no point in going over and over this obvious situation, and there aren't going to be any big surprises from here on out. It's all kind of painful to watch, actually.

The question is what the Democratic Party will do about it. Will they run Obama in 2012? My guess is that they certainly will. I base this guess on the party's traditional tendency to fulfill death wishes. The Democrats value things more than winning, a trait not much shared by their Republican opposition. The leadership of the Democrats is kind of like a mediocre college coach who prizes things like "attitude" and "sticking with the program" and "working his way up" to the starting rotation, et cetera, more than chalking up W's in the Win-Loss column. When it's your turn in the Democratic Party, then you get the Big Job. I used to write little parodies a few years ago about Mr. Mumbles & The Diva, based on the Congressional leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. If you can find two people in the country, in any line of work, who are less inspirational and effective than these two, then you should really submit their names to the Guinness Book of World Records. With substantial, sometimes huge, majorities in the House and Senate, these two stiffs were unable to make any dent in the Republican juggernaut. When Bush was President, Pelosi, who presided over the Constitutional body responsible for all budgetary appropriations, could not figure out a way to deprive Bush of the money he needed for the (a) Iraq War, (b) the Afghanistan War, (c) his Black Sites, or anything else. Although Bush and Cheney would admit on national television every couple of weeks that they were torturing people, Pelosi could not could come up with any argument that the failure of the United States to observe the Convention Against Torture (signed by Reagan), which requires the investigation and prosecution of anyone suspected of torture within a party-state's jurisdiction (and remembering that treaties are the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution), might at the very least be grounds for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Clinton was impeached because he horsed around with an intern and then didn't want to talk about it. The Democrats could not see their way through to impeachment when dealing with confessed felonies and war crimes. The Democrats play badminton, the Republicans play Rollerball.

I always thought Pelosi seemed more like someone who should be walking up to you at a party in Pacific Heights with a tray of canapés than the leader of one of the world's great legislative bodies. Mr. Mumbles, on the other hand, was so completely intimidated by the badly outnumbered Republicans in the Senate that he would blanch and hide under his desk if Bill Frist or Mitch McConnell handed him a note reading, "We might filibuster that." That's all it took. So while the official line now is that Obama is too "bipartisan" or too accommodating, in truth it's the whole group of Democrats in Washington who don't know how to return fire.

It's possible the Republicans might bail them out in 2012 by running a lunatic like Sarah Palin or a cornpone empty suit like Mike Huckabee. I think this is the GOP leadership's great fear, in fact. This would represent a hijacking of the Republican Party by the Tea Party zealots. It's hardly impossible. A recent poll demonstrates that about 40% of the American populace really, truly believes that the universe was created in seven days by an omnipotent being. Forty percent. In such a country, just about anything is possible. However, I think it's too soon even for an open-air asylum like the United States for Sarah Palin to win a presidential election. The independents (the modern key to any election) would recoil in horror, weigh the real consequences of their self-indulgent pouting about Obama, and rush to the polls to give the O-Man another term. Sort of kicking the Apocalypse Can down the road a few years.

But if the Republicans can enforce their legendary discipline in their ranks and head off the Cuckoo Brigade, and run someone plausible, they'll probably win. In November, 2010 the Republicans pulled off the biggest midterm defeat of Congressional Democrats in the history of the United States (way to go Barack, Harry & Nancy! okay, that was absolutely the last time.) And that Republican winner (who might very well preside over the collapse of the American Republic) will, if s/he wins, defeat Barack Obama, who will advance to the Democratic nomination by acclamation, as the Democratic delegates shout out their approval in the form of a Voice Suicide Note.