Vast Left Makes My Day

How liberating except I live in a swing state and have no such protest vote luxuries. I suspect my vote alone is not all that powerful as a tanking economy will now win the election for Obama anyway (and $600,000,00.00 and a press corp who should be on your payroll, etc. - note I didn't bring up lying, cheating, stealing votes and corrupt party collusion), but why take chances? This of course brings more irony as the Bush-Obama save the rich guys plan has prevailed there as well. Let's hope an Obama presidency will at least make it easier for bitches to get shit done. Here's Vast Left it's entirety and without permission:

Guess what!? Someone asked for my vote!

Irony is so fucking far from dead, it’s not funny.

In 2000, Ralph Nader ran on the notion that the two major parties were virtually indistinguishable.

For six years, George Bush and the Rubber Stamp Republican Congress proved him painfully wrong, and I remained an insufferable (but still, I think, justified) scold toward those who were too pure for Gore.

For two years, however, the Democrat-led 110th Congress has proved Nader right, and Barack Obama promises more of the same when he ups his pay grade.

Nader’s running mate Matt Gonzalez seems to have noticed the latter, if not the former. And his ticket just might get my vote next Tuesday.

Heaven forbid that Obama or Biden ask for my vote.

Obviously, people like me aren’t “real Americans” to them any more than we are to McCain and Palin: partisan, progressive, Reagan-hating, Bush-hating, secular, feminist, pro-gay marriage Baby Boomers who care about poverty, First and Fourth Amendment rights, and rejecting American imperialism. People who prefer logic and truth over blind faith and truthiness. Y’know, people whose agendas must never be listened to.

Instead, we get contentless pap like Biden’s umpteen variations on “we cannot remain red and blue.”

What the fuck does that mean, anyway? That two parties is now one too many? That we literally shouldn’t have a choice? No wonder Oprah called Obama “The One.”

Can you even wait to watch Obama’s 30-minute commercial and revel in the fact that we have no choice of who’s going to be our next president, in blissful awareness that the only viable opposition to him is the sick motherfucker who cheerled the Iraq War, sings about a new one with Iran, and who exploited his POW cred to shred the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions?

I fucking hate the modern Republican Party, so the prospect of its demise doesn’t trouble me, per se.

But if it’s going to be replaced by a single, empty, corporatist, messianic self-help “movement” that offers old, Reagan-flavored wine in hopey-changey bottles, it seems the problem we have is too few parties.

Let’s get one thing straight here: I am not a goddamn purist. I’ve proudly voted for the Democratic presidential candidates from Carter through Kerry. I swallowed my objections to centrist Hillary Clinton because she sometimes talked like a Democrat and emphasized the issues that matter most to me.

Obama, on the other hand, talks like someone who wants to be elected and admired and nothing more, and not at all like someone who’s proud to be a progressive, a liberal, or a Democrat. For the last two years, he has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to put forth a progressive vision for America at a moment that screams and begs for one. And, ironically enough, by failing to use this golden moment to defend and build his presumed brand, he’s left himself vulnerable to wholly unwarranted radical characterizations. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say.

Fortunately for Obama, merely not being a Republican is plenty this year, and whether the Democratic candidate be Chance the Gardner or Change the Huckster makes no difference.

Well, it does to me. Sorry to be so inconvenient, and all.

If the Democratic leadership refuses to offer something decidedly different from what Bush, Bush, and Reagan have served us these last few decades, then perhaps I’ll spend my vote on someone who would: Ralph Nader.

No, he can’t. But he would.

I certainly wish Nader were repentant about playing a role in helping elect George W. Bush. Gore stood for something very different, at least as these eyes saw it.

I’ve yet to see, though, that Obama stands for anything at all. Except symbolically, I’ll grant you. Any person of conscience loves to see color bars lifted and glass ceilings shattered.

But this year, my conscience can’t bring me to vote for either of two tickets that offer more of what’s literally killing this country. I just can’t make the choice between a valueless authoritarian jackass and a valueless hubristic gamesman, especially when they read from the same playbook on virtually every important issue: more war, more ignoring the poor, more corporate welfare, and more substitution of charisma and trivial talking points for essential policy changes and a repudiation of the prevailing (and try to tell ’em apart!) neo-con and neo-liberal orthodoxies.

Though Nader’s prophecy was more or less self-fulfilling, it’s coming true nonetheless.

Perhaps a worse curse than “interesting times” is “ironic times.” And we’re living in ‘em.