As promised, here's my piece in @damemagazine, in which I discuss lessons I learned from the 2000 election. Chief among them: don't listen to Michael Moore.
"Yes, New York went to Gore despite my protest vote. But my individual enthusiasm for Nader helped build a movement, and that movement convinced voters in other states that 'voting your conscience' was a swell idea. And by 'other states,' I mean Florida."
For anyone thinking of voting third party, or protest-voting, or sitting this one out because Bernie got robbed or whatever, here are some inconvenient, if not awful, truths:
There are two parties because THAT'S HOW THE AMERICAN SYSTEM WORKS. Third parties work fine in Europe, in parliamentary systems. Here, they only serve as spoilers. Google “H. Ross Perot.”
Republicans are exploiting the Green Party to make it more difficult for people in swing states to vote by mail.
Michael Moore must be aware of all this. He’s a bad actor, whose livelihood depends on just this sort of chaos. For all his claims to be progressive, he’s essentially working for the Republican Party & has been for 20 years.
Bernie Sanders is the new Ralph Nader, a supposed man of principle who refuses to join a major party. He’s making noise now about Joe’s platform, probably because he hasn’t gotten enough attention lately. Ignore him.
A vote for any candidate from any third party—Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Reform, Communist, Whig, United States Pirate, Rent Is Too Damn High—is a vote for Trump. Period, full stop.
A vote for Biden isn’t a vote for “evil,” as Moore would have it, any more than a vote for Hillary was a vote for evil in ’16, or Obama in ’12 or ’08. But Trump is flat-out evil.
Biden isn’t [fill in the blank] enough for you? Guess what, he doesn’t have to be. No candidate, not even Kamala Harris, is perfect.
So I encourage you to Vote Your Conscience. Which means that, if you don’t vote for Biden, we become Belarus, and you never get the chance to vote in a legitimate election for the rest of your life.
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On January 19, 2021, in the last hours of his presidency, Donald Trump wrote a memo in which he announced that the “binder of materials” received from the FBI via the DOJ a month prior was “declassified to the maximum extent possible.”
This was less than a week after Trump’s second impeachment—just 13 days after his MAGA horde besieged the Capitol in a failed attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of power.
Trump’s presidential Sharpie was busy that morning. On January 19, 2021, he issued pardons for, among many others: Steve Bannon, Elliott Broidy, Jeanine Pirro’s ex-husband Alex, and the disgraced art dealer Helly Nahmad, who had run an illegal gambling operation at Trump Tower.
Elaborating on #DebateNight thoughts that I shared on last night's Five 8 show.
[THREAD]
1/ Why the Dem freakout after the debate? We are all traumatized by 2016, and Biden's performance in the debate triggered our collective trauma. "No! Not again!" Hence the panic.
2/ Where does the panic come from? Is it fear that Joe can't do the job? No. Because we know he can. He's done it for 3.5 years at the highest possible level. The government is in good hands with Joe/Kamala. No worries there. None.
Alito's comments here are similar to remarks made by Rev. C. John McCloskey, Opus Dei priest and spiritual godfather to the Catholic extremist Leonard Leo cabal, to Charles Pierce 21 years ago. He, too, regarded the so-called culture wars as a Manichean struggle.
"Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life...to choose to survive w/ people who think it’s OK to kill women & children or for—quote—homosexual cpls to exist and be recognized? No, I don’t think that’s possible,” he said.
"But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way. If American Catholics feel that’s troubling, let them. I don’t feel it’s troubling at all.”
Like many leaders of the reactionary right—Mike Johnson, Mike Davis, Stephen Miller, and so on—the current head of the Heritage Foundation has a dull, forgettable name: Kevin Roberts.
[THREAD]
2/ Roberts has a winsome smile, a PhD in U.S. history, a background in academia, & a well-earned reputation as a nice guy. Who could have imagined that this bright, friendly Gen Xer would be leading a Christian conservative counter-reformation—a crusade to end American democracy?
3/ In 2013, Roberts, who is Catholic, became the second president of Wyoming Catholic College, a strict, almost monastic institution est. in 2007 that provides “a rigorous immersion in...the spiritual heritage of the Catholic Church”—and that will throw you out if you hook up.
If action is character, as F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed, then it is instructive to look at the life of Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson in reverse, Benjamin Button style. . .
[THREAD]
1/ It is the night before Veteran’s Day, 2021. On his primetime Fox News program, Tucker Carlson argues that the U.S. should back Russia, and not Ukraine, in the escalating conflict between the two countries. “Why would we take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side?”
2/ He insists that choosing Putin’s dictatorship over Zelensky’s democracy is a no-brainer because of “energy reserves.” This is either breathtaking ignorance of the region’s history or straight-up Kremlin propaganda. Or, I suppose, both.