There is something profoundly offensive about this declaration and, worse, there is something profoundly insufferable about the sentiments and beliefs behind it.
First of all, it is a matter of extreme white privilege to be able to “Vote Blue No Matter Who!” What this says is that anyone that appears on the ballot as the Presidential challenger to Donald Trump is better than Donald Trump.
Anyone. What this means is that if _______ (fill in the blank) wins/won the Democratic nomination, well, it wouldn’t matter what his/her policies are, what his/her age is, what his/her mental acuity is, or their voting record, or what they smell like: he or she is Blue [read: Democrat], we have to converge and unite behind him/her, our candidate of choice, our ONLY hope to oust the guy in Washington.
Are the people who created and those who advance this slogan unable to discriminate between the various candidates, some of whom are barely indistinguishable from Donald Trump and everything he stands for, and who certainly no better?
What this says to me is that they—the Democratic Party and its supporters—have no consciousness or awareness about the true state of the Union (U.S.), or the true state of the world, or if they do they just don’t care. There’s the privilege: people of color, poor people, women and children, and many other demographics that have historically and routinely denied that space to exist on this earth don’t have such privileges.
So why then would anyone vote for ANY Democratic candidate that the system advances?
Clearly, let’s throw out Bernie Sanders as a “choice”, since the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” is not meant to include Sanders.
The propaganda system has for a long time now daily churned out reports meant to demean and devalue Bernie Sanders, reports designed to shape and direct the voting public away from Sanders and towards someone, anyone, else who will insure that Business as Usual takes the day. However, the slogan was apparently created by the Democratic Party after Super Tuesday with the intention of channeling all voter energies and frustrations into voting for Joe Biden.
Anyone who makes the statement—with or without the insufferable self-righteousness that seems to often accompany it—whether in a Facebook post or in a NYT editorial or sitting at the lunch counter of their local small town diner needs to be prepared for the response that their sloganeering may provoke. In 2016, the response was the victory of Donald Trump.
“Blue no matter who!” is like a slap in the face to a great number of conscious, caring, compassionate people.
What is it that drives the repetition and regurgitation of this vacuous slogan: Callousness? Hope? Obliviousness? Blind faith? All of these?
Second, who is “we” that these people are purportedly speaking for when they say that “we” have to unite and get behind “our” candidate? It’s clearly the Royal “we” and I don’t know about you but I bristle when anyone presumes to speak for me, or does. The greater the propaganda anti-social propaganda venue (e.g. the New York Times or Boston Globe or Daily Hampshire Gazette) where the presumptuous slogan is expressed, the greater the insult, the more insufferable.
This is the perfect prescription for a repeat of the last election: not only do a lot of conscious caring intelligent people absolutely DESPISE the Democratic Party, and just about everyone in it, but I’m seeing a lot of these caring conscious people saying they would vote for Donald Trump before they would vote for Joe Biden. Ditto if Elizabeth Warren were the candidate of choice. Ditto Pete Buttieg. Ditto, for example, for someone as corrupt and egomaniacal as House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
No matter what propaganda the Pew Center poll pundits and anti-social media like the Washington Post are pumping out, it was not the “failure of voters to cast their votes” in 2016 that lost the first election to Trump: it was the insufferable ugliness of the candidate that people were faced with as a “choice” that drove people’s refusal to participate in the charade of voter ‘choice’. Next to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump looked pretty fresh (albeit, for many of us, akin to a hot steaming pasture patty).
Even almost four years later, far too many devoted Democrats still refuse to see, admit, hear or consider the corruption of the Clinton administration, of Bill Clinton, or Hillary Clinton.
On top of these denials and refusals, and what is apparently a very clear example of historical amnesia, there is the overwhelming failure of large segments of the population to recognize, admit and see the equally ugly and chronic pathologies of the Obama administration, in which Hillary Clinton played a pivotal role in advancing global chaos, human rights wrongs, war and destruction, while further eviscerating domestic policies meant to protect the environment, limit the power of corporations, institute any kind of health care reform, and provide some real equality for people of color.
I mean, let’s be clear: the Democratic Party comprises a large percentage of the rotten-to-the-core-political-center of the United States and the wasteland we call ‘congress’ and the people who run and ruin it. The two party system comprises the heartless heartland. It is an ugly soulless duopoly that serves the one percent.
There are so many good people in our circles—I don’t care who you are—in our towns and cities and country, who won’t have anything to do with the Democrats or the Democratic Party. God bless you. God bless them.
Now, for those people reading this who are cognitively challenged, this does not automatically mean that these people who reject the Democrats and the Democratic Party are devout Republicans, or any kind of Republican, or that they voted for Donald Trump. It surely does mean, however, that they celebrated when Hillary Clinton lost.
I was one of them. I worked in Central Africa for a decade, and saw so many ruined lives, so much destruction, sadness, meanness and corruption. And that’s where I learned of the very personal role of the Clinton’s in the war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide across the region.
Hillary Clinton is so shamelessly arrogant, oblivious, egomaniacal and elitist—to mention just a few of her psycho-pathologies—that she appears to still be stewing and scheming to hatch a plan to seize the Presidential nomination and occupy the Oval Office. She’s like Gollum, the drooling soulless caricature of a creature, in the Lord of The Rings, completely and insanely preoccupied with securing and holding and coveting “my precious” [read: the Oval Office]. Forget about Killary’s vile behavior and culpability in international crimes committed during the downfall and assassination of Muammar al-Gaddafi.
There remain the ugly historical records and their contemporary ongoing repercussions in Central Africa, the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans. We should never forget how the Democrats and Republicans have advanced the genocide against the Palestinian people.
People are unable to forget what they never knew. The propaganda system has so completely obliterated the true historiography of U.S. interventions in Central Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Libya during the Clinton years that people either don’t at all know what happened or simply chose a pathological collective amnesia. Along with these U.S. and allied (Canada, Israel, NATO) interventions came the unprecedented loss of life and unspeakable atrocities committed by U.S. Special Forces, blood diamond dealers and their oil & gas mercenaries connected to the Clintons, and their proxy warriors under the commands of John Garang (Sudan), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Paul Kagame (Rwanda), and, well, let’s not even get into the Californication of the historigrapphy of Somalia facilitated by the ficticious but patriotic whiteout of the truth under the enterprise known as Black Hawk Down.
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s ties to diamond kingpin Maurice Tempelsman are never discussed. From 1993 to 1997, for example, Tempelsman was a White House guest at least ten times, while he also met Hillary Clinton in private more than once. Tempelsman enjoyed vacationing with the Clintons and the Kennedys in Martha’s Vineyard, but he also flew to Moscow and back with President Clinton on Air Force One and was one of the 101 people who traveled with the Clinton’s on their ‘victory’ tour in Africa in 1997, even as hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutu refugees were being slaughtered in plain sight.
Tempelsman and the Central Intelligence Agency sucked the blood out of the heart of Africa for decades, propping up the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu. And, following in the footsteps of Reagan, Clinton and the Bush gang, did Obama do anything to advance the plight of the Hutu people and stop the ongoing genocide against them or the Congolese? No. Where was Joe Biden when this was all going down? It appears he was floating around the inner circles with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
The killing that the Clinton regime initiated in Central Africa was advanced by the policies and actions of the Bush and Obama administrations. The genocides in Rwanda and Congo and the absolute military dictatorships in Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan—replete with all the usual human rights horrors of outright butchery, assassinations, and disappearances—continue to this day. They are whited out of the press, or if something does appear it is expedient propaganda, fully serving the interests of the corporate elites and the corporations, continuing the process of clouding, shrouding or destroying the true history of these places and the people who live and die there.
“Vote Blue No Matter Who?”
I don’t think so.
Do black lives matter? Only as far as posting a sign on your gentrified well-manicured lawn.
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It’s even worse when the Democrats’ vacuous slogan comes at the head of a long list of claims declaring that, well, it’s not really about voting for the candidate that has been distilled out of the murk and morass of the Democratic nomination process, but rather its about what you are REALLY voting for when you “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” This is another part of the disingenuous, shallow, weak-backboned tripe offered as a reasonable antidote to the possibility of a Trump victory. You know, this kind of thing:
“If it turns out to be Biden (or any Dem that’s not your ideal candidate) — as disappointed as many of us would be — please remember:
1. You’re not just voting for President.
2. You’re voting for who replaces RBG on the Supreme Court.
3. You’re voting for the next Secretary of Education.
4. You’re voting for federal judges.
5. You’re voting for the rule of law.
6. You’re voting for saving national parks.
7. You’re voting for letting kids out of cages.
8. You’re voting for clean air and clean water.
…
22. You’re voting for sensible gun laws.
The list goes on.
No Democrat is perfect.
Your first AND second choices may have dropped out. Your third might. But the nominee, no matter who she or he is, won’t be perfect. They won’t pass your purity test. And yet every single one of them will be better than four more years of Trump!!!
Please be reasonable.”
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The above is simplistic propaganda meant to evoke a purely hysterical emotional response. It is complete nonsense. This list and every point on it is either simplistic, reductionist, manipulative or false. It completely fails any reasonable accounting of the corruption and complicity of the Democratic Party (together with the Republican party) in creating the horrible situation that so many people are trying to survive and dying under.
One could go through the list, point by point, and debunk every single one of these false simplistic and wrong claims. Let’s pick four exemplary points (7, 8, 16 and 21):
7. You’re voting for letting kids out of cages.
Actually, in November 1997, President William Jefferson Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act into law. This Act laid the groundwork for the massive trafficking of children and parents through U.S. family courts and with the complicity and oversight of the Department of Health and Human Services (and the Administration of Children and Families). Under this Act plenty of children have been separated from protective parents, especially protective mothers, and have suffered horrible abuses while in the “Foster Care” system.
8. You’re voting for clean air and clean water.
Actually, we can look at the record of every single president who increased the already obscene military budget and we can easily demonstrate that this led to massive environmental pollution, the creation of toxic Superfund sites, and egregious corporate pollution. Every president—at least in recent history—promulgated horrible covert or overt wars and/or they also paved the way for corporations to be treated as ‘persons’ and facilitate their getting away with absolute murder all over the planet. Every single president for the past seventy years has prioritized predatory capitalism over clean air and clean water. Even today, at this very minute, for a singular poignant example, the Town of Amherst Massachusetts, backed by the local propaganda press (e.g. the local Daily Hampshire Gazette) continues to ignore the high rates of toxic lead contamination in Amherst public schools. This was not a creation of the Trump administration, but a lethal problem contiguous to every single political administration in power for the past 60 years, at least. Under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, I was equally impossible to get enforcement of violations of the Clean Water Act or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act or others. This is not a creation of the Trump administration.
16. You’re voting for veterans to get the care they deserve.
Oh really? Tell that to the veterans and see what they say. I can count with one finger the number of presidents that have truly honored veterans by making sure veterans ‘get the care they deserve’. Which president would that one finger count? Well, hold one hand up and drop the two fingers to the right and the two fingers to the left of your index finger. That is, no president.
21. And you’re voting against allowing the USA to become yet another authoritarian regime.
Nonsense. Arguably, every single president to date has played a role in further proscribing human and civil rights, increasing the powers and unaccountability of the defense and intelligence establishment, eviscerating the commons, and refining and growing the powers of the Executive Branch. Every single one.
“No Democrat is perfect?”
This is the understatement of the century, or millennium, or longer.
“Your first AND second choices may have dropped out…”
Or, the first choice of many many people (read: that God-forsaken radical socialist / communist bent on destroying our great country) might be getting (read: got) the royal reaming by the establishment for telling the truth more completely than anyone else.
“…Your third might. But the nominee, no matter who she or he is, won’t be perfect. They won’t pass your purity test. And yet every single one of them will be better than four more years of Trump!!!
Please be reasonable.”
Please be reasonable? Oy. One best be careful. This is the point where instead of pointing your middle finger in the direction of the Democratic party you are—apparently—supposed to shove it up your own ass.
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There are a lot of really good people out there who find more resonance and some kind of solidarity with the Republicans and the Republican party. God bless you. God bless them. However, those who voted for Donald Trump might want to think twice about this choice now that the Coronavirus is striking the United States and its entirely inadequate almost non-existent public health care system. Watching your mother or father or sister or brother die in the hallways of a hospital might seem to inspire a whole new appreciation of what might have happened had Dr. Jill Stein—a medical professional with a moral compass—been elected a few years ago.
It takes two to tango in the political duopoly we live under, the Democrats and Republicans shore each other up, watch each other’s backs, all take super PAC funds, and so there is a very real mythology at play around the concept or ideology of (voter) ‘choice’ in a two-party tyranny.
All the posting and arguing and insulting and grandstanding and bullying on both social (Twitter, facebook, etc.) and anti-social (New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, CNN, etc.) media are symptoms of the pathologies of western ‘society’ manufactured by the power structure and promoted through an ideology of divide and conquer. To reduce the complex political landscape to a slogan and an ideology of “Blue no matter who!” is to succumb to the dictates and desires of the power system that is ruining our planet, destroying billions of human lives, and driving the suffering and extinction of all creatures great and small. To adopt the Democrats reductionist ideology is to follow the Pied Piper of the Propaganda system as obliviously as the rats followed the flautist in that medieval tale about conformity and fate.
The powers that be—and their propaganda pipers—have so horribly proscribed the discussions and debates about all aspects of our work and social conditions that even smart, thinking otherwise awake people have been subdued and now play along with the foolishness and stupidity and vacuousness, staying strictly within the parameters of the manufactured arguments, with little or no capacity to crawl, step or leap outside the boundaries of what is being said, and what is allowed to be said, and think more clearly, rationally and outside the box of Business as Usual.
For example: Elizabeth Warren didn’t lose out. She didn’t lose because she is a woman. She lost because her political values are unacceptable to far too many people. She scored points in this writer’s book when she slammed Bloomnberg, but far too few points too little too late and, anways, subordinated behind her otherwise Business as Usual position. All this whining and complaining that it was because she is a woman is disingenuous, at best, and fascist at worst. Ditto the demographics/populations in the south that voted for Joe Biden: the argument that black voters in the south cannot be criticized (by white people) for voting for Biden is an empty disingenuous race-baited argument. The fact is that there is a complete failure of large masses of people to understand the realities of the murderous Uncle Tom Obama administration (of which Biden was a part). This failure is not due to education alone, and it is not due to propaganda alone: there is a willful refusal to learn, comprehend, grow and thrive and this has been inculcated by think thanks and the media oligarchy based on the studied tried and true principles of propaganda and the formation of men’s (and women’s) attitudes.
Fascism is many things, but one of its central tenets is the shooting oneself in the foot: acting against one’s own interests. That is part of what fascism is. This is also part of why we have the guy in the White House who we do. That is also how and why the Clinton came to power, and the Bush gang, and Obama.
Anyone who is not angry about the destruction of the planet, the loss of life, the complete denial of our children’s future is not paying attention, psychologically dissociated, or already dead. The koan is that anyone who is (too?) angry about the situation we are in is wasting their precious life force. Hmm, so many seeming contradictions….
If people want to go around making empty foolish boorish pronouncements like “Blue No Matter Who!” they best be prepared for the response they might provoke.
“Blue no matter who?” is an INSUFFERABLE insult.
“Blue no matter who!” ? No thank you.
The real answers to the environmental and social horror show that we are witnessing, living and dying with, cannot be found in the political realm. Any sincere concerns for the environment, for indigenous people, for clean air and water, for equality and social justice, for health care, require an admission that the system is rotten to the core, and the propaganda system—in its own interests—is covering that up.
Any real solutions revolve around true resistance, cooperation, courage and action. I’m not talking about those actions dictated by the system, trumpeted by its select champions, the foxes in sheep’s’ clothing who are acting under the cloak of radical change but only so much as insuring that plenty of powerful peoples’ profits and privileges are preserved.
But, well, we’re a long ways from any radical or revolutionary uprising, so we might as well just settle for the ruse of the “lesser of two evils” right? Vote Blue, No Matter Who! Problem is, as history has proven all too clearly: There is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. In the end, everything seems to be drenched in red.
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