September Songs

Liberal Clinton supporter, from now till November:

Hillary Clinton is the most progressive candidate, running on the most progressive platform, that we’ve seen in at least 50 years.

Liberal Clinton supporter, after November:

You’ll never get it past Congress. What did you expect?

Oh, the days dwindle down

To a precious few

September, November

24 Comments

  1. Alex August 18, 2016 at 3:48 am | #

    Both of these things can be true at the same time.

    • InWonder August 21, 2016 at 1:27 am | #

      They can, and yet they are not.

  2. relstprof August 18, 2016 at 4:59 am | #

    This is why socialism must include Kierkegaard or Freud or Adorno or anyone who acknowledges the psychological and existential dimensions of pain.

    Without it, alienation as a concept is abstracted and ineffectual. Affection. It matters.

  3. Roqeuntin August 18, 2016 at 8:11 am | #

    Ha!

    Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka did an outstanding job on last night’s CNN town hall. The part where some clown asked them “How can you sleep at night knowing you might contribute to Trump’s victory?” and got schooled on national TV was worth the price of admission alone.

    These days I mostly just feel like I can’t do this shit anymore. The garbage people and saying and printing is almost too much to handle. I haven’t been this disgusted with politics in the US since 2004, and rather than Dubya it’s the entire system from top to bottom that’s the problem.

    • Tom R August 18, 2016 at 10:37 am | #

      She finished her answer by stating her opposition to what she call the politics of fear, to voting against the worst candidate instead of voting for the best. This is not schooling anyone, this is avoiding the question.

      He asked whether she was worried about being a spoiler as Nader was. She recited the boilerplate litany of Hillary’s sins. Trump has never held office, so his sins are mostly imaginary, although given his public statements a huge amount of imagination is not required. But she made no reference to the actual historical comparison in the question. While the policies of a Gore presidency are also hypothetical, my view is that there would have been a non-trivial litany of sins for a Gore presidency, and yet it still would have been vastly better than the Bush presidency. The Bush presidency gave us mammoth incompetency and inattention to detail that failed to prevent the 9-11 attacks, and followed it up by using the attacks as a pretext to start a massive Middle East war against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks.

      So do we think if we elected St Jill we could all go about our daily lives and pay no attention to the government for four years, because she would be a perfect president? Or do we accept that everyone is flawed, that if we want good government we need to pay attention and advocate for positive policies on a continuing basis?

      Do we use our votes for a candidate who is closer to perfection but with a miniscule likelihood of being elected, or do we use our votes to show a preference for a candidate with better but imperfect positions, and resolve to advocate for changes in the bad positions?

      From a strictly utilitarian view, I think there is a good case for the later. As someone who deeply regretted his vote for Nader well before Bush’s first term was over, I think it is an airtight case.

      • Roquentin August 18, 2016 at 12:43 pm | #

        I don’t even know where to start.

        Do we use our votes for a candidate who is closer to perfection but with a miniscule likelihood of being elected, or do we use our votes to show a preference for a candidate with better but imperfect positions, and resolve to advocate for changes in the bad positions?

        First of all, stop peddling this canard that the Green Party and the Democrats fundamentally share the same goals and are on some kind of continuum with the Greens being “pure” and the Democrats representing “compromise.” They don’t share the same goals and in most cases are fundamentally opposed to one another. Furthermore, I don’t know what strategy argues that it’s a good idea to vote for a candidate that doesn’t represent your views and then just hope she’ll decided to change after the fact.

        So do we think if we elected St Jill we could all go about our daily lives and pay no attention to the government for four years, because she would be a perfect president? Or do we accept that everyone is flawed, that if we want good government we need to pay attention and advocate for positive policies on a continuing basis?

        No, and no one is saying this. Where are you even getting this from? Why does voting for Jill Stein imply you would “go about our daily lives and pay no attention to the government for four years” and not do so if you voted for Clinton. This argument is barely even coherent, let alone persuasive.

        From a strictly utilitarian view, I think there is a good case for the later. As someone who deeply regretted his vote for Nader well before Bush’s first term was over, I think it is an airtight case.

        And blaming Nader for Bush back then was the same load of bullshit it is now. I’m going to come right out and say it: we’d probably have gone into Iraq if Gore won. Frankly, it’s on the Democrats to offer better candidates if they want our votes. There’s nothing “airtight” about it. If Hillary wants to court former Republicans so badly, let her get the votes from them. Seriously, what do you have to gain from a party and a candidate who wants nothing to do with you and actively excludes people who represent your views from the political process?

        But the bottom line is, if the problem is that the Green Party doesn’t have the support to be viable, how is refusing to support them supposed to fix this? If not now, when? In this election, with two of the worst candidates the system has coughed up? If Trump and Clinton isn’t a persuasive case for leaving the two party system behind, I don’t know what is. What do you expect to change by voting for the Dems? It’s not like we don’t know exactly what the Clinton’s politics are. We have years of experience illustrating exactly how they operate, where their allegiances are, the kind of legislation they support, etc. And yet people like you vote for them and just hope it’ll miraculously be different this time.

        It’s people like you who are living in a fantasy land. It’s people like you who are throwing your votes away. It’s people like you who have thrown away the tiny bit of political power you have on a candidate and party who doesn’t represent you because they’ve managed to scare you into submission with an orange boogieman in a shitty toupee.

        • Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant August 18, 2016 at 1:25 pm | #

          Thank you. You also did the readers the service of saving them from ME!

          I will only add this to your reply, and it is the sort of thing I have been willing to write before.

          Hillary-bot on PAC-pay Tom R says: “As someone who deeply regretted his vote for Nader well before Bush’s first term was over, I think it is an airtight case.”

          Tom R, you are a goddamned liar! You did not vote for Nader, and your confession of regret is unadulterated crap! You cannot pretend to buy our willingness to take you seriously by using that ruse to pretend to be “one of us” so that you can then Trump-scare/pseudo-left-guilt-monger us with an outright lie based on a false understanding of recent American History.

          Go to the “On The Media” radio show where Nader in an interview broadcast a little over a week ago gives a history lesson that demonstrates that he could not possibly be responsible for Bush II. To believe anything else is to be opposed to the right of voters to choose their candidates, because it means that the voters cannot be trusted with more than two candidates!

          Tom R, EFF YOU, you lying bastard, and EFF the donkey you rode in on!!

          See, Roquentin — I kept it short!!

          • Tom R August 18, 2016 at 2:41 pm | #

            I guess I should apologize to Corey for stirring up the pseudo-leftists repressed stormfronters in his comment section.

            Just to piss you off a bit more, I will disclose that in addition to voting for Nader in 2000, I voted for Kucinich in the 2008 primaries and for Bernie this year.

            Now I will go Eff off and leave y’all in peace.

      • b. August 18, 2016 at 1:39 pm | #
      • b. August 18, 2016 at 1:40 pm | #

        Even if Nader had been a spoiler, there is the proposition that Gore would have been fundamentally different from Bush. This is debatable – we already have the case of Obama, supposedly being different from Bush, having pursued policies that are different in “style”, but not in substance. We could argue that the worst of Bush’s excesses have been promoted to bipartisan normalcy and Washington “consensus” by Obama’s comissions and omissions.
        Finally, the proposition that it is beyond debate at this time that Trump’s future performance as a president will be substantially worse than just Clinton’s past performance as on the record is also debatable.
        For one, that proposition implies that Senate and House will be more than willing to co-operate with President Trump, while blocking a President Clinton. If that is true, we have – and have had for decades – a constitutional crisis on our hand that goes far beyond a single candidate.
        Furthermore, the pseudo-moral calculus of the #ClintonThusNoTrump fallacy implies that Trump’s predicted domestic damage should matter more to voters than Clinton’s actual past, and possible future foreign policy body count. I find the entire proposition contemptible, especially coming from Chomsky.
        Finally, elections are like markets – as a mechanism of information discovery, any attempt to restrict choices and manipulate outcomes is defeating the purpose of the institution in the first place. This is especially true when information asymmetry makes a mockery out of the “Day Trader” proposition of “tactical” voting. Elections are unlike markets, too – we can argue divestment vs. consumption, but it should be abundantly clear that an actual vote *for* a candidate will be presented as an endorsement and mandate.

      • InWonder August 21, 2016 at 1:33 am | #

        I hope you are aware that voting for Nader had nothing to do with electing Bush. You know who’s responsible for electing Bush? People who voted for Bush, including the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted for Bush in Florida. Also: the Republicans who rigged Florida and manipulated the situation afterwards. The Democratic establishment that refused to fight back effectively. Bill Clinton for having a subordinate give him a blow job under his Oval Office Desk. Al Gore, for picking Lieberman and running a less than inspiring campaign. The corporate media for dishonestly attacking Gore over nonsense during the campaign. I could go on, but why?

        Ralph Nader, the Green Party, and every single person who voted for him and the party are in no way responsible for the outcome of that election. I voted for Gore. If I could do it again, I’d vote for Nader.

    • Tom R August 18, 2016 at 10:39 am | #

      And the link to the “clown’s” question, at 40:30 of the video: https://youtu.be/DF0g-dzU64Q?t=40m30s

      • jonnybutter August 18, 2016 at 5:06 pm | #

        The problem I see here is the implicit idea, widely shared (not just Tom R), that how you vote is some sort of sacred, King Arthur-type trust, and that you must choose as if your vote will decide the outcome of the election. No. We have to vote strategically about 99.9% of the time, and I don’t see how it could be any other way in our system. If my vote decided the election, I would vote for HRC over Trump, and not agonize over it at all. But it’s never like that, and this time it will be an absurd blow out. Georgia could be a swing state.

        I despise both Clintons, and I’m not crazy about Al Gore or Obama (et. al.) either – but I voted for most of them because of the states I lived in at the times. So? Debs wasn’t running.

  4. Thomas Leo Dumm August 18, 2016 at 10:04 am | #

    “Try to remember. . .” Corey’s post seems to be a sort of invitation to express frustrations with the politics of the moment. So . . .

    For me it is that a constant of political life in the United States is that there is always already a need to re-member that which has been dis-membered. The great tendency in our politics is historical amnesia, and what we have forgotten is the most in the central role that the original sins of this country — the systematic elimination of the Indian tribes and chattel slavery — haunt all of our social, economic, and political institutions. We remain dismembered because we fail to remember. The hope? That as the racism becomes more visible (again) we can more clearly remember these things.

  5. jonnybutter August 18, 2016 at 11:14 am | #

    “Hillary Clinton is the most progressive candidate, running on the most progressive platform, that we’ve seen in at least 50 years.”

    “Hello, One Hour Cleaners”

    “Yes, I’d like to get a shirt cleaned”

    “Fine, just bring it in”.

    “And when might I pick it up?”

    “Two weeks”

    “Two weeks?! But…”

    “…unless of course you need starch, in which case it’ll be 5 weeks..”

    “Five weeks?! But…”

    “…and if it’s a color other than white, Six weeks..”

    “SIX WEEKS?! But your sign….’

    “That’s just the name of the shop, Gov”.

  6. jonnybutter August 18, 2016 at 11:17 am | #

    Oh, I goofed it all up. Here is the original – much better:

    Shirt

  7. good2go August 18, 2016 at 11:47 am | #

    Funny and true! But just out of curiosity, have you ever bought a house? Did you pay the asking price? Let’s keep in mind that these are opening bids, not the closing. Politics.

    • WAT August 18, 2016 at 2:51 pm | #

      That is a totally nonsensical analogy.

  8. jonnybutter August 18, 2016 at 12:08 pm | #

    I have bought more than one house and my family was in the real estate business (v small time, not like Der Trumpf). I don’t understand your comment, good2go – and I don’t mean that rhetorically; I really don’t understand it. How is the ultimate price you pay for a house like a presidential election? The former is the result of an explicit and binding negotiation between two parties. The latter is…well, not like that at all.

    This is a very funny OP if you know the song. Check it out!

  9. David EGan August 18, 2016 at 3:04 pm | #

    It’s a falsified campaigned based upon careening looks towards polls – inveighed as numbers but not statistics;The Tumpet and a darkening miasma among voters. Hillary is a classic cynic portrayed as heroine to the disenfranchised middle Americans who cannot decide the lesser of two evils. In fact, those abandoned citizens will soon realize that the game is up…and that
    a third party is required.

  10. Ronald C. Couch August 18, 2016 at 8:25 pm | #

    Why would I say either of those things. I might say “Well, it looks like I’ve got no choice but to vote for her because Trump is closer to a fascist than I ever want to see.”

    Then later: “Of course she wouldn’t do any of those things, I never expected she would, but it was necessary to vote for her. I just hope the next republican isn’t a real fascist after Clinton blows it.”

  11. Joshua S. August 19, 2016 at 1:14 pm | #

    Democratic voters are like someone in an abusive relationship who, in spite of being abused, keeps returning again and again and again only to be abused again and again and again. They just keep hoping that finally THIS time it will be different. Guess what? It’s not going to be different.

    The GOP uses the Southern Strategy to gain votes, while The Democratic Party relies on the Stockholm Syndrome.

    • Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant August 19, 2016 at 5:46 pm | #

      “The GOP uses the Southern Strategy to gain votes, while The Democratic Party relies on the Stockholm Syndrome.”

      As brevity really is the soul of wit, wit in the present case is more than just humor.

      Excellent because pithy! Well done. Now pardon me while I steal it from you… (don’t worry, I will attribute)

      • Joshua S. August 19, 2016 at 6:10 pm | #

        Thank you, Donald. And no worries — if it works, please share!

Leave a Reply