wish carefully

if i were a liberal, i wouldn't necessarily be rooting for santorum, and i wouldn't cross over to vote for him in michigan. true, he looks like an easier opponent. but say he gets the nomination. there's always some chance that something goes wrong: a terribly mishandled international incident; a scandal; an economic crisis. then you end up living your liberal life in a santorum admin. now i wouldn't expect a santorum admin to be as much of a crazed disaster as it seems it could be; no one's going to be banning contraception. on the other hand, i think that, except rhetorically, you wouldn't practically be able to distinguish an obama from a romney admin at all, except perhaps in terms of military spending.

Comments

[CB]

How are you not a basic classical liberal?

[Lisa Simeone]

No kidding, Crispin; we've said Obama is the black Romney and Romney the white Obama on this blog a dozen times.

[Lisa Simeone]

And speaking of your beloved Santorum:

[QUOTE] Santorum is on record as saying that the Koran is written in “Islamic.” Unlike Gingrich, Santorum is devout enough to recognize that the burning of someone’s religious book is hurtful. But, like Gingrich, he was angry that the president apologized for the auto-da-fé. “Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution,” said Santorum apropos of nothing since there is no move to introduce it into the United States. It would take a Santorum to come out in defense of the medieval Crusades, “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers. What we’re talking about are core American values.” [END QUOTE]

Yeah, there's a brilliant mind at work.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/28/terrorists-to-the-right-of-them-terrorists-to-the-left-of-them/

[el mago]

Here goes a 2nd time, since my first post seems lost in space:

Back in the late 70's Washington stopped funding for mental health institutions,(insane asylums) thus launching an army of the mentally impaired (insane) onto the streets, bringing on a first wave of homeless and dispossessed wanderers, one of whom, a rail thin black woman with dreads, wandered Seattle's Pike Street Market area pushing a shopping cart and shrieking at passersby, index finger pointing: "fuck you, you snake eyed bitch". A precursor to modern politics and commentary both left and right.

"Fuck you, you snake eyed bitch." Pass the plate, ban sex, and bomb Iran.

And don't forget your capitalization and punctuation.

Reminds one of the film that played continuously in Cambridge,Mass Central Square (What's the name of that movie and the theater where it played? It was right there on the corner. I forget. 50 trivia points. You know, the movie where the inmates take over the asylum . . .oh, never mind. We're living it.)

Right, got it now, "The King of Hearts". Still can't remember the movie theater's name.
My memory is not the only thing gone.

[Lisa Simeone]

Central Square Theater.

[Jon Cogburn]

I'm getting chills, because all the Nader voters that cursed us with Bush said exactly the same thins about how there would be no difference between a Bush and Gore administration.

It was patently untrue.

Heath care reform? Return of progressive taxation (letting Bush cuts expire and then pushing for a cut for lower income people while keeping up the payroll tax cuts) versus even more regression in the tax code? Foreign policy (leading from behind versus neo-conservative wars)?

None of these things is negligible.

[Stephen]

Jon...no prepare to get screamed out of this blog. Everyone here wants a war with Iran because they're convinced Obama is worse than George Bush. Yeah yeah...Obama is Hitler... We get it.

[ergo]

Leading from behind = bombing Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, doubling down in Afghanistan, "ending" (aka privatizing) the occupation of Iraq on the same timetable as Bush while leaving a big fat fortress in the middle of Baghdad, supporting pet dictators through their atrocities, sometimes later supporting transfer of power to equally repressive juntas whenever said pet dictator no longer provides a tenable face to his subjects, saber rattling against Syria and Iran. Real improvement on the neocons, that. But the Donks want to increase the coffers to sort of pay for all that as well as prop up the health insurance industry. How noble of them.

Also the idea that the hypothetical foreign policy of craven militarist Gore would have been distinguishable from that of the dauphin needs way more than simple assertion. After all, he was VP during which time we were bombing Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, supporting ethnic cleansing in Turkey, backing civil war in Colombia, and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and others worldwide) via sanctions.

This is also the guy who voted to lay waste to Iraq in 1991 for some face time on TV, supported the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, continued to support regime change in February 2002, and then proceeded to give a speech in September of that year criticizing Bush for a unilateral pre-emption doctrine, yet that didn't seem to matter to him when Clinton did it. Real set of principles there.

And we're supposed to believe Gore would have been different than Bush how? Right, he would have made the rich pay 2 extra cents on the dollar for the criminal profiteering of the empire's managerial class. Let's hear it for democracy.

[anon]

Uhm

Supreme Court appointments, especially magnified this term because at least one conservative and probably two liberals are going down. The Court's makeup will be decided for decades during the next four years.

Domestic Executive branch decisions. On such stuff as environmental regulations, Justice Dept. actions (and even if there is a functioning Justice Dept. at all; under Bush it was questionable whether there was), the consumer protection bureau (though it's still not clear how important that is), abortion and contraception access.

The Donkle view of politics is insane, the state is a lie, etc. But that don't mean Obama's second term won't look a lot different than Romney's first.

[Lisa Simeone]

[QUOTE]"Jon...no prepare to get screamed out of this blog. Everyone here wants a war with Iran because they're convinced Obama is worse than George Bush. Yeah yeah...Obama is Hitler... We get it."[QUOTE]

BULLSHIT.

The only person at this blog who wants a war with Iran is Crispin.

And yeah, pull out the tired and totally phony "Obama is Hitler" because it makes so much sense.

No, Obama isn't Hitler; he's Obama. And he is -- in fact and not in dystopian fantasy -- not only continuing but expanding the worst abuses of the Bush administration.

But let's not point out uncomfortable facts. It makes the Democrats twitchy. Everything's okay Because He's Our Guy. Everything that was black is now white.

Torture? War? Drones? Bombing campaigns? That's "foreign policy leading from behind"?? Indefinite detention? Criminalizing speech? Spying on anyone and everyone in our own back yards? Bailing out bankers? Giving them a tax break (where the hell does Jon Cogburn get the notion that Obama has lowered taxes on the poor and middle class and raised them on the rich??).

And health care reform? We didn't get health care reform. We got health insurance reform. Meaning a big ole valentine to the insurance industry.

And you're equally full of shit about Nader. Nader didn't lose the election for Gore. The Supreme Court did. The election was overturned by judicial coup.

Yeah, that's a robust democracy for ya.

[Lisa Simeone]

And wanna spy on your neighbors? There's an app for that! Because, ya know, there's A Terrorist Hiding Around Every Corner:

http://publicintelligence.net/west-virginia-unveils-app-for-suspicious-activity-reporting/

[Stephen]

Actually Lisa, I'm totally there with you. Obama is the head of a country that has enslaved its own people and now has waged a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, and possibly untold millions in the future. This is EXACTLY what Hitler did. Enslaving people, killing millions. Can't you see??? Obama IS Hitler! You say it best yourself and oh so reasonably!!:
"Torture? War? Drones? Bombing campaigns? That's "foreign policy leading from behind"?? Indefinite detention? Criminalizing speech? Torture? War? Drones? Bombing campaigns? That's "foreign policy leading from behind"?? Indefinite detention? Criminalizing speech?"
You say it best yourself. He is pure indescriminate evil.

[dmantis]

Lets not forget Obama's baby the NDAA gives him the right to kill anyone, anywhere he feels the urge. Hey, wait! They removed the American citizen part because democracy works and shit so its all good.

Not fucking likely.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/06/new-bill-known-as-enemy-expatriation-act-would-allow-government-to-strip-citizenship-without-conviction/

TL;DR - "The new law would change a part of US Code 1481 which can be read in full here. Compare 3166 to 1481 and the change is small. The new section makes no reference to being convicted as it does in section (7). So even though the language of the NDAA has been revised to exclude American citizens, the US government merely has to strip Americans of their citizenship and the NDAA will apply. And they will be able to do so without convicting the accused in a court of law."

But hey, atleast Obama can put together a coherent sentence.

[Joe]

Thanks for the laugh, Jon. Gush v. Bore? Really? Not that I buy into the idea that a Gore admin would have been much different than Bush or that Nader cost Gore the election, but if you want to find someone to blame for giving us Bush (not that he actually won the election, or that any of it matters anyway), look no further than Al Gore himself. If the guy actually stood for any of the things you mentioned above--or anything at all--there would have been no reason for "progressives" to vote for Nader. Fuck Al Gore.

[CB]

Stephen what's your threshold for not supporting murderers?

[adamcrazypants]

hey wait a minute, didn't a majority of Democrats in the Senate vote for the Iraq War? lulz. it's what America wanted, Jon. who are we to say? ask crispin why we're wrong now.

[Joe]

CB,

I'm gonna guess it's when they haven an "R" next to their names.

[Stephen]

Everyone...please stop. Andrew Breitbart is dead. Can't we just enjoy this together? My guess....Cocaine.

[Montag]

"because all the Nader voters that cursed us with Bush"

HAHAHAHAHAH thanksralph! more registered democrats who voted for Bush than Nader. you kidnapped yourselves!

voters are hilarious.

[ergo]

anon 3:30am:

So supporting imperial murder is okay, in exchange for some alphabet soup agencies that the largest interests can use to further maximize their influence and control. Lamenting an allegedly dysfunctional justice department is a bit ridiculous, given that its primary function is to imprison the underclasses via the drug war. Ain't no Democrats in power doing anything to slow that shit down, quite the contrary. Maybe you were under the mistaken impression that it exists to subordinate the powerful? No wonder the Supreme Court is the last refuge for Donk apologists.

[Joe]

Perfect, ergo.

[anon]

Ergo

If you can quote anything at all in my last comment that says that the differences b/t Obama and Romney are more important than their similarities, please go ahead and do so.

Jesus Christ. Right now we're living through an international Holocaust brought on by the US/Western imperial war and economics machine. Stipulated. But that doesn't mean that there won't be differences b/t an Obama and Romney administration, and recognizing those differences in no way diminishes the immoral depravity of the state actions which are common between them.

Go ask the Alaskan women who have to pay for their rape kits if they would have rather not have done that. The women who have to have dangerous abortions because they can't get the time or money to go to a clinic to get a safe one if they would have rather not had to do that. Go to the Nebraskan sanddunes and say you're ok with those being destroyed. Go ask someone who doesn't look quite American in Arizona or Alabama if they have noticed a slight decrease in their quality of life lately. Go lecture a gay person that wasn't able to be with her partner as she was dying about how rightwing and leftwing policies are the same. Now think of all those problems people have with individual states and nationalize them, because the S. Court will be a solid and rabid rightwing block for thirty years.

Let's see what'd I leave out? The justice department thing - you're right, the drug war consumes a majority of federal convictions, and it belongs in the common policy category. But what about the people of color who get shat on with even more frequency and velocity because the Civil Rights division is gutted? The union members who are unable to seek redress for the thousands of daily wrongs committed against them because the NLRB is trashed? And this is more abstract, but when the voting rights division is all but shutdown domestic excesses get harder to address because one of the only mechanisms for curbing them is weakened.

This whole "I wash my hands of the state, my soul is pure" attitude is incredibly puerile and immature. There are millions of people who would be directly and non-negligibly harmed from right-wing rule, and you're just taking a giant shit on them to feel intellectually superior. What's worse, these are the people that are generally trotted out whenever someone feels the need to swipe at Donk apologists: the "underclasses", the downtrodden, the grist for the evil mill of the state.

Would things be immeasurably better if the state just went away? Probably, yes. But guess what: that's not going to happen today, and it's not going to happen ten years from now, and anything you do to bring it about will have so small an effect as to be indistinguishable from none. But you can have a non-negligible chance to increase the quality of life for the very people whose welfare you deploy as a rhetorical tactic.

So by all means, yes, keep teaching people about how the state functions in social relations, and the evil murderous character in everything it does. Keep trying to fight the by-far-the-most-odious-things-the-state-does which both parties pursue with equal vigor. But that is completely compatible with trying to make people's lives not suck so hard in the short term by preventing lunatics from fucking them harder than they're being fucked now.

And before you even start: yes, the tools of the state are used by powerful interests to oppress people. You have a rudimentary understanding of Foucault, good for you. Had you read further, you would have been subjected to the terrifying idea that those relations of power aren't embedded in the state, and that even in the Bakuninist paradise we will still have to be vigilant against people trying to fuck over other people, which if it isn't called political engagement it might as well be. Furthermore, those tools of oppression can themselves be sites for action which fights back and somewhat alleviates that oppression.

Really, the only consistent intellectual position about this that justifies throwing everyone into the maw of unchecked rightwing domination is that we're legitimizing the system if we work within it, and only completely shutting off interaction with it can hope to change it. Which, if you want, ok. But that doesn't mean not giving a shit about the political system. Because every calorie of food you buy, every mile you travel, every piece of clothing you wear, every kilowatt hour you use is legitimating the machine. It doesn't give a fuck if you use it but don't try to curb its excesses.

Living in some kind of farm/commune community thing would be nice. I'm kind of pissed at myself that I can't bring myself to do it. But for fuck's sake don't pretend that helping the system run in all ways but one is depriving it of something it needs.

I'm so sick of this. Have some empathy for fucks sake.

[Stephen]

Bingo, anon. They would rather be "right" than make a difference. Speaking for myself and myself alone....I am Democrat through and through. I believe in these Democrat ideals
1. Reproductive rights
2. Labor rights
3. Higher taxes for the the wealthy
4. Gay rights
Yeah, it's not perfect in the Democratic party but they come closest to pushing my ideals. I play politics to shape the world I live in, not to make some flacid moral stand out in the wilderness. I voted for Nader in 2000 but now I play to win. You wanna spin out a bunch of yarns about how great it would be if Emma Goldman, Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn was our President? Great...that's a fucking fantasy world in a center-right country, but i agree with the sentiment. You wanna tell me that my support of Obama is no different than supporting Mitt Romney? Suck my fucking dick.

[ergo]

anon,

I'm not sure all of your references are actually serving the point you're trying to make. Like for starters, Obama ain't stopping the TransCanada pipeline, and it's gonna fuck up a whole lot of land, whether that land is in Nebraska or not. The NLRB created a layer of union bureaucracy to prevent wildcat strikes and enforce contracts the members did not support. It's the state-created mechanism (by progressive icon FDR, with the support of capital) that is in fact preventing them from seeking redress for wrongs. That there is increased anti-immigrant sentiment in regions of the country is directly related to the bipartisan "free trade" agreements and the militarization of the border (initiated by Clinton) that forced peasants off their lands and into slums with nowhere to go but here while simultaneously eradicating the manufacturing industry domestically. How is the state, let alone the Democratic party, helping anyone in these situations? Also, which did more to reduce Jim Crow discrimination, federal enforcement of Title II, or the civil rights movement and the cultural change it facilitated? After all, the state created Jim Crow's successor too, and it's pretty fucking ugly. Likewise, activism and cultural change is doing way more for gay rights than a rubber-stamping administration ever will.

I don't deny that the state can be used to benefit certain groups. Federal enforcement of Roe v. Wade has made abortions safe and available in heavily Christian regions of the country. (One should ask if this, or indeed the union itself for that matter, is sustainable.) For the world's largest expansionist empire, the primary functions are going to be the permanent war economy and the domestic gulag, which constitute over half the budget. (The fantasy is that some benevolent state could exist at all without that.) But yeah, you can move parts of the remainder of the budget around a little bit, and you can even provide aid to people who are downtrodden.

However, the empathy you seem to be advocating involves a rather cruel calculus that requires adding perceived legitimacy to an engine of "international Holocaust" so that the remaining table scraps can be used to benefit some people domestically (except for the millions in the penal system, of course). Yeah that's some kind of empathy, and it's called Stockholm syndrome.

[anon]

Hey ergo, thanks for keeping the discussion going.

I think we're in agreement on a few things: most of what the US does is almost incalculably awful. People working within the US can do some good using the state.

The biggest point of contention then is whether that good is outweighed by the "added perceived legitimacy" for the state/imperial project/economic machine/whatever metaphor.

Uhm, yes. The good is the difference between Democrats and Republicans. It's important to keep in mind at this point that whether or not the NLRB is primarily intended to prevent wildcat strikes, or whether free trade agreements suck balls, what we're talking about here is trying to isolate the benefits accrued to electing Democrats instead of Republicans.

So: abortion/contraception policy, which is huge. The denial of dignity/harassment of brown people in border states, a la the new Arizona and Alabama immigration laws, is less. Gay marriage benefits undoubtedly increase (but by how large an amount is questionable). Disaster management isn't staffed by incompetents, which means responses to things like Katrina aren't near-genocidal. The outlook for the environment is a bit complicated, but there's no question that under Republicans there at least the same processes are accelerated. It's pretty clear that Democratic policies result in less income inequality than Republican ones, that most sections of the poor have a higher quality of life, and so on. Again, things will suck balls for the poor under either administration, but they will suck less balls for the poor under a Democratic administration.

For this election cycle the S. Court is a big deal for reasons stated. So magnify all the above issues. Plus there are court specific ones. The criminal justice system was more arbitrary and less responsive to abuses before liberal jurisprudence ushered in reforms in the 60s; the justice system is a human rights nightmare now, but it'd be worse without reforms. Drug case issues especially (seizure, privacy, all that). Capital punishment is a certainty with conservatives, a near-impossibility with liberals.

The fairness and capriciousness of trials is also a huge issue. The current conservatives have held recently that almost no proprietorial misconduct is cause for a mistrial, that no conflict of interest exists for judges, that nothing is wrong with for-profit jails that are at ten times capacity, that prison labor is awesome, etc. All that would be reversed under a liberal court and greatly exaggerated under an expanded conservative majority. Again: the justice system is a nightmare. But there are gradations of nightmare. And a liberal court results in a better nightmare than a conservative court.

Ok. So. Those are the good benefits. Against which are weighed the costs. "Perceived legitimacy". First and foremost, the system is "legitimated" through economic as well as political activity. Every piece of food clothing etc. that gets bought legitimates the system. By the time we're talking about whether or not to support political parties the majority of damage has already been done. It's like you're worried about gaining weight and are convinced that the 5,001st calorie of the day is going to do tremendous damage that the preceding 5,000 haven't done. It's not that the last calorie is good, it's that that's a completely unproductive way to view things when you're trying to change them.

Ok, let's unpack this a little bit. How does legitimacy of the system increase or decrease? What are the mechanisms involved? And how does political participation hamper those mechanisms? It seems like by far the most important mechanism is education, which doesn't depend in the slightest on whether one participates politically. Another mechanism is how other people view you acting, which only applies to people with knowledge of your actions and can be counteracted by going off about the evils of the state regularly. While the benefits of political action apply to everybody. The broadest mechanism is in the abstract sense of "here's another citizen who's engaging with the process, thereby legitimating said process as one that works for the benefits of its citizens." But, again, the only way this really works is with people who have personal knowledge of your individual contribution, which is both small and can be counteracted with education.

So at the very least, working through the political system adds legitimacy to that system in a murky and nebulous way.

Let's look at the problems of holding off on pursuing benefits for political action for fear of adding legitimacy to the political system. The political system isn't changing before this election, or in ten years, or in twenty-five. The timeline over which a system changes due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of the kind added by political participation includes a lot of women whose lives are ruined through terrible abortion policy, a lot of people needlessly abandoned because of poor disaster management policy, a lot of people screwed over by a legal system even further mangled into a terrible mess by conservative jurisprudence, etc. That is just a hell of a lot of suffering to just ignore in order to avoid a nebulous contribution to a legitimacy problem that will still be around for decades.

And ultimately, what are the benefits to avoid adding legitimacy to the system by working through it to achieve good ends? We don't know. We can't know. But it's overwhelmingly likely that the current system will still be around decades from now, and that it wouldn't matter one whit if all us anarcho-curious people kept up our anarcho-curious shit but worked within the political system to curb its excesses.

Finally with regard to the legitimacy thing, you speak of a rather cruel calculus. But your position carries some cruel calculations of its own. Because one of the ways to defend your position is to do a "heighten the contradictions" thing, where curbing the system of some of its excesses just relieves the pressure and allows it to hang around for longer than it otherwise would have. That, I hope I don't have to argue, allows an enormous amount of suffering for an extremely nebulous future whose mechanisms for getting to a better place than the status quo are completely unknowable.

Here, I think, is the largest kind of strategic point I can make. When we're deciding whether or not to engage in political action, we're not deciding whether or not the system as a whole is a good thing. We're deciding whether the world would be better or worse if we worked for one or the other parties were in power. We have very specific, concrete, widespread benefits that would accrue if one party were in power over the other. And the only thing mitigating against that is a murky, nebulous, caveat-ridden, nigh unknowable sequence of events that could result in a better world someday if we abstained.

I don't know. Maybe the entire thing comes down to risk tolerance: how willing are you to gamble away the near-certainty that political action will bring more benefits than abstaining in the hope that a new better system will result. But we live in an extremely fucked-up world that will continue to be extremely fucked-up, and we know how we can make it a little better. With eyes wide-open, knowing what we're doing, always looking for something better.

[anon]

Oh and Steven:

I'm not sure you're doing this, but be careful of using a mindset that thinks the current political system can result in a society that doesn't systematically screw over most everybody in large and small ways.

I think we agree that using the system to change things on the margin is worthwhile, but let's not forget what we're dealing with here. The only reason we can stand it is that we're far enough removed from the horror that goes on that we can block it out, abstract it, intellectualize it.

[brian]

you guyz are talking about voting, right? voting for more and better demos to halt the right-wing take over of america (lol).
i make more of a difference in the world voting for the winner of american idol or the slam dunk contest than i do voting for the fucking president.
anyway, re syria (and iran), it doesn't matter if we vote, who we vote for, how many letters to the editor we write, how many blogs and blog comments, there is gonna be (if not already) war.
public suicides are way better than voting.

[adamcrazypants]

lolyeahrightTHANKSRALPH it was Clinton that militarized the police and rattled the saber for going after Iraq and escalated and reinforced the Drug Wawr. . .Democrats at best are just place holders so that Mammon can catch its breath. nobody is saying it will be pretty when the entire rotten thing topples, nony, just that it will be more just.

[CB]

Stephen the point it that your 4 ideals are:
1. Not JUST democratic ideals. Shame on you for wording the ideals in such a way that they are exclusively democrat ideals.
2. The Democrats haven't supported most of them. They haven't been pro labor in ages, and they aren't raising taxes on the wealthy. Neither of those two things happened under an Obama regime, while democrats controlled congress. Of course, this isn't a surprise because all the Democrats, including Obama, have campaign funding from wall-street and big business, who would cease funding their campaigns if their tax rate was threatened and they were forced to pay workers more.

Thus, your democrat ideals are not actually democratic ideals, and democrats aren't pressing for them.

Any other drivel you have for why you can't stop being a faithful democrat, in the face of contrary evidence?

[Montag]

you cannot combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle. democrats as placeholders: http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/stopme/chapter02.html

[Joe]

Stephen,

I'm not sure anyone here is saying that there's *no difference* between Dems and Repubs. More like you have to squint so hard to see it that it's hardly worth the effort. Also, you play to win what? As far as I can tell, since Obama was crowned emperor, Wall St. has won, the insurance co's have won, the national "security" apparatus continues to win, etc. What have you won?

[ergo]

anon,

I appreciate your conversation, but I don't share your assumptions. It is not at all clear whether Democrats aren't in fact worse than Republicans when it comes to war and empire. For the majority of the 20th century, this seems almost indisputable. It seems to me that the only somewhat recent potential counter-arguments would be the Iraq war and the Reagan administration's covert war in Nicaragua. Yet, who killed more, Clinton's sanctions or the Bushes' invasions, Reagan's support for the contras or Carter's support for the genocide in East Timor? As mentioned above, Clinton's policies (as did those of Reagan/Bush, and Nixon/Ford for Carter) laid the groundwork for the 2003 invasion and current subjugation. And Bush/Cheney may have laid the groundwork, but Obama has expanded the terror war and global garrison into new fronts. At best, the parties are partners in crime, at worst the Democrats are worse, which would pretty severely undercut your thesis.

My point with the NLRB is that the regulatory agencies usually initiated by (and certainly given far more rhetorical support from) Democrats are part of the problem. That the other faction of the ruling party makes these agencies more beholden to profiteering interests does not mean they aren't still tools of extraction, and it doesn't mean they should have been created in the first place. It certainly doesn't make the Democrats friends of labor or the environment. They are a phony release valve for public dissatisfaction with serious problems, much like the political parties themselves. They are also an instrument of pacification, like the welfare state is with the poor and Social Security and Medicare are with the middle class. So it's not clear that Democrats aren't better friends of this system, which you admit is awful.

Anyways, I'm not the best person to lay the whole left-right thing on, since it is FAKE (apologies to Montag) and personally I think anarchism has more in common with the paleoconservative right than the institutional left, which has a dangerous centralizing impulse to every issue that goes totally unquestioned.

[anon]

brian,

Just in case you were talking to me: I agree just voting for President does less than voting for American Idol, etc. I don't vote, myself. I'm talking about canvassing, working phones, etc. Stuff that influences which party is in office.

[Lisa Simeone]

The Dems controlled Congress for the last two years of the Bush admin and the first two years of the Obama admin. And they improved things??

"But Obama got rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell!"

Oh, stop the presses! Now gay people can get slaughtered in wars just like straight people! What an accomplishment!

And as we've already pointed out, repeatedly, neither Obama nor the Dems are interested in taxing the wealthy more and relieving the burden on the poor and middle-class. Insisting that they are is garbage. Maybe they were interested in that 30 years ago, but not anymore.

For god's sake, they're the ones who put Social Security on the table. They're the ones who are going to gut it, with the the blessing of the Republicans. Maybe when we're all living under bridges in a few years, we can reminisce about the good old days.

In some states and some local elections, there are still some differences between Dems and Repubs. But in national politics? Baloney.

Though "suck my fucking dick" is certainly an impressive argument.