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Edited on Wed Jan-30-08 03:14 PM by smoogatz
I guess it's inevitable—a candidate drops out and some small number of true believers declare their interest in electoral politics dead forever, inform us that they're voting "none of the above" in the GE, and, flaring their nostrils, storm from the virtual room, leaving an awkward silence and the faint smell of "WTF was that all about" in their wakes. It's normal. It's fine. Maybe it won't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Still, I find it somewhat incomprehensible, given what we're up against, given the disaster visited upon the country by the Republican nitwits who've been running it into the ground the last seven years.
Back in 2000 when Gore was running against Bush, I went around telling people it was one set of corporate-backed douchebags against another, and as far as the rubber-meets-the-road issues went, it was hard to see a RCH-worth of difference between them. I was leaning Nader, but because I lived in Georgia then I didn't even vote: I figured whichever way I went—Green or Dem—my minority vote would just disappear into the big, ugly Republican electoral turd the state of Georgia was sure to pinch off.
What an idiot I was. It did matter (though my particular vote still wouldn't have counted), Gore would have been a great president, and had he been allowed to take the office he was elected to we'd obviously be in a hell of a lot better shape than we are now. I could be wrong (God knows—look at my track record), but my instinct is to tell all the DUers currently posting pissy little diatribes about how the corporatists-have-won-and-none-of-the-other-candidates-give-a-shit-about-us-so-fuck-the-whole-business that they don't know what they're talking about, that Obama (my choice, for now) and even the Clintons are far better choices than bathsit-crazy, bomb-bomb-bomb McCain, who appears to be poised to win the Republican nom. Far. Better. Lookat what the Republicans have done to us, to our Constitution, to the environment, to the food supply for Christ's sake, to our standing in the world, to the treasury, to our national security, to the dead and wounded from 9/11 to this afternoon in Afghanistan and Iraq. You want more war crimes, more crippling debt, more global warming, more of the same shit, different fucking wingnut? By all means, sit out the rest of the election.
I know it smarts. It's disappointing. It sucks. Blame the media. Blame the corporations. Blame the dumbass voters for not being smart enough to see what a great guy Edwards really is. Turn off CNN for awhile. Take a break from DU. Have a drink or two, sing a chorus of "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye." Give it a few days. Then, please, for all our sakes—get over it. We need you and your passion and your commitment to fixing all the incredibly fundamental stuff the Bush/Cheney criminal cabal have fucked up, which is pretty much everything. I'm pretty sure the rest of us can't do it without you.
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