An inconvenient truth for our "progressive" friends

By Isidore F. Stone
Politics Editor

As predicted in these pages last week, the Supreme Court on Thursday authorized the most dramatic expansion of the federal death penalty in U.S. history when its six bent Republican members hiding behind a cowardly unsigned opinion held that an agency charged by Congress with protecting workplace health and safety could not in fact require employers to protect the health and safety of their employees in a time when COVID has already claimed 850,000 lives and continues to kill off Americans at the rate of 2,000 per day.

We'll save the deconstruction of the Court's brazenly political and unprincipled opinion to others (like the dissenters) and limit ourselves to assigning blame.

Thank you Jill Stein and her backers!

The elephant's share of the responsibility belongs of course to the Republican reactionary-industrial complex, which built an empire of bulls***t in the service of its one key goal: installing a government that has as its sole end the protection of the interests of rich reactionary white men.  As part of that goal, it has propagandized for, essentially, ever that government has no role to play in making life better for anyone who is not rich, white, and male.  Even more remarkably, it has mobilized white racism to ensure that those who are not rich and even not male forget all that and just focus on the white privilege bit.

But this is not a piece about reaching out to these angry racists, which has proven to be a fool's errand, no matter how many fools the New York Times dispatches to jerkwater diners.  This is about pointing the finger at another but-for cause of the collapse of the Supreme Court.  

Of the six unprincipled Republican a**holes who condemned thousands of American workers to an early and unnecessary death, five (excluding Long Dong Thomas) were appointed by Republican Presidents who owed their election to the failure of progressives to support the Democratic candidate.

In 2000, demented Jew hating spoiler candidate Ralph Nader siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore to give the Presidency (maybe – we'll never know for sure because the bent Supreme Court of that era stopped the Florida recount) to George W. Bush.  He duly nominated two unprincipled a**holes: John Roberts '76, who came to W.'s attention for his role in persuading the Court to stop the Florida recount, and Sullen Sam Alito, whose 100-octane white resentment has provided the fuel for the current Court's firebombing of the Federal Government.

Here are the results for Florida and New Hampshire for W., Al Gore, and the Demented Jew Hater left to right:

As Cecily Strong would say, do the math!  Had the 97,488 idiots who voted for Nader in Florida (or their equally wrong-headed 22,198 coreligionists in New Hampshire) voted instead for Al Gore, there would be no Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Sullen Sam Alito.  And no majority for letting a pandemic rip through America's workplaces.

In 2016, demented but possibly not Jew hating spoiler candidate Jill Stein performed the same function for the Former Loser Grifter, allowing the FLG to eke out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

For those of you with short memories, here's a little reminder from CNN:

In each case, had everyone who voted for Jill Stein instead voted for Hillary Clinton, Hillary would have won those states' Electoral Votes and the election.  There would be no Justice Neil “We don't need no stinkin' masks” Gorsuch, no Justice Brett ”This underwear is locked” Kavanaugh and no Justice Amy Coney Stepford Barrett.  And there would have been three principled Justices who one hopes would have decided the vaccine-or-test rule on its merits, and upheld it.

It's no answer to say, as some research suggests, that the absence of Nader or Stein would not have elected the Democrat because those voters might have just stayed home.  This is why politics is not a science.  The point not what these allegedly progressive voters might have done; it's what they should have done.

And had they done the right thing and gone to the polls and voted for the Democrat who had a chance of winning, American workers wouldn't be in the crisis they're in today.

We're old so we remember a lot of blah blah from lefties claiming there was no real difference between Gore and Bush, or between Clinton and the Former Loser Grifter.  We'd like to introduce you to a pandemic that begs to differ.

Which brings us to today.  With our democracy hanging by a thread, the conventional wisdom is that 2022 will be a debacle for the Democrats because ... well, there are lots of reasons.  Generally people aren't too chipper during a raging pandemic. Parts, but by no means all, of the Democratic agenda have been stalled by the Supreme Court, solid Republican opposition, and two d**kish Senators.

Here's a representative sample of said CW from that reliable dispenser thereof, The New York Times Washington Bureau:

Thank you Ralph Nader!

Democrats already anticipated a difficult midterm climate, given that the party in power historically loses seats during a president’s first term. But the party’s struggle to act on its biggest legislative priorities has rattled lawmakers and strategists, who fear their candidates will be left combating the perception that Democrats failed to deliver on President Biden’s central campaign promise of rebooting a broken Washington. 

We don't recall that being Biden's central campaign promise.  We recall him promising to bring honest law-abiding democratic government back after a four-year absence and trying hard to pass some progressive priorities.  But no matter, we'll accept as a premise that Democrats must turn out in these midterms, as they failed to do in 2010 and 2014, but did in 2018.

And while we're at it, they better turn out for state governor races in places like Pennsylvania and Florida if there is to be any hope of keeping the Republican coup d'etat at bay.

Already we're hearing from our friends on the left that their manifold disappointments with the Biden Administration, some of which are actually real and fair, might lead them to sit this one out:

The presumption seems to be that come election time, voters owe the Democrats their support, rather than Democrats owing voters the promised policies that improve people’s lives. Democrats also seem to believe that democratic institutions unto themselves — in absence of policy follow-through — will automatically generate positive political outcomes for their party. The idea is that people will vote harder, because they have to, given the alternative.

The national elections of 2010, 2014, and 2016 — as well as Virginia’s 2021 election — prove the opposite. They show that when a ruling party so obviously sides with its corporate sponsors, voters are perfectly willing to stay home or use those democratic institutions to throw that party out of office — even if that means electing an even worse set of villains. 

The author is clever enough to write his screed as descriptive, not as a recommendation, but he seems satisfied enough with the result (electing villains). We're not going to identify the writer because we're not here to rubbish some random rich screenwriter/crank. We're just providing an example of progressive “thinking” that if followed will lead to a generation or more of legal oligarchy. (Their answer is apparently that's what we have now, but we don't recall the Supreme Court from 1936 to 2000 to be invariably devoted to the ruling class.) 

We would never suggest that progressive Democrats follow Mark “Lumpy” Penn or other empty Third Way gasbags and abandon their principles.  Of course they should fight for better Democratic candidates than hedge fund handmaidens like Terry McAuliffe.

But when Election Day approaches and the choice is between a Democrat, good or mediocre, or a Republican insurrectionist, we have an inconvenient truth to share with our progressive friends:

Regardless of the imperfections of the Democrats as a group or individually, if you do anything else besides show up and vote Democratic, you are consigning you and those you care about to a tyrannical regime and in a time of pandemic perhaps even worse. 

We understand that the left doesn't like to hear that.  But just because a fact is unpleasant doesn't mean it's not true.  

If you think that staying home and “electing a worse set of villains” is an acceptable response to imperfect Democratic candidates and policies then, to borrow a phrase from a recent movie (written by our polemicist quoted earlier), you better look up.  The extinction event is only ten months away.