Congratulations, Stupid.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Joe if you aren't responsible for your country, why am I for mine?
As a "colony", don't you have more prerogative to revolt?

It pisses me off that things have been done in my name that can never be undone, for example the war in iraq or the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention. I am responsible for that cos I haven't tried to bring down my government to stop it. (If I had brought down the government how many Australians would have died in the process? meanwhile the Iraq war would have happened anyway.)

If you don't care about the civil rights of Americans (quite a few who aren't white) why should Clinton have?

Clinton is trying to be their elected representative. I'm not. I'm not American. I'm not even from the USA.

If you have first hand experience of racist mistreatment (which I don't doubt you do) why do you then think someone like Trump (who is a racist white nationalist) will mean less violence for non-whites in the world?

That is a fair question, but why would it necessarily mean more? I would have thought Obama being elected would mean less violence for non white people. Drones and killer cops showed how wrong that line of thinking was.

This may be hard to believe, but not many Americans don't get a say on how things are run.
A lot of times it is like a colony as well.
Except on election day.
And we saw how that went.

I do believe that.

But it brings us to election day and my original point which was if you resort to fascism to stop a fascist why do you think the outcomes of that will somehow be less bad? More to the point if you resort to extremism of any sort to stop a fascist what is to stop you being as extreme next time something stops you getting what you want (violent self defense doesn't count as extremism btw)?

How would you (or anyone else) end up less compromised than Trump if given enough power.

Uh, yeah seriously. If someone is a fascist and them getting elected will further their fascist agenda then controlling how some people vote will prevent that.
Say, if a Hitler was going to be elected by votes, I'd have no problem controlling some peoples votes. That sets a bad precedent, obviously, but so does a holocaust

You could always intimidate them into not voting. Or find some way to stop them voting. Or rig the election or change their vote electronically afterward. All standard ways of controlling other people's vote. Maybe ask some of trump's people.

But to do that you'd have to have hindsight about how Trump (or Hillary or Obama) or Hitler for that matter would turn out before the election. We all know how bad Hitler is now but how many knew how bad he'd be in 1932? Same applies to Trump.

[brekin]

Joe, I think we agree more than we disagree. I have some minor quibbles with the above, but overall its cool. Only thing I have to disagree with is:

You could always intimidate them into not voting. Or find some way to stop them voting. Or rig the election or change their vote electronically afterward. All standard ways of controlling other people's vote. Maybe ask some of trump's people. But to do that you'd have to have hindsight about how Trump (or Hillary or Obama) or Hitler for that matter would turn out before the election. We all know how bad Hitler is now but how many knew how bad he'd be in 1932? Same applies to Trump.

I don't think we can pretend that we aren't sure what Trump is capable of. He's told us he's into killing the families of terrorists, deporting millions of people, not providing refugees with asylum when the US has created the conditions that make mass migrations necessary, thinks Putin is a sweet guy, has nationalist, white supremacy backing and ties, etc. He's a unrepentant sexual predator, racist, demagogue, bully, xenophobe, misogynist, etc. I mean his one saving grace is that he has no shame and can't stop attacking and telling everyone what he is going to do. He's gone out of his way to be alarmist and be an extremist when he hasn't had to. Lord help us when he gets squeezed into a corner and feels like he didn't have any other choice.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Joe, I think we agree more than we disagree. I have some minor quibbles with the above, but overall its cool.

I do to but was shocked that you'd want to force someone to change their vote.

Only thing I have to disagree with is:

You could always intimidate them into not voting. Or find some way to stop them voting. Or rig the election or change their vote electronically afterward. All standard ways of controlling other people's vote. Maybe ask some of trump's people. But to do that you'd have to have hindsight about how Trump (or Hillary or Obama) or Hitler for that matter would turn out before the election. We all know how bad Hitler is now but how many knew how bad he'd be in 1932? Same applies to Trump.

I don't think we can pretend that we aren't sure what Trump is capable of. He's told us he's into killing the families of terrorists, deporting millions of people, not providing refugees with asylum when the US has created the conditions that make mass migrations necessary, thinks Putin is a sweet guy, has nationalist, white supremacy backing and ties, etc. He's a unrepentant sexual predator, racist, demagogue, bully, xenophobe, misogynist, etc. I mean his one saving grace is that he has no shame and can't stop attacking and telling everyone what he is going to do. He's gone out of his way to be alarmist and be an extremist when he hasn't had to. Lord help us when he gets squeezed into a corner and feels like he didn't have any other choice.

I don't disagree that Trump is capable of being a dangerous fuckwit. But that doesn't mean he actually will be.

Meanwhile families of terrorists get killed, people get deported from the US and Trump isn't President yet. I honestly don't think he will be as bad as some say, but I know that is only based on a hunch. And like I said before things aren't that good in the US. Improvements for black people have taken ages and leave many behind.

If worst comes to worst with the supreme court lots of progressive policies could go backwards, and I understand thats not good. But again blame where it belongs - the Dems campaign concentrating on how awesomely good Hillary was instead of that potential shitstorm.

But internationally I think he's less likely to cause more trouble than is already happening. The US and Russia were definitely on track to generate more conflict. I can't see that happening as quickly now (but it still might.) And honestly I don't know enough or trust any source enough to know who is right or wrong (if anyone is) in Syria and in the Crimea or along Russia's borders.

[JackRiddler]

.

Possibly to conclude this thread:

One thing's self-evident to anyone not in denial, engaging in normalization, or actually invested in the winner. This multiply and maddeningly loony-tunes "election" process is ending in the installation by Electoral College of the popular vote loser, who explicitly (not covertly) spoke to racism and promised authoritarian solutions; a man on horseback, a preening kayfabe autocrat for now atop a much larger, right-wing, counter-liberal, neo-con, vengeful and imperialist one-party government in control of the three branches and smelling blood. You want to debate that, there are now threads here aplenty for Neo-Trumpets to express their pathologies.

Another thing is self-evident to me, at least, as a voter for neither of the one-of-two guaranteed outcomes, and feel free to debate that here: That the loser (popular vote winner) was not the "lesser evil" but the offer of a better battle-space for resisting the policy atrocities and repression that would have followed either outcome, but will be much worse under this one. Normalization and cooperation are not an option, any good to come of this will be in the potential reversal and defeat by people power (let it be so, let it be more than dream) of nearly any and all of the programmatic promises of the Trump campaign, which were expressed in clear language for fifth-graders.

The networks soon to be holding the federal high ground will move fast, cannot be normalized, must be fought. They will use the mechanics of state to go after press, opponents, Internet, everyone they ever wanted to get even with, everyone seen as weak and vulnerable, and you. The more they look like a post-modern version of Hitler taking power (and they will to varying degrees), the more dangerous it will be, but also the more trouble they will run into. (Which is not to say "they" are "Hitler" - not even Hitler was "Hitler.")

The possible fall of the Trump character will have a mass-cathartic effect, but leave an even worse and unvarnished but relatively faceless, unified reaction in charge, a bunch of old perpetually unhappy bully-men aware of the demographic decline of their patsy base and determined to get all they can and establish new realities.

Long in the coming, this is the battle for "America."

Those of you who like, can now read the following and write a few billion women in where they are missing from it. (Nobody's perfect.)

But do not read it, except out loud -- and be LOUD when you do:

===========================================

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!


-- Langston Hughes, 1935

.

[JackRiddler]

Harper's Weekly Review

PUBLISHED BY HARPER’S MAGAZINE (EST. 1850)
November 23, 2016
By Matthew Sherrill

President-elect Donald Trump announced several high-level appointments to his administration, naming Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for the death penalty for Edward Snowden, as director of the CIA; Alabama senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s for making racist remarks, as attorney general; former Breitbart News editor Steve Bannon, who staffers said "aggressively pushed stories against immigrants, and supported linking minorities to terrorism and crime," as chief strategist; and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who has said that fearing Muslims is rational, as national-security advisor. "Great," said former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke. The president of the Czech Republic urged Trump to appoint his ex-wife Ivana as an ambassador, and Trump's 35-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, explored the possibility of a White House position, despite a federal law banning presidents from hiring their family members. It was reported that Trump is considering appointing former Texas governor Rick Perry as secretary of the Department of Energy, which, as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2011, Perry promised to eliminate.

A San Antonio judge presiding over a naturalization ceremony told new citizens that if they don't like Trump as the president-elect, they "need to go to another country"; Kansas secretary of state and Trump transition-team member Kris Kobach suggested that Trump was amenable to creating a registry for Muslim immigrants; and Trump's chief-of-staff appointee, Reince Priebus, suggested that immigration from certain Muslim regions of the world would be temporarily halted. The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., hired a "director of diplomatic sales" to attract foreign dignitaries, and Trump denied an allegation from a reporter in Argentina that he had asked Argentine president Mauricio Macri for permission to build a new office building in Buenos Aires. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad referred to the incoming Trump administration as a "natural ally," President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines called Trump's victory "well-deserved," Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told U.S. anti-Trump protesters to "show some respect," and the leadership of North Korea said it did not care who won the election. Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in the popular vote climbed to 1.7 million votes. "Heil victory!" shouted the attendees of a white-supremacist gathering celebrating Trump's election in a federal building a few blocks from the White House.

The vice foreign minister of China refuted Trump's previous claim that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese government. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against his for-profit college, Trump University, after being accused of unfair business practices, false advertising, fraud, and financial elder abuse. "Resolution of these matters," said a spokesperson, "allows President-Elect Trump to devote his full attention to the important issues facing our great nation." Trump used his Twitter account to attack negative coverage in the New York Times, to criticize the television program Saturday Night Live for being biased and unfunny, to complain about audience members booing vice president-elect Mike Pence at a performance of the historical hip-hop musical Hamilton, and to promote a story about how he saved a Ford automotive plant that was, in fact, never in jeopardy of closing. An analysis found that "fake news," or propaganda, websites generate more traffic on Facebook than major news outlets, and Oxford Dictionaries announced that the word of the year was "post-truth."

[NeonLX]

Is a "civil war" even possible in this current era of the US? Could/would "Americans" be prodded into action (to what end)? Or are we stuck in the endless Black Friday loop.

I've already answered my question internally, but I'll consider any persuasion.

[JackRiddler]

No. My thought: The state is too big. At a certain level of rioting or sabotage even by the Alt-Trumpets (whose violence is likelier to be more in the mode of a crime wave, already underway, rather than militia actions), let alone rioting or sabotage by disenfranchised groups or leftists (ha ha), there will be a convergence of state actors around escalated totalitarianism with fear propagation as extreme as it needs to be to fortify national unity, and a predictable Gleichschaltung For Peace from media and most of online culture. Internet will be controlled as needed and emergency will be sovereign. Round-ups if they occur (beyond those for deportation purposes, which will, and of course do occur) will not be met by organized armed response (with the possible exception of the spectacle known as terrorism). If such a development in the repression stops, it's through civil uprising toward reconstitution of liberal order. Escalation to "war" thus would be more as state against troublemakers (possibly with deputized civilians) than popular organized militias and battle lines in open civil war. For that a state more powerful and pervasive than ever would literally have to break down due to some exogenous disaster, in the Mad Max tradition. Am I too precise? Do some of these scenarios listed as likelier than others sound like "civil war" anyway?

.

[JackRiddler]

cross posting here cos too many damn threads and I wanna be able to find shit.

.

It's interesting how the other thread on investigation in a plausible suspicion of an RI staple -- electronic election fraud! -- has engendered such hysterical reactions. I guess some people have their heart set more on the imagined Trump revolution, or perhaps post-Trump awakening, that they adopt the condescension they're always complaining about. You even got the automatic believe-anything crowd posting the authoritarian pooh-pooh of the issue from 538. Hey, if they didn't find a statistical correlation I guess we really should go full black-box on the next round. Just scrap all these annoying paper thingies and ineffective options for audits or oversight. Malice doesn't exist, anyway. Tell you what, let their poll be the election, save a lot of money.

Luther maybe I can bring you around to saying nomenklatura, domestically (at least until now) we've been more in a late Soviet than a Nazi flavor. Ha.

To reply more generally, let's try to predict how on earth any changes to the outcome will affect civil society. I see the future spiraling off in many different timelines, almost none of them good. The path to civil peace requires a lot of hard work.

I think anything that prevents the open assault on "civil society" scheduled for January 21 is probably the better outcome. Not that stopping Trump is going to happen.

For the 19th time, I'll say it: Clinton winning offered not the "lesser evil" but the better battlespace. Her admin would have been compromised and disbelieved from the start, and forced to go under if it didn't make concessions in the direction of popular demands like single payer. Now we're going to be fighting a Genghis Khan who's going after the privatization of Medicare up-front. Multiply by a dozen analogous examples. But oh, yeah, he's totally going to make peace in Syria, that's the Pence and Pompeo credo.

In struggles for justice and peace, the groups she won are the first who need to ally with each other for protection. It's the same old coalition politics, it has to come before peddling everything to the supposedly delicate sensibilities of a fictional white male economically displaced voter who had no racist motivations whatsoever, who isn't a dupe when he claims Trump is for real, who only went Trump because SNL or HuffPo was so mean to him.

Most people voted for Clinton not because they were brainwashed, or because of a media assault. They were thinking lesser evil than the pirate capitalist who wasn't robotically lying about being nice, like her, but braying the racism and misogyny and telling you up front that he's going to rip your country a collective new asshole. (Oh thank god, finally, an alternative to the establishment!)

Gee golly, how did they get their impressions of the asshole who (though everyone is pretending he is an outsider) just lived on their TV as a real asshole playing a fictionalized asshole for 15 years straight? Was it a faulty emotional intelligence?

Most people didn't vote for her because they're the "degenerate artist" Brooklyn/Venice "liberals" of Nordic's sick and hateful imaginary, in which of course he, the struggling white man, is the real and only worthy victim. (My fellow Stein voter on the opposite coast, hilarious).

At this point the trash-talk around "liberal" especially has little salience (it's not about the technocrats actually in charge) and morphed back into a propaganda campaign to distance people and split apart the opposition to Trump, alternating between the "violent" protester and the kale-eating hipster. (How interesting that New York is the center of all this again.)

.

[JackRiddler]

It's very good that Hillary Clinton looks like she will be about two million votes ahead of Trump in the popular vote, when it is finally tallied.
The fact that over two weeks on and we still don't know exactly how many people voted says everything about the US political system, which is structured not really to rely upon such things as how many people precisely voted.
But the attempts by the Clinton establishment to talk up her success are wide of the mark.
Lots of claims that she got the highest vote since whenever.
The latest figures show turnout this year at about 58.1 percent down from 58.6 percent in 2012.
But 2012 was a mid-presidential term election in which the White House generally is not expected to change hands and this time certainly was not expected to.
You would normally expect turnout to be significantly higher at the end of an eight-year term rather than midway through.
The overall fact remains, Clinton could not mobilise the vote Obama got in 2008.
That a Black candidate won eight years ago and a white one lost this year cannot be explained by general levels of racism.
Of course, a general level of racism is something of a statistical abstraction. You can have, and there is evidence of, a polarisation in which hardened racism plays a role in cohering the Republican/Trump base.
But the fact remains: Clinton could not galvanise the anti-racist and anti-Trump side, which is a majority. And to explain that, you do have to look at the deep disappointment with the Obama presidency - not least among Black people in the US.

[dada]

At this point the trash-talk around "liberal" especially has little salience (it's not about the technocrats actually in charge) and morphed back into a propaganda campaign to distance people and split apart the opposition to Trump .

The opposition is split apart. The left and the liberal, however the mindless media nonsense wants to frame it, are at cross-purposes. In the press, the left is invisible, it doesn't exist in the political arena. And the liberal doesn't make an effort to disabuse anyone of that notion. Liberalism's refusal to 'go there' is what robs the left of its most effective tools.

From the left, opposition is inseparable from opposition to the technocrats in charge, and the system of global exploitation with the dollar at the helm. The 'liberal' center-right can't articulate the strongest arguments it needs, because they are the system, just like their 'conservative' counterparts.

The liberals I've had conversations with since the election, in my family and etc, don't look to unite with me on the left. Because I want to disperse power. They want concentrations of power to keep functioning normally. So instead of building the movement that would actually fight what they don't like, they prefer to focus on the concentration of power. I end up looking at them as closer in political alignment to the right they claim to fight, than me.

Is this my fault? I'm willing to work with them. (I have been known to employ my talents in service to a liberal agenda occasionally. They happily use me.) They aren't willing to work with me, though. There's a chasm between our world-views. How do you bridge it?

[stefano]

After a long, ugly, and immensely stupid presidential election, a modest plurality of a little more than half of voting-age Americans voted to make a deeply loathed avatar of the despised political establishment the next President of the United States. Unfortunately, they were improperly geographically distributed, and so our next president is going to be a deeply loathed TV con man who flipped a few critical states by promising to reestablish national greatness through a vague program of populist economics and protectionism, who expertly played on rural and exurban resentments about someone else—black people, women, immigrants, whomever—getting a notionally better handout.

In this regard, the election didn’t represent a great groundswell of support for fascism, but rather a great, national exhaustion with politics. The prospect of four years under a thin-skinned loony toon surrounded by the bitterest dregs of Republican has-beens, racist conservative media impresarios, and disgraced military pensioners too embarrassing for their own armed-forces colleagues is truly awful and terrifying to contemplate, but we should not forget that this side lost the popular vote and represents perhaps a quarter of the actual adult population of the United States. It was the lowest turnout in 20 years. If this marks the death of American democracy after all, we can at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that it was less a homicide than the drivers nodding off at the wheel.

Please read the whole thing, lovely writing by Jacob Bacharach, the artist formerly known as IOZ.

[JackRiddler]

Yes, lovely writing and on-target by Jacob Bacharach. Hope people will read in full. Thanks stefano!

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/who-lo ... 1789443349

The same 40-odd years that saw worker productivity spike while wages flattened, job protections declined, and the systems of social safety were dismantled were—not coincidentally—the period during which the Democratic Party as an organization and institution latched itself to a meritocratic myth that, at its logical conclusion, turns life into an endless nightmare of perpetual competition, the children of today trying to outcompete the Chinese for the entry-level jobs of tomorrow, which require six years of experience and a master’s. At least conservatives pay lip service to the countervailing comforts of church and charity, even if they don’t really mean it.

The meritocrats, of course, have outcompeted you and are smarter than you, and they must relentlessly prove it. They were all immensely pleased by how clever and interesting the Affordable Care Act was. It didn’t feel like a government program; it felt like a cool internet business. And if you are a writer for Vox, you may indeed have time to putz around comparing plans and calculating the relative merits of high-deductible plans that you can’t use because you can’t afford any of the deductibles anyway, but for most working people, this just adds to the dull reality of life today, a dismal labyrinth of incomprehensible paperwork and unnecessary bureaucracy when all you really want is to go to the doctor or to retire without going broke.

[norton ash]

Co-signed on Bacharach. Fine piece.

[slomo]

Yes, lovely writing and on-target by Jacob Bacharach. Hope people will read in full. Thanks stefano!

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/who-lo ... 1789443349

The same 40-odd years that saw worker productivity spike while wages flattened, job protections declined, and the systems of social safety were dismantled were—not coincidentally—the period during which the Democratic Party as an organization and institution latched itself to a meritocratic myth that, at its logical conclusion, turns life into an endless nightmare of perpetual competition, the children of today trying to outcompete the Chinese for the entry-level jobs of tomorrow, which require six years of experience and a master’s. At least conservatives pay lip service to the countervailing comforts of church and charity, even if they don’t really mean it.

The meritocrats, of course, have outcompeted you and are smarter than you, and they must relentlessly prove it. They were all immensely pleased by how clever and interesting the Affordable Care Act was. It didn’t feel like a government program; it felt like a cool internet business. And if you are a writer for Vox, you may indeed have time to putz around comparing plans and calculating the relative merits of high-deductible plans that you can’t use because you can’t afford any of the deductibles anyway, but for most working people, this just adds to the dull reality of life today, a dismal labyrinth of incomprehensible paperwork and unnecessary bureaucracy when all you really want is to go to the doctor or to retire without going broke.

I agree that this is a great essay. The fact that you approve of it makes me think that you and I are in agreement about most things related to this election. So ... can you explain why so much animosity between us up-thread (and on the other related thread)?

[Nordic]

Here's another:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/ ... ncredulity

I Would Love to Share in Your Incredulity
byThomas S. Harrington
29 Comments

Where incredulity begins and ends says much about what horrors we are willing to tolerate—or have tolerated thus far. (Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)
I would love to share, my liberal friend, in your sense of incredulity about the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of United States. I would love to stand with you in the sense of woundedness that, while certainly painful up front, carries with it the secondary compensation of a warm and nurturing solidarity. I would love to sit with you and fulminate in righteous anger about the unparalleled vulgarity and cruelty of Trump and his followers.

As much as I’d like to do these things, I won’t. Why?

Because I know you, perhaps better than you even dare to know yourself. I know you well because I have watched you with great and detailed care over the last three decades and have learned, sadly, that you are as much if not more about image and self-regard as any of the laudable values you claim to represent.

I have watched as you accommodated yourself to most of the retrograde social forces you claim to abhor. I have seen you be almost completely silent before the world’s greatest evil, unprovoked war, going so far as to embrace as your presidential candidate this year a person who cold-bloodedly carried out the complete destruction of Libya, a real country with real people who love their children like you and me, in order—as the Podesta emails make clear—to further her personal political ambitions.

I watched as you stood silent before this same person’s perverse on-camera celebration of the murder by way of a bayonet thrust to the anus of the leader of that once sovereign country, and before the tens of thousand of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of refugees, that war provoked.

I watched during the last eight years as you sought refuge in the evanescent qualities of skin color and smooth speechmaking so as to not to confront the fact that your "liberal" president was almost totally lacking in actionable convictions regarding the values you claim to be about.

I watched as you didn’t say a peep as he bailed out bankers, pursued whistleblowers and deported desperate and downtrodden immigrants in heretofore unimaginable numbers.

And I didn’t hear the slightest complaint (unlike those supposedly stupid and primitive libertarians) as he arrogated to himself the right to kill American citizens in cold blood as he and he alone deemed fit.

I monitored you as you not only completely normalized Israel’s methodical erasure of the Palestinian people and their culture, but made cheering enthusiastically for this campaign of savagery the ultimate litmus test for social and political respectability within your ranks.

I watched as you breezily dispatched the memories of the millions of innocent people destroyed by U.S. military aggression around the world and damaged police brutality here at home in order to slavishly imitate the unceasing orgy of uniform worship set in motion by the right and its media auxiliaries in the wake of September 11th, 2001.

In short, since 1992, I have watched as you have transformed a current of social thought once rooted in that most basic an necessary human sentiment—empathy—into a badge of cultural and educational superiority. And because feeling good about yourself was much more important to you than actually helping the afflicted, you signed off, in greater or lesser measure to almost all of the life-sapping and dignity-robbing measures of the authoritarian right.

And now you want me to share in your sense of shock and incredulity?

No, thanks, I’ll save my tears for all of the people, ideas and programs you heedlessly abandoned along the road to this day.