Why I'm Not Voting to Re-Elect President Obama

Ordinarily, I have the greatest respect for Esquire's Charles Pierce. He's one of the very few bloggers/journalists out there who actually inspires me to stay on my tippy toes. Get him off the subject of RomneyCare (which he pointedly endorses simply because his ill wife has somewhat benefited from it) and Barack Obama and he'll generally not only find himself on the right side of every issue but also skewer with a Quixotic razor-sharp corkscrew sword the bigotry, hypocrisy and genetic-level stupidity of what passes for an actual conservative movement.

Unfortunately, we're in the waning hours of a marathon election season that feels as if it's lasted longer than Gunsmoke and Meet the Press combined. And on Halloween, Pierce couldn't help but weigh in with what is indisputably the most ill-informed, skull-chillingly stupidest, head-in-the-sand post I've ever read from a fellow liberal. It's entitled Why I'm Voting to Re-Elect President Obama and there was no way in sulphur-stinking Hell I could let this post go unchallenged. Hopefully, by the time I've finished unpacking my argument, it'll be more readily apparent than it is now why I've chosen to use the video of the Liz Warren rally in Hudson yesterday as a lead.

The central thrust of Pierce's argument is a pathetic attempt to drum up some legitimate consensus for the president. Here's the part that made me leap vertically from my chair a couple of days ago:

Still, I thought long and hard about tossing (Stein) my vote, because I live in the bluest of blue states, and I felt that, in casting my vote that way, I would absolve myself of complicity in the drone strikes, and in the inexcusable pass given to the Wall Street pirates, and in what I am sure is going to be an altogether dreadful Grand Bargain while not materially damaging the most important cause of all: making sure that Willard Romney is not president. And I might have done it, had Jill not gone on TV and talked about how those people who are voting for the incumbent president simply to make sure that Willard Romney is not president are doing so out of "fear."

Horse hockey.

It is not fear. It is simple, compelling logic.

Yeah, folks, he actually wrote that, obviously with a feeling of misguided satisfaction.

First off, I utterly fail to understand why Pierce, a fellow Massachusetts resident, would have to think "long and hard about tossing (Stein his) vote." Really? Unless you feel like burning your red and pink liberal card like our parents did their draft cards and bras, it's either that or voting for a Brooks Brother mannequin/Koch brothers fuck doll called Mitt Romney or a war criminal like Barack Obama.

Secondly, Massachusetts is not "the bluest of blue states." If Pierce had done his homework, he'd know that a full 51% of Massachusetts voters are registered as Independents and with the exception of Deval Patrick, we have voted in exclusively Republican governors in the post-Dukakis years and quite a few before Dukakis. It's just the bifurcated nature of the progressive MA mind: We exclusively elect (until Scott Brown, who ran against a dyspeptic Crypt Keeper who is our Attorney General) Democratic senators and congressmen yet think this or that Republican would be hunky-dorey for our own state budget and job market (they haven't been). In that respect, this Jekyll and Hyde political sensibility is shared with California, the state that gave us Barb Boxer yet overturned gay marriage at the first opportunity when flooded with LDS/Mitt Romney tithing bucks.

Thirdly, and far from least, if Pierce actually thinks that people aren't voting out of a fear of Mitt Romney and aren't voting against Romney and for Obama, then I think he should get his brain MRI'd. Perhaps he got a concussion during this bruising election season. But people aren't voting against Romney out of fear?

Charlie, dude, if I had a nickle for every fucking time I've heard some wet-legged "liberal" ask me after I tell them why I'm not voting for that drone-humping child-killer Obama, "So, do you want Romney to win????????" I'd be able to open up a competing Super Pac for my actual choice, Dr. Jill Stein, that would make Turdblossom's GPS Crossroads look like an Ethiopian's piggy bank by conspicuous relief.

And where I come from, Chuckie, m' lad, that's fear. Pure, unadulterated piss-and-shit-in-your-BVDs fear.

In fact, I'll go you one further: The biggest, most obvious single reason why people (and I'm speaking of African American voters, aka "you people" in Romney World) are voting for Obama is simply because he's black. To pretend otherwise is to join the ranks of those who think the earth is 6000 years old and flat,  global warming is a hoax and evolution a theory. Four years ago, we couldn't stop talking about how fan-fucking-tastic it was that we'd just elected our first black president. Do you think that fact has been lost on all the African American voters who'd voted for him in '08 and would do so again even if he brought back slavery and put all of them in chains and back in the cotton fields?

My ass African Americans aren't voting for him because of his skin color. But it ought to be obvious even to this new (and, let us hope, very temporarily), oblivious Charles Pierce that Obama's level of support isn't nearly what it was in 2008. It's like the first renewal of marriage vows. Yeah, it's kinda romantic but your folks aren't there nor most if any of your friends and while you may get laid a couple of times that night, it wasn't the wedding night sex you had four years ago when you loosened the plaster right behind the headboard back at the hotel. You stop, take a Viagra while wifey calls the babysitter to check on the kids.

It's not the same and we all know it.

While we're deluding ourselves into thinking that we really deserve only two choices and that the guy with the blue tie is better than the guy with the red tie, many liberals and the undeclared Obama Republicans (like Colin Powell) are sticking with Obama because Romney simply scares the shit out of people, including his own wife. Four years may be an eternity in politics but we still aren't that far removed from Bush that we've forgotten the neofascist administration that Obama is still using as his template as I'd predicted four years ago.

Moderate and sensible Republicans get the dry heaves over the prospect of a President Romney, so-called liberals, especially black voters, delude themselves into thinking Obama's the greatest pinko since Eugene fucking Debs, with Romney the sociopath game show host making that comparison a little easier to swallow. Black voters certainly don't want to see their man get voted out after just four years because for them that would mean civil rights have taken a giant step backward. And, let's face it, it has. And if you need further credence to my assertion that people of color are voting with color, ask me sometime how many times I've been called a racist simply for saying I wasn't voting for Obama again (I have two biracial sons).

And Chuck Pierce is hardly convincing when he lazily tries to square a nonfear of Mitt Romney with tepid support for a guy who murders children with complete impunity and would spit on Pierce's trademark hat from on high if there were no cameras around. And that brings us to Elizabeth Warren and her place at the top of this post.

The cowardice that Pierce claims is completely absent from the American electorate now and seemingly forever is to be found abundantly in the Obama administration and this has been a constant since the Obama administration was the Obama campaign. Barack Obama has shown about as much spine as a microwaved earthworm in the face of right wing outrage and faux right wing outrage at that and he'll throw anyone under the wheels of his omnibus, especially if they're black (Shirley Sherrod, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, etc).

And it was cowardice that set Elizabeth Warren loose on the campaign trail.

Warren, you'll no doubt recall, was Obama's first pick to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau only to recess-appoint Richard Cordray when he could've just as easily made the appointment for Warren when Congress went into recess summer last year. If Obama thought he was going to somehow avoid faux Republican outrage over the Cordray recess appointment, then he's just as deluded as Pierce and many of the idiots who still pretend to be fanatical supporters of the POTUS who'd essentially declared war on the Constitution and Bill of Rights in particular.

That's right. Fear and yet another Obama fuckup freed up Elizabeth Warren to become an even greater force for good than she would've been heading up the CFPB that Warren and not Obama built from the ground up. It's a happier ending than we saw with the other Obama fuckup of installing Janet Napolitano as Homeland Security Chief that resulted in Gov. Jan Brewer and SB 1070.

While I had to bite my tongue yesterday and keep from asking Liz Warren two questions (#1 "Where the fuck were you two years ago?" and #2 "How do you feel about Obama throwing you under the wheels of the bus when the minority Senate Republicans had a neverending hissy fit about your nomination?"), my enthusiasm for her candidacy is as unconditional as Pierce's. The only difference was I never had to think for a second about throwing in my lot with her any more than I had to think for a second years ago about voting third party in the presidential race.

I still respect Pierce's writing but with this colossal fuckup in ascribing false courage to the American electorate, I'll never be able to look at Pierce with the same enthusiasm nor with the same level of respect. It's kind of like a microcosm of how the American electorate looks at Obama. They'll still listen to him but not with the same brainless, unconditional fervor with which they'd listened to his populist bullshit in 2008.