Fine. Bring it.

On July 21, 2024July 21, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics8 Comments

Okay. So. Biden’s out. And, at least right now, it looks like the party is doing the sensible thing and coalescing around Harris, although I’m still waiting to see endorsements from a few notable sources– Obama, Newsom, Whitmer, Jeffries and Pelosi chief among them. We are not doing a fucking underpants gnome primary, people. We just aren’t. The candidate was Biden until a few hours ago and now it’s Harris. Get with it so we can move on.

I have not donated money to any political candidate yet this cycle. As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to send Harris some money. You should too.

I am, having had a few hours to think about it, of two distinct minds about this news. First, I’ll remind you that I was a vocal Kamala Harris supporter in 2020. Harris was my horse until she dropped out, and I was ecstatic when she was named Biden’s running mate. In the abstract, Harris being the Democratic nominee bothers me not in the slightest. I thought she’d be a great President four years ago and I think she’ll be a great President right now. I will cast my vote for her with pride and glee.

(I note that in the 2020 primary I voted for Elizabeth Warren, who had already dropped out. I have not actually had a chance to vote for Harris for President yet, only VP.)

I think in a lot of ways Harris is the perfect anti-Trump candidate. Running a Black woman and a former prosecutor against that felon rapist sonofabitch is about as clear a distinction for the two parties’ visions of the future as I can possibly imagine. And if you want to read into the image above for further preferences on the ticket, you go right ahead and do that. There’s no “two sides of the same coin” bullshit going on here. These are radically different candidates.

So yeah. I am, in some ways, not at all disappointed about this, and I’m substantially more excited than I thought I was going to be under these circumstances a week ago.

That said.

Matter of fact, lemme put a separator here.

We have effectively just watched a soft coup against the American President, led by a bunch of shitheel billionaire donors, a handful of elected cowards, and the New York Fucking Times, and I’m not happy about that at all. In fact, I am viscerally fucking angry about it, because Biden has been the best President of my lifetime (and it’s not close) and he didn’t deserve this fucking bullshit.

There are eleven years and well over a million words of posts here; feel free to read through the archives to see what I’ve had to say about mainstream media in the past, and understand that when I say I would not cry a single tear were the NYT brass to be lined up against a wall and shot that this is very much a new feeling for me. I have never seen the media more brazenly put a thumb on the scale the way they have been in the last couple of months, and the way the NYT in particular, an organization that even now is calling for an underpants gnome primary, has gone fully all-in for Trump has been at various times alarming, frightening and disgusting.

The Republicans were literally calling for pogroms last week. They printed out signs for their delegates to wave around calling for mass deportations. The numbers they’ve been throwing around keep getting bigger– I’ve heard as high as thirty million, which is nearly ten percent of the population of the entire fucking United States.

And these people get mad when we compare them to Nazis? We literally had a four-day white supremacist rally on national TV just now. This guy’s running mate compared him to Hitler once.

No, Trump’s “striking a softer tone.” Is he really? No, not even a little bit. But the truth doesn’t fucking matter to these fucking scribblers.

But Biden’s old. But her emails. It’s the exact same fucking thing. Pay no attention to the fact that Trump is in every single way in worse shape than Biden is. Biden old Biden old Biden old.

Fuck the fucking New York Times, and fuck the national media. I have been pushing back on people for years about anti-media tirades. There’s no denying it. They want the country I live in to degenerate into a fascist hellhole, and they want a man elected whose agenda literally and specifically includes putting people like me in jail. And they just turned up the hysteria and kept turning it up until they got what they wanted. It won’t be a week until they settle on their line of attack against Harris. There’s been a bullshit lie for every Dem candidate since Kerry; Harris will not escape unscathed, it’ll just be more brazenly racist and sexist than previously.

And yet.

I’m not Joe Biden. I’ve never met the man; I’ve never even seen him in person. And obviously I don’t know if we’re about to find out about some sort of recent medical diagnosis or something that would have made it clear to him that it was time to go. Fuck the Goddamn debate; he’s 81 and he may have just genuinely realized that he wasn’t up to the stress of campaigning and running the fucking country at the same time any longer. It may be that even without the events since the debate he’d be dropping out today anyway. Hell, he just got Covid for the third fucking time. Every adult has the experience of some family member who was elderly and perfectly healthy and sharp until they just … weren’t any longer. My own mother’s decline at the end was shockingly quick. And I’m sure everyone reading this who is over 30 can come up with a similar example. One fall, one broken hip. One illness. Bam.

It may be that he genuinely thinks he can’t do it any longer and it may also be that he decided fuck it, I’ve given everything I have to this country and I’m ready to be done. I’m very, very fucking angry right now, but I’m not angry at Biden. He was damn near my last choice for President in 2020 and he has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Perfect? Of course not. Not close. I’m a grown-ass Goddamn man and I know better than to expect perfection from any elected official. They’re all going to piss me off and/or let me down at some point. I don’t even think that’s a cynical thing to say; it’s a simple fact of existence.

But fine. He’s made his decision, and he’s made it in a way that I can’t find any reason to criticize; I had initially thought that he’d passed on endorsing Harris, because I was out of the house when the announcement was made and all I saw at first was the letter, and not the subsequent endorsement. I do think he should use the time he has left in office making the Supreme Court absolutely miserable; the thought of Dark Brandon unleashed for a few months makes me very happy.

One way or another, the rest of us have got a job to do. Get in line and start pushing, motherfuckers.

In which this isn’t fair

On November 6, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

It is an unbelievably perfect demonstration of how fucking perverse all of existence is right now that, literally less than ten minutes after telling my wife that I was getting (hah!) stir-crazy and wanted to go out and impulse-buy something, I went outside and checked the mail and found a brand-new Goddamned Best Buy card waiting for me. The card currently carries no balance at all; I typically use it only for large purchases (really, the only reason I ever enter a Best Buy nowadays) and the last thing I bought was my desktop, which is a 2017 model. I could use a new laptop, as the battery on the old one is starting to go, or I could make the smarter choice and just replace the damn battery. Similarly, for the first time since my initial upgrade I’ve cast an eye at the new Apple Watch, but there’s just no good reason to do that either. In either case it would be spending money just to spend money, and I’m trying to be smarter about that crap nowadays.

(I do expect to have to shell out the money for the laptop battery pretty soon, which will be a couple hundred bucks. But the thing is … six? seven? years old and there’s no speed issues at all, and if I bought a new one it would be north of two grand. The only problem is the battery, and since I don’t go anywhere I can keep it plugged in most of the time. I even still have my work laptop at home in case of emergencies.)

(Checks to see if BB has PS5s available)

(They do not)

In general, the election has failed to improve my mood. Other than the presidency, which is all over but the shouting at this point, I went from “it looks like I’ve lost every other race I care about” the other day to “I have lost every other race I care about” today. The School Board race was especially heinous; not only did the plagiarizer not lose her seat to the crank, but the other district seat up for reelection, another person who voted to return, also won, and the teachers lost their best advocate on the Board in favor of an imperious ass who I am not at all looking forward to having to deal with, ever. My personal interactions with her when she was with the district were never good, plenty of people have much worse stories than I do, and her husband was fired for incompetence.

And yet, because this is South Bend and we hate education here, she actually got the most votes of any of the At-Large candidates. So. Dandy.

But yeah: I’ve been waiting for that moment when it feels like the weight falls off my shoulders, and apparently Biden at least theoretically clinching the Presidency hasn’t done it yet. In theory the rest of the networks (particularly the AP) getting the fuck in line and making the call might help, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to relax until the fucker is hauled out of the White House by his hairpiece, preferably to be tossed directly into jail to die alone in a deep pit. Apparently the AP is waiting for Biden’s margin to exceed half a point before they call Pennsylvania; I’m not sure what the holdup is otherwise. Either way, I thought I was going to feel better about all this by now.

I can haz next Wednesday?

On November 2, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

wegotthis Had a weird conversation with a co-worker today who was planning on staying up punishingly late tonight to watch Game 7 of the World Series, yet could not understand why I was not expecting to get any sleep next Tuesday night due to staying up late watching election returns, liveblogging, and generally making an ass of myself on Twitter. To my mind, they are basically the same activity, only mine involves literally defeating the forces of evil.

Do not panic, by the way, if you are a Democrat and prone to such things. I have been saying this for months: Hillary is going to win, and she’s going to win big. I don’t care what Nate Silver says, I didn’t care what Nate Silver said a month ago, and I’m not going to care what he says in five or six days. Clinton is going to win. Trump never had a chance. I am more mellow about this election than any in my lifetime, and my memory probably encompasses an extra election or two beyond what you might expect from a 40-year-old, because I have a lifelong habit of paying attention.

I am right about this.

Trust me.

Do not panic.

Meanwhile, speaking of not panicking, the Cubs just went up 5-1. I will probably watch another twenty minutes of baseball and then consign the rest to history and go to bed; I am working my way through a thousand-page Ken Liu novel and kinda want to prioritize that over grown men swinging sticks.

Goal for the next two days: no naps. Likelihood of achieving goal: minimal.

A quick history lesson for Bernie Sanders supporters

On February 10, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics15 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a guy named Barack Obama. You may have heard of him. No one outside the great state of Illinois had any idea who Barack Obama was until 2004, when he delivered the (brilliant) keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. I lived in his district in Illinois at the time, and I spent a couple of hours on the phone after that speech telling everyone I knew that Obama would be the first black President so that I would get credit.

“You wait,” I said. “2012 or 2016. He’ll be President.”

You may see my mistake already. In 2007, when Obama first declared that he was running for President, I was, with no trace of hyperbole, one of his biggest fans. How do I know? Because, again, virtually no one outside of Illinois knew who he was, and as someone in his district as a state Senator and Illinois Senator, someone who knew where his house was, I’d been following his career for a while.

And I wasn’t sure he was ready to be President. Somebody else was running. You may also be familiar with her: her name was Hillary Clinton, and her nomination was widely believed to be unstoppable. (There was also John Edwards, but for the purposes of this conversation he’s irrelevant.)

I started off as a Clinton supporter, who felt that Obama would be a good President, would certainly grow into the job, but didn’t think he was ready. It was the campaigns that convinced me otherwise. Clinton displayed a startling talent to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and Obama’s team out-hustled and out-thought hers at every available opportunity. Obama won Iowa, and got crushed in New Hampshire. For the most part, especially early on, most of his victories were at caucuses. Why was he winning the caucuses? Because he out-organized Clinton, and eventually he was winning enough that that inevitability argument got punctured, and it was only a matter of time after that.

You may have heard something about superdelegates, and you may think it’s unfair that Secretary Clinton is so far ahead in delegates right now. You may have even used the word “corrupt” to describe the system.

How many superdelegates do you think Barack Obama started off with?

How many do you think he had by the end of the primaries?

You are aware that these people are able to change their minds, right? From what I’m hearing, Bernie Sanders supporters tend to be young people, a phrase I can no longer apply to myself. It is possible you are not aware of these things. Superdelegates have been a part of the process for a long time, and convincing them to vote for you is part of running for the Democratic nomination. If Bernie Sanders was not aware of them already, and if he does not have a plan to (eventually) win their support, he is doing this wrong. It is not as if these rules were decided behind his back, or were hidden from him somehow. And, again, if he wins contests, they’ll come around.

“But the people are behind us!” you say. Well, some of them. Some of the white ones, anyway. The rest of us haven’t had a chance to vote yet.

Speaking of voters of color.

You may be under the impression that Barack Obama was able to coast to these victories mostly on the strength of the black vote. You may not be aware that the initial knock against Obama was that he was not black enough to court black support.

Go read that article.

I’ll wait.

Not only was Obama mixed, not only was he young, not only was he relatively unknown, not only was his middle name Hussein when we’d been fighting against Iraq for most of the previous administration, but he was running against Hillary Clinton, the wife of a man who was declared by no less a black luminary than Toni Morrison herself to be the first black President. There is a good argument to be made that the Clintons do not deserve that support, but the fact is especially in 2007-08 black voters loved Bill Clinton and Hillary was widely believed to have inherited that support. Obama was not supposed to be the candidate of black voters. Clinton was.

Your candidate, Bernie supporters, is also perceived as having a problem with minority voters. I’m using the word “perceived” intentionally, because insofar as the problem is real, it’s fixable. But he’s going to have to acknowledge it, and he’s going to have to do it now. Black voters– and Latino voters and Muslim voters and Asian voters and and and and and– are not monolithic and they’re not dumb. They’re not going to vote for Hillary Clinton because they liked Bill. Obama proved that. Sanders can too, but he’s going to have to try.

Whining about a corrupt system and superdelegates is not going to get your man the nomination. Whining about women voters going to Hillary is not going to get your man the nomination.

Whining, in general, is not going to get Bernie Sanders nominated for President.

Hillary Clinton is a lot of things. Unfortunately for her, one of her previously displayed qualities is the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. She is not inevitable. She is beatable. But the Sanders people are going to have to put in the work, and they’re going to have to engage with voters of color and with women voters in a serious way, and they’re going to have to convince the superdelegates– who are, in case you don’t know, mostly Democratic elected officials— that he’s the right man for the job. Convincing the superdelegates might be difficult, seeing as how Sanders has only been a Democrat for, what, a year or two? One of Clinton’s strengths is that she’s perceived as much more able to have coattails– to bring in other Democratic elected officials behind her, to alter the balance of power in the House and the Senate so that some of these nice things both candidates want to do become possible.

Is Bernie going to be able to do that? Is he trying?

He probably ought to start.

See y’all in South Carolina.

Eric the half a blog

On January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics13 Comments

It is amazing to me that fully eight years after the end of the Bush administration I still can’t blog properly about politics without getting a headache. Every post I have in mind right now touches on the presidential race in some way, and I don’t want to write any of them because Christ am I tired of talking about politics, despite the fact that outside of education policy (and there’s been precious little of that lately) I almost never talk about politics around here.(*)

Some of you know this; there was a Previous Blog; back when Xanga was a thing (google it) and that blog was basically politics 24/7. I burned out. I can’t do it anymore. Which is why, for example, Jeb Bush can shoot a “Heckuva job, Brownie” over at Governor Rick “Why the fuck am I not in jail yet” Snyder over the way he poisoned thousands of children and then gave a nice speech about it and the only mention it gets around here is this sentence. I can’t make myself write the post. It’s too hurty. I don’t have the energy for it.

Or, for example, and this is a real thing, how I just don’t have the energy to argue with people who think referring to Hillary Clinton as “Hillary” is hugely sexist when this is Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo:

The “H” stands for “Calling me Hillary is sexist,” obviously.

(And, for that matter, while Carly Fiorina is more likely to use her full name than just “Carly,” I can find a fair amount of campaign material that just calls her “Carly” and nothing that just says “Fiorina.”)

And there is still ten fucking months until the election.

Sooner or later either the dam is going to burst, and the torrent of bile that will be unleashed around here will drive away each and every one of my previous readers, because I love you fuckers but you have no idea what I’m actually like once I get going on this shit, or my head’s just going to explode, which is probably the best solution for everyone outside of maybe my immediate family. My son will miss me; my wife and other adult family members will probably just be glad they don’t have to put up with my shit any more.

Fuuuuuuuck.

(*) I got curious and checked my categories; I have sixty-some-odd posts categorized as “politics,” but virtually none of them are Washington/election politics, which is specifically what I’m referring to here. Frankly, most of them are about feminism, which may perhaps deserve its own category by now.