This morning there were a raft of articles like these floating around my corner of the Internet.
We already stand to lose up to 10 seats in the Senate, and it’s not remotely clear that we will gain any seats in the House. Why?
Greg Palast: How Racist Voter Suppression Could Cost Jon Ossoff the Georgia Election
Voting systems “probed” – Feds won’t say which 21 state election systems Russia hacked
From the Vice article:
We are not making our country safer if we don’t make sure that all Americans realize the breadth and extent of what the Russians did in 2017, and frankly, if we don’t get our act together, they might do in an even more dramatic form in 2018 and 2020.
Don’t talk to me about history. History didn’t account for Scalia’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act or for Russian interference. And it sure didn’t account for a wrongheaded progressive movement that splits the left into two groups who won’t talk to each other and spend their time arguing.
“You’re not progressive enough.”
“Well, you’re not pragmatic enough.”
That’s total bullshit, pushed by people with so little engagement in the actual election process that they think it’s only necessary to show up every four years as if voting for President is the only requirement in a civil society.
As long as the Right still calls Social Security and health care “entitlements” and their stupid base fails to grasp that it’s THEIR money the rich want to take, it won’t matter. 62 million idiots elected a two-timing pussy-grabbing lecher who promised them he would save the babies and the guns.
We won’t turn these people to the light because they’re happy with what they got. They’re perfectly content to blow up 50 years’ worth of progressive health care and safety net structure because they’re still angry that a black man held the highest office in the United States, against all their collective racist objections, and they will punish the Left, no matter how much it costs THEM to do it.
It’s the ones who were told that Trump and Clinton were the same and who swallowed that trash who will also cost us the elections in 2018 and 2020 if we don’t shift the dialogue from idealism to pragmatism.
That’s what cost us the Presidency, on top of all the voter obstruction and interference, at the state level and through foreign intervention.
You don’t toss out 40k registration forms and pretend these people don’t have the right to vote if you have confidence in the system. You do it to protect your power.
The GOP won’t stop until they have a filibuster-proof majority in the House and Senate. Once they have achieved the goal, they will rewrite our Constitution and eliminate every amendment that ever gave rights to anyone who isn’t a white Christian male with land.
That’s been the whole ball game ever since Nixon left office.
I’m over 50, separated, with two kids on the LGBTQ spectrum, both of whom are twice exceptional. We will have nowhere to go but Canada if this crap doesn’t stop flying because it won’t be safe for us to stay in the US, where we were born.
The numbers for Johnson beat out the numbers for Stein by a substantial chunk. You’re not going to get a Libertarian to vote Democratic, no matter who’s running. With the number of sub parties in this country, you’d think we operated with a coalition government, and you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong.
There is a two-party system because our political structure is based on winners and losers. That’s binary. Only one winner gets to do the job, and for the runners up, the more who participate, the more watered down the opposition. The Green party will not overcome this divide because unlike the Tea Party and Republicans, they are allergic to the concept of pragmatism. They want an ideal world where no such ideal is achievable. There simply aren’t enough Greens to support such a sea change, and that’s not going to change.
And that’s how we got here: Ossoff Loss Underscores Left’s Fissures in Trump Era
From the article:
Sanders allies may argue that a more progressive candidate might have won. The Vermont Senator recently pointed to the strong performance by the British Labour Party in the recent U.K. elections as proof that left-leaning politicians can win. But Sanders endorsed candidates have also lost in recent months. He backed a candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, Heath Mello, who went on to lose to a Republican. The Sanders-supported candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, also lost as did his pick to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, Tom Perriello.
If that’s the narrative that makes you feel better about why these people are losing, you’re completely missing the point. So you want people to rise up and take over the polls. That’s nice, but they can’t vote because states like Georgia, South Carolina, or anywhere else in this country that is overrun with the GOP, refuse to let them register or get near the polls on election day, or simply throw their ballots out as invalid. You fail on the essential basics of WHY those people can’t vote.
Make no mistake: We’re seeing a test run for 2018. It will not matter who runs for the Democrats, how Liberal they are. Be prepared for a bunch of “we only needed this much to win; too bad more people didn’t bother to show up” dialogue in service to blamecasting.
That’s the problem here. It’s not the ideology, it’s the mechanics. As long as progressives still harbor and nurture the “if only Bernie had won” bullshit and focus on ideology instead of mechanics, Democrats will continue to lose.
My family came here over 100 years ago to escape the kind of crap Trump and the GOP are pushing, and we will have to flee this country (where my grandparents were born), because of this stupidity.
Stop pushing the ideology and raise the damn alarm!
17 months.