Fine, I’ll Vote for the Racist, Warmongering, Demented Old Cracker

No, not that one. There’s nothing that could ever make me vote for Trump. Unless he suddenly declares that he’ll be decimating the morbidly obese military budget and imposing progressive tax laws putting a fair high burden onto the wealthiest individuals and corporations in order to pay for a complete restructuring of the economy to meet and overcome the climate catastrophe, provide universal healthcare, housing and food assistance, abolishing policing and the prison industry, and everything else on the progressive, responsible, give-a-fuck human being wish list, I would never even consider it. Even then, I wouldn’t, because I’d know he’s lying, like he does about everything else, except in those 0.0001% of cases where he lets slip something truthful, like how he knows that he and the Republicans could never win a free and fair election, or how he wants to fuck his daughter.

While I’d never vote for Trump, I was also adamant that I would not vote for Biden either. I famously wrote an article around this time last year titled I won’t Vote for Joe Biden, and I’m not Alone, in which I listed a few of Biden’s many flaws, ways in which he is a shit human being and a pisspoor politician, and expressed my anger with the Democratic establishment for pushing such an abysmally weak and unappealing candidate, and urged them to shape the fuck up and not make the same mistakes they did in 2016. Yet, here we are. Biden is the Democratic candidate. The Democratic party’s leadership is determined to repeat their mistakes, to make them in worse ways, because they genuinely do not actually want to win and are determined to give Trump a second term.

My position was also that it doesn’t particularly matter whether or how I vote. Living in California, a state that has a buffer of millions keeping it blue, it’s inconceivable that, whether I vote for a third party candidate that I actually like, or abstain from voting for president, it would make a lick of difference either way. I stand by that argument. Whether I vote Green, blue, or just tell the whole sham make-believe game of an election in our imaginary democracy to fuck off, it would change nothing.

The only thing affected would be my own sense of justice, rightness, dignity, ethics, morality. That samll shit. I know that my one vote, just as it wouldn’t help Trump if I didn’t vote for Biden (and it truly wouldn’t: shut the fuck up), wouldn’t mean Howie Hawkins would win. No matter how much we need a Hawkins presidency. Biden is tepid shit beside Hawkins. Policy-wise, I like Hawkins even more than Sanders. Much more. And Angela Nicole Walker is a saint compared to Kamala Harris. But voting for them... It would do little if anything positive for the Green Party and Howie Hawkins, probably not even in terms of better national recognition. Even now, I know the majority of people reading this are asking, “Who the fuck is Howie Hawkins?”

If I still lived in a “battleground” state, overburdened with enough suicidally stupid crackers to give Trump another victory, there’d be no question of my voting Democrat. For all my loathing of Biden and the party’s leadership, I couldn’t countenance the possibility that I didn’t take a simple action to unseat the sociopathic fascist doing all he can to ruin this country and the world, and I’d vote for Biden. Just like I did for Clinton when I was in Pennsylvania in 2016. To be clear, every non-psychopath in a swing state needs to vote for Biden. Whatever disagreements or personal philosophies or hang-ups on that point there may be are moot. Under our pathetic and corrupt national political system and the travesty that is the electoral college, if you vote for anyone but Biden, you are, whether through action or inaction, giving support to fascism, to racism, to misogyny, to every awful thing that Trump represents. If you don’t take that one small action against him, you hate the United States and the notion of democracy. Not that Biden is a good champion or representative of either, but in swing states, a vote not cast for Biden is one given to Trump (much as I loathe that argument, here we are). Not voting against Turd means that you are in favor of dictatorial rule, the elimination of any freedom and liberty. You support white supremacy and rape. You are on the side of evil. Objectively speaking, that is.

I’ve not so much come around to the idea of voting for Biden as I’ve given into it. Has he convinced me in recent days that he’s a good candidate and would be a good president? Has he convinced me that he even wants to win or that he’s trying at all? No. Not at all. In most ways he’s reinforced my dislike of him and confirmed my theory that he and those running his campaign are determined for him to lose. He’s not improved his position on pivotal issues. He’s still saying he’s more inclined to increase funding for police rather than defund them and reallocate the money for more productive social services. He is still opposed to Medicare for All, or any form of universal healthcare, still championing the ACA or Obamacare, despite the current healthcare system, in which Obamacare is based, being a travesty, and the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic which has shown the perilous fragility of our country’s idiotic employment-based healthcare system. Rather than try to win over, or at least placate the concerns of, progressive voters, he’s been taking shots at Sanders and insisting that he, Biden, is not a socialist. (No shit.) He’s still refusing to commit to the Green New Deal, despite seeming to stumblingly express support for it during the debate before correcting himself, saying he supports the “Biden plan.”

Speaking of the debate: everyone has made the obvious observation that it was a completely embarrassing and unwatchable shitshow, but not that many, other highly partisan sycophants, have admitted the truth of the outcome, that Turd won the debate. He didn’t win with well reasoned arguments or admirable elocution. Even against an opponent who’s as poor a speaker as Biden, Turd is incapable of not bleating nonsense like an ornery jackass. He won as I expected him to win, particularly against a poor speaker like Biden, by sheer volume and force. He won by bullying. He interrupted and shouted down Biden like an octogenarian on a meth-bender demanding that a supermarket cashier honor an expired coupon. The result was that all that most people were able to talk about after the debate was Trump. It wasn’t positive talk, in most non-neo-Nazi circles, but that’s never been the case with him. He dominated the debate, and that is the only thing that matters to his cultists. That’s what he did last time, and he’s counting on it working again. Biden was soft-spoken and slow-talking, as unengaging and uninspiring as ever, letting Trump bully and walk all over him. The best that can be said of Biden’s performance is that he didn’t embarrass himself with any of the incoherent and insane ramblings for which he’s been known in his recent dementia-addled years. In that sense he exceeded expectations. And sure, in the binary choice that our electoral system forces upon us, I’d rather have the threadbare old doormat than the white supremacist shit-monster.

I was pressured into agreeing to vote for Biden by my sister. She didn’t convince me with a well reasoned argument. That’s not the way of modern politics. Rather, she bugged me in every conversation until finally I said, fine. And I guess I’ll stick to that. Though truthfully, writing this has made me less sure. My ballot has been sitting on my desk for about three days.

But hey, there’s still a chance that fate and Trump’s own poor health and profound idiocy will spare us this dilemma. With any luck, Queen Rona will still flush the orange Turd and save us where undemocratic electoral politics are wont to fail.