06/29/2022 15:28:23

Although this is mostly a tech blog, from time to time I have used this platform to share my political opinion. I don't know if any of my readers really care one way or another, but today I'm going to talk about politics a bit. So if you don't want to hear it, cut loose now because this basically just a politically charged rant.

The basic jist of this post is this: I am done voting for the Democratic party. I swore off voting for the Republican party back in 2004 and since then I have been constantly and increasingly frustrated with the ineptness of the Democratic party. But the word ineptness doesn't really do this situation justice because that's not what the problem is.

No the problem is that the Democratic party is structured to operate purely as a foil to the cancerous regressive Republican party. Therefore every part of the platform, their campaigns and even their entire relationship with voters is basically predicated on the simple idea that they themselves are not Republicans.

So why not a third party? Well our first-past-the-post voting system pretty much makes having a viable third or fourth party impossible. Especially here in America where most of us seem to at least silently concur with the ole Ricky Bobby adage, "If you ain't first, you're last". So ignoring for a moment that the Libertarian and the Green parties are both kind of balls to the wall insane, they don't really have an actual snowball's chance in hell anyway.

Anyway, back to the Democratic party. They are basically as useless as a third tit on a boar. They are useful only as a protest vote because honestly, in part because they don't seem to believe in much of anything at all. The upside of this is that they don't seem to believe in fascism and in making our government more and more theocratic. The downside of this is that they don't seem even remotely inspired to actually do anything to actually counter Republican's attempts to take us in those directions.

Oh yes, I just used some trigger words that probably pissed off any Republican readers I have. Too bad. You all managed to transform a semi-respectable center-right party into a far-right party that has no guiding principles to fall back on, cherry-picks its "platform" based on some vapid and ever amorphous definition of "how things used to be" (code for white people need a break) and somehow managed to turn even that flaming shit show into a cult of personality centered around one of the most loathsome human beings to ever come into existence, Donald J. Trump.

Oh yeah, we are talking about the Democrats, right? Actually no. This post is really about the American political system as a whole and how utterly pointless it has become. Republicans claim to hate activist judges, until the activist judges kick abortion to the curb in name of the states rights while also kneecapping state's ability to implement state level gun control policies for "reasons". There is no logical consistency to be found here. But don't feel bad guys, because there isn't any of that on the Democrat side of the fence either.

Going back to abortion for a moment, the only reason Roe v. Wade is now yesterdays news is because a religiously stacked Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. Democrats are now planning to run on fixing that in the midterms. Well that's a complete load of shit as we are only in this situation because Democrats failed miserably at doing their job between 2016 and 2020. Trump was able to nominate three Supreme Court justices whereas if Democrats had even a single iota of spine, he would've only gotten two. In this fantasy land, this would've left the conservatives with only 5 seats one of which was occupied by John Roberts, a conservative who actually has principles and places a high value on the perceived legitimacy of the court as an institution.

Let us not forget that Democrats allowed Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans to usurp Obama's last pick in early 2016 by simply refusing to put it up for a vote with the reasoning that it was that it was too close to a presidential election and that the voters should be allowed to decide. Now of course I have several problems with this, the first of which is that the Supreme Court isn't supposed to be political so the reasoning here automatically belies the corruption that is now inherent in this process. Secondly, the timing never has been and never was going to be an issue.

Nevertheless the spineless Democrats allowed this to happen, probably because they honestly thought Hillary would be the next president. Gotta love the fact that anybody believed that (sadly yes I also believed this after Trump got the nomination). In any event, Trump won and nominated Gorsuch. Then later on he nominated Kavanaugh. Finally on the eve of the 2020 election, Ginsburg died and lo and behold the Republicans shocked everybody by deciding that the reasoning they used in 2016 to block Obama's pick didn't apply to a third Trump pick. They then proceeded to use every trick in the book to force the Barrett nomination through at light speed.

It bears repeating: Spineless Democrats also allowed all of this to happen. The worst part of it is that they take no responsibility for playing the role of enabler even as the country's worst impulses form into ever more theocratic and fascist laws and rulings around them.

I cannot in good conscience continue to vote for the Democratic party. They are a symptom of a much larger problem in this country in which nobody understands and appreciates how anything works and in which everybody is so cynical that this level of overt failure is just seen as the price of doing business. Imagine for a moment being a Democratic politician on the federal level and being content with the fact that over the last 20 years you have accomplished absolutely nothing of measurable value (exempting the 2018 farm bill which I will gladly give everybody props for). It gets worse when you imagine that there are millions of voters that are perfectly fine with this state of affairs.

Of course since I'm obviously not going to start voting for Republicans again, I'm effectively done. Short of relevant local and state referendums, I am retiring from voting. May a pox fall upon both the Republican and Democratic party houses. As long as these are the only two real choices (one of which isn't much of a choice and other of which is insane), I choose to abstain as that has now become the only way that I can live with myself.