[Peace-discuss] Arguments…

[C. G. Estabrook]

This is an amazing statement -- it shows how successful the extended 
presidential campaign has been as a distraction from real political discussion 
(distraction being of course its conscious purpose, because on the issues of 
importance to the US ruling class, the principal candidates are virtually 
identical). Lindorff seems to be seriously saying that, in the final analysis, 
he will make his selection in the presidential election on the basis of the 
religious views of a vice-presidential candidate!

I suppose the same argument would have justified voting against the Catholic 
John Kennedy in 1960.  (There were of course other reasons, serious ones, to 
oppose Kennedy -- and some of them were knowable in November 1960.)  But it's 
surely illiberal to establish a religious means test for federal office.  And it 
violates at least the spirit of the Constitution: "no religious test shall ever 
be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United 
States" (Article VI, section 3). 	

This piece seems to be another example of how "the chattering classes" privilege 
"cultural issues" (God, guns, gays, gender, and abortion) over the pocketbook 
concerns of working-class voters.  It also illustrates how "liberals and pwogs 
–- in my view somewhat creepily -- thrill to beat up on [Palin]," as Alex 
Cockburn says.

Cockburn points out that the VP nominee for the Democrats is "a man with a lot 
of blood on his hands [in regard to foreign policy, and] a man who has played a 
serious role in incarcerating, hence disenfranchising millions of poor people, 
many of them black, for drug offenses."  In a real campaign, we'd be talking 
about that.

"This is a man with six full terms of infamy in the US senate. Find a 
Palestinian kid maimed from a cluster bomb, and you’ll likely read 'Greetings 
from Joe Biden' scrawled on the casing. Find someone crippled from 25 per cent 
interest charges on credit card debt, and you’ll espy 'Best wishes, Joe Biden' 
scrawled across the front of the bill. He’s a poster boy for all that is foul 
about the Democratic Party."

Palin is the only one of the four that has used the term "working class" in the 
campaign, but Lindorff's contempt for her and her class, and what he takes to be 
their ideas, leads him to vote for Obama rather than the anti-war Nader, even in 
a safe state, and even though he recognizes that Obama "has backed away even 
from saying he wanted the war ended"!  Incidentally, I think Lindorff is wrong 
to say that Obama has said that invading Iraq was "wrong ... morally"; he's 
never opposed the war in principle, just tactically as "the wrong war in the 
wrong place at the wrong time" -- when we really should have "finished the job" 
(i.e., killed more people) in AfPak instead, according to Obama.

Given the non-democratic nature of US presidential elections, it's usually only 
worthwhile to vote against the worse candidate, and I'd vote against McCain if I 
lived in a state where it might make a difference.  But I don't -- Illinois has 
been a "safe" state in recent elections -- so I can follow Debs' rule: “I’d 
rather vote for what I want and not get it, than for what I don’t want and get it.”

Nader's views seem to me to be the best of those on the ballot -- in a real 
election we could have debated their deficiencies -- so I'll vote for him. 
Lindorff's "arguments" illustrate how the presidential election and the 
Democrats have eviscerated the anti-war movement.  We can only hope that when 
the election is over we can get on with the business of working against the 
pro-war policy of the incoming administration.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Presented below are arguments we've heard among AWARE members. If you read
> this piece, read also the commentary which follows it on the website.
> Lindhoff is betting that there is uncertainty about Obama, given his cv,
> which allows a degree of hope.  --mkb
> 
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/16
> 
> The end seals the argument for Lindhoff:
> 
> /And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As crazy as
> John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a solution for all
> problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old man has chosen to have
> a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted and stunningly ignorant
> religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin, as vice president, would in all
> probability end up becoming president during a McCain first term./ / / /This
> country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader of America an
> end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It's not just the polar bears
> and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a Palin presidency. It would
> be all life on earth./
> 
> Published on Thursday, October 16, 2008 by CommonDreams.org *Why I’m Voting
> for Obama* by CommonDreams.org
> 
> *by Dave Lindorff*
> 
> Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.
> 
> It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now, according to
> all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the Democratic candidate
> holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14 percent over Republican
> John McCain-enough to overcome even the most devious Republican vote
> suppression techniques and voting machine chicanery.
> 
> I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a seriously flawed
> candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform, saying not that
> invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that it was "the wrong war."
> Since then, he has backed away even from saying he wanted the war ended,
> opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable that would have the killing and
> dying in that sad land going on longer than most wars this nation has fought.
> He has also called for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear
> evidence that more troops just will make the situation there worse, and has
> called for an expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of
> the Army and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more
> killing and more waste of precious resources.
> 
> Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by President
> Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and abetted the
> illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the National Security
> Agency-spying that we now know is massive almost beyond our imagination, even
> including the monitoring of private family conversations of American service
> personnel in Iraq, of journalists, and almost certainly of Bush
> administration political "enemies." By backing that obscene bill, Obama has
> made it almost impossible for victims of this police-state surveillance
> campaign to sue and find out what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up
> to all these years.
> 
> In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while 
> spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about "change."
> 
> Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has 
> consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they are.
> He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system, which every
> other modern nation has long since proven to be a more cost-effective and
> health-effective way to run a medical system than the failed free-market
> approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the Establishment political
> system. He has correctly denounced the economic bailout as welfare for the
> rich and for the corporate criminals who have been sucking the life out of
> the US economy for years.
> 
> And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.
> 
> The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I lived in Ohio
> or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is too close to call, and
> so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to do so here in Pennsylvania is
> really a cop-out.
> 
> But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and right-wing
> yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear people calling for
> Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the rabid hate mail circulating
> in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a secret Muslim, a terrorist, a
> Marxist and a black nationalist, I want to see the man resoundingly win this
> election.
> 
> But it's more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and experience,
> admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.
> 
> Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep thinking that a
> guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard Law School grad (and
> even law journal editor!) who could have named his price at a Wall Street law
> firm, but who chose instead to be a political and community activist, a guy
> who has relatives who live in humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent
> some of his childhood actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to
> mention a guy who has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to
> bring something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the
> history of the country has come to the office with such a background.
> 
> Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn't be heading
> for an election victory. He wouldn't even be the Democratic nominee. He'd be,
> at best, where Dennis Kucinich is-holding a seat in Congress where his every
> progressive effort would be stymied or mocked by the House leadership.
> 
> The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke (many of
> its purists even mock successful left candidates political figures like
> Kucinich, for god's sake!). Fractured and fractious small groupings have
> little or no link to the organized labor movement-traditionally the bedrock
> of any successful left political power. And the labor movement itself is as
> weak as it has ever been and keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such
> as it is, has even less connection with the broad mass of the American
> public, thanks to years of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao
> and Soviet Communism.
> 
> I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic Party. 
> Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made it into 
> office-people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep.
> Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic Party has shown
> itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall Street and in the
> corporate suites.
> 
> That said, there are important things that could happen-and I stress the word
> could, not would-if this election were to be won by Obama and by Democrats in
> the Congress. One of these things is that there will be new Supreme Court
> justices named over the next four years. Some will inevitably replace some of
> the aging "liberals" on the bench (some of whom have not always been so
> liberal on economic issues). Some could also replace current conservative
> justices (Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don't
> look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years, and even
> Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with epilepsy or
> some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a frothing fit of
> unconscious on occasion).
> 
> Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course for 
> workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job. A major
> reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the workforce in the
> 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and 13 percent of all
> workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor law has been whittled
> away and turned to management's advantage to such an extent that it is almost
> impossible now to win a union election. Employers who break labor laws suffer
> no penalty even when found guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for
> union activity can hope, at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and
> back pay after fighting for years. Most just give up.
> 
> If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a President Obama
> signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if new pro-labor
> officials were appointed to the national, regional and local labor relations
> boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see a genuine revival of the
> labor movement in America with consequences for workers' lives, and for the
> political system that would be far reaching and profound-and that could even
> pave the way for a resurgence of a left/labor political movement.
> 
> Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take Obama's 
> warmongering seriously. Given the man's background, I am confident that he is
> not a militarist by nature. It may be politically opportunistic for him to
> try during this campaign to out-tough McCain on Afghanistan while calling for
> a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it would be a disaster for him to pursue
> a wider war in Afghanistan after taking office, ensuring that his presidency,
> like Bush's, Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's before him, would be
> dragged down by an endless bloody conflict.
> 
> A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an 
> unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as 
> quickly as possible. Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I simply can't see a
> smart guy-and Obama is a smart guy-getting dragged into another quagmire.
> 
> Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global warming,
> so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make itself felt soon
> in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which will demand a crisis
> response. Obama, I believe, will be the right person at the right time, to
> lead that response.
> 
> And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As crazy as
> John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a solution for all
> problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old man has chosen to have
> a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted and stunningly ignorant
> religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin, as vice president, would in all
> probability end up becoming president during a McCain first term.
> 
> This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader of America
> an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It's not just the polar
> bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a Palin presidency. It
> would be all life on earth.
> 
> Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest
> book is "The Case for Impeachment [1]" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
> is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net 
> <http://www.thiscantbehappening.net> [2]
> 
> Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org <http://www.CommonDreams.org> URL
> to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/16