Many women plan to vote for Obama because he supports abortion rights, even though they deplore his drone assassinations and wars. What other trade-offs can Obama offer to light-on-integrity pseudo-progressive voters?
Trade-Offs
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
9 Comments. Leave new
You’re getting at a good point here Ted, in that Americans seem perfectly happy to support a murdering war criminal if they think he’ll be a little less conservative than his opponent on domestic issues. Your analogy does have a little problem though, because your cartoon implies that Romney doesn’t support drone strikes on innocent civilians; hence the “trade off” you mention. Unfortunately the situation is even worse than that. Either person when president would happily still kill anyone they like for any reason or no reason at all. Given that, if you still think that voting is the way to go, there seems nothing wrong-headed about voting for the monster that will let your library stay open a few more hours. That you are being complicit in the US’s foreign policy by endorsing either candidate, and by not working to overthrow the system, is the only problem.
Oh, its even worse than that- Romney will do everything you’re complaining about, multiplied by a factor of a thousand. So here’s a clue about being “light on integrity”- if you act to aid the person who will make things thousands of times worse (even through inaction) you don’t actually have any integrity.
You don’t like drone strikes? Aid the candidate that will add hundreds, if not thousands more.
You don’t like the fact that Obama might be pushed into war with Iran? Help the candidate that’s salivating for war.
You dont like that the Republicans managed to block Obama and kept Gitmo open? Aid the candidate that will expand Gitmo.
Thanks for demonstrating the problem with “progressives”- that they’re regressive. No wonder they can’t get anything done.
And, given that yet again, that the blame for the majority of things you’re complaining about needs to be placed 100% on the Republicans, where it rightfully belongs, this is a fairly weak cartoon.
Whimsical, I think we’re making similar-ish points, if mine is from a more radical perspective than your Democratic point of view, but come on. The knee-jerk blaming of the Republicans in congress defense is literally impossible to maintain with any intellectual honesty in the case of this comic.
For the issue of drone strikes, these are *according to the White House* the unilateral purview of the Executive-in-Chief with no oversight from congress. So every drone strike is a choice the president is making on his own to assassinate someone (and bystanders by very-foreseeable “accident”) without due process. Likewise if an invasion of Iran were like EVERY “war” since 1945, it would also be declared unilaterally by the president. That’s two of the three foreign issues Ted mentions, so even if we grant that Obama “can’t” close Gitmo (not true in my opinion) the, as you say, “majority of things you’re complaining about” are “100%” the fault of the president, not congress.
I just don’t think Romney would be any better.
In 1968, Humphrey promised to continue Johnson’s essential war to keep the Commies out of Vietnam. Voters ‘knew’ that if the US lost, we’d all have to queue for meat and only have one brand of toothpaste.
Nixon said he had a ‘secret plan’ that would quickly end the Vietnam War with a complete US victory. Progressives didn’t vote for Nixon, they stayed home. Without their votes, Humphrey lost.
Whimsical says, had the progressives supported Humphrey, the US would have moved to the left. By sitting home, the progressives let the US move to the right. So we got Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush, Sr. And when Clinton got in, he leaned to the right and abolished AFDC. And then we got Bush, Jr.
And all because progressives sat on their hands and let Humphrey get defeated.
Whimsical might be right, but I’m not convinced. Maybe, once Humphrey won on his platform of continuing the war Johnson had escalated, he would have moved farther to the right, and the next Democrat elected would have been even further to the right.
My own feeling, after watching for half a century, is that we’re SNAFU. Voting for Obama gets us Gitmo and ground troops in Afghanistan and air strikes against Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and other places where Obama thinks he can get some political mileage by killing someone and then assuring the US voters that the deceased was one of the world’s most evil persons, probably worse than Hitler and Stalin put together. And the New York Times will strongly support the president and assure its readers that Obama is absolutely right when he says this.
The alternative of not voting for Obama probably gets us much worse.
And I don’t see any viable ‘third options’.
@Ecpyrosis-
Romney wouldn’t be better, he’d be thousands of times worse. And making it easier for him to become President (through action or non action) just because you’re disappointed in Obama isn’t a display of integrity- it’s mental masturbation.
How cute, Whimsical used the magical thinking card again. “It will be worst under Romney, he will have American troops rape them, then pull out and bomb them after raping them.” your pathetic Whimsical the only positive you can come up with for your candidate is that he isn’t Republican, he makes the same basic decisions as Republicans, he continues to torture and kill, but hey, he’s not Republican, can you imagine how much worst the murder would be if you voted Republican? LOL you have to be a troll don’t you Whimsical? Nobody could actually say that crap with a straight face.
Thanks for an excellent demonstration of mental masturbation, patron2. Now go herp derp all over someone else’s post. And dont come back till you can play with the grownups.
Ecpyrosis, you are quite correct that neither Mr Obama nor Mr Romney exhibit any compunctions at all about using drones to kill foreigners abroad, but I don’t think Ted is saying that Mr Romney is less inclined to do murder than Mr Obama. What he seems to be saying – in my interpretation – is that certain people attempt to justify voting for Mr Obama by choosing to regard the choice as a trade-off – on the one hand, Obama is murdering people around the globe and using (with, of course, the kind help of the Congress) 53 cents on every tax dollar the federal government collects to support the military and (in)security forces (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q0Os3q2p86Q), on the other hand, he supports same-sex marriage. With Romney, the thinking (quite correctly) goes, there would be no trade-off, one would get both murder ’round the globe *and* a no to same-sex marriage. Thus it is better to choose Obama. What Ted here points out is that this trade-off has nothing to do with «progressive» values. I think michaelwme’s description of the situation as SNAFU (or perhaps even better, FUBAR) is accurate – the only things which will bring these interminable US wars of aggression abroad to an end are 1) bankruptcy or 2) a thermonuclear conflagration which puts an end to the short happy life of H sapiens sapiens on the planet, whichever comes first. But then, I am an inveterate optimist…..
Henri
Ah whim. It’s you who gets off on political snuff. Your fantasy of Obama as good guy by proxy not due to his choices but your fantasy of life under Romney.