Pardon My Idiocy

A local friend planned a petition party to help the Pennsylvania Dems get nominees on ballots. I cooked up a dish to share, and went over to help with coats and chairs. One of the attendees was showing another how to find podcasts on a smartphone. I could hear Michael Cohen ranting to Ben Meiselas about the “idiots, and there’s no other way to describe them” who voted for Trump.

I sat down in a circle of folding chairs, as a local organizer vented to a candidate about all we could have had, tsk! if not for the idiots who refused to vote for it, sigh!

I said I’m not sure I want to blame the voters. Many are just trying to make ends meet, I said, and maybe they didn’t feel heard by either of the dominant parties. Understandably, you know, with the minimum hourly wage still at $7.25. Some maybe wanted to crash the system. Maybe, in their desperation, some voted for whatever looked the most like change.

Well, they certainly got change, didn’t they! Tsk!

Many a so-called idiot works three jobs. Ask me, a recovering law-school adjunct, how I know that’s a thing. Quite a few people lack the extra time and energy to study and debate the candidates’ actions and keep abreast of political news. You know what, though? If a candidate who could champion universal medical care effing got to work on it, that news would have bubbled up to working people. Luigi Mangione sure bubbled up to working people.

But the Dems balked. And they cast aside those who gave no vote of confidence to a party backing a war criminal. All—the workers, the progressives, those whose families were the targets of cultural and physical extermination—all would be lumped into the idiot category. Vote for a third party and you’re just… yeah.

Speaking on Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast in February, Governor Walz admitted what we all knew. The 2024 Harris-Walz campaign could have done something big—something election-defining.

“When we get back – which we will – we’ll fight. I’ll tell you what people are going to expect is they’re not going to expect us to tinker around the edge with the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. They’re going to expect universal health care.”

When you get back, Governor? Who will trust you then? For heaven’s sake, people can’t have universal health care in the supposedly most well-off nation on Earth? Oh, Gov, did you really have to wait for hindsight? Bernie Sanders has attempted to inject this matter into the Dems’ platform for years now. You could have picked up and dusted off the Bernie Sanders campaign materials and gone to town with them. Why didn’t you do that—with lives at stake, lives that have since been lost? Your party tinkered around the edge of everything, nursing a palpable resentment for those who tried to push you into caring about people.

Would you think elected Dems would now suddenly “fight” for the people’s rights, liberties, even basic survival? Take a look. As usual, Gov, they’re appeasing up a storm.

And what trust is due to politicians who proved willing to sustain the killing of other people’s children? Candidate Harris boasted of having the most lethal fighting force in the world even as swing-state voters told pollsters they needed help with the cost of living, not more military spending.

The Dems flung themselves to the right, calling it the middle. And despite identifying the Harris-Walz ticket as the “underdogs” with “a lot of work to do to earn the vote of the American people” Kamala Harris professed to agree with everything Biden did. So much for earning the vote. A commitment to survival wages wouldn’t have lost any voters (and if it did, it ought to have been done anyway). Stronger Social Security benefits? Free higher ed? A cap on rent hikes? Where were the helpful things, while tens of billions of dollars were being taken from the people for Netanyahu’s criminal colonization campaign that most people wanted no part of?

Just asking. Pardon my idiocy.

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