The Life in My Years

There I was, on November 8th of 2016, standing in line at the polling place, minding my own business when my conscience tapped me on the shoulder, “Dude, you aren’t going to vote for Hillary, are you?”
“Why not?” I asked. “Better than Trump.”
“No shit. Hemorrhoids are better than Trump. Dog shit is better than Trump.”
“So what’s your point?”
“Hillary’s a shoe in. No way Trump wins. There can’t be that many stupid people in America. I say, write in Bernie.”
“I’m not going to write in Bernie. You fucking crazy?”
“If you don’t write in Bernie I’ll hold my breath till I turn blue,” said my conscience as it stomped about.
“Fine then, I’ll vote for Bernie.”

A few hours later, Hillary Clinton took the stage at her headquarters. Cora and I watched, stunned, disappointed and afraid. “Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.”

I remember the camera panning to staffers who were openly weeping. That’s what staffers do after losing a hard fought slog of an election. But they weren’t weeping over the loss. They were weeping over the notion that Donald Trump was going to be president. My memory of turning to Cora and saying, “Fucking Donald Trump is President of the United States,” is as clear as if it had happened just last night.

Hillary should have won. Hillary could’ve won. Nobody in their right mind thought that a boorish, racist, reality show con man could be elected to the most powerful office on Earth.

And so I and the legion of conscience soothers who voted for Sanders, or Jill Stein, or plain old Jill Smith down the street, because we just couldn’t stomach Hillary could only bury our heads in our hands and hope. Hope that during the ensuing three months the new boss would take a crash course in “how to act responsibly at being the most powerful person on Earth,” and actually learn it. We hoped, as the world did, and as some of his handlers promised, that he would grow into the job.

Hope dashed. Promise not kept.

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Four years later, or, after 1461 days, or 2,103,840 seconds, because some of us were literally counting the seconds until the madness of Trump’s presidency would end, Joe Biden took office. But not until a struggle, an attempted coup, and a violent insurrection had taken place. The wicked witch is dead, we thought. There were tears again. Tears of relief and of joy.

The tears hadn’t even dried when Trump and his office holding sycophants and his cult of weirdos and idiots went on a four years long rant of whining and lies and threats of retribution. Trump and his gang of pirates refused to go quietly.

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And here we are, with just five months and change until the next election. The same two guys who the majority of people don’t want. I suppose that the plus to having this unpopularity contest is that each of the candidates has a presidential term that the voter can evaluate and base his vote on.

We have a fair sense of what we’ll get with a second Biden term. If we get a reprise of the past four years we’ll get stability and an honest shot at bipartisanship from a man who will hold to the promise of being president for all Americans (notwithstanding the MAGA claims to the contrary). We’ll get a president who will hire a competent bureaucracy, and if necessary, won’t nominate a flaming ideologue to the Supreme Court.

We’ll also get the Biden who drives me to distraction. The guy who isn’t sleepy Joe, but slow off the mark Joe. His handling, or mishandling, of three significant issues has marred his presidency.

For more than two years, Biden acted as if the crisis on the border would somehow go away of its own accord. By the time Biden reacted, the border was inundated and the Republicans have since taken politcal advantage of the full blown crisis.

Biden’s initial handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has always been three or more steps behind the curve.

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And then came Gaza.

October 7th was horrific, but what has occurred since is state sponsored murder on an industrial scale. The Israelis have pounded Gaza into a rubble strewn graveyard of innocents while sponsoring a famine.

Gaza is a crisis that Biden has, as my old Aunt Mabel used to say, fucked up six ways from Sunday (though Mabel might have not have used the “f” bomb).

After the attack by Hamas, Biden was the same Joe who has a 50 years long history of support for Israel. He condemned the attack by Hamas and vowed to stand with Israel.

And then Netanyahu and the IDF went off the rails and Biden reverted to slow, indecisive Joe and the administration has steadfastly remained on the wrong side of world opinion.

The United States has used its veto power to shield Israel from resolutions in opposition to its scorched earth warfare. The United States has looked pathetically weak with its airdrop of supplies (which was followed by the “flour massacre”). Biden has stubbornly refused to condition military aid to Israel. His administration has suffered the embarrassment of resignations in protest of U.S. policy.

Most recently Biden slammed the International Criminal Court’s decision to request a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu. Seriously Joe, you couldn’t just shut up about it?

All the while Biden’s condemnation for the Israeli prosecution of the war has been too little and far too late. For months, Biden has given every indication of being Bibi’s bitch.

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Let’s not fool ourselves though. Donald Trump will be much worse for Gaza. He was the guy who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He was the guy who recognized Israeli expansion into the West Bank, long considered to be in violation of international law. And it was Trump who recently stated that he would let Netanyahu, “finish the job.”

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My conscience has been grumbling about Biden for over a year now, pissed off at Joe’s decision to run for reelection. My conscience is very pissed off at the way Biden has painted himself into a Gaza corner. My conscience may be pissed but I not about to let it cast a protest vote just because it feels the need to stick it to old man Biden.

That’s because my conscience and I haven’t forgotten the four years of Trumpian insanity. It’s only taken a mere four years for people to have erased the preceding four years of chaos and incompetence.
The lies. Over the course of four years, 30,473. And that’s just the public ones.
The sucking up to dictators.
400,000 dead Americans from COVID the day he left office.
The failed attempts to repeal the ACA (Obamacare).
The tax cuts for the rich.
The “very fine people” at Charlottesville.
The misogyny, the racism and the xenophobia.
Lafayette Square, and the violent dispersal of a peaceful protest, in order for Trump to hold a Bible upside down in front of a church.
Stealing and retaining secret documents.
January 6th.
Throwing rolls of paper towels at hurricane victims as if that’s some kind of salve for their desperation and suffering.
The border wall fraud.
Floating the idea to send U.S. troops into Mexico to root out the cartels (in essence an invasion of a sovereign nation).
Floating the idea of shooting protesters in the legs with live bullets.
The dismantling of Roe.

Sure we laughed, albeit uncomfortably, at the sheer stupidity of a president who:
Didn’t know that China and India share a border.
Toyed with the idea of injecting bleach to prevent COVID.
Postulated that wildfires could be prevented by “raking the forests.”
Heaped praise on George Washington for “taking over the airports” during the Revolutionary War.
Said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

And that’s just the small sample.

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My conscience and I have also heard, from Trump’s own mouth, that what he is promising in a second term is even worse, should he be reelected.
Deportation camps.
Use of the Justice Department to get back at his opponents.
Gulags for political opponents.
Repealing the ACA.
Tax breaks for the rich.
Defunding the FBI
Abandoning Ukraine.
Gutting the EPA and the FDA.
Disbanding the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (because we didn’t learn the first time around?).
Taking control of the FCC to stifle opposition media.
Establishing Christianity as a national religion.
Establishing patriotic education.
Government influence over public colleges and universities (similar to what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary).
The notion of banning contraceptives.
Use of the military to quell demonstrations.

In a recent speech before the NRA, Trump promised to turn back all of the (watered down and weak) gun legislation that was passed during the Biden administration.

A Trump presidency assures us that this off the rails narcissist, and whichever deranged sycophant becomes his vice-president, will have control of the nuclear arsenal.

Trump has made it perfectly clear, through his vile rhetoric, that he’s a flaming racist and a bigot, who will hire flaming racists and bigots to fill out his administration.

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Based on past evidence and a startling look into the future, Joe Biden should be ahead in the polls by double digits. Hell, if reason ruled it would be triple digits. And yet, a recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that Biden is being “boat raced” by Trump. And to make matters even worse, many Democrats who were polled are voting Democrat in the down ballot and not voting for Biden.

According to the poll, Joe Biden is the problem. Yeah, I know, a poll is just a snapshot in time, and blah, blah, blah.

A candidacy that’s been on the brink is teetering on the edge because a sizable portion of the delicate Biden coalition is either sitting this one out or is voting for, I don’t know, Tom Brady?

It’s the protest vote by the folks who are listening to their conscience over various issues but mostly over Gaza. Sure it’s well meaning but it’s equally, and sadly, short sighted.

To be brutally honest a protest vote is an act of self-aggrandizement that fails to see, or sees and simply ignores, the wholesale damage that will result from a second Trump term.

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While your conscience is rightly troubled over Gaza, it’s turning a blind eye to the tormented LBGTQ+ kid who hangs herself in the garage. Or the Black church parishioners whose church is torched by an emboldened white supremacist. Or the young mother to be, who dies unnecessarily after going into sepsis because she couldn’t get an abortion. Or the dreamers who get summarily booted out of the only country they’ve known, the country that so many of them have contributed to. Or the people who will lose their health insurance and subsequently their life savings, or maybe even their lives, because they had to choose between rent and medication. Or the young black man who gets murdered by the rogue cop who Trump has promised to indemnify. Or the opposition journalist who gets jailed for being “subversive.” Or the prosecutors and judges and witnesses who find themselves persecuted and prosecuted because they did their jobs in holding insurrectionists to account. Or the Sikh, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the atheist or anyone else who becomes marginalized in a white nationalist Christian society. Or the Ukrainian under the Soviet yoke. Or the desperate Eastern Europeans who fear Russian expansion. Or the Taiwanese waiting for the Chinese invasion. Or the people who want to enter America in order to escape the violence and the repression in their home countries. Or the environmentalist in Europe, in despair because the whole fucking cause has been abandoned by an America under the yoke of a science denier. Or the person protesting against the Trump administration, apprehended and thrown into an unmarked van and then disappeared.

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A recent video posted on Trump’s own Truth Social platform boasted that a Trump victory might result in a “unified Reich.” Anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of history knows that the last time the phrase “unified Reich” was a part of any political vernacular was in Germany during the rise of Hitler.

The Trump campaign blamed the post on a “staffer,” because that’s what you do. It’s sort of like blaming the inconvenient fart on the innocent dog.

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And if all of the above doesn’t move you and your conscience, maybe the two of you should consider what might be the most compelling argument for keeping Donald Trump out of office. And that’s the very real possibility that Donald Trump will be able to nominate relatively young replacements for the retiring Alito and Thomas and even Sonya Sotomayor who, it’s been reported, is not in the best of health at age 78.

Combined with Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett there is the possibility that MAGA justices could dominate the Supreme Court for decades, and serve into the lives of my own great-great grandchildren.

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Once again, to be clear, I have not been happy about Biden’s reelection run and I think that his policy vis a vis the Gaza War is dead wrong. Unfortunately the Gaza War is not the only issue that the voter will be confronted with, come November.

Vote your conscience but ask yourself what needle, beyond the one of your own vainglory, will be moved in a positive direction. What needles might be moved in a negative direction.

The sad irony is that in the end, your vote of conscience will likely do more harm than good to the Palestinian people.

Everyone’s vote is sacred. Everyone has the right to vote however they choose. It’s your choice. But if Trump is elected and you chose to indulge your conscience at a crucial time, then I hope that once the walls are crashing down around us, you’ll have the decency to just sit down and shut up and let the rest of us pick up the pieces.