1. I gotta be honest with you. I never really got over Elizabeth Warren's drubbing once voting started. She was, to these weary eyes and ears, clearly the best fucking candidate in the field, intellectually head and shoulders above everyone else, with an understanding of how to take apart an opponent and how to make a deal and when those things are appropriate. Yeah, I'm still pissed off that I never got to vote for her. And I'm pissed that I didn't get to vote for Bernie Sanders this time, as I did in 2016, now that Sanders has suspended his campaign. But Warren got a raw ass deal from the media, which erased her repeatedly after her brief momentum slowed. However...
2. My causes, the things I have been fighting for over the decades like universal health care, civil rights for people who have been traditionally oppressed, environmentalism and climate change (seriously, I wrote a letter to Gerald Ford asking him to make recycling into national policy when I was like 8), and so much more, that shit, all of it, do not fade when my preferred candidate is out of the picture. Otherwise, why have beliefs if I'll allow everything I love to be further harmed because I didn't get Jesse Jackson or Jerry Brown or John Edwards ('04, not '08) or Elizabeth Warren or, you know, Bernie Sanders? That's not how it works. Most of the time, you hit the bar and you end up heading home not with Mr. Perfect, but with Mr. Ok, Fine, but that doesn't mean the sex can't be a blast. You just gotta give up the ideal fuck for the fuck you get to have. Or you're just never gonna get laid.
3. While I supported him as Obama's veep and cheered him on for taking apart Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan at debates, I have long had issues with Joe Biden, going back to his treatment of Anita Hill (which I wrote about at the time in a college paper - I think I even made fun of his teeth). As I wrote back in December, I didn't want him to be the nominee because "Joe Biden wants to make nice with Republicans" when, really, we should want to bury them in their political graves and then dig up their corpses and piss on them. Biden was probably sixth or seventh on my list of Democrats. But none of that matters. None of it. The Democratic primary season is over. This is where we're heading, to a Biden nomination, and there is nothing you or I can do to stop it. So you may as well get your head around it. I did after Super Tuesday. It isn't fun, it isn't what I wanted, but this is the hand we've been dealt in this shitty poker game. I figure my ante is my life and the rest of pot is everyone else's lives. You can't fuckin' fold if you see it that way. I can't let the bloated bastard in the orange hat win.
3a. Yeah, the sexual assault allegations made by Tara Reade against Biden are disturbing. And they should be investigated fully. No question. In fact, while denying Reade's story, that's what Biden's campaign has said it wants reporters to do. One further thing on this, though: I have to think that Sanders and his staff weighed how legitimate Reade's claims are. I have to think they vetted the story and found it wanting. If they thought it was all valid and provable, Sanders would have been a fool to drop out. In fact, do you really think Bernie advisor and intense attack dog David Sirota would have just let that go?
4. The job of progressives now is to influence Biden as much as possible, to get progressive candidates elected to the House and Senate, to get progressive governors and state legislatures and motherfuckin' school boards into office. You wanna make all this shit happen? Then you have to build it into the political fabric of the nation, not just in the White House. Republicans spent the last forty years making everyone believe that they had to kowtow to the religious right and nutzoid conservatives. That's the narrative that runs the nation: What Republicans and the right want is American; what Democrats and the left want isn't. It's the narrative that has to be overcome every fucking time a Democrat runs for president. Bill Clinton overcame it by taking Republican issues as his own. Obama did it by sheer force of personality and then by being pretty damn good at his job (as well as running against the poisonous W. Bush legacy both times). I've written for years about how Democrats, especially ones that have any progressive inclinations, need to create a new narrative, one that says the United States is the inclusive, liberatory place we've believe it could be, even if it fails sometimes to live up that ideal. You have to get that narrative into the political DNA of the country, and the way you do that is by embedding it at the local level, as well as the national.
5. Look, I could be a dick about this (I have been and I probably will be again, but, hey, this is the mood I'm in now) and say that if you're a Sanders voter who refuses to vote for Biden, you're giving the election to Trump and all that that means, especially when it comes to the Supreme Court. Instead, let me put it another way: Trump and his administration and his voters just fucking suck. They are just fucking terrible human beings who are actively harming people in the USA, who are accelerating climate change, who are savagely anti-immigrant, who want to get rid of women's rights and LGBTQ rights and civil rights, who have no problem with the country becoming a white nationalist Christian theocracy, who love guns and hate things like food inspections, who are corporatists at a level that would make even the most craven corporate teat-sucking Democrat look like an amateur, and who hate you, like hate you for existing and hate everything you stand for and would probably like to arrest you, eject you from the country, send you to a Trump reeducation camp or worse. Don't you wanna fuck up their world? I do. Very, very badly. I want their world shattered. The way to start to do that is to get rid of Trump. That's why I will have no problem voting for Biden. It's a step away from this path of damnation. I'll do it without any hesitation. You should, too. However...
5a. If you're a Sanders voter who now says they'll vote for Trump, you never supported Sanders's causes. You're just a fucking twatcrab who gets off on seeing things fucked up. Fuck off all the way out of here.
