Losers B Us

I've been thinking about the incredibly nasty arguments against either not voting in the prez. race or voting for a third party.  Tbogg  (although Tbogg seems to do one of these every week now or even more frequently as he sees the end times approaching) and his Sparkle Pony and Lawyers, Guns, and Money and their Gush v. Bore.  I realized yesterday that they all come down to the same argument:  "If you people (meaning I guess liberals) hadn't voted for Nadier then it wouldn't have been so close and Gore would have won and we would not have had 9/11 and the depression. Therefore, if you do it again it will be your fault if we get Romney.  And if we get Romney he will be a lot worse then Obama because Bush was both a reactionary and incompetent so he was cleverly able to get a lot of reactionary things done and the same thing will happen this time."

I really do think that is the argument.  It doesn't seem to matter that Gore was willing to give up and that the Supreme Court was willing to steal the election, it is always the fault of the people who were trying to show the democrats that governing has consequences and therefore they refused to vote for a guy who proudly endorsed everything Clinton (gutting the banking regulations, various wars, NAFTA, screwing welfare recipients) did.  The only thing Gore would not support was the fun part of the Clinton presidency:  free and easy sex.

Well at any rate, it wasn't Gore's fault for not fighting, it wasn't Gore's fault for losing his own state, it wasn't every single democratic senator's fault for refusing to challenge Florida's electoral votes.  Oh no, it was the fault of the people who voted for Nadier.

Maybe, but now I think that in actuality the nefarious plan by Ralph was working at first.  Before 9/11 Bush was unpopular and his programs were unpopular and his administration was going down the toilet.  Then came 9/11 and Bush some how became a war time hero president.  It didn't matter that the guy and his people really fucked up and failed in ways that have now been made clear.  It didn't matter that he ran like a scared rabbit on 9/11.  He became the Big Daddy we all needed to defend us and we had to believe in him.  Certainly the MSM felt that way and either because of the never ending propaganda of the media or simply because they too needed a Big Daddy to protect them so did a majority of the voting population.

So had 9/11 not happened Bush would have been a failure and it is entirely possible that we would have had a more liberal president and congress.  Now this may be pie in the sky, because I am presuming that there were democrats out there who were liberal and who might have gotten nominated, which admittedly may be a little silly, but still.

Which means Bush owes a great deal to Osama Bin Laden so I guess I can see were one might begin to question whether or not Bush was in on it since he got so much out of it.  I personally don't think he was.  I just think that he and his people were so incompetent that they let it happen and then were clever enough to capitalize on it.  This could only happen with an adversarial press that is so far in the tank that it isn't what anybody with a rational mind could think of as "an adversarial press."  But none the less it did happen.

So short of another 9/11 kind of thing (which is not really all that out of the question) a vote for a third party president and letting Romney in might mean that he will screw up so badly that there is a possibility people will see that that kind of reactionary governance is bad.  I mean it was working before.

So as the saying goes we live life forward, but understand it backward.  In other words the people who tell me that if only Ralph wasn't in the election 9/11 and the depression wouldn't have happened only know that those things happened because they are looking back and they did.  There was no reason to expect that a vote for Ralph was a vote Osama bin Laden.