Tipping points
Stuff can only build up so much before I snap and have to do something about it.
This year, I abandoned my vow to not vote for any Democrat. Why? Because the GOP doubled down on racism, and spent many many months doing everything but bringing out the N-word. There are differences between the parties (I do not understand the new GOP plank of “we oppose what the Democrats are doing today, even if it was our position last week”, and their traditional hatred of women, teh gay, and the browns, but I am impressed that they managed to overcome at least some of their institutional religious bigotry to campaign vigorously for a Mormon) and the Romney campaign was pretty consistantly telegraphing that they’d take all the offensive features out of the Obama government and turn them up to 11, but I find the whole war criminal aspect of the Obama administration disgustingly offensive and was planning to just not pull the lever for any of the national races.
And then the Romney campaign started cheerfully pushing the “he’s not a real American” (as well as a collection of other equally offensive racial slurs) nonsense, and all of the Republican talking heads took up that “you wouldn’t vote for a NEGRO, would you?” line of talk.
That’s an interesting question. And my answer is, yes, of course I will vote for the Hawaiian negro, despite his being as much of a war criminal as George W Bush is, because the Hawaiian negro and his party aren’t being the big tent for bigots. (And, even though they were forced into it by circumstances, I will give the Obama administration a lot of credit for doubling down in favor of equal rights when they could have plunged a shiv into the back of the lgbt community and picked up a small segment of the homophobic voters bloc.)
I would still support war crimes trials against the Obama administration (and whatever members of the Bush administration have not fled for South America to escape war crimes prosecution) but if it comes down to supporting a known war criminal or supporting (either actively or by omission) a racist party that will continue the war crime tradition that the USA has developed, I’ll vote for the war criminal.
My motto for this year was “Vote for the war criminal, it’s important!” and that’s what I did. Straight party line vote for every state and national office I could find, because they aren’t racists.
And that was a good reason to vote for the lesser evil, not just against the greater evil.