There Was No Election

There was no election.

Despite the cacophony of the major-media propagandists, liberals and progressives did not take a walloping; and there was no mandate for the lunatic fringe that runs the Republican Party.

Virtually no one voted. Only 21 percent of eligible voters voted in California. Only 33 percent of the eligible voters participated in elections across the country. And everyone agrees: very few Democrats bothered to vote.

“Why?”

Allow me to diverge a minute. When I was a kid, I was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I still remember Duke Snyder, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella as they struggled to defeat the behemoth in the Bronx – the New York Yankees.

Then one morning, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. My team, the team that lived near where I lived, was gone. I had been abandoned. Consequently I lost all interest in baseball. I haven’t seen a baseball game since.

Fast forward fifty years – I feel abandoned again. This time it is not a baseball team that abandoned me, but the Democratic Party. The leader of my party, Barak Obama began to drift right from day one in the Oval Office. It was an about-face of historic proportions.

Obama’s move to the right proved to be relentless: it is not over – and he is unapologetic.

For instance, despite his highfalutin rhetoric about caring for the environment, he is pro fracking, and pro XL pipeline; he is pro fast-tracking a corporate deal in Asia that is so secretive that he won’t share information about it with members of his own party; he is pro nuclear power (within days of the Fukushima disaster, he supported new licensing of new Nukes); he has not ended torture (what else do you call the forced feeding of detainees in Guananamo who have never been tried, who have been cleared for release, but who will never get out as long as Obama is president); he is pro assassination (what else can you call targeted killing of people [mostly civilians] in countries in which we are not at war and which are not at war with us); he has taken the surveillance state much further than Bush or Cheney or Orwell would have dreamed of; he is sticking to Bush’s no-child-left-behind despite lackluster results; his economic team entered the White House through the revolving door that connects to Wall Street; his attorney general has proclaimed that big banks cannot be prosecuted; his new attorney general (if approved) made her mark defending Wall street crooks (the prediction is that Republicans will love her); he traded Bush’s bloody war on Iraq for his own in Afghanistan – which became the longest in US history; he is waging endless wars in Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and at least a hundred and thirty other countries in every corner of the world despite the fact that he campaigned as the candidate who would end war; he turned the Nobel-Peace-Prize committee (which awarded him the prize in the hope that he would be encouraged to make peace) into a hollow, meaningless chorus.

Obama abandoned us in 2008. His most vituperative language is reserved not for the lunatic fringe on the right, but for us. Remember when he said in 2010, “the positions of the left would result in getting nothing done, except having a sanctimonious pride in the purity of their own positions.”

Sanctimonious pride. Wow! He not only abandoned us, he hates us.

Sanctimonious pride? Will he put social security, Medicare, and Medicaid back on the chopping block (in the interest of “compromise and good governance” – certainly not in the interest of Wall Street billionaires who have been lusting after the trillions there that could be funneled by privatization directly into their own coffers.) Will he dare us, the sanctimonious, to criticize him?

Only a day after the 2014 election disaster, Obama declared his willingness to “compromise.” Not with us. With them. He is not interested in winning us back. There is not even a gesture. He then flew East. To the Asia-Pacific conference. To undoubtedly push his “pivot” east which will do no good for the American people, the environment, or our labor force.

He sees the enemy; he thinks it is us.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We could have a leader who supports the values of FDR and JFK and LBJ. The kind of leader who would invigorate the Democratic Party, and take on the nefarious One Percent.

But he won’t do it. Unfortunately, neither will Hillary.

So the rest of us (who couldn’t vote for Democrats who are at best Republican-lite) have to take our chances, let the chips fall where they may. We have not abandoned the Democratic Party. We have been abandoned by them. Maybe if we continue to withdraw our support from fake democrats, the real thing will emerge to save the US before it’s too late.