By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
As a practice, I despise both major parties with a passion usually reserved for religious zealotry. But I’m not ashamed, even as a lifelong leftist, to admit that I hate the Democrats most of all. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m a leftist that I hate the Democrats most of all. The only thing worse than a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires is a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires who try to pass them selves off as the high handed voice of egalitarianism. It’s like having Strom Thurmond throw on a Rasta wig and wax poetic about how he understands why the n*ggers feel cold and the slum’s got so much soul (compliments to Jello Biafra). It doesn’t exactly make me feel better that I use to be a member of that limp-wristed blackface fraternity.
But it was 2008, the scoundrels of the Bush junta were on their way out the revolving door to cushy no-show jobs in the defense industry and there was one candidate left in that party that I still believed in, and I’m not talking about Joe Lieberman’s designated black dauphin. Dennis Kucinich was the last of a dying breed. He seemed to have stepped out from a different era, like the long lost munchkin lovechild of George McGovern and Joan Baez. He didn’t just want peace, he wanted revenge against the war machine; 50% cuts in defense spending, shuttering all foreign bases, Nuremberg Tribunals for the retreating Bush junta. He didn’t have a chance in hell and I didn’t give a shit. He was on a crusade that was bigger than any election, and I was willing to swallow my vomit and leave the Green Party to join him.
I look at the ten clown car pileup that is the 2020 Democratic primaries and there is no Dennis Kucinich to be found. Just a multicultural graveyard of hyper-statist partisan corpses. For five fucking minutes we had Mike Gravel’s beautiful crusty old ass, but the glorified carnies who rig the debates quickly erased all signs of his existence until his shallow well ran dry. What we have now is a contest largely between two separate but equally deceptive cliques of creeps. The “Moderates” or, as I call them, the Obama Revivalists, and the “Revolutionaries” who are really little more than blood and butter social democrats (to quote the late Dr. Thompson, “You people voted for Humphrey… and you killed Jesus!)
The Obama Revivalists have to be the most comically delusional conglomeration of convoluted cunts since Obama himself sold half my generation on an 8 year extension of the Bush regime with Hopelandic gobbledygook lifted straight from a Chicken Noodle Soup paperback he found at the airport. The basic pitch of these neoliberal imbeciles, who only the Clinton News Network would have the gal to call “Realists”, can be summed up by Cher’s tattooed ass on a battleship, ‘If we could just turn back time. If we could just find a way…’ They seem to all suffer under the grand-mal delusion that all of America’s woes began in February 2017, and just 8 more years of Obama (or 24 of Bush) can cure the American Empire of an authoritarian collapse that has been a longtime coming. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom. Voting for one of these mass media approved Obama Revivalists would be the equivalent of treating a brain tumor with a shotgun blow to the head.
