There Is No "Lesser" Evil Now

Chris Floyd:

No mainstream Democrat will ever allow full-fledged criminal investigations and prosecutions of Bush II officials for torture and the war crime of military aggression. You know and I know that's not going to happen. We will get, at most, some soaring rhetoric about "healing national wounds" and "coming together again" and "moving on." (With the outside possibility of a few small fry being offered up as sacrifices, to let the Dem president preen as the "restorer of the rule of law" -- and also purge the Republicans, and Bush, of the worst taint: "Hey, it was a few bad apples, and now they're gone. We've got a clean slate!")

So let's not wring our hands like Russ Feingold, fretting over the Regime's nominees. Let us simply reject, adamantly and utterly, anyone put forward by the Bush Administration -- and anyone who approves anyone put forward by the Bush Administration.

And let us at last be done with the fatal pretense that what we are witnessing today in the war of aggression and the torture program are some kind of aberration, the result of "bad apples" in the White House and Pentagon. Let us instead embrace the truth spoken by Simone de Beauvoir, about the "war on terror" that her native France waged in Algeria (and which is quoted to apt effect by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine):

To protest in the name of morality against "excesses" or "abuses" is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no "abuses" or "excesses" here, simply an all-pervasive system.

That system is one of authoritarianism and corporatism, coupled with criminal war abroad in the name of American hegemony, that I have discussed here and here.

There is one thing worse than "anyone who approves anyone put forward by the Bush Administration." That is the person who intentionally absents himself from taking a position at all -- the person who claims he recognizes evil and, precisely at the moment the battle is joined and one must either resist evil or support it, removes himself from the conflict, thus ensuring that evil will triumph.

Into this category -- which is perhaps the most abominable of all moral categories -- fall most of the major Democratic presidential contenders. Chris Floyd again:

The only four Democratic senators who did not vote on the nomination of Mukasey – and the legitimization of torture and presidential tyranny it represents – were the four Democratic senators seeking the presidency.

Draw your own conclusions on the implications of these absences, and what they portend for the possibilities of genuine reform should any of these worthy paladins win the White House.

I am sick to death of hearing Democratic apologists, including many prominent liberal and progressive bloggers, make excuses for these loathsome human beings -- or, which is worse, watching them ignore these assaults on liberty, humanity and civilization, just as these presidential contenders ignore ongoing crimes that they could try to stop if they cared to. Try to understand this: the Democrats will not "save" you, me, the United States, the Constitution, or the dying, moaning animal that just got run over in the road. The Democrats are coequal partners in this monstrousness. They have been for many decades. In one critical respect, the Democrats are worse than the Republicans.

But go on. Keep telling yourselves you support the Democrats because otherwise, the state of things will be even worse. How exactly will they be worse? We are now a barbarian, pariah nation, one that officially endorses and utilizes torture, just as the most disgustingly brutal and inhumane regimes in history have endorsed it. We commit genocidal murder against peoples and nations who have never seriously threatened us. The Democrats could stop the murder, but they refuse to do so. The foundations of liberty have been completely destroyed, and the Democrats have no intention of restoring them. Full dictatorship could descend upon us via many routes -- and the Democrats refuse to close off even one of them.

So how exactly could things be worse? Lie to yourselves if you must, simply to get through the day without detesting yourselves as much as some of the rest of us detest you. But don't lie to everyone else any longer.

Decent, intelligent people see through the lies, all the way to your pathetically rotten souls. If you support Democrats as inextricable parts of one of the core institutions of power in contemporary America, you are supporting evil -- while you simultaneously make sickeningly dishonest claims to some kind of superior moral virtue. At present, it would appear that some bloggers can do virtually nothing but lie. In such cases, I have one suggestion to offer: shut the hell up.

AND: Not so by the way, some of us saw all this very clearly before the last election. I did.

ALSO: I linked this essay above, but I hadn't reread it in its entirety for some months. I just did: "Living Under the Guillotine's Blade." It's damned good. I hope you read it, too.