Voting Democratic OR Republican -- Choosing Moral Blindness?

Chris Floyd has written a compelling article responding to the anger of Robert Parry (revered liberal journalist who had broken important stories involving the Iran-contra scandal, the history of Bush family crimes, American betrayals of Central America, etc.) at liberals who are balking at voting Democratic out of conscience this November.

An important and highly painful issue for some voting in this upcoming election.

Chris Floyd writes:

Parry believes he is preaching a tough, gritty doctrine of "moral ambiguity." What he is in fact advocating is the bleakest moral nihilism. To Parry, the structure of American power -- the corrupt, corporatized, militarized system built and sustained by both major parties -- cannot be challenged. Not even passively, not even internally, for Parry scorns those who simply refuse to vote almost as harshly as those who commit the unpardonable sin: voting for a third party. No, if you do not take an active role in supporting this brutal engine of war and injustice by voting for a Democrat, then it is you who are immoral. 

You must support this system. It is the only moral choice. What’s more, to be truly moral, to acquit yourself of the charge of vanity and frivolity, to escape complicity in government crimes, you must support the Democrat.

Floyd inventories the present administration against Parry’s stance:

If the Democratic president orders the "extrajudicial" murder of American citizens, you must support him.

If he chairs death squad meetings in the White House every week, checking off names of men to be murdered without charge or trial, you must support him.

If he commits mass murder with robot drones on defenseless villages around the world, you must support him.

If he imprisons and prosecutes whistleblowers and investigative journalists more than any other president in history, you must support him.

If he cages and abuses and tortures a young soldier who sought only to stop atrocities and save the nation’s honor, you must support him.

If he "surges" a pointless war of aggression and occupation in a ravaged land and expands that war into the territory of a supposed ally, you must support him.

If he sends troops and special ops and drones and assassins into country after country, fomenting wars, bankrolling militias, and engineering coups, you must support him.

If he throws open the nation's coastal waters to rampant drilling by the profiteers who are devouring and despoiling the earth, you must support him.

If he declares his eagerness to do what no Republican president has ever dared to do -- slash Social Security and Medicare -- you must support him. 

For Robert Parry, blinded by the red mist of partisanship, there is literally nothing -- nothing -- that a Democratic candidate can do to forfeit the support of "the left." He can even kill a 16-year-old American boy -- kill him, rip him to shreds with a missile fired by a coddled coward thousands of miles away -- and you must support him. And, again, if you do not support him, if you do not support all this, then you are the problem. You are enabling evil.

THEN YOU ARE THE PROBLEM? YOU ARE ENABLING EVIL?

We seem back to the “lesser evil” rationalization of all good Democrats. But “lesser evil” seems to have jumped the proverbial shark for some of us tragically.

Floyd goes on:



Given this wildly askew moral compass, what would Parry make of that great American refusenik, Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay taxes to support a deadly militarist adventure in Mexico and the government-sanctioned system of slavery, and whose thoughts on civil disobedience and disengagement with evil inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi? Thoreau said: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” 

What would Parry say to that? “Enough of your vain moral posturing, Thoreau. Forget the Mexican War; get out there and support James K. Polk. He’s a Democrat, for god’s sake! Do you want someone worse to get in there? It’s a disgrace not to associate yourself with this government!”

Floyd explains that Parry has accused the left of failing the Democratic party in the elections of 1968, 1980 and 2000. In these crucial years the Democratic Party lost control of the White House.

In 1968 Floyd blames LBJ primarily not the leftists:


What’s more, the real abandonment of the party that year came not from disaffected leftists, but from the Democrat’s own leader: LBJ, who simply dumped the party, and the presidency, out of hurt feelings at being challenged in the primaries. He didn’t stand up and fight for his social programs and Civil Rights measures, he didn’t end the war (which Parry tells us he was “seriously” contemplating – and which he could have done with a snap of his fingers).

Nor did he give more than the most tepid support to Humphrey until the very end of the campaign, when he knew it was too late. He just quit and walked away, with the nation reeling in turmoil from the war he had escalated, and from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. If any one person could be said to have given us Richard Nixon, it was LBJ.

Regarding Jimmy Carter’s defeat, Floyd has this to say:



Parry also seems to think that if Jimmy Carter had not been “abandoned” by “leftists" in 1980, in his second term he would have not kept supporting the Afghan religious extremists he himself had loosed on the Soviets (to the world’s everlasting betterment, as we see each day around us).

Or that Carter would not have continued supporting murderous Latin American dictatorships and surrogate wars in Africa as he had done throughout his term. Or that he wouldn’t have continued the massive arms build-up he had launched, or continued saber-rattling at the Soviets, or proclaiming the American right to launch pre-emptive war if anyone threatened the vicious tyrants in the Middle East who supplied us with oil. And so on and on.....

.
... Carter lost primarily because of a poor economy (not helped by his avowedly conservative economic policies), his own tepid ineptitude, and because of the Iran hostage crisis -- which occurred after his boneheaded mismanagement of the American reaction to the Iranian revolution, including his decision to allow the ousted Shah into the United States, and other measures which aided the revolution’s most radical elements and undercut the secular moderates at every turn. (A practice that has been faithfully followed by every American president since.)



When it comes to the election of 2000, Floyd asserts “Gore actually won that election, of course, which moots Parry’s point about leftist lethargy robbing worthy Dems of the big brass ring.” It was Gore and the Democratic Party that did not pursue a constitutional challenge that could have been made to Congress.

Floyd also quotes Gore’s distant cousin, Gore Vidal, from The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001:

“In order to be re-elected in 1996, the Clinton-Gore administration adopted a series of right-wing Republican, even protofascist, programs, with lots more prisons, death penalties, harassment of the poor, cries of terrorism, and implicitly, control by government over the citizenry.”

Floyd goes on:

Gore’s tenure at the top also saw the stripping of the financial controls on high finance – a surrender of Democratic (not to mention democratic) principles that ushered in the casino royale that led to the current – and increasingly permanent – economic crisis.

And there was also the little matter of the deaths of at least 500,000 children from the US-UK sanctions on Iraq. (And half a million – a vast mountain of child corpses – is just what the Clinton-Gore administration were happy to admit to on national television, to show how tough and savvy they were. The real figure is certainly much higher.)



Would Gore have launched the war against Iraq the way Bush did? We certainly assume not. Though the military industrial security complex seems an unstoppable ever devastating and/or traumatizing monster. Gore did pick Joe Lieberman as his Vice Presidential running mate who is a rampant war-mongerer. Gore’s own senator father was against the Viet Nam war which ended his political career but young Al Gore aligned himself, according to Floyd, with the militarist wing of the Democratic party during his years in office.

Floyd admits to heinous Republican atrocities:

None of this is to exonerate the Republicans of the monstrous crimes they have most assuredly committed –and/or continued – during their turns at the top of the bipartisan helter-skelter. It is simply to note what the historical record clearly shows: first, that lack of ‘leftist’ support did not cost the Democrats the presidency in any of these years. And second, that the Democrats’ own crimes and atrocities and follies are part and parcel of a system of corporatist/militarist rule that has become so abominable that no one can without disgrace be associated with it. To see this clearly and say it plainly is not “vanity” or “perfectionism.” It is reality. And to deny this, distort it, and denounce those who no longer wish to legitimize it with their votes is not a courageous grappling with “moral ambiguity;” it is a self-infliction of moral blindness.

Floyd concludes:

Yes, I know the United States in 2012 is not the USSR or Hitler’s Germany. And Parry would doubtless say, “Of course they [political activists] were right to disassociate themselves from such monstrous systems.” But where do you draw the line? How much evil is acceptable?  Is there a certain number of victims that a system must reach before one is allowed to disengage from it honorably and morally?  To murder six million in death camps or millions in purges is obviously unacceptable; but to kill 500,000 children – is that OK? A million innocent people in a war of aggression – is that beyond the pale? Or can you work with that, can you accommodate that, should you swallow these mountains of dead, washing them down with a big swig of moral ambiguity?



Romney might well prove to be a “worse” president than Obama. (Although Parry does not address the realpolitik argument that a Romney victory would likely wake the ‘left’ from its slumber and cause it to oppose heinous crimes and vicious policies – aggressive war, murder programs, safety net slashing – that it is now happily supporting because a Democrat is doing them.) But that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not one gives legitimacy and justification to a brutal and unjust system by actively supporting and empowering it – and thus perpetuating its bipartisan evils far into the future.

I am still reeling from Obama’s Department of Justice giving Goldman Sachs a free pass on all of its vast financial criminality last Thursday in spite of a Senate report of over 600 pages serving up serious evidence to the contrary. A Senate committee was actually fighting on behalf of the citizens rights against the bank cabal and Eric Holder snatched financial criminality from the jaws of justice. Something I am sure the Romney administration would have done, also.

I am also reeling from the alignment of covert CIA operations in Syria with Al Qaeda and other fundamental jihadist mercenary terrorists for the sake of overthrowing the Assad government (ends justifies the means military group-think?), setting up thousands and thousands of citizens to be killed in the crossfire and as of now displacing 2.5 million Syrians. Think of it. Faux-humanitarian intervention to be asserted late in the game via UN and media manipulation when the dirty work of covertly foreign supported shock and awe terrorism has made disaster capitalism and occupation easy for pirate imperialists.

I am voting for third party Green presidential candidate Jill Stein. I think both corporate-captured legacy parties are profoundly amoral in terms of both domestic and foreign policy and we as citizens need to stand up to them. I side with Chris Floyd on this one, not Robert Parry.