Who I Voted For

a bitter choice

“Some nights are like honey — and some like wine — and some like wormwood.” — Dorothy Parker

This afternoon, I cast my vote for president and it felt like how I imagine a colonoscopy does: humiliating but necessary. To cheer myself up, I got a smoothie before heading back to my apartment in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.

I cannot find a single, solitary example of how Kamala Harris plans to run the country differently than Joe Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris told The View when asked what she’d do differently from him. (This despite her campaign slogan being “A New Way Forward.”)

Hey, remember that movie you didn’t like? What if I told you there’s a sequel where everything's the same, word for word, except there’s a new lead actor reading the lines?

You already know how the movie goes. It’s a slasher film. Israel continues warring in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Their enemies retaliate. Israel retaliates against their retaliation. Meanwhile we are told that America has “ironclad” support for Israel, and the carnage is punctuated with White House assurances that everything is under control and that they are working on a diplomatic resolution.

We’re working [sonic boom] around the clock [big explosion] for a ceasefire [even bigger explosion]. 

Want polls that are definitive on this wait-for-the-results day? American voters are sick of endless war. Their problem? They lack the Harvard Kennedy School of Government education necessary to comprehend the genius of the Pentagon’s strategy of deploy, display, and deter. 

Dimwits. That’s what we are if we believe that anything military is going to achieve peace and security one of these days. Meanwhile the true dimwits of doom, the national security experts that appear on TV and the hundreds who sign letters to support a commander-in-chief Harris continue to be listened to even though they are the architects of failure.

The administration claims that it is preventing “regional” war in the Middle East when the regional war is already here. The administration applauds NATO and its effort to defend Ukraine promising more of the same “to the end” and “as long as it takes” — on our backs. The administration tells us that it has to build up the military and spend more billions to defend against China without a hint of attention to seeking peaceful coexistence. The national security establishment is using “disinformation” and foreign influence and cyber security and “critical infrastructure protection” to insinuate itself into seemingly every aspect of civil society. This has been my whole life, this lineup. I anticipate that whoever is elected the next president none of this is going to change.

Today ends with an election that’s cast as The Most Important Ever — blackmailing people into voting for the sequel.

All that being said, it surprises me that I voted for Kamala Harris. But I did. Not out of any appreciation for her shambolic campaign or its self-serving fear mongering about democracy being at stake. I did so largely out of disgust with the stories about, say, teenage girls (or younger!) being forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term; or women unable to promptly terminate nonviable fetuses, compounding the pain of loss with being forced to carry it around, literally (I know someone this happened to personally). 

Last night, news broke that a young American soldier had died from sustaining non-combat injuries while working on the Gaza aid pier — the Biden administration’s ridiculous publicity stunt intended to paper over its inability to influence anything with regard to the war. The pier ended up delivering almost no aid, as I’ve reported, before being damaged by the choppy seas and thereafter dismantled. The soldier, a young 23-year-old black man, reminded me of the three young soldiers, also black, killed in Jordan by a drone this past year, another consequence of the Gaza war. These four enlistees are exactly the middle class everyman the Harris campaign claims to fight for.

I finished that smoothie while writing this. The taste in my mouth now is bitter. It’s all bitter.