the sotomayor problem
Poor poor Sonia Sotomayor! The right is being so mean to her! So UNFAIR! So RACIST! Waaah waaah waah.
I’m so fucking tired of this shit.
Here’s how it goes,
EVERY. TIME.
Without. Fail:
The quote unquote “left” (I use the term here to refer actually to the right middle, which is what the “left” is these days) picks some milquetoast shitass candidate for something. President or supreme court or dogcatcher or whatevs. And because the left is so in-fucking-clusive, they (note that I do not use “we”) increasingly pick someone of color, or someone with a vag, and that’s all well and good. (and they always, ALWAYS, have to be calm calm calm. God forbid we get an uppity Puerto Rican or an angry black man in office! The world would END!) Of course it is. We are a nation filled with peeps of color, over half of whom have innies instead of outies, and of course we should be picking candidates from the widest possible spectrum of people. Sane people have known this from the beginning of time, but it’s taken us like 2,000 years to come around to it because we’re pretty much idiots. But now we’re slowly getting there, and enough about that.
So the “left” picks someone, in this case a Nuyorican, and hooray hooray. Blah blah. It’s humiliating that this is a victory, etc.
The constant, consistent problem, of course, is that maybe because of her skin tone and gender or maybe just because, these candidates are always, without fail, CRAP. Because that’s all the left knows how to do: pick up crap.
I’m not saying Sotomayor is a Bushie or anything. All my reading points to the same thing over and over: she’s a centrist. And let’s be clear about what that means: Sonia Sotomayor will do nothing but uphold and confirm corporations’ consolidation and centralization of power and wealth and the continuing shitting upon of working people* —you know that, right? You’re a smart cookie, dearest blog reader, you must know that.
So instead of the left screaming about how WE WANT A SUPREME COURT JUSTICE WHO STANDS UP FOR US! For our values of hard work and not getting fucked over by the corporate consolidation of power that completely and totally pwns and owns us on a daily basis until we are so ground down we want to lay down and die!
Instead of doing our democratic duty and fucking screaming and protesting and FORCING our government (OUR GOVERNMENT, not The Government We’ve Decided Not To Care About Because Michelle Obama Seems So Hip And I Really Like Her Belts And Flats And Is It Just Me, or is Malia Obama Just Growing Up Right Under Our Noses?) to do what we want because we OWN IT, what do we do?
We get upset because the lunatic right isn’t treating this craptastic Supreme Court nominee nicely enough.
We do it EVERY TIME. The right, people. Let’s think about this. Who are these right wingers? We know who they are.
Liars, godfreaks, misogynists, racists, sublimated gays with raging homophobic complexes, rich white dudes, heartless fucks, literal human trash, that’s who we’re dealing with here. And we’re surprised when they lie, godfreak out, hate women and people of color and LGBTQ and poor people? WHY? Why are we surprised?
I honestly don’t understand it. Of course the work of calling idiots out on their idiocy needs to be done. But it often seems to be all the left does. I understand the impulse of a vaguely well-meaning (which is what the left is these days, vaguely well-meaning dolts) person getting what little outrage their tiny little Obama-voting brain is capable of going when one of these trashpeople says just what you’d expect a trashperson to say. I get that.
But when it’s all you talk about, always, forever, endlessly, when the entire mediablogtwittercomplex devotes itself exclusively to counter attacks when we should be talking about what WE WANT AND WHAT WE DESERVE,
well,
it just makes me a little upset, OK? That we’ve let the right define the terms of the debate, and that we’re always on the defensive.
It stinks, and I’m over it.
And you know what? I can hear all my sweet, kind, well-meaning Obama-voting friends saying: “But he’s in a tough place. He’s a politician. He can’t make big sweeping changes overnight, he’s got to work for goals he can actually get accomplished with a very uncooperative and combatitive other side….”
…and their voices just drone on and on in my ears, and I’m slowly backing away, thinking about, like, uh, lolcats and ice cream and vintage pink dresses or whatever happy, non-explosive place I can get myself to before responding.
Because no one seems to understand it anymore. Here’s how I was always taught it worked:
You work hard to elect the candidate you believe in.
That candidate always loses.
So you’re stuck with some chump, and instead of understanding their pain or whatever the fuck everyone tries to do these days, you PUSH THEM. You get all Jewy and you nag and niggle and email and call and protest and scream and yell and make signs and tattoo your forehead and make them listen to you, not the corporations that paid their way into office, not the special interest groups that own them, not the political establishment that limits their imagination and scope.
Democracy, you know?
.
.
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*Yeah, I took that from my Facebook status update for today. What are you going to do about it? I’m workin’ it across several media networky platforms, yo.
One Response to “the sotomayor problem”
Wished I’d said all of that.