SocraticGadfly: Antiwar incrementalism doesn’t work, Dem-only voters

October 03, 2007

Antiwar incrementalism doesn’t work, Dem-only voters

To Democratic supporters who tell antiwar activists to settle for incrementalism and vote Democratic, I offer the following thoughts:

Incrementally with a war? You’re either antiwar or prowar. Cutting troops without making it a clear part of ending a war (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) is like being a little bit pregnant. Either that, or it smacks of Tricky Dick’s “Vietnamization.”

Let me substitute Iraq for a domestic issue of violence: the death penalty.

Would you seriously ask anti-death penalty activists to campaign for incremental stages?
While they/we might accept (grudgingly) incremental stages, we will NEVER campaign for them.

If people like you, who run Democrats up the flagpole and salute, can’t get that analogy, you won't get anything.

Beyond that, my foreign policy opposition to most Democrats goes far beyond Iraq. If I want imperialism, I’ll vote Republican, rather than imperialism-lite Democrats.
As far as “voting 1996,” I was criticizing some of Bill Clinton's preachiness imperialism-lite that far back.

Preferably, we’d have a parliamentary government, but, there’s no way in hell the two mainstream parties are ever going to surrender their duopoly.

Frankly, that’s part of the reason I don’t want to vote Democratic, either; it's not just enabling the Democratic Party, it's enabling the current American political system, which is NOT the world's best, despite claims otherwise.

As for the Greens alleged “percentage of fault” in Florida 2000, if the butterfly ballots had been printed differently, Gore would have won Florida.

Hell, for that matter, if Gore had conducted his legal campaign post-vote better, he might have shamed one of the five black robes enough.
So, I don’t really think Greens are at fault.

Oh, and all you Democrats who claim I have “blood on my hands,” nope, it’s you — you voted for the prowar Kerry in 2004. And the more you try to pin that libel on people like me, the more you alienate us.

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