Today, on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine. There was not one question about vanden Heuvel’s blind support of Kerry’s pro-war candidacy (even in heavily-gerrymandered states, like Illinois, where entire counties could have voted anti-war and not changed the ultimate recipient of Illinois’ electoral votes).

Ironically, vanden Heuvel covered “nuclear terrorism, Washington’s stance on Iran” (citing DN!’s website), Iran being the apparent next target of American wrath.

Perhaps liberals & progressives have a long memory for the political missteps of their opponents, like talking about who stumped for Bush during the 2004 election, but they take a considered silence when talking about who stumped for Kerry when they didn’t need to, who unquestioningly supported Barack Obama (calling his election #4 of the “Good Things in Bad Times”), and who chides Nader for running (#7).

In order to prevent settling for the least-worst, you have to analyze the record of your candidates and make demands on them. Kerry’s campaign ran with no demands from the Left. Obama’s Senate record is horrible, supporting candidates for high office that he should know better not to support, but the Left is silent.

On a similar note, I had to miss Medea Benjamin’s visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this past Tuesday because I was preparing for my radio show Digital Citizen (which I plan to set up a website for so you can hear archived episodes of the show). Benjamin was one of the people who endorsed the letter denouncing Nader’s run for office; the same letter that made no demands of Kerry and said nothing of who to support in the so-called “safe” states. There were plenty of candidates to recommend for one’s consideration: the Green, Socialist, Constitution, and Libertarian parties all had candidates who were against the war. I’m guessing that the friendly audiences she speaks in front of weren’t so impertinant as to remind her that Nader’s candidacy was far more progressive than Kerry’s, would have cost progressive safe-state voters nothing to support, and was expected to not be as popular nationally as he was in 2000 (yet that didn’t stop Democrats and progressives from spending much time and money trying to keep him down) so even by ridiculous support-Democrats-in-the-clutch logic, voting anti-war would have done nothing to adversely affect Kerry’s campaign.

We’re going to repeat this in 2 and a half years or so. And meanwhile, the anti-war crowd is making a mockery of themselves by holding no major marches in recent memory and not explaining how many of them can vote pro-war from safe states and consider themselves bonafide advocates against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Update: Sharon Smith’s article in Counterpunch is well worth reading, particularly Smith’s take on a quote from Medea Benjamin. Speaking of Medea Benjamin, a few years ago DN! played a clip of her at an anti-war march saying something to the effect of “I’ve got a message for the women in the audience” and then going on about how the world’s leaders (the vast majority of whom are men) were (exact quote) “testosterone poisoned”. Nobody on DN! remarked how sexist that comment was and how no man could get away with saying how women are ‘estrogen poisoned’. Benjamin said this during an anti-war march in Washington or New York, I’ll try to find a recording of the clip so you can hear it for yourself (I once had a clip of it, excerpted from a DN! episode but that CD has been scratched and become unreadable). archive.org has a copy of the DN! show but that particular episode is unavailable right now. I’ll update this blog entry when I get a copy of the show.

According to United for Peace of Pierce County:

“On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. — Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has “signed off” on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq….”

If the anti-war marches will rev up again over this, the question must be asked: how many of them voted for a pro-war candidate from a safe state? What explanation will they provide to clarify the obvious confusion resulting from that mixed message?

Nicole Colson writes about the Democrats taking a less-than-pro-choice stance on abortion. Take her article at face value and accept its defense of a Democratic Party slide at first blush. Then, ask yourself, why is this happening?

I figure it happens because Democratic Party supporters have no where else to go. They’ve alienated the Greens, and Nader’s progressive independent campaign—both campaigns that might have taken their concerns seriously and worked with them. They ignore the Socialists, and other alternative parties don’t support their pro-choice stance on abortion (Constitution Party, for instance). So, they’ve pinned themselves into a corner.

When one pledges undying loyalty to a political party, one is giving that party permission to work against those values which ostensibly drove one to support the party in the first place. Two and a half years from now, we all know that pro-choice supporters will vote Democrat. Thus, the Democrats can afford to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the lies that go with that, running poor people out of personal welfare (AFDC) but continuing billions of dollars in corporate welfare, champion the death penalty (which also adversely affects the poor more than the rich), support stopping universal single-payer health care, and a host of other corporate-friendly ideas the Democrats back. The Democrats can afford to test the waters and see how much further they can distance themselves from a pro-choice abortion stance.

A comparable pickle exists for some of these voters right now: I hear that the so-called “anti-war” crowd is organizing another national march somewhere in the US. It’s bad enough that there have been no such marches in recent memory—the last big one was well before the election and their thunder has almost entirely been forgotten. I figure that a majority of the marchers voted from what are called “safe” states—states which have heavily gerrymandered districts making it possible to know how their electoral votes will be cast before the election. The majority of voters vote from “safe” states. Voting from a “safe” state gives one freedom to vote one’s conscience; anti-war safe state voters had no excuse to vote for Bush or Kerry (virtually every alternative party candidate was anti-war, so there’s plenty of room to be compatible with one’s economic sentiments and still vote against the war).

Given all this freedom to vote one’s values, what are we to make of a majority of anti-war marchers who voted for a pro-war candidate (either Bush or Kerry)? I look forward to the excuses which will attempt to explain how one’s anti-war sentiment can be put on the shelf when one goes to vote and then picked up again when one is comfortably away from the election.

Update: Ralph Nader takes progressive columnists to task for comparable reasons in this essay.

“It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can’t vote and doesn’t vote.”

—Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), in an interview on Meet the Press

He wasn’t talking about the recent American “elections” where roughly half of the country doesn’t vote, a major chunk of those who are ostensibly registered to vote cannot vote, and the rest are gerrymandered into a false dichotomy. He was talking about the Iraqi “elections” which are differently horrible.