But how did Republicans settle on the Brandon phrase as a G-rated substitute for its more vulgar three-word cousin? It started at an Oct. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. When the president visited a construction site in suburban Chicago a few weeks ago to promote his vaccinate-or-test mandate, protesters deployed both three-word phrases.
Two protesters dropped the euphemism entirely, holding up hand-drawn signs with the profanity. On Friday morning on a Southwest flight from Houston to Albuquerque, the pilot signed off his greeting over the public address system with the phrase, to audible gasps from some passengers. And if you object and are taking it too seriously, go away. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were the subject of poems that leaned into racist tropes and allegations of bigamy.
George W. Bush had a shoe thrown in his face. Up until then, I was thinking to myself that a vote for Biden is not actually a vote for him, but a vote against Trump, alongside other such tall tales and poor excuses.
But when Obama took to the podium and began to get emotional and pleaded for people to go and vote for Biden, r ight there and then, I decided it would be obscene of me to do so, especially with this hypocritical con man on his side. Every time Obama starts choking up, I remember him crying in public for children who have fallen victim to gun violence in the US, just before going back to his Oval Office to send even more arms to Israel with which to slaughter Palestinian children, or sell them to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to kill more Yemeni children.
Are Palestinian and Yemeni children not children? Every single human being stands for the entirety of our humanity. Biden is even worse than Obama in his die-hard Zionism — in his support for the apartheid state of Israel, in his categorical disregard for Palestinians. Voting for Biden means excusing all the times in the past he helped arm Israel to murder Palestinians.
Voting for him means, should he become the next president, siding with him every time he signs — and he will undoubtedly sign many — a new arms deal to support Israel and its murderous tyranny. Why would any decent human being want to do anything like that? Yes, Trump is an American monster but so is Biden. People like me have no candidate in this election. The task of my sort of critical thinkers is not to jump on the bandwagon and rush to vote for Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, reluctantly.
Generations of critical thinkers from Rosa Luxemburg to Aimee Cesaire to Frantz Fanon to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy did not live and think and write for us to cast a strategic vote for a reactionary liberal, an unrepentant warmonger, a hardcore Zionist, with a record of racism and alleged sexual abuse.
Our task is something else. Naturally, nobody says that. But in between the two choices Weber left us, emerges a third: A n ethic of ultimate responsibility. Our specific and ultimate responsibility today is not to rush to vote for a lesser evil, as I also argued about four years ago when the choice was between Trump and Clinton, but to sustain the course of critical thinking that seeks to overcome both evils.
Members from the other party were once more willing to give a new president some benefit of the doubt early on — or at least, their opposition was not quite so baked in, as the figures for both Bush and Barack Obama suggest.
This is certainly borne out in attitudes toward the economy : Democrats thought the economy was immediately doing worse once Trump took office, while Republicans immediately thought it was getting worse after Biden won the election. Those are sentiments that are likely to keep both camps more firmly entrenched in their partisan camps moving forward. How pollsters ask Americans about the intensity of their views of the president varies. Geoffrey Skelley is an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight.
0コメント