Daniel Nichols Finds a Reason to Vote for Romney

It’s something like Dale Price’s tongue in cheek remark that a Republican in the White House will jog the press into doing their jobs.

If George W Bush had targeted American citizens for assassination, or killed so many civilians in drone strikes, or had expanded presidential powers at such an alarming rate we would, I am convinced, be near something like a revolution.

But because so many on the left hold on relentlessly, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, to an illusory Obama, the quasi-messianic figure of national transformation, the Man of Peace, the One, there is little resistance to his imperial presidency. There are notable exceptions to this, like the Counter Punch blog,  Glenn Greenwald, the late Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky, but for the most part the left is oblivious. I saw a car the other day with many bumper stickers denouncing war and an Obama sticker as well, apparently without irony.–

In light of this one can make a good case for voting for Mitt Romney.

Nothing would awaken the left like a Republican pursuing similar aims. Especially a Republican like Mr Romney: rich, elitist, clueless. One can foresee massive demonstrations again, widespread resistance to the empire. How about a bumper sticker that says: “Vote Romney. Do it for the Left”?

The Right, with its infallible anti-charism for missing the bleeding obvious, has chosen to batten on the one aspect of Obama’s rule that is the scariest and most dangerous–his seizing of dictatorial power to indefinitely detain and murder anybody he likes on the basis of his secret and unilateral will alone –and remain strategically supportive of that, since it hopes to wield those awesome unaccountable super-hero powers itself someday to bring the American Way of Salvation through Leviathan by Any Means Necessary to the Empire.  Consequently, when a Lefty like Obama is advancing toward abolishing a free country and establishing a quasi-Napoleonic tyranny, both Left and Right support him since, dude, blowing up swarthy people with drones and killing people without any of that pantywaist due process crap is, like, awesome. (Meh, so what if hundreds of them are kids.  That’s the price swarthy people have to pay in our struggle to do whatever we like in pursuit of American ends).

But when a representative of the Thing that Used to be Conservatism takes over the job, the Left will at least pretend to suddenly care about that, thereby acting as a minor check on the growth of the Police State Presidency instead being what it now is: the supine supporter of an obvious tyrant and war criminal.  I wonder how many election cycles we will go through before the Executive decides that that little exercise in manufacturing consent is no longer necessary?