3/08/2016

Note to Fellow Sanders Supporters: You're Gonna Vote for Clinton in the General, So Shut the Fuck Up

The Rude Pundit was talking to a friend in Tennessee after the primary there on Super Splendiferous Tuesday last week. "Yeah, I voted for Hillary," he said. Why? "Because all these Bernie people in town are just such assholes about it, so fuck them." The Rude Pundit talked to him again today, and he said that the Bernie voters he knows have said that they won't vote in November if Hillary is the Democratic nominee.

To which the Rude Pundit responded, "Oh, tell them to shut the fuck up. They're gonna vote for Hillary and they fuckin' know it."

Look, this here blogger is a future Bernie Sanders voter when the primary rolls around. He's not a slavering Bernie whore, ready to take all the Bernie chowder he can handle the way he was with Obama in 2008. But, as the Rude Pundit's said before, Bernie's beliefs line up with his own better than Hillary's, so logic would seem to dictate that he vote his heart here. However, he is well aware that Hillary Clinton may end up winning the Democratic nomination for president. In that case, he'll go to the middle school down the street in the fall and hit a button for Hillary. How is this even a question?

Yesterday, the Rude Pundit tweeted out some mighty tweets about how the constant call by Sanders and his supporters for Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs, et al, is a bullshit distraction. We all know exactly what's in those speeches, and it just sounds a little too much like Republican demands that Clinton release all her emails from her server or all her documents back in the days of the Rose Law Firm investigations, neither of which yielded any new or interesting or indictable information. It was a fuckin' snipe hunt, a distraction so you don't have to deal with real shit. What the fuck do you think you'll learn from the speeches? That she gave prostate-fingering hand jobs to Lloyd Blankfein? How is that any different than what we know now?

Everyone pretends like there is some Rosetta Stone to understanding some aspect of Hillary Clinton's putative corruption or criminality, some email that says she personally ordered the Benghazi attack, some document that says she killed Vince Foster to protect her lesbian cocaine affairs, some speech where she explicitly promised endless golden whores to Wall Street executives. This shit is like searching for Bigfoot. You see something move in the forest and instead of being satisfied chasing a deer, it's gotta be a giant, mythical man-beast. Except it's always just a deer unless you are delusional or full of shit.

In reaction to those tweets, the Rude Pundit received an implied death threat via email: "You're a fucking asshole and I hope you are murdered. ALL Hillary supporters should be murdered." That's annoying because 1) idiot motherfucker is wrong, and 2) it borders on a parody of a threat and it's hard to tell if it's serious. Either way, it's goddamned over the top.

So when the Rude Pundit reads things like Steven Salaita's recent piece in Salon, he can't help but think, "Oh, shut the fuck up. You're gonna vote for Hillary." Salaita complains about feeling like shit for being told to "Vote for Hillary or be responsible for Trump." That, he says, "is the slogan of somebody either maintaining or being played by the system." Which is a fancy way of saying, "My candidate might not get the nomination, so I'm taking my wubbie and going home."

'Cause, see, this Sanders voter understands the motherfucking system as a shitstorm of mindless, violent jingoism competing with people who are trying to keep the whole fucking place from falling apart. The Rude Pundit wants Sanders to be the nominee. But he wants Donald Trump or Ted Cruz not to be president even more. Like his support of Sanders over Clinton, it's just that simple, logical an equation. And if his vote for Clinton in the general will prevent the nation from being ass-raped by the cruel nativism and brutalist capitalism of the GOP, then he has a moral and ethical obligation to do it, even if we take every negative thing said about Clinton as true. It's still not as bad as Trump running the joint.

While this seems like a raging pro-Hillary post, it's not. If Biden were running and was the possible nominee, it'd be the same. But the Rude Pundit reads blithering nonsense like a 28 year-old Sanders supporter saying, "I will never support Hillary Clinton. I identify as a socialist. She stands for everything that I’m against. It’s Bernie or nothing," and he can't help but think that guy is a fucking liar and poseur, preening and sounding tough.

Like nearly every Bernie voter, he's gonna line the fuck up, shut the fuck up, and punch that touch screen for Hillary. Or he deserves whatever fucking hell awaits on the other side.

By the way, if Sanders ends up being the nominee, Clinton voters better fuckin' vote for him. Love only works if it goes both ways.