Today my sister sent me this word document and requested that I “tumblr this shit” so here it is.
How The Obama Campaign Lost My Vote
I woke up this morning, eleven days before the election, to discover a friend had emailed me this video, starring Lena Dunham, creator of HBO’s Girls, and paid for by the Obama campaign. Go ahead and watch it if you haven’t seen it yet.
I find this ad unbelievably tasteless and offensive, but so far I seem to be anomalous among left-leaning people in feeling this way. The mainstream online feminist community doesn’t seem upset, which is part of why I wanted to write this. Feministing.com has made no mention of the video, nor has Feminist.org. Jezebel.com, meanwhile, ran a story called “Obama Wants You to Vote Like Your Vagina Depends On It”, which called the reaction against the video “frantic pearl-clutching from conservatives”.
I am disappointed that the discourse about women’s rights has become so narrow-minded and politicized that we are encouraged to laugh at the unfunny idea of “binders full of women”, but we are supposed to ignore or approve of an ad that encourages young women to vote for Obama by asking them to imagine voting as a sexual act. Maybe I can’t take a joke. Maybe I’m missing the forest for the trees. Maybe I’m simply clutching at my nonexistent pearls. But I am going to try to articulate exactly what bothers me about this video.
The problem with this video is that it enacts precisely what the liberal community keeps re-iterating is the problem with the GOP: the objectifying, dismissing, and politicizing of women’s bodies. It is already bad enough that girls are told that they need to legitimize their existence by having sex . Now this ad is not only reinforcing these paradigms, it is also telling women that the only way to legitimize their existence, to become women instead of girls, is by walking into the polling booth and drawing back the curtain and voting for Barack Obama. It is telling women: you should feel bad if you’re that little girl who didn’t know any better than to fall for Romney’s lies. It is telling women: you should feel bad if you think about voting and decide you’re not ready. It is telling women: you should feel bad if you vote for Obama but it doesn’t feel “amazing”. And it is telling women: we know the best way to win you over, and it is by being just a little bit suggestive.
Let’s look more closely at the text of this ad:
“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You wanna do it with a great guy.”
If you’re really going to wait for a great guy, you’ll be waiting a long time. Anyone who is running for president at all is already morally suspect. Running for president requires you to think that you are qualified to hold one of the most powerful positions in the world. It requires you to think that it’s okay to put your friends and family into the glare of the public spotlight. It might require to compromise your own beliefs in order to try to win votes. Being president might require you to spend your twentieth anniversary in a televised political debate. Being president might require you to send people into harm’s way and take personal responsibility for what happens to them.
“You should be with a guy with…beautiful…”
Beautiful what?
“Someone who cares about and understands women. A guy who cares whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control.”
What does “understand women” even mean? Slightly more than half of all people are women. Good thing it’s easy to simplify them into the ones who want birth control!
“The consequences are huge.”
The consequences of who wins the election are huge. But not the consequences of your individual vote, especially because of the electoral college system. Individual voters registered here in Connecticut, for example, have virtually no chance of affecting the outcome of the presidential election.
“You wanna do it with the guy who brought the troops out of Iraq.”
Why didn’t she add “and went after al-Qaeda and bin Laden”? That’s what Obama said in the first debate immediately after he mentioned ending the war in Iraq. Sexy!
“You don’t wanna do it with a guy who says, ‘Hey, I’m at the library studying, when really he’s out not signing the Lily Ledbetter Act.”
It’s true, Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and Romney said “I’ll get back to you on that.” But this is a weird way to bring up this issue. Romney can’t have been out signing the Lily Ledbetter Act, because he hasn’t been president.
“Or who thinks that gay people should never have beautiful, complicated weddings of the kind we see on TLC and Bravo all the time.”
Gay people want to get married just so they can have beautiful, complicated weddings like on TLC and Bravo! Supporters of gay marriage want gay people to get married so they can watch more beautiful, complicated weddings like on TLC and Bravo! To reduce the argument for gay marriage to the level of spectacle is offensive. Also, who wants a complicated wedding, I ask you?
“It’s a fun game to say, ‘Who are you voting for?’ and they say, ‘I don’t wanna tell you,’ and you say, ‘No, who are you voting for?’ and they go, ‘Guess!’”
We have a secret ballot for a reason.
“Think about how you wanna spend those four years. In college-age time, that’s a hundred and fifty years.”
What?
“Also, super uncool to be out and about, and someone says, ‘Did you vote?’, and “No, I didn’t — I wasn’t ready.”
I cannot even put into words how awful this part is. Politically, it is everyone’s right to vote, or not vote, as they see fit. Casting a vote does not automatically make you a cooler person. The great part about living in a democracy is that you have the right to choose your voting behavior for yourself, regardless of whether or not you happen to be a woman.
In terms of the sex metaphor: wow. Just…wow. It’s bad enough that what she says might be true: it is uncool to say, No, I didn’t—I wasn’t ready. But to witness this type of public virgin-shaming in the name of women’s rights is heartbreaking.
“My first time voting was amazing. It was this line in the sand. Before, I was a girl; now, I was a woman. I went to the polling station, I pulled back the curtain, I voted for Barack Obama.”
Either this is a joke in very poor taste, or the Obama campaign honestly believes a tired cliché about the magic of the “first time” will get young women all excited about voting. Sorry, Obama, but I already consider myself a woman, and it has nothing to do with whether I have ever had sex or voted.
The last shot is of a knowing giggle, as if she knows that it’s naughty for ladies to talk about sex and/or politics.
One of the reactions against the video has been that Obama should know better because he has daughters. At first, I thought that this line of attack was taking it too far, until I realized Obama loves using his daughters as convenient signposts of his concern for women’s rights. In the second debate, he said, “I’ve got two daughters and I want to make sure that they have the same opportunities that anybody’s sons have.” I am not convinced that the best way to give women the same opportunities as men is to air ads specifically targeted towards young women that encourage them to make their “first time” special by voting for Barack Obama.
We’ve all heard all of the awful things Republican congressmen have said about “legitimate rape” and so on, and all of the invasive medical procedures they would like to force women to undertake. The metaphorical undertones of these events is so potent that a Michigan congresswoman stood on the floor of the Michigan legislature and said, “I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.”
If the GOP philosophy towards women is akin (pun not intended, but now that I type it, yes, it’s intended) to rape, the Democratic philosophy seems to me to be akin to seduction. It reminds me of poems like Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, which claims, “Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” It reminds me of Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”, in which he asserts that “Catholic girls start much too late, / But sooner or later, it comes down to fate.” It reminds me of Angelo in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, an authority figure who tells a novitiate nun he will spare her brother’s life only if she sleeps with him: hey, if she were to agree, it would be consensual, right? It reminds me of Barney Stinson, the character on How I Met Your Mother who lies to and sleeps with a caricatured parade of dumb, blonde, busty women—but “always gets the yes” first. And more than anything, it reminds me of Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Pardon the spoiler: Lovelace abducts Clarissa, with the ultimate goal of winning her consent to sex; failing that, he eventually drugs and rapes her. And this is why all of the partisan rhetoric worries me. In the end, I am not sure how distinct these two sides are. For all that the “Your First Time” ad encourages us—albeit with tongue in cheek—to imagine a line in the sand, I cannot believe that all these lines in the sand are as firmly drawn as people want to believe they are. Lines in the sand are faint. They are subject to being washed out by water, to being rubbed away by footsteps, to being covered with sandcastles, to being erased and redrawn.
Yes, I am tired of hearing the conservative legislators in my home state of Virginia refer to transvaginal ultrasounds as “trans-v” ultrasounds for fear of saying a dirty word. But I am also tired of seeing the word “vagina” plastered all over the place by well-meaning liberals. To abuse the word in either way is to continue to ensure that women will be talked about as—and worse, talk about themselves as—nothing more than sex objects who will shut up if you just give them their damn birth control pills already.
I was already worried about whether I could vote for Obama in good conscience, whether this meant ethically sanctioning the acts of violence inherent in his support of drone strikes and the Second Amendment. I also did not love his reference to “the mentally ill” in the second debate, which slipped under the radar in the face of Romney’s more blatant references to “illegals”. I was hanging on to my vote for Obama only out of the sense that I was obligated to choose the lesser of two evils, the feeling that our entrenched two-party system gave me no other choice.
But now I know for sure: I have a choice over my own ballot. I will not let any tenuous line in the sand make my decision for me. I can vote for Jill Stein. I can write in a candidate. I can send my absentee ballot back unopened. Whatever I do, I will not vote for Romney, but I also will not vote for Obama.
SCOTUS effectively repeals Confrontation Clause
This morning, October 29, 2012, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to an appeal by Ghassan Elashi, a defendant in the Holy Land Five cases, who was convicted of providing material support for terrorism when his non-profit Islamic charity, Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, sent money to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
Leaving aside the bogus nature of such charges, the appeal in this case was grounded on the fact that, for the first time in US history, the government’s witnesses were allowed to testify anonymously and under aliases. The petitioner, Elashi, sought to have his conviction overturned on the grounds that this violated his 6th Amendment right to confront witnesses testifying against him.
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
It is not difficult to see the importance of the right to confront and question witnesses whose testimony could change your life forever, and this Due Process right has been a fundamental feature of our criminal justice system for, like, ever. But as with all of our rights in post-9/11 America, nothing is sacred anymore.
By declining to hear this case, the Supreme Court has effectively given license to the Department of Justice (and likely to local prosecutors) to ignore the Confrontation Clause, just as it has allowed them to ignore the 4th Amendment, 5th Amendment, and parts of the 6th Amendment. Elashi will now spend the rest of his life in a cage for the crime of being a Muslim in the US and sending money overseas, and the rest of us may have just lost yet another of our Due Process rights.
It is worth noting, for those who would be inclined to believe the government’s charges, that the very same recipients of these donations also received aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), proving once again that it’s not “terrorism” when the US government does it.
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I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might have concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. Nope. […] The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers - just aren’t valued.
Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama
On stage, as he smiles into the camera, using words to evoke some of the best sentiments within us, it’s hard to believe certain facts about him:
- Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.
- Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.
- Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.
In the end, Conor Friedersdorf sums up my thoughts like no one else: “Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret. To hell with them both.”
(via slowkingvictim)
(Source: mehreenkasana)
Yes they did.
David Boaz—The other day I saw a bumper sticker with an Obama logo and the words YES WE DID. This was hardly a surprise, as Obama got 67 percent of the vote in my neighborhood and 72 percent in my county, home to lobbyists and bureaucrats. And the embattled Republicans don’t flaunt their dissidence on their bumpers. But I began to wonder just what the driver was proud of.
Yes we did increase the national debt by $4 trillion? Yes we did create a national health insurance program passed in such haste that it’s full ofgross errors and requires restrictions on telling the media about it? Yes we did continue the wars a lot longer than we promised? Yes we did launch a third war in the Middle East without congressional authorization? Yes we did exercise presidential power more aggressively than George W. Bush? Yes we did laugh at the very idea of not arresting people for smoking pot? Yes we did ratchet up regulatory costs in a weak economy? Yes we did create the slowest recovery in postwar history?
Soon even my Republican neighbors may be sporting bumper stickers reading YES YOU DID.
Why.
If Dr. Paul does not win the nomination, I will still be voting for him, or even writing in his name.
Reasons:
Voting in accordance with my conscience and my principles is now more important to me than voting for the party. I don’t agree with any of the other Republican candidates on even half as many things as I agree with Ron Paul on. I’m a libertarian with a socially and economically conservative background, and Paul fits the bill perfectly. The other candidates are not talking about correcting the root causes of our national problems, as Paul is. They’re talking about trying to treat the symptoms by enhancing the very conditions that caused them. On policy issues, I see very little difference between the other Republicans and President Obama. So it does not matter one bit to me if it’s Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum versus Barack Obama in the general election. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Sure, the rhetoric is different, and the beneficiaries of government largesse are different, but free markets and individual liberty are thrown out the window just the same. Just as Obama has continued all of the most objectionable of the Bush administration’s policies: unconstitutional foreign wars and interventionism, massive deficit spending and corporate bailouts, corporatism, expansion of the welfare state, ad nauseam, I hold out no hope at all that the new bunch of Republicans will be any different, except for Ron Paul. I flat-out just don’t trust Romney, Gingrich is a disgusting human being and an opportunist, and Santorum is a warmongering religious authoritarian. I just could not, in good conscience, vote for any of them.
We should be doing everything we possibly can to avoid a war with Iran, because not only can we not afford it, not only would yet another aggressive foray into a land on the other side of the planet be morally and practically insane, not only is Israel not our constitutional responsibility to defend, not only can Israel handle the threat that Iran may or may not pose very well on its own, but Russia and China have major economic and political interests in Iran. An American invasion will almost certainly escalate into a long-expected third world war. Already, the Obama administration is moving troops around the world and cutting forces in Europe, Africa, and South America, in order to focus on China. This strikes me as either insane or evil. I want nothing to do with it. Another, bigger war will complete America’s decent into despotic tyranny and bankruptcy. All of the Republican candidates, save Paul, are just itching for that war, whatever their claims to the contrary. They all support the sanctions that are putting a choke hold on the Persian people, just as FDR’s sanctions against oil exports to Japan before WWII put Japan in a position where they had to either shut down and abandon their empire, or attack the United States in a gamble. Sanctions do not ever prevent wars. They cause them.
I will be voting for the man who represents an about-face along that road. For me, it will never again be about Republicans versus Democrats. It is about life and liberty, against all the tyrants and purveyors of death in the world who would snuff out that light.
Barack Obama is not America’s problem. He is just a symptom of a system that rewards smooth-talking liars who are backed by financial and military corporations that are deeply intertwined with the government, and which is fueled by the Federal Reserve’s powers to inflate the currency to fund corporate bailouts and wars. This has been going on for ninety-nine years. It caused every dead American soldier sent to perish in Eurasia, every American who starved during the Great Depression and every other recession, this past century, and it will keep killing and destroying for the sake of power, until it is stopped.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich are not the solutions to that problem. They are products of it, just as much as Obama is. None of them will reverse the decline of American freedom and prosperity, either because they don’t understand what’s causing it, or because they want to be a part of it.
Ron Paul has the solutions.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Biggest oxymoron I’ve ever seen. Literally.
“We’re at war.”
Huh?
“We” who? Last I checked, I never enlisted. I’m not wearing a uniform. I haven’t killed anyone. I didn’t vote for any of these wars. I don’t support them. I wouldn’t support them. If I got drafted, I’d dodge. And it’s not my fault that money is stolen from me in order to fund them. So…how did I get dragged into these wars?
So, one can imagine my utter confusion when I’m told I must give up my civil liberties because “we’re at war.” I’m sorry but no, the United States government is at war. Barack Obama is at war. The soldiers are at war. But I am not at war.
That’s a really sad and selfish concept.
and totally not Jesus-like.
… how is this not Jesus-like? How is advocating for an end to the war not Jesus-like? How is philanthropy without militarism not Jesus-like? How is pacifism not Jesus-like? How is betraying nationalism in the name of actually helping others not Jesus-like? How is putting the humanitarian interests of a sovereign nation ahead of our own strategic interests not Jesus-like?
This opinion may not be a popular American opinion, but it’s a biblical one.
“America has never been, and will never be, a ‘Christian’ nation in any significant sense. Among other things, America, like every other fallen, demonically-oppressed nation, is incapable of loving its enemies, doing good to those who mistreat it, or blessing those who persecute it. By applying the term ‘Christian’ to America, we’ve massively watered down its meaning — which undoubtedly helps explain why the vast majority of American Christians assume being ‘Christian’ is perfectly compatible with hating and killing your national enemies if and when your earthly Commander and Chief asks you to. The sooner the label ‘Christian’ gets divorced from this country, the better. It provides hope that someday the word ‘Christian’ might actually mean ‘Christ-like’ once again.”
-Pastor Greg Boyd
“We’re at war.”
Huh?
“We” who? Last I checked, I never enlisted. I’m not wearing a uniform. I haven’t killed anyone. I didn’t vote for any of these wars. I don’t support them. I wouldn’t support them. If I got drafted, I’d dodge. And it’s not my fault that money is stolen from me in order to fund them. So…how did I get dragged into these wars?
So, one can imagine my utter confusion when I’m told I must give up my civil liberties because “we’re at war.” I’m sorry but no, the United States government is at war. Barack Obama is at war. The soldiers are at war. But I am not at war.
You people are fucking retarded, I swear. It’s like all these little Democratic party hacks on Tumblr will find any reason to praise Obama.
Because yeah, it’s really fucking plausible that the same president who extended the Patriot Act, the same president who ordered extrajudicial assassinations, and the same president whose Department of Homeland Security routinely engages in warrantless wiretaps, domain name seizures, violations of due process, etc. — that same asshole — is going to give a flying rat’s ass about free speech, internet freedom, or anything else that involves protecting people’s liberties.
So no, Obama is not going to veto any legislation to protect you. Idiots.
Forgive the profanity for a moment and read what Ricardo’s saying.
