Today, the right wing noise maching is amplifying Ann Romney's claim that had Mitt Romney been elected President, we would not be figting ISIL in Iraq.
Had Mitt Romney been elected President, or John McCain or may a merciful God forbid it, had Sarah Palin ascended to the Presidency when John McCain’s heart or mind failed him under the acute stress of a job which has turned Barack Obama gray, we would not now be fighting ISIL in Iraq and Syria.
In Mount Pleasant, SC, I hear the C17s flying over my home out to sea at night, heavily loaded with weapons and supplies. I know where they are going. It is far more war than I want, but a much smaller conflagration of fear and hate than we might have had.
Had Romeny, McCain or Palin become our President, we would be fighting some of the men in ISIL in Iran. There would be a native army of a million men, dug in on their home ground completely committed to defeating us there, backed by arms suppliers in Russia and China. We would, by now, be embroiled in a struggle for American national survival which would have ended the partisan divide in our politics with the realization that about 500 million Moslems were devoted to killing us all.
We would have cities on fire, pocked by the ground zeros of major terrorist attacks. An enraged population would have ostracized, attacked and attempted to exterminate the Moslems found within our borders if they weren’t sitting in Internment camps. Mobs would probably be hunting down the Hindus as well since most people would be too terrified to be bothered with the difference. We would be in the grip of a police state that would be crushing any possibility of dissent while 300 thousand American men and women would be fighting in a regional war which would probably stretch from Syria to Afghanistan, the surviving remnant of the 400 thousand we had already sent to the front.
There would be another quarter million draftees on their way to reinforce them. It would be a mobilization on the scale of WWII against enemies empowered by the Internet (where the power was still on), high speed travel, asymmetrical warfare in a world where you can level a building with the contents of a backpack. Our domestic police forces would be using everything which could project or stop a bullet on our streets between the times when a shoot on sight curfew wasn’t in force.
Mitt’s friends in the 1% would be enjoying the vast opportunities of a survival economy where the private sector had the privilege or rationing the ability to meet every basic need including transportation, food, water, energy and medical care. They would be busy sucking up all the capital and property left outside their control as fast as terror, poverty and the tears of children could drive it in. They would be fighting each other for the concrete, rebar, ammo and food supplies for their luxury bunkers. They would be wondering how long, and to what extent they could trust the private security companies and the guards they employed to protect their families.
For the right, it would be the dreamed for fulfillment of every nightmare they’ve ever invented. Every excess and impulse they harbor would be completely indulged. The streets would be full of flags and broken glass. It would all be guns, and no butter. All the social safety program would be defunded. The prisons and internment camps would be full of people shackled into round the clock work to sustain the war effort. Everyone with ambition, intelligence or a sound pair of legs would be in uniform. It would be the only place in our society where they would have the opportunity to apply their talent or intelligence. If you were a teenager who wanted to drive a vehicle, your family’s car would be on blocks and your only option would be something with a military camo paint job on the other side of the planet.
However, the right would discover that it wasn’t like the way they choose to remember WWII. Smaller families who did not know their neighbors would be shattered by the loss of their few children. Marriages would disintegrate. The churches might be full, but the prayers would be full of regret and resentment directed to a God which in their hearts, America no longer trusted. A social fabric thinner, less resilient and deeply divided by race, class and religion would shred as the suffering and losses mounted. A nation awash in firearms would become violent and criminal while the police focuses on keeping riots out of the streets.
The left, would be locked in its “free speech zones” being persecuted and ignored. Meaningful debate of complex issues would have completely disappeared, making our current anemic national dialogue and media look, in recollection, like a graduate level discussion of King Lear at Harvard. The questions people would have on their minds would be focused on their next mean and the strength of the bars on their windows which might be made from park fences hacksawed into sections and through bolted to the walls.
Gas would be over $10 a gallon. Transportation and energy would be unsustainably expensive. Deeds to real estate would become part of the currency. Inflation, not the regular kind, but the terrifying sort where money chases evaporating resources would, in an era where the speed of printing and distribution of paper money is no longer relevant, simple destroy the concept of government sanctioned currency. We would be on a barter economy, stuff for things and things for stuff. Behind that would be a very unrepublican government assistance program which would gather at gunpoint and dole out subsistence where they believed it mattered. Bomb builders would eat. Ballerinas would starve.
The 1% would be holed up behind razor wire and guards, comparing the quality of their bullet proof vests and armored vehicles. What used to be the middle class would be looking for ammo, food and rocks. Suicide would burn through the population like an epidemic. Epidemics would burn through the population like the black death.
All of these things have happened before: Russia in 1917 and 18. Germany in 1931. France during the worst parts of the 100 years war. Rwanda, Cambodia and Somalia in our lifetimes have collapsed into genocide. Explosives spend only a tiny share of their time as the friends of civilization.
The hapless, George W. Bush Presided over an administration which secured power in a manipulated election. Without voter suppression, Al Gore would have won Florida by tens of thousands of African American votes instead of maybe losing it by about 500. Bush vacationed while the warnings of 9-11 sat on his desk and his staff worried about they type of warfare which makes arms dealers rich. It’s hard to make a billion dollars arresting angry men with box cutters. All the hope we felt in the Millennium moment crashed to the ground with the World Trade Center.
Bush squandered two trillion dollars on wars he may have thought had something to do with Osama Bin Laden and which Dick Cheney knew would make his friends wealthy. Dick failed to grasp how dangerous poor, dirty men with guns can be. They inflated a real estate bubble with imaginary money and nearly everyone could buy a poorly built house until a lot of them had their entire wealth carried off in foreclosure. Finally, in September 2008 the music stopped and we came within days of having no food in the grocery stores. It took the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the 1% in the history of the Earth to get the corrupt system turned back on.
We elected Barach Obama. I was in Pensacola, Florida doing voter protection. The nation rejected McCain and Palin and the billionaires began a political war to demonstrate to America, particularly its poor and minorities, that it isn’t going to matter who you vote for. We elected Obama again, and they still don’t listen.
Occupy rose, connected and was crushed in two months. It survives, discredited and reviled, in a thousand ways outside of politics and media.
We labored through a healthcare signup process sabotaged by the Insurance companies it protects and computer systems which weren’t ready and failed until we succeeded in signing up 8 million people, including my own family. It still didn’t count. The Billionaires spent enough money to get people who had never had health insurance and got the Medicaid expansion and zero cost to hate the President. In South Carolina 300 thousand people didn’t get covered by the expansion, but most of them are too alienated and discouraged to acknowledge their situation by thinking about voting.
They shut the government down so, among other things, my wife’s workload at a job dependent on government contracts and her heart condition put her in the hospital resulting ultimately in her leaving work. People suggested she should manager her time better.
My congressmen, Mark Sanford left his wife for his mistress and then left his mistress for another woman. Sanford was elected after the end of his disgraced time as Governor over 17 other Republicans in the primary, many of whom got to church three times a week, have 30 year marriages and pay their bills on time. He will be reelected this November, to represent me and Charleston, SC, without Democratic opposition.
Finally, a President elected to get us out of Iraq was forced to send our Military back into Iraq because the brutality of ISIL was more than most of civilization could take. If you really want to know what America would probably look like by now had McCain, Palin or Romney become President, you can probably get a good idea by examining life in the Caliphate before a President with the Nobel Peace prize blasts it out of existence. Knowing no drama, Obama, he’ll probably finish that ahead of time and under budget. The Republicans will say he did it wrong. Like healthcare, they won’t be putting out a detailed proposal on how it should be done right before the decisions are made.
Our President is trying to govern a frightened and bruised nation. In South Carolina, stupid on steroids has taken over politics. It’s more than my votebuilder canvassing software on my tablet and hours walking my precinct meeting alienated African American voters can fix. I will be screaming at the next fund raiser who calls my home on the phone. I am tired of enabling them. If you are a candidate who wants to get up at 6 am and ride the bus with me to meet voters, (which I do on a regular basis) I’ll be waiting at the Mary Street transit center ready ride with you, manage a singup clipboard and tweet out your progress.
If you want to squander my money on pain free television advertising which ignores the power of the mute and fast forward buttons on a TV remote, waste someone else’s money.
I am still glad that Barack Obama is our President. I wish he was more progressive, more pro labor and aggressively leading a fight from our side to “take back our country.” I am however, still very grateful we have not arrived at the hell we would have been delivered to had we not won the 2008 election. We could have and should have done much more with our victory, but I recognize that all congressmen and senators serve money. I’m just grateful that my son, who would be a poor, disobedient soldier, wasn’t sent out to be killed by a right wing Sergeant who hated him in some blood soaked desert on the other side of the planet. I’m happy that the power is on, the water is drinkable and the Mount Pleasant farmer's market is full of twenty different varieties of jewel like cherry tomatoes.
I grieve the loss of the hope I felt at midnight when we celebrated humanity's arrival at a new millennium, but I am glad we have a President who thinks and believes, ultimately in the value of human life and understands its varied and delicate nature. Perhaps I exaggerate, but history has shown us worse. Worse to some degree is what we woudl be living in were Romney, Palin, Paul Ryan or John McCain our President today.