Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard and the Slow Death of the Democratic Delusion

As a practice, I despise both major parties with a passion usually reserved for religious zealotry. But I’m not ashamed, even as a lifelong leftist, to admit that I hate the Democrats most of all. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m a leftist that I hate the Democrats most of all. The only thing worse than a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires is a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires who try to pass them selves off as the high handed voice of egalitarianism. It’s like having Strom Thurmond throw on a Rasta wig and wax poetic about how he understands why the n*ggers feel cold and the slum’s got so much soul (compliments to Jello Biafra). It doesn’t exactly make me feel better that I use to be a member of that limp-wristed blackface fraternity.

But it was 2008, the scoundrels of the Bush junta were on their way out the revolving door to cushy no-show jobs in the defense industry and there was one candidate left in that party that I still believed in, and I’m not talking about Joe Lieberman’s designated black dauphin. Dennis Kucinich was the last of a dying breed. He seemed to have stepped out from a different era, like the long lost munchkin lovechild of George McGovern and Joan Baez. He didn’t just want peace, he wanted revenge against the war machine; 50% cuts in defense spending, shuttering all foreign bases, Nuremberg Tribunals for the retreating Bush junta. He didn’t have a chance in hell and I didn’t give a shit. He was on a crusade that was bigger than any election, and I was willing to swallow my vomit and leave the Green Party to join him.

I look at the ten clown car pileup that is the 2020 Democratic primaries and there is no Dennis Kucinich to be found. Just a multicultural graveyard of hyper-statist partisan corpses. For five fucking minutes we had Mike Gravel’s beautiful crusty old ass, but the glorified carnies who rig the debates quickly erased all signs of his existence until his shallow well ran dry. What we have now is a contest largely between two separate but equally deceptive cliques of creeps. The “Moderates” or, as I call them, the Obama Revivalists, and the “Revolutionaries” who are really little more than blood and butter social democrats (to quote the late Dr. Thompson, “You people voted for Humphrey… and you killed Jesus!)

The Obama Revivalists have to be the most comically delusional conglomeration of convoluted cunts since Obama himself sold half my generation on an 8 year extension of the Bush regime with Hopelandic gobbledygook lifted straight from a Chicken Noodle Soup paperback he found at the airport. The basic pitch of these neoliberal imbeciles, who only the Clinton News Network would have the gal to call “Realists”, can be summed up by Cher’s tattooed ass on a battleship, ‘If we could just turn back time. If we could just find a way…’ They seem to all suffer under the grand-mal delusion that all of America’s woes began in February 2017, and just 8 more years of Obama (or 24 of Bush) can cure the American Empire of an authoritarian collapse that has been a longtime coming. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom. Voting for one of these mass media approved Obama Revivalists would be the equivalent of treating a brain tumor with a shotgun blow to the head.

Until very recently, the leader of this pack was Joe Biden, quite possibly the only human being with half a pulse who’s more corrupt than the woman who softballed Trump the keys to the White House in the first place. Joe Biden is also incredibly the one candidate, aside from maybe that crypto-fascist Muppet, Michael Bloomberg (you know him from his commercials, where he struggles gallantly to suck his own balls), who might actually be worse than Orange-Man-Bad himself. This toxic sarcophagus has spent more than half a century proving that he is every bit as sexist, racist and homophobic as Trump and at least three times as violent. His grubby finger prints are all over at least four of America’s smoldering forever wars and Grandpa Munster’s appetite for destruction is still Cracker Barrel hardy. All I can say, speaking as a hypochondriac who’s lost three out of four grandparents to dementia, is thank god for Alzheimer’s. If Biden hadn’t finally lost his remaining crackers on his third sojourn to Pennsylvania Avenue, we might be staring down the barrel of what a Hillary Clinton White House might look like with a shorter shriveled man-clit.

Unfortunately for mankind, the Obama Revivalists still have Mayor Pete in their back pocket, another token minority wind-up doll full of half-baked meaningless innuendo and absolutely zero concrete policy positions whatsoever. This seems to be the Democrats new ace in the hole. They can’t sell mild mannered Republicans with black friends like the Clinton’s and Amy Klobuchar as Democrats anymore, so they give woke young people the opportunity to vote for the first name-a-minority for president, so they can pat themselves on the back for being progressive, even when they’re essentially just voting for Humphrey with butt-stuff. Speaking as a queer anarchist, I don’t particularly want to see any of my people in the White House, and I sure as fuck don’t want the first one to be a trigger happy Wall Street sock puppet. I now know why the caged Cornel West sings. But I wasn’t raised on R&B, so I’ll be howling like Courtney fucking Love on a bender if that little police state twink wins.

This leaves us with the so called “Revolutionaries”, led by the mighty morphing Menshevik, Bernie Sanders. And I can’t think of a better example of why you should never trust a social democrat, aside from Red Rosa’s mangled corpse, than old Bernie. For starters, as the asshole has finally fessed up himself, this is not a man who comes from the Norman Thomas/Eugene Debs school of socialism. Bernie is LBJ with a brisk. In addition to his audacious social welfare schemes, Bernie has also supported every war crime ever committed by a Democratic president, from Slick Willie’s scandal diverting NATO ransacking of the Slavic world’s last functioning social democracy in Yugoslavia, to Obama and Hillary’s insane campaign to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi with Surge-hardened Jihadists, which led to the collapse of half a fucking continent. This isn’t so much because Bernie is pro-war, but rather, like most social democrats, he’s a team playing coward above all else. Don’t be fooled by his Independent credentials. That’s just a costume he puts on to ply the populists back home in Vermont. When it comes to the DNC, Bernie is Charlie fucking Hustle. His 2016 revolution was a fluke. He never had anymore intention of beating Hillary than Trump did. He was in it to herd wayward Obamaites away from third party temptation. But Bernie, like everyone else, underestimated how much sane Americans despise Hillary Clinton.

I hate Bernie but I’ve always had a soft spot for his supporters. The Sandernistas gave Hillary holy fucking hell every step of the way and might have even put that corpse in the White House if the Democratic Party hadn’t gone out of its way to screw him at every turn; Overturned primary results, anti-Semitic disinformation, blatant charter violations, missing ballots. The only one who cheated in the 2016 circus was Hillary, and Bernie stood by like the two-bit chickenshit that he is, with his mouth shut and his hands in his pockets, while the kids who sweat blood for him got reamed like Andy Dufresne by the party he serves above all else. And then, as if that weren’t enough to earn his place in hell, he takes his rightful spot at Madame Secretaries feet like a neutered Cocker Spaniel for the remainder of the election. I respect the hell out of the Sandernistas, but my respect for their fearful leader is clinically non-existent. And Elizabeth Warren is even worse. A lifelong prophet for the virtues of Reaganomics who discovered her inner leftist, just like her inner Indian, just in time for the weather to change on America’s appetite for laissez-faire anal rape. The woman has no positions, only poses. Which is why most of her Paul-Krugman-meets-Walter-White progressive alchemy falls apart under even minimal water pressure.

The only wild card in this election season, the only upstart who provokes a twinge of hope in the dark heart of a bitter pessimist like me, has been the verbally ultra-violent antics of Tulsi Gabbard. Regardless of how you may feel about her checkered past, you’d have to be more comatose than Biden and Bernie not to at least get a chubby from her cold-blooded lady-in-white routine, taking the stage like Lady Snowblood to decapitate the DNC’s preferred Kumbaya vibe, launching kamikaze attacks on establishment darlings like Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete. The media and their DNC mandarins have gone out of their way to smear Tulsi as having some spooky Kremlinite ulterior motive, but I’m beginning to suspect that her true loyalties remain on the other end of that debate stage.

Tulsi was the ultimate Sandernista back in 2016. She was the one member of his campaign willing to call out the Democrats for their crooked bullshit, taking a switch to that bitch Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even resigning from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC in protest to put Bernie’s name forward at the 2016 National Convention, well after Bernie himself had rolled over. This time, I suspect she decided to take her Shogun-like loyalty to the next level, running herself in a desperate attempt to light a fire beneath Bernie’s pussy ass and going after his major competition like Luca fucking Brasi. The bitch is a class act. I like her. I like her a lot. But she suffers under the same painful delusions as many of her fellow Sandernistas. Even if she manages to spill enough blood to get Bernie nominated, it won’t change the fact that the man is a coward, and his balls belong to the DNC, who will never in a million years green-light a legit antiwar VP or Secretary of State like Tulsi or her comrades on the better half of the Squad. The best case scenario is another decade of Bush/Clinton policies obscured behind a pseudo-socialist veneer. In other words, Lenin Moreno for gringos. No thank you.

I love Tulsi, and I love the weird conglomeration of left and right wing renegades who have coalesced around her campaign even more. These freaks are my people, my dearest motherfuckers, and I wear that Tulsi 2020 bumper sticker with pride for them. But Tulsi ain’t no Dennis Kucinich. Those short-lived days of bread and roses are long gone. In this toxic climate of a new Cold War, which Democrats peddle like Goldwater Girls in heat, even the parties fringe has become another tool of the establishment. I left the Democratic Party because I saw this coming back in 2016. And I recently made the strange choice to join the Libertarian Party as a quasi-Marxian syndicalist because I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to change this beast is to tare it down Sinn Fein style, by any means necessary, with the bullet and the ballot box. I cock my gauge for peace as the storm clouds gather…. Bring it on. I’m ready.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.