LEE CAMP: We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out

We can make all sorts of noise and even scare ’em, but the A-Holes are here to stay.

Biden-Harris presidential drive-in rally at Broward College, Coconut Creek, Florida, Oct. 29, 2020. (Adam Schultz, Biden for President)

By Lee Camp
Special to Consortium News

It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive. 

But we can’t vote out the assholes.

Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful. (They are “parashits,” if you will. Copyright pending.)

I’m not arguing Trump’s goons aren’t awful. I’m just saying that if you even take a momentary peak at the people Biden is already putting in power for his transition and his future cabinet, they’re still more assholes. 

War Hawks in Charge of Peace

He’s putting war hawks in charge of creating peace, fossil-fuel puppets in charge of fixing the environment, propaganda enthusiasts in charge of the media and cops in charge of fixing a brutal white supremacist police system. I’m pretty sure he’s getting ready to put Rudy Giuliani in charge of election integrity, and a dead skunk who formerly worked for Dow Chemical as the head of the EPA. 

We can’t vote out the assholes. 

We already know that Biden’s first national security briefing included two board members of the massive defense contractor Raytheon. Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes said in a CNBC interview a couple months ago that it would be “ridiculous” to think military spending will be cut under Biden. But it doesn’t stop there.

We now know Biden’s pick for defense secretary is Michele Flournoy and his selection for secretary of state is Tony Blinken. As The Grayzone has reported, these two have played central roles in all the wars waged by Democratic presidents all the way back to Bill Clinton. 

Michele Flournoy, center, with Ambassador Richard Olson, to her right, and former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley, February 2020. (U.S. Institute of Peace, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

But to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, it makes sense that one would want a defense secretary with a standard American war criminal past because otherwise they wouldn’t know their way around the Pentagon.

You don’t want to get a new guy (or gal) in there as head of our murder machine, and he’s bumbling around muttering, “What lever do I pull to blow up a village in Somalia? I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention during the introductory tour. I thought I launched a drone bomb in Libya this morning, and it turned out to be just the button for the coffee machine. But the cappuccino was great. I will say that.” 

We can’t vote out the assholes.

The Environment

Let’s move on to the environment. How are Biden/Harris doing on that front? Well, in an interview, the most famous environmental activist ever played by Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich, already railed against Biden’s EPA transition team selection, Michael McCabe, a former DuPont consultant.

As his climate change envoy Biden chose that great climate activist — that warrior for the trees and birds — John Kerry. …Ummm, we literally have a few years until the point of no return and Biden thinks the guy who helped negotiate the completely meaningless Paris Climate Agreement is going to do a goddamn thing? I have a sneaking suspicion Biden only picked Kerry because he looks like a horse and therefore might be better equipped to explain to the animals why we’re killing them all.

The Apple Fire burns into the night north of Beaumont on July 31, 2020. (Brody Hessin, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The head of Biden’s transition for the U.S. Agency for Global Media is Richard Stengel who called himself the “chief propagandist” at the State Department and said the American government doesn’t use propaganda against our own people enough. That’s like putting Pikachu as the starting center of your NBA team — it’s not a recipe for success.

Then there’s Janet Yellen to run the Treasury — someone we know is a team player when it comes to capitalism’s destruction of the globe.

Is everyone starting to get the point? We can’t vote out the assholes.

Other Countries, Not Us

Other countries can. Other countries have the option to vote ‘em out. They just did it in Bolivia, despite the security forces arrayed against them. They voted out the U.S.-backed fascist coup. They did it for the most part in Mexico by electing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is largely progressive. They do it fairly often in other countries. But not in America. Can’t happen. Both sides of our fake two-party system are owned by the “business community” (AKA assholes).

Our system is owned by the frauds and the scam artists, the trolls and gremlins, the con-men and hacks, the swindlers and hucksters, cheaters, scammers, fraudsters, and big fat flimflammers! Oh man, how I hate a flimflammer. They know that no matter which of the corporate parties wins each election — they still win. And we’re seeing it yet again.

It happens year after year after year after year — like that Bill Murray movie where he’s repeating Groundhog Day over and over, and he even kills the groundhog to see if that will stop Groundhog Day from happening, but it doesn’t. Groundhog Day still doesn’t stop. I think the movie was called “The Day That Happened A Lot.”

We can’t vote the assholes out. 

Still in Power

At Joint Base Balad, Iraq, U.S. soldiers wait to board aircraft taking them back to the United States. (U.S. Air Force/Erik Gudmundson)

That’s why I say it doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. Maybe you read this two weeks from now — in which case you’re viewing it on a phone while sprinting away from the zombies that have been transformed by Covid-19 and are now exacting revenge for the way they were treated during the election with their insatiable man-eating tactics. (Don’t forget to douse them with kerosene and light them after you hit ‘em with the shovel because otherwise they’ll come back. They’ll come back, and they’ll remember you.)

I have to admit, I’m cheering for the postal employees. But don’t take that personally. It’s just because I’m pissed about the 2006 bill that the Democrats and Republicans joined together on to destroy the U.S. Postal Service, and I want to see a kindly 70 year-old mustachioed man in blue shorts exact his revenge. (It’s tough to say whether you can still call a grandpa “kindly” when he’s chomping into your carotid artery, but still.)

Point being, if we truly want to change this system, then we can’t spend four years bickering about what will happen one day when it will always be the same result. We need to spend those four years building the systems that make the assholes obsolete, that make the system seem old and meaningless.

We need to build the alternatives that make the ruling elite, the oligarchs at the top, look like fucking VHS tapes. Really, we need to make it so that people look at Joe Biden’s garbage pro-war and pro-Wall Street cabinet and go, “What the hell were you ever used for? I don’t know how you fit into the system these days. We need an adapter or something.” 

Side note — Why is it that everyone over roughly 30 or 35 still has a small stack of VHS tapes or DVDs somewhere in our house or apartment? What the hell are we preparing for? Do we all think that after 20 years of never watching one VHS or DVD that the night will come when we say, “Let’s spend the next six hours watching scratchy versions of ‘Ghost,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ and ‘The Firm’?”

Even if that did happen — even if hackers in the United Arab Emirates developed a new internet virus that shut down all television and streaming services and we blew the dust off the old collection — after about 30 minutes of deciding what to watch, we would then realize we don’t have a way to play goddamn DVDs anymore!

We’re all going to be holding up the disk grumbling, “What do you do with this again? Do we plug it into an iPod and hook that to the microwave? I can’t seem to recall.” No, we’re never going to watch those again.

And yet, we’ll keep that little stack of VHS & DVDs there until we die. Just in case. You never know. Maybe the dollar will collapse and VHS tapes will be the new form of currency, and you’ll be able to buy a helicopter ride out of the country with a single copy of “The Breakfast Club.” Who knows. It could happen.

Point being — We can’t vote out the assholes.

Because we can’t vote them out, the U.S. is less democratic than many other countries in the world. So let’s stop talking about nothing but the presidential election and start building a better future that makes this one look like that old pile of VHS tapes.

If you find this column important, please share it. Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show Redacted Tonight. His book Bullet Points and Punch Lines is available at LeeCampBook.com and his stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at LeeCampAmerican.com.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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7 comments for “LEE CAMP: We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out

  1. robert e williamson jr
    December 1, 2020 at 19:35

    I’ll make a prediction here.

    I hear comments from both parties mouth pieces that the public is fed up with the old politics as usual by way of the rancid dead meat of the two party system that completely fails to work for America’s masses.

    Unless Joe Biden figures it out and bends to the needs “will” of the “Biden is the lesser of two evils” voters who voted him in he will not see a second term.

    Th leaders of the democrats who live in denial of who and what they continue to represent seem to be the only individuals who do not see the handwriting on the wall. Many new voters see it, this is why they voted.

    The cynical farce that passes for the U.S. government is running out of time, while the MSM squeezes every nickle they can out of the non-news of the Trump fiasco and choose to cover not one Dog Damned decent news story.

    Lee is so very right. These idiot assholes can be voted out when they are the only candidates allowed to run.

    The system is so badly broken it is irretrievable. This election pretty much proves it, that is if the last one didn’t do it for you.

    So, “You can by the whole seat but all you will need is the edge “. This quote by Hunter S Thompson, date and source unknown.

    Like I’m fond of saying it’s later than many of you think.

  2. c
    December 1, 2020 at 18:20

    Stopped after 3 graph. Why don’t you support Trump’s efforts to uncover Election Fraud. Your take on Trump is fasionable on the left but he is none of the things you claim. It is 100% unfasionable and unprofitable to lose your base but you should try and look at his accomplishments. I’m a liberal and am happy Trump did not start any wars. And that he is fighting the utterly corrupt election results. I wish great minds like you and Jimmy Dore would do your homework on Trump. You did not fall for the Russia Hoax but you fell for a lot of media manipulated lies on Trump. Wish you could bust out of your media bubble. Binge watch some American Thought Leader interviews. Just get a different perspective. I use to love your commentary but I’m afraid you’re not following the truth. With love, pura vida!

    • a.z
      December 2, 2020 at 13:30

      there was no new war cause Iranian leaders r patriots and not crazies willing to sacrifice all for the theocratic principles. they r the ones who held their fire and paid price and keep paying the price as emboldened chicken hawks r doing all they can to start one. u think iraq was disaster iran wouldve been 1000 times worse and trump aalmost stumbled on to war a couple of times but only to be saved by because of prudence shown by Iranian leadership. yes iran would have paid a terrible price, but they would’ve won the war usa can’t even beat the Taliban.

  3. Dao Gen
    December 1, 2020 at 03:31

    Lee, you’re right! All the people you mention on the new A-Team are definitely working for the US power elite and not for the people, despite all the pretty words they toss around like colored balloons at Hillary’s coronation. One thing we do need to do is get behind a serious research group that can figure out how we can amend the constitution and various state laws and launch a truly populist third party, one that can get populist progressives and populist conservatives to work together on various core policy areas, such as protecting free speech and preventing censorship, getting M4A, and using Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to help ordinary people with fiscal policy, a federal jobs program, and private debt forgiveness programs. Bernie knows about MMT, but he is afraid of being mocked by the MSM, so he refuses to talk about it, but even Repubs are starting to get interested in MMT. Actually, we ought to switch to a parliamentary system in which multiple parties can switch their allegiances according to the issue. As for non-electoral strategies, if Biden tries any outrages such as sending troops into another foreign country, how about holding a freely streamed public People’s Tribunal such as those once headed by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre?

  4. Moi
    November 30, 2020 at 21:40

    Lee Camp sadly is mistaken if he thinks other US allies can vote the arseholes out. Geez, look at Israel or any of the Gulf monarchies.

    Every election (that is in those nations that hold them) it’s deja vu all over again.

    • December 1, 2020 at 07:13

      Sad state of affairs that this country is now comparable to Gulf states monarchies and Israel. You are right.

    • Rob
      December 1, 2020 at 12:58

      Using Israel as an example was a poor choice, because the majority of Israelis want the assholes in power, be it Netanyahoo or someone else. Any sort of progressive movement or party is despised and marginalized.

Comments are closed.