This topic was prompted by the persistent reflection among the pundits that what we will be getting next year is another Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump matchup for the November election.

Let's review. Joe Biden is the guy who won because back in 2020 they hid him in a remote location or something while Donald Trump destroyed his own chances at re-election by making the election about himself and his enormous ego. And -- back in 2020 -- nobody outside of the Cult of Trump cared about his enormous ego; he was a guy who at best ate junk food and played golf while America focused on something else. Joe is running for re-election this time around.

The selling point for Team Biden is the "lesser-evil voting" appeal: the other guy is worse. The Bernie Sanders dramatization of this selling point is the idea that "the future of democracy is at stake"; the current Team Biden presentation of democracy, however, in its control over the Democratic Party, is one of how "you have no choice." You are not allowed to choose RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson. You cannot choose Cornel West because if you vote for him -- Team Biden tells you -- Donald Trump will win. And you can't choose Donald Trump because they will prosecute Donald Trump. Because nothing screams "saving democracy" like depriving the public of choice.

Any observer who cares to think would have to conclude that if the future of democracy were really at stake, a vote for Joe Biden would be wasted. Let's mention Team Biden's persecution of journalists, and move forward to discuss Team Biden's obsession with Ukraine, a place in which the future of democracy might vaguely be at stake except that the current President of Ukraine has in fact banned all left-wing opposition parties from that country.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not control the airspace above the areas which they occupy, so all "counter-offensives" they conduct have been, are, and will be pointless except insofar as the money they justify will flow into the hands of the already-wealthy. We nonetheless have Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, saying she wouldn't support a bill replenishing FEMA (this in the middle of disaster season) unless more "aid" was sent to Ukraine. This is of course all part of the cottage industry through which the US government pretends that is cares deeply about that portion of Ukraine inhabited by ethnic Russians for the first time in the world's history. The on-the-ground result of "aid," of course, is more counter-offensives and thus further diminished Ukrainian troop strength as the corpses pile up. Behind the scenes, more money is skimmed off from "aid" and sent to the already-wealthy. The country itself is already property of the IMF, World Bank, and analogous European institutions.

What can easily be predicted from all of this mess is that the war will continue, regardless of its cost to Ukraine, until the November 2024 election. Joe can't be out there saying he lost a war when, "democracy is at stake" or something like that. By that time the US should be a Third World country because a large share of the international bourgeoisie will stop investing in the US because of what the US has done to confiscate the wealth of anyone (Russia being the name most recently added to the list) connected to any country they didn't like. Oh and the Russians, Saudis, and UAE, all oil producers and now members of BRICS, will cut production to the US. So yeah, Detroit? Cleveland? East Palestine? Lahaina? What's left of the West Coast's forested areas? Row upon row of abandoned houses, businesses, and dead municipal infrastructure? When November 2024 rolls around you'll be seeing a lot more of that.

Okay so how does all of this information connect to lesser-evil voting?

So yeah, even though Cornel West was and is the TARGET of lesser-evil arguments, he's -- according to Jimmy Dore -- USING them to portray Biden as the lesser evil. I wanted to bring this up as a problem of how lesser-evil arguments are so pervasive they can even poison third-party candidacies -- I didn't want to get into it about who is right and who is wrong. Jimmy Dore is of course thoroughly invested in lesser-evil arguments -- Dore thinks of Trump as the lesser evil (between him and Biden).

Let's go back to the argument I gave about lesser-evil voting in a previous diary:

"Lesser evil" -- the "lesser evil" is clearly something to vote for, but not for the reason usually portrayed. "Lesser-evil" voters are not interested in minimizing evil, because -- for instance -- at present the actual minimization of evil would mean swiftly concluding the proxy war in Ukraine out of an aversion to World War III. But, rather, those who proclaim themselves to be "lesser evil" voters want to avoid thinking about evil. Evil is evil -- there isn't a calculus to it. "Lesser-evil" voting is therefore not really about considerations of evil.

So this is the thing. We go to the polls. It's one of those November-every-four-years elections. We know that the demographics of our votes will render them meaningless unless we live in swing states, in which the electoral votes of our state are up for grabs. Then we think "I should vote for the lesser evil" among the two candidates one of which will attain our state's electoral votes. The result of it all is that we get another evil President. Later, more evil is done, and we have the world we have now.

What happened was that did not seriously think about evil. And so now evil, having triumphed over us so thoroughly in the past that our ability to recognize it has become impaired, threatens to extend its rule over us further. Over the next sixteen months, then, Biden evil will become more apparent than it is now. We will then have to decide -- again -- what to do.

PS -- RBN went over the Jimmy Dore/ Cornel West think in fine-toothed-comb detail.

I changed it so it was timed for 50:24 when the Dore/ West content began.