Are You A Lesser-Of-Two-Evils Voter? No? What About When The Greater Evil Is Demonic, Existential, Hitlerian...?

I haven't seen him in a while, but I used to run into George Takei in one of my favorite neighborhood Italian restaurants all the time. It's an unspoken word in L.A. that you don't bother the celebrities, so I never did say anything to him. Takei is a good solid member of the Democratic Party and he often pushes the party line, feeling, no doubt, that he's doing God's work. Like I said, I never spoke with him; what I know about him is just what I've read by him. I surmise he's a lesser-of-two-evils kind of guy. I used to be too. He's 82, more than a decade older than I am. I always thought when you got old you could stop with the less-of-two-evils voting and just vote for candidates you want to see in office. I guess not everyone agrees with me.

On Friday, Takei, a glorious one-man anti-Trump propaganda machine, tweeted a proposition to his nearly 3 million followers: "Will you join me in pledging not to speak negatively about any of our candidates? We don’t know who the nominee will be, but they need to be as strong as they can be going into the election against Trump."

Takei missed the point of primaries-- and in more ways than one. Now, if he's talking about not spreading lies and baseless smears against potential nominees, his request is fine. But if he is asking his followers to not bring up the records of candidates, at this point, he's leading them down a dangerous path.

Take my word for it: Trump's opponents research team has everything anyone on Twitter is going to ever throw at Joe Biden, Bernie, Beto, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris and everyone else, even the candidates who would need a miracle-like occurrence to break through. (After all, Buttigieg's sudden meteoric race has to be looked at as a miracle-like occurrence, no?)

Anyway, getting out weaknesses in the candidates before primaries and caucuses lock in the Democratic candidate, is crucial. Suppose no one ever mentioned anything about Biden's history on race during the primary and people who care about racism didn't know anything about Biden before Obama chose him as VP. Do you think for a moment that Trump wouldn't make sure that every voter in the country with a history of voting for Democrats wouldn't be bombarded with messaging about Biden's record?

Perhaps even more important, we need to pick the man or woman we most want to see in the White House. Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie, has put forth a series of outstanding policy proposals. Some of the other candidates-- say Gillibrand, BETO and Kamala for the sake of argument-- have been "me too supporters" of some of those policies. That's great. Thank you. In the case iff these 3, however, their past records don't support a desire some might have to believe their commitments. That all needs to get hashed out in the primary season.

Actress and activist Alyssa Milano has even more twitter followers than Takei-- 3.67 million. On Saturday she reacted positively to Takei's proposition:

Many of her followers knew better-- and said so on her twitter feed. A typical rebuke went like this: "So we can’t say Biden fought on the side of credit card companies over us? We can’t point out that Mayor Pete isn’t strong on policy at this point? Are you for real? Who wins the primary then? The person with the most money?" Several commenters sounded just like me: "Absolutely not. People should never choose the lesser of evils, shouldn't follow their party even though the candidate is corrupt. Our democracy is broken, and a traitor has illegally seized power. We need to stand behind our ethics to defeat him, not abandon them out of fear." And "Critique is actually both the point of primary season and our collective responsibility as voters. That responsibility is higher for those of us with several forms of unearned privilege, like me and like you. It's highly disturbing that you don't or won't know these things."

That Trump's a monster-- and an existential threat to all of us-- and that needs to be said over and over and over, every day and in every way. But being "better than Trump" does not figure into primary season, when we're looking for the person not just who can beat him in the election, but who will also be the best woman or best man to be sitting in the White House until at least 2025.

I could have been quiet about Beto, for example. I thought about doing just that-- holding my tongue. But with Beto-mania all over the news, I realized I had a civixc duty to perform. I've known Beto since his first campaign-- a primary against an establishment Democratic incumbent. Blue America endorsed him them, the only progressive group to do so, and helped him raise money too win the seat. He turned out to be a bit of a disappointment-- not terrible by any means, but not... well we never re-endorsed for reelections. Then he captured the imaginations of many Democrats when he took on the role of David in a dramatic race against Ted Cruz. Blue America endorsed him for that. What the hell... he's good on some things. But when he lost and started floating trial balloons about running for president, I was mortified.

Several friends, less involved with politics than I, were sold. They declared themselves Beto Forever Fans. Oy! When I asked each what they knew about Beto, it was basically nothing at all. They didn't even know he was a congressman, let alone a New Dem backbencher with no accomplishments at all and without any kind of core that could predict where he would stand on any current or future issues. I don't dislike Beto at all and certainly didn't include him in The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President series. But voters had to know, especially voters who I had urged to support him in his campaign against Ted Cruz. Beto is no Joe Biden, no John Frackenlooper, no Kirsten Gillibrand, no Howard Schultz, no Mike Bloomberg, no Terry McAuliffe... Neither is he in the same league as Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, two candidates who would make truly transformative and excellent presidents. So I started laying out Beto's record for some of my friends, one of whom swooned over him because he looks like Tobias Menzies, the actor who plays Brutus in Rome.

If Beto is the candidate against Trump-- very unlikely-- I'll vote for him, even though I live in California and don't have to. But I would. Biden? Not a chance. If I lived in Florida or Wisconsin or Ohio or any swing state, I'd have think hard about it. But I'd like to think I'd have the courage of my convictions enough to just not do it. I don't want to see Joe Biden as president. I didn't want to see him become president any of the half dozen other times he started running. And if you don't want to hear why, there are other people to follow on Twitter, other people to annoy on Facebook, other blogs to read... In fact this is from my own Facebook page. I didn't delete Richard Natale, who I don't know and don't understand how he wound up on my "friends" list. But if he's smart, he should spend his time reading what George Takei's page and not make himself miserable by reading mine. We're at different stages of evolution.