Daniel Ellsberg Has Lost His Way

Dear Mr. President,

Daniel Ellsberg has lost his way. Repelled and outraged by your betrayals and lies, he will not vote for you but urges all liberals, progressives and undecideds in swing states to. I have admired Ellsberg since the 1970s when he put it all on the line to make public the Pentagon Papers. This is a man I thought incorruptible, a man of moral courage and conscience. To read “Defeat Romney, Without Illusions About Obama” saddens and angers me. He recognizes you’re a tool of Wall Street, that your drone assassinations are immoral, that you’ve launched unconstitutional wars, decriminalized torture and prosecuted whistleblowers, but assures us that Romney will be worse: war in Iran, environmental devastation, the end of Roe v. Wade, Medicare and Social Security, etc. In the end, his justification for this moral double standard comes down to the lesser of two evils theory, dismissing your sleight-of-hand magic trick of saying one thing while doing the opposite and convincing us to believe what you say rather than what you do: opposing the Bush tax cuts while extending them; proposing single payer health, then taking it off the table even before negotiations began; opposing the Patriot Act but extending and expanding it; praising whistle-blowers as crucial to democracy while prosecuting them with more zeal than any president in history; proposing immigration reform while deporting more immigrants than ever, vowing to veto the NDAA but signing it into law in the dead of night… and much more. Ellsberg has drunk the Kool-Aid and bought into the lesser of two evils theory, ignoring the fact that you are the more effective evil or that voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. A vote for you makes us complicit in your crimes against humanity and corrupts us all, erodes our morality and humanity. Mr. Ellsberg’s moral compass has been seriously compromised. How many corpses have to pile up before he decides it’s not okay to vote for you? How many war crimes? How many drone strikes? How many extra-judicial assassinations? How many constitutional guarantees voided? Yes, Mitt is dangerous, but compared to you he’s a bumbling, inept amateur. Mr. President, you are a known and imminent threat to the very foundations of America: you have gutted the Constitution, terrorized nations around the world and codified into law the mechanism for repression and tyranny. I disagree with Ellsberg. No one should vote for you. Jill Stein for president!