At this point, I’m completely over Susan Sarandon. It’s not just a forced ambivalence, either. Now I actively hate her. Her words and actions over the course of this year have been nothing short of insane. She was a Bernie Sanders supporter at first, endorsing Bernie in the early months of his candidacy. When it became clearer that Bernie was not going to win the primary – and I still don’t know why that came as a shock to people? – Susan had several notable meltdowns. One of those meltdowns was on Chris Hayes’ All In, when she basically suggested that Bernie supporters should turn their support to Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton, because at least Trump was an agitator or anti-establishment.
Skip ahead to the DNC, and Susan showed up to make noise with the Bernie-or-Bust people, and I mean that literally. The Bernie Bros acted like a—holes throughout the DNC, even booing Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. Susan was super-disappointed that the Bernie Bros didn’t get a bigger forum in which to denounce Hillary Clinton AT THE DNC. Seriously. Then, just ahead of the election, Susan publicly endorsed Jill Stein, claiming that because Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag, people should feel free to “vote their conscience.”
Post-election, I don’t see how anyone can look at the vote tallies and say that the third-party candidates and their supporters didn’t have a terrible effect in many states. Clinton lost Pennsylvania by less 70,000 votes, and the third-party candidates got more than 200,000 votes. Clinton lost Michigan by less than 12,000 votes, and Jill Stein personally got more than 50,000 votes. Hillary lost Wisconsin by less than 29,000 votes and guess who got more than 30,000 votes? Yeah. While it’s not Jill Stein’s fault, per se, it is the fault of every person who made a conscious choice to vote for Stein, Gary Johnson and the other third party candidates. As Rachel Maddow said on Election Night, “People go into this eyes wide-open. If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president.” Those people walked into the voting booths and wanted to “vote their conscience,” just like Sarandon suggested. And those votes of conscience resulted in the first fascist ever being elected to the American presidency. I hope their votes of conscience keep them warm at night during the coming nuclear winter, which will inevitably begin when Trump declares war on Japan, Bhutan and Sweden on Twitter and he decides to lighten our nuclear arsenal on a whim.
But Susan doesn’t want the blame. She posted this on Twitter this week:
To all those who find blaming me less painful than introspection, never knew I was this powerful. pic.twitter.com/etgSWBcH6a
— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) November 16, 2016
Well, Viggo Mortensen also endorsed Stein, so that’s yet another thing Sarandon got wrong. I mean, I get it. Right now, third-party voters don’t want to acknowledge or admit that they contributed to the election of an orange madman. But during the next four years, I hope all of those voters get to see the consequences of their actions and I hope they all have a come-to-Jesus moment, or whatever you want to call it. But right now, it just feels like this conversation is about as useful as banging my head against a wall repeatedly.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.
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