I am still haunted by the 2000 presidential election. I thought highly of Ralph Nader and was supportive of his campaign. Gore was a lackluster candidate and an awkward campaigner, and Nader offered a lot more progressive option.
Today, I am looking out over various social networks, and seeing a lot of people talking about Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
If Jill Stein is projecting securely at 270+ EC votes on November 8, go for it (in fact, if she’s the leading candidate over Trump at that point, consider it an obligation). If you looking at Gary Johnson… well, I don’t know why you are here, and perhaps you should spend time thinking about what motivates your vote. And in either case, only a great fool would make that decision over 3 months in advance instead of making the best decision at that point in time.
But I will tell you this: if come November 8 it is a two person race between Clinton and Trump and you don’t vote for Clinton, you are a god-damn moron. If it is coming down to the wire between Donald Trump and a dead possum, vote for the possum carcass.
You aren’t going to get a damn principles purity prize in the damn mail for voting your conscience. Grow up and understand your vote isn’t some selfish thing for you. It is about your civic and global duty.
16 years ago, 3 million people voted their conscience and
-It resulted in Osama bin Laden escaping justice for 10 years
-It killed 1 million innocent Iraqis
-It resulted in tens of thousands of dead and injured US troops
-It resulted in the US becoming a nation that tortured its prisoners
-It resulted in Guantanamo and the weakening of habeus corpus
-It resulted in the deregulation of capital ratios of financial institutions, directly leading to the proliferation of CDS and MBS “assets” that directly resulted in worst financial crisis in 100 years
-It lead to the US pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol and setting back climate change response by over a decade
-It led to political hacks editing and suppressing climate research from NASA scientists, also setting back climate change response by over a decade
-It led to a political environment where a critic of the administration had his wife outed as a CIA agent in an act of retaliation
-It led to Colin Powell standing in front of the UN with a fake vile of anthrax to sell the war on Iraq
-It led to a President publicly stating “intelligent design” should be taught along evolution
-It led to hundreds of thousands of fewer Pell grants
-It led to Justices Alito and Roberts; a ~5-4 conservative court; and Ledbetter, Citizens United, Schuette, Burwell v Hobby Lobby, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby)
-It led to Bolton, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Perle, Yoo, Gonzalez and a host of other excrable people in positions of great power and the grotesque explosion of K Street corruption
I have to stop. I’m exhausted and irate from going back through memory lane and the cruelty of fate/the Brooks Brothers riot/3 million well meaning souls that have to live with the horrible, horrible damage they facilitated. Your vote isn’t a god-damn tantrum. “Don’t vote your fears” … you better god-damn vote your fears. Do you think Gore would have been anywhere close this bad? Do you have any reason at all to believe that Trump will be anywhere near as good as George W. Bush? You should be god-damned terrified.