election 2016

I voted for Bush twice and Obama twice. Spend more than five minutes reading through the material on this blog and you'll know in a hurry that I'm a liberal. How many people would even continue reading to find out what I think about this election? How many just shut down the minute you use a label like, "conservative" or "liberal" or "progressive"?

I want to say that I genuinely feel like this is not a normal election, and so serious reflection is called for. Our country is the greatest democracy the world has ever known. Democracy depends upon the citizens doing their civic duty and voting. Voting responsibly requires reflection and information.



As I read the other day, a flaming pile of medical waste could get to 40% in this country just due to the polarization of America. Party die-hards will never cross over, and they constitute a big chunk of the electorate. That is itself a serious problem that will continue to eat at our constitutional republic long after November 2016.

I'm not sure that anyone will change their mind based on what I say, and I don't want to reiterate things that lots of other people have already pointed out. Since so many people have already put together coherent and cogent explanations of why one ought to vote for a particular candidate, I will list some of those resources. They're called "newspaper endorsements"...and the numbers are clearly one-sided. Zero major newspapers have endorse Trump. Zero. The only "endorsement" from a "newspaper" he got was from Roger Stone's Enquirer.

Widely read newspapers that have endorsed Clinton (16), Johnson (4) and Trump (1). pic.twitter.com/U7qx5nS5NH

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 2, 2016

Amazingly, several newspapers which have always endorsed a Republican agree with me that this is not a normal election. The editors at those papers are well-read conservatives, and they find Trump unacceptable for various reasons. USA Today has never issued an endorsement of any presidential candidate its entire history, but the editors felt compelled to weigh in against Trump this year. The Atlantic magazine has only endorsed two presidential candidates in its entire 159-year history (since 1857!): Abraham Lincoln and LBJ. Guess who the third person is? The arch-conservative Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has yet to endorse anyone, but one of its editorial board members endorsed Hillary the other day.

Does any of that give you pause?

I know many ignorant people (and I mean willful ignorance, not just someone lacking a formal education) will ignore this, as well as all of the other mountains of evidence of what a complete dumpster fire Trump would be as POTUS. They will retort that these newspapers are "the elites" or "the establishment" or whatever other drivel they dredge up from the dark recesses of their souls minds. But this is attacking/ignoring the messenger so as not to have to defend one's position against superior arguments. A serious person could go through and rebut the charges made here. But Trump is very hard to defend, as Mike Pence showed us.

The things that Donald Trump has said, for any other normal candidate, in any other election year, would have caused America to laugh him off the stage. A man who brags about his penis size in a presidential debate, repeats at a rally that another Republican is a "pussy" for not torturing people, says we need a "deportation force" (and then repeated it in August) to remove millions of law-abiding immigrants, that deportation should be just like in "Operation Wetback" from Eisenhower, endorses killing the wives and children of terrorists (what would that make us?)...ok sorry I am starting to lay out the same case that all of these newspapers do.

Honest questions for honest people: Why do you support Trump? How can you defend the things he's said and done? What makes you think that he will be better for our country than Hillary?

If you say it's policy positions, do you even know what his positions are? He doesn't seem to, as he's changed his positions 126 distinct times on 21 major issues.

If you say it's national security or foreign policy, do you really think that this loudmouth, blustering fool would do a better job than an experienced former Secretary of State who negotiated nuclear arms treaties? Did you know that 22% of Trump's own supporters believe he'll start a nuclear war? Do you realize that he has had to fire his campaign staff -- two different shakeups of leadership, by the way, discrediting the idea that he'll "surround himself with the best people" -- for being tied to Russia?

If you want to drag out scandals and pile them up, Trump wins handily. John Oliver made this point the other day.

Clinton deleted emails. She was Secretary of State when terrorists attacked in Libya. Those are the two major scandals that the GOP constantly repeats. She uses "lawyer" language on these two, but in both cases, the details have been exhaustively, ridiculously analyzed. The details are publicly known. And in both cases, the top two "scandals" that Republicans try to paint her with constantly, there is zero evidence of criminal wrongdoing on her part. This despite 8 congressional investigations into Benghazi, and an FBI investigation into the emails.

Trump's ties to organized crime and undeniable mob dealings (some of it tied to the casinos in Jersey), Trump's tax avoidance schemes that allowed him to lose $1 billion during a boom year in 1995 and stay rich (much of which we still don't know about because he refuses to disclose his taxes), -- you have to love the spin he and his water-carriers put on it, calling him a "genius", despite his complete lack of involvement in planning his own taxes -- Trump's fraudulent "university" which he tried to deflect AG investigations into, Donald's fraudulent "charitable foundation"...which he used to buy paintings of himself and he used to try to pay off Florida AG Pam Bondi and other AGs, the list goes on and on and on...and if you want to read the newspapers mentioned above, you'll see all the facts. But are you interested in facts about who and what Donald Trump is? What kind of man, leader, president he would be?

The kind of man who is what he is, has said what he has, and has done what he has is never to be trusted with the awesome powers of the presidency of the US. His own running mate couldn't defend him, and Trump had to lie repeatedly during the first debate about his own words and actions, all of which are on tape.

If you vote for him in November over Hillary, you are either plugging your eyes and ears to reality, or you are knowingly voting for a man that Republicans themselves have called a pathological liar, con artist, cancer on conservatism, carnival barker, utterly amoral...and frankly I want to ask you not to talk to me again until after he loses in November, when I will ask you what the FUCK you were thinking. If he loses...

If he wins, I doubt I will want to talk to you about anything.