That comes with the territory of running a global hegemon. Every modern president has the blood of tens of thousands on their hands, including Saint Carter. I think it’s more likely Trump’s love of brinkmanship and tendency to double down will result in wider conflicts than anything Hillary will do, but your mileage may vary.
Indeed. Last month the Supremes struck town Texas laws that would have severely limited the ability of Texas women to terminate pregnancies. Under the guise of “protecting women’s health”, regulations would have made many abortion providers go out of business. In such a large state, many women would have had no nearby facility. Especially women without much money–who also had family & work responsibilities tying them to their area.
The anti-choice folks will continue to fight in any way they can. I’m sure SenorBeef doesn’t take this personally. I’m too old to be personally affected but can remember my youth. In which I was prevented from dealing with unwanted pregnancies by Planned Parenthood. (Which is also being “punished” by Texas lawmakers; PP supplied much health care with state funding–preventing abortion, among other services. Other organizations were supposed to spring up but they haven’t, really. Bernie was a bit "above"PP.
Voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is like voting for my next door neighbor’s cat – they’re simply not going to accomplish anything other than being a spoiler for one of the two leading candidates. That’s not an opinion, that’s a real-world fact.
With this in mind, I would ask those who are voting for these protest candidates to consider the tone of the rhetoric and behavior coming from the right. Consider the rhetoric of Turkey’s strong man Recep Erdogan who has been repeatedly referring to his opposition as a “virus,” as he now trashes what’s left of democracy in that country and rounds up anyone even being suspected of having negative views toward him. Now compare that to the rhetoric of the republicans at the convention, who featured a minister who referred to the opposition as “the enemy.” We had an arena of thousands chanting “Lock her up!” Seriously, asking for an opposition candidate to be jailed. It’s not just Hillary in their cross hairs. We had other prominent speakers implying that a sitting president is a secret Muslim extremist. You have a major party that runs a campaign that are based on repeated and outrageous lies. This is not a movement that the country can sit and wait out for four, eight, or 12 years. This is mainstream party that has splintered and broken into fragments, with the largest of those fragments unifying to form a bitterly divisive and toxic form of politics that hopes to access power through plurality. Does this not remind you of another deteriorating democracy across the Atlantic in the early 1930s? The more we accept this sort of rabid, toxic, and vitriolic form of unthinking discourse, the more we legitimize it. And the more we legitimize these thoughts, the more mainstream they become, the more likely it is that people will begin to act on intolerant impulses.
Voting is more than a right; it’s a duty. We have a duty to confront a dangerous, undemocratic strain of politics, and to use our votes to make sure it doesn’t govern.
No, it’s not the only way. In fact, that way has never worked. The proven way is what we’ve witnessed over the last 6 years with the Tea Party.
The simple political truth in a first-past-the-post system is that a voter on the left margin of the Democrats is more likely to stay in the party, all else being equal, than a voter in the right margin. That’s because, for the median voter, it’s not a huge loss to get a Republican elected if they don’t support the Democrat. They are the median voter because they share some preferences with both sides. Whereas for the left edge voter, getting a Republican elected is much, much worse than getting a Democrat elected. A move left means losing votes in the center, and since the center votes can more easily swing, parties rarely successfully move to their edges as a result of general election pressures. Now, of course, it’s theoretically possible to convince the left edge to be as unreliable as the median voters. But that’s nearly impossible over the long-term because the left edge has so much more to lose. So every time you succeed at clicking up the Green Party vote a few notches, and get someone like George W. Bush elected as a result, the whole effort collapses under the weight of the game theory.
What that means is that, in our system, the real ideological battles happen in the primaries. The Tea Party moved the GOP to the right, not by threatening to vote for third parties, but by primary challenges and then voting for whoever won in the general. Win or lose the primary challenge, the result is candidates who move to the edges to protect themselves from being primary’d. That is Bernie Sanders. Even in loss, Bernie Sanders got Green Party types a lot of things they wanted.
So, if you think the Democrats are a bunch of corporate shills, you should support candidates in the primary who aren’t. Happens all the time, sometimes successfully sometimes not. But that is the mechanism that keeps them as left as the electorate will permit. I think you also have to keep in mind that when you have a minority opinion in America, you’re not going to wield a lot of political power through voting.
If I vote my conscience, I will be leaving the POTUS spot blank.
“Oooh they’re badgering me!” I weary of hearing this.
You can vote whatever way you want, or not vote if that is your decision (by far the worst to my mind, but that’s neither here nor there). You can salve your ideological purity by not voting for either major candidate. But if Trump becomes President, you objectively think that’s the worst possible outcome, and you didn’t vote for Hillary, you cannot evade complicity in it or responsibility for it. So your ivory tower will be intact while the rest of the country goes to hell. Feel better now?
My conscience tells me not to throw ineffective temper tantrums(“They’re both bad so I’m not voting!”) just because I don’t get exactly what I want.
I’m not sure if those last two responses were aimed at me, but if so here goes…
I don’t hate Hillary Clinton, not am I a Bernie supporter although I would have happily voted for him had I had the chance. I don’t think she’s evil. I don’t give a fuck about Benghazi. I don’t think she or anyone else rigged the election. My only opinion of the email scandal is my utter disbelief that someone so obviously a corporate stooge like Wasserman-Shultz as in charge of the DCN to begin with.
My problem is the rightward shift of the party that occurred under the previous Clinton administration. During that shift unbelievable damage was done to traditional constituencies of the democratic party. Above all else I believe Clinton to be a political animal and given the Clintons previous history of throwing constituents under the bus for political expediency, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t trust her to work for me. Fool me once and all that.
Call that a temper tantrum if you want to.
Ok, how about a candidate who agrees with you 90% of the time. I ask this because it seems to me that it is really only a small percentage of issues that Sanders and Clinton actually disagree about. I don’t see anyway that someone could be an avid Sanders supporter without agreeing with Clinton on the vast majority of issues. I’d be curious what your results would be for thefollowing quiz, and would be surprised if your Clinton score was much lower than 90%.
Which(Trump or Clinton, which are the ONLY two realistic choices at this point) would you have as president?
And do you remember why the Clintons began shifting to the right? Progressive ideologues always support gun control and health care reform in presidential elections – and then they’re nowhere to be found in mid-term elections, thus giving control of congress to a party that launches endless investigations about things you don’t give a fuck about and preventing the changes that you actually do give a fuck about. Maybe you’re not the one who abandons progressives at the polls just when it counts most, but a significant number do. At minimum, place the blame where it belongs.
Again, though, not denying that Hillary has run a crap campaign, as have the democrats as a party. But I wanted to respond to that criticism, because I’ve heard it too much and if people are going to call out moderates as turncoats then they need to understand why they abandon progressives – progressive voters abandon them first.
Nevermind. Enjoy your fence.
It looked more like i was about getting reelected from where I was sitting. YMMV
I grant that that may be a valid point, but it’s not much in the way of incentive is it?
Notice - he chose one.
Said Lucy Van Pelt to a prone Charlie Brown.
Yeah but there should have also been a scene where Bruce already punched him before asking the question. Metaphors tend not to be perfect.
Actually, the thing to fear would be my getting the government someone who can’t bring themselves to vote against the greater evil deserves.
I categorically dismiss the notion that I deserve a Republican as president.
Clinton isn’t a “less evil” candidate than Trump, she is, simply stated, a superior candidate compared to Trump.
Voting is a civic duty. It’s your vote and you’ve been given the legal right to do with it what you wish, but you have an ethical obligation to use it wisely and to understand that your vote impacts other people.
That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to get it wrong once in a while, but it’s absolutely wrong to use your vote knowing that the only possible outcome is to help a party that is openly hostile to political opposition and is clearly attempting to undermine the rights of those who are more vulnerable in our society. Whereas you think we ought to wait four or eight years to find a more ideal candidate, what happens to the voting rights of people who get bumped into electoral purgatory simply because can’t find a copy of their original birth certificate or some other technicality? It’s kinda hard for Jill Stein to win elections…if more blue states get turned into red ones artificially. That’s just one example – there are many more.