Equally.
Really. :dubious:
Just as an exercise, persuade me, here.
It has been established beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump hates America.
Make your case that Hillary does, too.
TIA
In terms of local politics, I think the OP is 100% correct, at least the way it is around here.
I’ve voted for a Republican who was a better Democrat than anyone the Democrats had on the ticket. Arlen Specter was a good guy.
Political parties exist and they matter.
It might be pleasant to think that your Congressman is going to always consider the issues and vote in the way that best serves the country and his district but that’s not reality. A lot of the times, your Congressman is just going to vote the way his party has collectively decided to vote.
So you’re not just voting for Candidate Smith or Candidate Jones. You’re voting for the Democratic Candidate or the Republican Candidate.
Your opinion means nothing to me, and I’m not interested in persuading you to agree.
I have a certain set of principles that I identify as conservative. I vote for the candidates who come closest to meeting them. If the ostensibly conservative candidate is a horrible human being? SOmetimes I hold my nose and vote for him anyway. Sometimes, I reluctantly choose the more liberal alternative.
In 2016, I was faced with two candidates I did not like, trust, respect, or agree with on any major issue (though, in Hillary’s case, at least I believed her convictions were genuine; Trump has NEVER been a conservative, and wasn’t even a Republican until 10 minutes before the primaries). Can YOU give any principled conservative a good reason to vote for either person?
I couldn’t think of one. Some of my fellow conservatives tried to convince me, “At least he’ll put good judges on the courts.” My answer: “Says who? He’s an unprincipled jerk. What makes you think he’ll be on our side if and when it’s unpopular?”
I had no good options. I went with a man who had no chance of winning. It didn’t matter, since I live in a state that Trump was sure to win anyway.
ISTM that being the viable candidate who DOESN’T hate America should be a good enough reason for ANY principled American, be [s]he liberal or conservative.
Hillary referred to half the electorate as deplorable- I’d say she hates half her fellow Americans.
Can you blame her?
Out of curiosity, (a) what’s your opinion of the judges he’s appointed thus far, from Gorsuch on down? And (b) do you grant that, after four or eight years, you might well remark sonofabitch, he really did come through when it came to putting good judges on the courts, didn’t he? Compared to whoever Hillary would’ve presumably tapped?
I see all this, as a larger general human behavior issue or characteristic.
In my experience, most people don’t put much work in to thinking anything through. Even many of the ones who are busy shouting at the rest of us to change our minds about whatever.
I attribute this to fundamental human avoidance of effort. People are fanatics, because it’s easier to be a fanatic, than it is to deal with each challenge that arises, as it does so. In turn, it is easier to cater to your own emotional reactions to everything, than it is to realize that your emotions of the moment can lead you to do things that cause you even more emotional upset later.
That said, when it comes to politics and governing, SOME of the people who choose one party over the other and ignore the individual candidate, are actually doing so for well-thought out structural reasons. In my case, I wont vote for many individual Republicans, because I know that no matter how good MY LOCAL Republican representative is, due the the way that the Federal government is structured, if he is elected to Congress, he
a) will have zero power or influence, because power in Congress is determined by number of years in office;
b) will tip the balance of power in Congress overall, so that the existing leadership of the Republican Party, who I assuredly did NOT elect, will continue to control ALL legislation that is allowed to come up for a vote at all.
Therefore I quite agree with the OP’s concern that voting Republican or Democrat due to a belief in political magic, is certainly destructive. But doing it for functional reasons is not.
Oh, I get it.
Sorry, my mistake, taking you at your word like that. What could I have been thinking?
You CALL yourself a “conservative” (and imply that you’re a principled one, to boot), but your eagerness to re-write history, combined with your refusal to appreciate (or even acknowledge the existence of) nuance positively SCREAMS “reactionary.”
I don’t have a problem with people voting for their party, as long as they’re democrats.
OK you don’t like the Republican Party I take it, and perhaps feel the Democrats should be more strictly in line with the progressive left. 
But I don’t see how you’re making any general valid point about people v party as the title implies. Or else you’d have given examples where people ‘blindly’ vote for the Democrat when he or she is the ‘retard’ running. Or the Democratic candidate is never less capable or qualified as an individual than the Republican?
But I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to vote mainly for a party in national elections or even mainly against one of the parties, which in my observation is the strong trend. It’s not love of the GOP/Democrats, it’s can’t stand one or the other, for a lot of people. That’s certainly true of the Trump phenomenon, very little love for the GOP among his strongest supporters, lots of disdain for the Democrats. But same is true IME with lots of people who think the Democrats aren’t ‘progressive left’ enough. Feeling the Bern wasn’t about loving the Democrats either.
As several others have mentioned, when the office isn’t national, and the lower level it is, the less true that is. Our local municipal elections are theoretically ‘non partisan’. I can’t stand what the Democrats have become on a national level in my view, not that I particularly love the Republicans. But I’ve voted locally for people I know are hard core liberal Democrats in their national views against people who I know are squishy moderates or even secret Republicans (being a fully admitted Republican here is a liability even in ‘non partisan’ local elections). There’s no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the trash as I think Bloomberg said. And our locality has a corruption problem. It’s traditionally a county Democratic political machine corruption problem, one of the more infamous in the country. But there are squishy moderates and even secret Republicans also in the orbit of that machine. So there’s a stronger reason to look for individuals unconnected to it and neglect their views on national issues, which they won’t be dealing with anyway in office if I vote for them.
Speaking as someone who voted for Hillary, I’m not 100% sure I get what in his comment is drawing your all-caps scorn: near as I can tell, she really does think that millions of Americans are deplorable to the point of being irredeemable.
Did I miss a memo or something? How many millions of Americans do you think she finds irredeemably deplorable?
Okay, I’ll engage (for some reason):
First of all, I concede that she used the term “deplorable.” Nuance demands acknowledgment that she used the word in reference to “about” one half of Trump supporters. There is no way to honestly conflate that with “half the electorate.”
In addition, I have repeatedly said that the fuckstick currently befouling the Oval Office hates America. Nuance demands that “America” be distinguished from a particular group of individuals who happen to hold American citizenship.
Third, I’d be grateful for a citation of her saying either the word “irredeemable” or “irredeemably” out loud in reference to the basket she labeled as “deplorable.”
With respect to your last question, I’m not prepared to say or speculate about who she finds irredeemably deplorable. As for how many I find to be so, I hesitate to put a number on it; but I will confidently state that all of them share the characteristic of being okay with the presence in the Oval Office of the America-hating fuckstick who goes by the alias of Donald J. Trump.
Isn’t that how she segues into the next part of the same speech? “They are irredeemable, but, thankfully, they are not America. But the other basket,” she says, because she now wants to talk about the folks who are desperate for change and feel the government has let them down: that’s the basket full of people who should be understood and empathized with.
But, see, that’s sort of the whole bit you mentioned, about whether she deplores half of all Trump supporters or half of the electorate: you’re not prepared to say, of her; and of you, you hesitate to put a number on it, but say they share the characteristic of being okay with the, uh, fuckstick’s presence in the Oval Office. And until you stop hesitating, I honestly don’t know what you think: you figure it’s a subset of people who are okay with it, sure – but do you figure that’s one-tenth of the electorate? Two-sevenths? Four-ninths?
OP,
I did not read your post and I do not intend to do so. The very moment I saw your username I hated your guts.
My immediate first thought was that you are a birther scum that uses Obama’s name to spew some hateful idiocy to make people subconsciously feel angry or uncomfortable whenever he is mentioned. I was truly surprised to see that you’ve been here over two years, so maybe you’re not a troll after all.
But seriously, I think you should change it, you’re poisoning your own well with it, especially here in the Pit.
Actually, she very much did not.
Here’s the full quote:
She said that half of Trump’s supporters (not half of America, half of Trump supporters) were deplorable (and she even specifically defined “deplorable” - as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic.) She then further went to say that she did not see all of Trump supporters that way.
At most, she referred to a quarter of the electorate as deplorable. And in the quote itself, she said it was a generalization. Now, to you, saying a quarter of the electorate is deplorable and irredeemable may also not ok - but please, blame her for the actual words, not a fictionalization of them.