Well, as it turns out, SINCE I went off on Gary Johnson’s “and what is Aleppo?” fiasco, he actually topped himself in a press conference where someone asked him to address global climate change and he said, “the long-term view is that in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right. So global warming is in our future. ” Now, he’d said just before that, “I just argue that the result (of government spending on climate change) is completely inconsequential to the money that we would end up spending, and that we could direct those monies in other ways that would be much more beneficial to mankind.” But that doesn’t really go into serious detail as to what should be done, if anything, and as we’ve seen, the same press that gives Donald Trump credit for walking on two legs and says that his not displaying symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome is “professionalism” will dive on any comment Johnson makes and make that a Libertarian Straw Man the size of Godzilla.
What’s weird is that despite Gary Johnson turning himself into the San Diego Chargers of political candidates, he’s still at least 8 percent in a lot of polls. Which is to say, he hasn’t gone up any, but he hasn’t gone down either. Seriously, why is that? All I can say for myself is that Johnson’s comments ought to be disqualifying to any serious candidate for president. The problem is that at least one of the two “serious” parties doesn’t have a serious candidate for president. And no, liberals, this isn’t a “both sides are the same fallacy.” I know damn well that President Clinton would not be the same as President Trump. President Hillary Clinton would not mount a giant gold-plated T on the roof of the White House. President Hillary Clinton would not make Wednesdays Hot Oil Wrestling Night in the Blue Room. And Hillary Clinton did not say she would turn her business holdings over to her offspring as a “blind trust” the way Trump did – even though many people have pointed out that having family in charge of the assets is the opposite of a “blind trust.”
That in itself should be enough reason to make sure Donald Trump does not become President. Another would be the use of donations from other people to his Trump Foundation charity for private purposes, buying personal gifts, and making political contributions – which is not just skeevy or unethical but outright illegal. Yet, after crashing in the wake of the two party conventions, Trump is now leading polls over Clinton in several key states like Florida. And liberals are casting about looking for someone to blame, from “third” parties to double standards to the idea that anyone not bowing down to Hillary is being “unrealistic” because their candidate isn’t “perfect.” In fact, that’s the argument being puked out in multiple sources. Do an internet search on “Hillary Clinton is flawed” and you’ll get Daily Kos going “Cause, you know, I’m flawed. And you are flawed. And Bernie Sanders is flawed and Barack Obama is flawed and even Michelle Obama is flawed. But the difference between all of them and me–and probably you, is that they have all given their flawed lives to public service. And now, they are all working together in their inevitably flawed ways, to save all of us, and the whole world from a sociopathic narcissist. ” Or Jonathan Chait going “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” This is a bullshit argument, and the fact that liberals seriously seem to think that this is the best they can say is proof of how defensive and desperate they are. Do you really think that Chump voters aren’t aware by now that their guy is “flawed”? When a car dealer wants to sell a Hyundai Elantra, he doesn’t start out by saying that it’s not a Lamborghini. All we want is a car that will get us to work and back without blowing up within two years. That’s the problem here. The whole country, Left and Right, is sick of business-as-usual, “Normal” politicians, and constant war. We don’t know if Clinton will go full neocon or let her paranoia turn her into a left-wing Nixon.
Look: If we’re going to be “realistic” here – which is what all the liberals who are desperately afraid that their Perfect Inevitable Queen may lose are always telling me to do – then we first need to dismiss both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Because whatever their merits OR flaws, neither has the voter base necessary to get a majority or even a three-way plurality of votes, or even win on a state-by-state level, which is what is actually required for the Electoral College system. (That’s why Gore didn’t get elected, remember?) Then you have to consider that Donald Trump declares himself more disqualified to be president with every public appearance he makes, because apparently he just can’t help himself. So you’re left with the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable president after all. So that means going over her record becomes that much more important for navigating the next four years, not less. Things being what we’ve seen, the second Clinton Administration may get itself into yet another paralyzing and possibly impeachment-worthy scandal, and it won’t necessarily ALL be the fault of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (TM) of Republican meanies.
Part of the issue is that when “first past the post” means that only two parties have a realistic chance of support, the issue of “can this candidate win?” takes almost exclusive precedence over what should be at least as important a question: “should this candidate win?” One of the problems with that mentality, as Hillary Clinton is discovering, is that not wanting Candidate B to win is not the same thing as wanting Candidate A to win.
In my example: I’d already decided that after George Herbert Walker Bush, I was never going to vote for another Bush on principle. (Even then, I didn’t realize that Bush Junior would make Senior look like Eisenhower.) That’s part of why I ended up supporting Libertarian candidates. But Michael Badnarik was appealing only insofar as he wasn’t Bush or Kerry. In 2008, the Libertarian Party nominated conservative ex-Republican Bob Barr while the Democrats picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, and Republicans nominated Senator John McCain – who’d picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the woman who turned out to be the John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheeto Jesus.
With that decision, I knew I couldn’t go Republican. I also didn’t trust Bob Barr, being one of those social conservatives who turned me off to the Republican Party in the first place. So in 2008, I voted for Obama. And not just as a “lesser evil.” Indeed, I think that was the only time I voted for a candidate that I liked AND that had at least an even chance to win. He didn’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian; I wasn’t a doctrinaire libertarian. He just had to be good on balance, and I didn’t think Barr or McCain were.
Over the next four years of Obama’s first term, he was disappointing on a lot of issues, certainly on civil libertarian issues like Guantanamo detentions and the “War on Terror.” On the Affordable Care Act, the Administration was, depending on perspective, either too socialist or not socialist enough. By 2012, I wasn’t too enthused about Obama but I thought the Republicans (under Romney-Ryan) hadn’t learned anything. On the other hand, Gary Johnson had gained the Libertarian nomination, and as a former New Mexico governor who had successfully run things with a strong Democratic opposition, he seemed like the kind of practical right-winger that Republicans used to promote and have since actively rejected. So I voted for him.
Now, I continue to have serious issues with the Obama Administration, but I would actually rather have Barack Obama serve a third term than have either Clinton or Trump, two dysfunctional, power-hungry creatures, be president of the United States. And while Gary Johnson, with his increasingly dippy statements, is no longer somebody I would support over Obama, I would STILL rather have HIM as President than Clinton or Trump. Because if Johnson doesn’t know where Aleppo is, Clinton helped make Aleppo the way it is, and Trump would end up making a real estate deal with the Russians to buy Syria dirt cheap for hotel properties.
There are reasons why it normally doesn’t pay to vote third party. Constitutionally, we have a “first past the post” election system, not a runoff or parliamentary system. Politically, even beyond the constitutional structure, we have an entrenched duopoly that has ginned up the laws to force any possible competitors through a prohibitive series of legal hoops to cut off even the diminished level of dissent that they would normally have. However when people who apologize for the status quo (usually liberals) tell the rest of us this stuff, they’re “mansplaining” this to people who already KNOW that going “third” party is unproductive, if only because gross vote nationwide does not translate directly to Electoral College votes. (Which is why Ross Perot never got Electoral College votes.) But what it really comes down to is that the third parties are “third” because those few people who do look them up find their platforms too immoral, or too impractical, or they like the platform but don’t think enough people (in their state) will vote with them.
The problem with using that logic to support the status quo, though, is that it still applies to one of the major parties if it becomes unpopular enough in a certain state. If you live in California, voting for Trump is just as much a vain, throwaway vote as voting for Johnson or Stein. But if you’re in Georgia or Texas, voting for Clinton would be the equivalent of a “third” party vote.
A point that Clinton apologists either do not address or actively dodge.
The problem with “but the other candidate is worse!” point is that it reveals that the binary logic of the two-party system has already reached its terminal point of absurdity. The expected result of such a system would be polarization. But polarization pays off only if the whole voter base is polarized, and in equal degrees. In practice, when that doesn’t happen, one party polarizes by purging all of its “squish” voters and candidates, which means that all the relatively moderate people who have been made unwelcome by their old party are refugees who get scooped up by the other party without them having to change their positions much at all – even if ultimately those new people are really not a good fit. So when the Republicans purged all their Jon Huntsman moderates, their Gary Johnson libertarians, their Colin Powell neocons, their RINOs, their get-alongs-to-go-alongs, they were essentially left with either the kind of people who actually take Trump seriously and those who know better but want the votes of the former group. And that latter group, like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, are the next on the chopping block, whether they admit this to themselves or not. Meanwhile, all those other guys either became official Libertarians like Johnson, publicly decided to sit things out this time, or actively declared they were voting for Clinton. So these center-to-right people, by definition, are the kind of people who have already rejected the premise ‘You HAVE to vote for the Republican, because the Democrat is always worse!’ So why would you expect them to obey a faulty programming code just because you switched the nouns?
The people on the Right who accept that premise, like Ted Cruz, are the people who are trying to rationalize voting for Trump, even if (or especially if) they know better. They’re already rehearsing their rationalizations for 2020: “Look, our nominee may be a fire-breathing demon with acid for blood and maybe he just raped an entire orphanage including the nuns, but at least he’s not Hillary Clinton.”
So the irony is that if Trump DOES win the election, it will be mainly because the Republicans embrace liberal “logic” more than the Democrats do. Because the people in the middle that the Democrats need are the ones who reject binary partisanship, and the ones who embrace it are the wrong team.
What then of the largely “progressive” Millennials? You would think that they would accept the premise “You HAVE to vote for A because B is so much worse” if only because it is so undeniably true this time. But as I keep telling people, it is not the Right that Hillary needs to worry about so much. The substantial complaints about her are from the Left. Hillary Clinton is not trusted, because she is not trustworthy. For Millennials and the Left, this does not have so much to do with Benghazi and emails as the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to every one of the “progressive” positions she currently (for the duration of expediency) holds. “Progressives” may be stupid about a lot of things, but not in this case. Again, even setting aside the constitutional and political reasons against voting for a third party, the reasons an individual doesn’t vote for one usually come to: The platform (or candidate) is immoral, the platform is impractical, or one thinks that the party won’t get enough votes. And while the Constitution effectively dictates that there can only be two effective parties, liberals do not (or will not) point out that they haven’t always been the same two parties in history. At some point in the cycle of absurdity, one of the two parties will be considered by the majority to be too immoral, too impractical, or too unpopular to get enough Electoral College votes. It’s just a question of which party that happens to first. So if enough people decide that Hillary Clinton is too immoral to support, or can’t get her platform through Congress, or think that she doesn’t have enough votes in their state…
Well, hi, liberals. Welcome to MY world. I don’t know why you’re not happy here, you did so much to create it.
Not like this is more than academic in my case. In recent weeks, polls in my home state of Nevada have brought Trump to competition or an outright lead over Clinton when after the conventions her margin in the state was about 60-40. So according to my own logic, I have to vote for her if that trend keeps up. I still think that with the major “blue” states being near-impossible to dislodge from her bloc, Clinton will still ultimately win an Electoral College victory, but I still want to take my state away from Trump in order to prevent it from inflicting on itself a disgrace even worse than the Sharron Angle fiasco that we barely avoided not long ago.
Fuck this dumb-ass country and fuck my dumb-assed state. Because the ONE good thing about Trump getting elected would be the sense of Schadenfreude I would feel when the reality of Trump actually becoming president and having to take responsibility for something invokes a fit of whining, pants-shitting terror in the people I hate the most.
First and foremost of these being, Donald Trump.