Okay, mods, feel free to move or delete as you need to, but I have no other decent outlet for this.
Two years ago, the worst I could imagine was Jeb Bush vs. Hilary Clinton. Today, I would almost kill for that option. So I have one word for the general electorate of this country: Shame.
And here are some more words for you: Shame on all of you. There is so much blame to go around, I hardly know where to begin. So, let's just list the groups and expound.
- Progressives (a group I know all too well). If you jackasses would get off your high horses and recognize that when you make every conservative out to be the second coming of Lucifer you do serious harm to the nation, I'd have a little respect for you. Don't pretend that you wouldn't have done the same thing to Jeb Bush that you do to Trump. I know better. I didn't hear just your, "Oh poor Jeb, I feel sorry for him as he says, 'Please laugh.'" I heard you denigrate Mitt Romney for an innocuous comment about "binders full of women," as if his honest attempt to hire women was an act of Satan. You repulse me.
- Run-of-the-mill non-thinking liberals. You know, the ones who show up on election day having heard nothing except what their labor union told them, or their "non-political" church leaders told them. The ones who believe Joe Biden and Barack Obama when they say that Republicans will put black people back in chains. The ones in the inner cities who vote Democrat year in, year out, sure that this will be the election when they get all the goodies the Democrats have been promising them. Meanwhile, their children suffer through poverty, crime, drugs, and unspeakable horrors as the corrupt politicians keep raking in the dough.
- Run-of-the-mill non-thinking Republicans. The opposite, yet equal, of group 2. They don't think, they have little education, and they're just as prey to the venal, corrupt politicians with (R) after their names as the other side is to the Democrats.
- Conservative talk media. Not Hannity - he was always an idiot. I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh and, even more so, Mark Levin. Do you know what set me off tonight? It was coming home, listening to Levin go off on a rant about how the GOP establishment was going to throw conservatives under the bus post-election, and Levin said something to the effect of, "Well, maybe I just won't be in the party anymore." I don't want to hear it from you, Mark. A year and a half ago, I tuned in to you to hear you take down the phony Trump. Instead, I heard cagey comments and a lot of hedge-betting. You didn't throw in for Cruz until it was too late. And then to tell me that the Republic is doomed if I don't follow you and vote for a Republican, simply because he's the Republican candidate and pretends to espouse a few conservative beliefs? No, Mark. You don't get to tell me that anymore. If you'd abandoned the party a couple years ago when the party was clearly learning the wrong lessons from 2012, I might trust what you say. If you'd come out when Trump won the nomination and said that you can't support either candidate, I might have trusted you. But instead, you're buying right into the party line, shilling for the Republican establishment you claim to despise.
- Thinking conservatives and thinking liberals who will vote for Trump or Clinton anyway. You are numerous enough to sway this election, should you choose. Movements in just a few medium-sized states could have made a difference. To give up without a fight, to accept the corruption and evilness on both sides as a fait accompli, is, in my mind, cowardly. But you bought into the false binary, and for this, I will have a hard time forgiving you.
Finally, if even half the people who pay attention to politics in this country would refuse the false binary, we wouldn't be stuck with the mess we have. Instead, 51% of the voting public is going to go vote for a corrupt, venal career political hanger-on to her husband's career and pretend that it's a vote for womankind. Another 48% is going to go vote for a corrupt, venal career crony capitalist New York liberal who hijacked the Republican party with populist nonsense. And the remaining 3% will be left holding the bag for you idiots. Shame.
