The Lesser Evil, The Third Party Option or the Final Solution?

Any topic that qualifies as a complicated conversation generally contains a lot of heated passion from every side, regardless of the topic being explored. I will of course be talking from my own point of view, so go with the assumption that it’s my opinion. When I give facts, I will also provide the appropriate links so that you know it’s NOT my opinion.
So before I wade into the fray, I remind my gentle readers that regardless of how much of a twist your knickers get into, this is still a POLITE conversation. Anything less than polite (flaming, obscenity directed at the author or the other comments, hate speech, derogatory remarks without real substance for an alternate view, or sheer stupidity) will be deleted and the user will be blocked.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…” (Shakespeare, “Henry V”)

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This began life as a posting on FB, responding to this post and the comments that ensued like a college food fight.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s VERY easy to make a choice for who our next President shall be. Let’s list the potentials:

1. DT, a racist, homophobic, Anti-Semitic, misogynistic, FAILED businessman. NO political history to show us how he would function within the Federal Government or any government at any level. He has the attention span of a gnat and the willingness, shall I even say the eagerness to use the nuclear option. He is also facing possible (edited) criminal charges of sexual assault and rape; he has 5500 lawsuits pending against him. Both of these things prove that he is a liar and a man who does what he wants and refuses to accept the consequences. And he has visible, traceable connections to Vladimir Putin–and money is the majority of that connection.

His Vice Presidential candidate is a known politician–and known for making laws that mirror DT’s views. For the gods’ sake, Pence voted “no” on the hate crime law. And this is the man who would be the President, DT has already said so. Pence would be managing the daily affairs and our foreign policies. (And DT is already talking about pulling out of NATO and the WTO.)

(Here’s a link that will show how DT has consistently lied to America.)

(Here is the link to Mike Pence on the Wiki. And here is his website. Feel free to compare the two sites.)

2. Hillary Clinton. A career politician, former First Lady and Secretary of State. Consistently smeared by the GOP and her detractors so much so that you can’t even tell what is a lie and what is not. She has been cleared of wrong doing in the Benghazi debacle; the email scandal was created by others and she has been shown to be no more wrong about them than any other politician with a personal email server, Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice to name two. Her associations with Wall Street are known. Her husband, First Dude Bill, couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants while he was President but that doesn’t mean HC had anything to do with that. She was successful as the Secretary of State, meeting with our international allies and discussing things rationally and to mutually acceptable conclusion. Her political history very strongly supports the view that she would do everything else before ever pushing that red button. She speaks the language of the government. She has experience, she is extremely smart, and she behaves like an adult.

Her Vice Presidential candidate is Tim Kaine. He is the junior Senator for VA in Congress. He has a political history that is easily checked. He is for women’s rights, LGBT and black equality, and helping the people he was elected by.

(In the interest of fairness, here is a link that discusses the various “scandals” for HC. I would like to point out that this article specifically addresses the continued “scandals” and attacks on her with this: “With Hillary Clinton leading the field for the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to the State Department emails—will be under the microscope. (No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.)”)

Here’s a link to Tim Kaine on the Wiki. And here is his website. Feel free to compare them and then compare them to Mike Pence.)

3. Third party candidate. Apparently Jill Stein is one. I haven’t heard of ANY others. Regardless of their ideology, their political history and their personal character, they are UNKNOWNS. We have as much idea about their type of Presidency as we do for DT. Historically, any third party candidate splits the votes and the least-wanted candidate usually ends up winning. From Bill Moyer: “Abraham Lincoln — who ran as a Republican during the era of Whigs and Democrats — was America’s last third-party candidate to successfully win the presidency.” Folks, that was 1860. 150 years ago. With a MUCH smaller population and without Fox, CNN and MSNBC all barraging us with lies, half-lies and statistics. Since that time, all the 3rd party candidates have done is split the ticket and upset the apple cart, leaving the other party’s candidate as the President.

So as Amy said, you “just want someone who can row.” In this case, that means someone who has the ability to do the job, who has the background and education to handle the complexity of the Chief Executive’s workday, someone who can meet with our allies and not insult them to their faces. We need someone who will be a representative on the world stage that we can be proud of and support. We need a President who will continue the work for equality and healthcare and improving people’s lives–and not undoing the last 60 years of equal rights for all.

We need a President who will select the best person to sit on the Supreme Court, not just rubber-stamp the person chosen by their corporate Overlords. (Or the person who gives them the most money.) The SCOTUS will be there long after the President has gone to retirement, even after serving 2 terms, should it come to that. And they have, if you didn’t know, an ENORMOUS influence on YOUR daily life by making decisions on laws and court cases that deal with the issues we all face, such as the right to our own bodies, the right to love whomever we love and to marry them if we choose; the right to a living wage, to education and how it is presented, and many other topics of what we would call “daily living”. The SCOTUS should represent ALL of the people and that requires a court that has a diversity in its members.

At this point in the election process, insisting that you’d never vote for HC OR DT, but will vote “your conscience and select the 3rd party candidate” is a childish, thoughtless way to make your choice. It’s just like the Brits who voted to leave the EU–many of them were protest votes and they were shocked to find themselves cast out into the world on their own. (Economy wobbled worse than it was already wobbling, pound crashed, general bad stuff happened.)

This is NOT the time for petty “I’ll show you!” voting. And I’m sorry, but it’s not even time for “I truly believe in this 3rd party candidate and all they could do” because they will NOT be elected. For one thing, nobody has heard of them until like Election Day…

And mostly, it’s because they don’t know how to row. If you’re that attached to your 3rd party candidate, then begin the day after Nov 8th and start building your campaign for the 2020 elections. Get their name known, get them on the national media, get them the same type of publicity and campaigning that DT and HC have been doing for the past…8 months? It seems like forever.

But please, please, truly and deeply consider each candidate’s worth and how each of them would be as President, based on what we know now. And DT is apparently a train wreck waiting to happen–but if that’s who you want to vote for, then do it. But if you do not to see That Man in the White House, don’t spoil HC’s chances by not voting for her. A “not vote for her” is simply a vote for DT. It really comes down to that.

EDIT
Another person on my FB feed posted why we should be voting for the 3rd party option. My reply to him includes some additional information about how that extra person on the ballot doesn’t get them elected to the Presidency but certainly changes who would have won.

I said, “Lovely sentiments. No real argument with your statements. HOWEVER, let me share something I read yesterday: “Donald Trump is a national crisis. You do not get to choose who is in the lifeboat with you, but you certainly want someone who can row.”

Your Green candidates only show up on Election Day. If they’ve been campaigning, it was very quietly done because there was no (ZERO) coverage that I could see. I can’t even tell you who the Green candidates are. Which means that most of the nation has also not heard of them. They have no visible public presence. As near as I can tell, they have little actual political experience in anything approaching the national level.

The fact of the matter is really quite simple: we are a two party system. Sorry, your party isn’t one of them. And a 3rd party candidate in this race will only split the vote and give the victory to the very candidate who would be the single worst selection for our President ever. The last time a 3rd party candidate won was in 1860. In the intervening 156 years, not a single one has–but they all split the votes and caused a great change in history. You only have to look back as far as the Bush-Gore-Nader campaigns in 2000. It’s called the “spoiler effect” (See here).

We simply cannot, cannot afford to let that happen. Now is not the time for a protest vote. Look at how well that worked out in Britain.”