The Bitchy Pundit

I bet you thought that Trump was responsible for this, but it’s actually Chaffetz. Let me walk you through my thought process. I read this story yesterday, concerning the war that our intelligence community has declared on Trump. I’m not sure that we needed a formal declaration, since they had just finished taking down Michael Flynn. The war was pretty clearly underway, and probably just getting started. Thus my despair for the state of our democracy continues to grow.

Let me start with a recap of the events that we’re all familiar with at this point: it all started last summer when we learned that the Russians hacked the DNC as part of their efforts to influence our elections. This happened in conjunction with Putin’s army of internet trolls pushing out pro-Trump propaganda. At the time, we had no real evidence that Trump was working with Putin on any of this, but we did have plenty of reasons to suspect that was the case.

Let’s start with Paul Manafort, who had to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman back in August because we found out that he was lobbying for a foreign government, without having formally registered as a lobbyist for that foreign government (as he’s legally obligated to do). That foreign government was of course, Russia. Manafort got a giant pile of cash from Ukranian Prime Minister (and Putin puppet) Viktor Yanukovych.

So that was weird.

A month later, one of Trump’s foreign policy advisors (Carter Page) had to leave the campaign because we learned that he was talking to senior Russian officials about lifting the Obama sanctions on Russia.

So that was weird.

Actually at that point, it had gone way beyond weird when you combined those two resignations with Trump’s effusive and persistent praise for Putin. And yet, Trump supporters and die hard Bernie-or-busters soldiered on with their denial of the kremlin connections and all played their parts in giving Trump (and Putin) the White House.

And then we had the pee-tape leak, which was information gathered by a well respected former MI6 operative who was hired by republicans to gather everything he could find on Trump. Do I know for sure that there’s a pee-tape? I don’t. Do I believe there’s a pee-tape? I believe it’s possible, but I’m waiting for the actual tape to appear on Youtube. The only thing I’m certain about is that if it exists, I will end up on my computer. I do strongly suspect that Putin is blackmailing Trump with something. Nothing else explains all of this.

And then we get to Flynn last week. He was the third person close to Trump who had to resign over improper (and very likely seditious) conversations with Russian officials.

Now, I know that it’s easy to get caught up in the scandals. I did. But when I  took a step back and reflected on the events, I realized that our intelligence agencies are basically running the country right now, and that’s terrifying. They are responsible for all of the information that we know about Trump and Putin, and they let us know by leaking to the press for the better part of a year.

That’s not how this is all supposed to work. When I start thinking about what we don’t know, I become flat out terrified for this country. I don’t know if the intelligence community briefed the Obama administration on what they knew last summer. I don’t know if Loretta Lynch was given the opportunity to investigate. I don’t know if the DOJ knew the full extent of all of this. If they did know, why didn’t they gear up to prosecute? Was the house oversight committee briefed? I don’t know what the fuck happened while Obama was still in office.

I do know that the FBI have been battling themselves in an internal civil war where the NY bureau went rogue in doing their best to put Trump in the white house, which has left the DC bureau steaming mad. I do know that the intelligence leaks that have been coming from the FBI are coming from the DC bureau. I don’t know if the CIA and the NSA are also leaking, or if this is all coming out of the FBI.

I do know that all three agencies have a lot more information than what they’ve leaked so far. It would be completely inconceivable to assume otherwise. Remember the story about Trump turning off the recording during his call with Putin a couple of weeks ago? Well, I’m pretty certain that our intelligence agencies, Germany’s intelligence agencies, the UK’s intelligence agencies, and every other intelligence agency in the world didn’t stop their recordings.

Here’s what I know beyond a reasonable doubt: there is no chain of command left for the intelligence communities to follow with this information. We do know that they did went to the Justice Department with the information they had on Flynn back in January. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Our intelligence agencies don’t have the power to prosecute anybody. The intelligence agencies investigate things and then bring the results of their investigation to the Justice Department. The Attorney General then decides if a prosecution is warranted. Our current Attorney General is Jeff Sessions, who was appointed by Trump. That doesn’t seem like a viable route for the intelligence community to take if they want to expose treason on the part of the president and his staff.

There is another avenue. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform can investigate. Unfortunately, the head of that committee is a republican tool, who has announced that he’s not willing to do his fucking job. Now, Jason Chaffetz is not the sharpest tool in the shed. He’s a lot like a lobotomized bulldog who bypasses any thinking and goes straight to attacking  democrats, just because he can.

That half-wit bulldog is the only hope we have of salvaging the small slivers of democracy we have left. I want to believe that if he decides to earnestly investigate Trump’s relationship with Putin, the intelligence community wouldn’t have to leak like a sieve to the press. We can’t keep going down this dangerous road, where random spies and analysts are basically running the country with raw intelligence information that hasn’t been vetted and reviewed. I know that it’s tempting to be grateful for these leaks right now but trust me, this is not going to turn out well for any of us if we embrace this as the new normal.

I am unfortunately convinced that Chaffetz is entirely too dimwitted to realize that what he’s doing isn’t actually protecting his beloved party, but rather blowing up our democracy. Trump is going down either way. I just don’t see how he can turn any of this around for himself.

So why do I put our fate in Chaffetz’s hands rather than in Jeff Sessions? Because Chaffetz needs to win an election in less than two years. We have some leverage on him. Sessions isn’t directly accountable to a single American Citizen, since he sits in an appointed position.

Chaffetz’s offices in both DC and Provo need to be surrounded by thousands of concerned citizens every single day until he relents. I know that this isn’t likely to work, since Chaffetz has historically demonstrated a complete and utter lack of concern for public opinion, but we have to do something. Our democracy is literally falling apart before our very eyes, and anyone who isn’t in full blown panic mode about this doesn’t fully understand what the big picture looks like.

 

 

You’re Nazis. The only reason I referred to you as the “alt-right” in the title, is for SEO purposes. You’re fucking Nazis, and the only reason I will include the term alt-right in this piece is to search optimize this post.

As Nazis are historically wont to do, you’re a sad sack of self loathing losers who are a disgrace to your race. Why do I say you’re self loathing? Because you’ve told us that you can’t compete for jobs against immigrants (especially the eye-legal ones) so you need for them to all leave so that you can get a job. How fucking pathetic. And yet in the same breath, you claim your racial superiority. Really? I’m flummoxed as to where said “superiority” can be witnessed, since you can’t compete with a non English speaking eye-legal for a job? When someone has to point to the color of their skin as their only source of “superiority”, that seems like a clear sign of self-loathing to me.

In all of your poorly educated fervor in regard to your superior race and whatnot, you’ve failed to ask yourselves who it is employing all of these brown people that you can’t compete with. Is it brown people trying to give their fellow “inferiors” a leg up. Nope. Corporate executives in America are super white. Did I say super white? I meant super white men. And as the country is becoming more of that icky brown shade you’re so superior to, executives are getting even whiter. So maybe you should ask yourself why they don’t want to hire you. Do they perhaps know something about your superiority that you don’t? Maybe that it’s a joke perpetuated by people who have literally no other source of pride?

I live in Harlem. Harlem is a part of Manhattan that is dominated by brownstones, rather than high rise apartment buildings. There were a few decades there where no one wanted to live here. By the early nineties, it was impossible to give away one of the beautiful brownstones like the one I live in. The property taxes were literally higher than what anyone was willing to pay to buy one. As a result, they all started falling apart. By the late 90s/ early 2000s, they were selling like hotcakes. The gentrification process had begun and developers were snatching up the brownstones and renovating them. That process is still going on. Two brownstones on my block are being renovated right now. One of them is directly across the street from me. I see the workers show up every morning between 6:15 and 6:30 to start work. This is true of both renovation projects. They’re usually done around 6:00 in the evening. None of them speak much English. Every day, one of their wives shows up with a cooler full of home made food for the whole crew. It’s a different wife each day, so they have a schedule. Mind you, there are around a dozen places to grab a quick, cheap bite to eat within a two block radius. At least one of the wives I saw dropping off food, was wearing a maid’s uniform and a name tag so she was on her way to work. They work every day but Sunday. On Thanksgiving, they were all at work at their usual time, 6:30 am. Since it was a holiday, they ended their day at 4:00 instead of 6:00. On the day after Thanksgiving, they worked their usual schedule of eleven plus hours. Wanna guess who the bosses are? Yep, they’re super white guys.

So if you’re having trouble finding a job, you should definitely come to New York City. There’s literally never a time when there aren’t hundreds of construction or renovation jobs to be had. I’m positive these jobs pay what one would expect the type of job that has you working over eleven hours a day, six days a week, and on holidays. So come and get them, Nazis. There’s a fabulous life here for you and your Nazi wives.

Now, I don’t have the skills to build a house. I don’t have anything remotely resembling the skills to build a house. I do have a job that pays six figures, provides me with good benefits, and paid me for binge watching Westworld on Thanksgiving. I have never been able to figure out why what I do is considered more valuable than what the workers who are building the house across the street from me do. So unlike you Nazis, I don’t have any delusions of grandeur despite the fact that it’s society telling me I’m more valuable, rather than just racist voices in my head. But I’m positive that many of you have these awesome home building skills I lack, so come on over and take your jobs back from the eye-legals who have “stolen” them from you.

Now at this point, I have to confess that I’m Jewish and probably used my sneaky Jew ways to get a good paying job. I should also tell you that I’ve never worked in the financial industry, and have turned down dozens of requests for interviews for that industry. I just can’t do that in all good conscience. I also accidentally interviewed for a job I was recommended for that turned out to be with a News Corp company. I didn’t realize it was News Corp until I showed up for the interview and saw that I  was entering the News Corp building. I turned down that job. So I’m not one of those Jews who runs the banks or the media, but wanna know who is? Herr Trump’s chief advisor and your Nazi leader, Steve Bannon. That’s right, he was an investment banker for an uber Jewy firm you may have heard of: Goldman Sachs. He then went on to start his media empire. So when you’re deriding the Jew bankers and media executives, don’t forget who your leader is.

Since I’m filling you in on things you don’t know, I have some terrible news for you. Terrible news that I’m positive you’re clueless about since many of you are the same dolts who took to the streets in February 2009, and called yourselves teabaggers, leaving me no choice but to refer to you by your own chosen name. Since you were so fucking clueless about what a teabagger is, I’m pretty sure that I’m about to drop a bombshell on you: your Vice President elect is super gay. He’s not just a little bit, maybe-you-can-tell gay. He’s super fucking gay. When a well coiffed republican man advocates for gay conversion therapy, they’re coming out to you. You idiots are just to stupid to realize it. Mike Pence started off as a right wing radio host before he became governor. Most people don’t know this, because his show never really got out of Indiana so he ran for governor and proceeded to run that state into the ground. I would not be at all surprised if someone told me that he agreed to be Herr Trump’s running mate, so that he could finally raise his profile enough to contend for the position of Liza Minelli’s third gay husband. That’s how super freaking gay Mike Pence is.  Now I don’t expect you to believe me, because you couldn’t really be alt right Nazis if facts registered even a little bit. But I will enjoy mocking you for being so damned blind again over the course of the next four years.

So as you’re going around the country committing hate crimes against the dreaded gays, just know that you elected a super gay vice president. Now maybe you’re all absurdly claiming that being gay is a perversion in order to deflect from your own actual sexual perversions? I’m talking to you, Nazi cucks. Every time one of you shows up on one of my social media pages to call me or my followers cucks, you’re telling me a lot about yourselves. You see, I know where the term comes from even if you don’t. Let me clue you in (from the link):

“I describe cuckolding as a marriage where the husband derives sexual pleasure from watching his wife have sex with a man who has a larger penis.”

Now I don’t know why you would feel compelled to clue me in about your sexual fetish (and shortcomings), but they’re of no concern of mine. Whatever you and your consenting partner decide to do in the privacy of your own bedroom is none of my business. Please try and keep it that way. I have no desire to picture your tiny little prick during the course of a political discussion on my social media pages. Get a pump, learn to use your tongue, get some therapy, or get yourselves as many well-endowed men as you can find to pleasure your women. But stop making your sexual problems part of my life.

In closing, I just want to say that you’re all just sad little people. From your inability to compete for jobs, to your cluelessness about what’s going around in the world around you, to your misguided over sharing regarding your tiny penises. You’re very sad people, and I’m sorry that being anonymous assholes hiding behind your keyboards is all you have in this world. Must be hard, typing out all of that hate, what with your tiny hands and all. I rejoice in the knowledge that you have to live the rest of your miserable lives knowing that a black man was President Of The United States, and all you have is a tiny prick and a keyboard to make yourselves feel better about it.

I’m not going to sugar coat this: the next few years are going to be some of the worst in the history of our country. I have been having a hard time letting mind do what it does: making calculations on everything that is going to be destroyed by Trump. My mind just can’t wrap itself around all of it.

The Supreme Court is lost to us for another thirty years. Not by a 5-4 majority, but probably by a 6-3. That, we know. Trans Canada has already released a statement about how they’re looking forward to working with Trump to finish Keystone. The Dakota Pipeline will definitely be moving forward, since Trump is a big investor in that project. I can go on and on, but I’m not going to.

If Mitch McConnell kills the filibuster, we and the democrats (even if they found their spines) would be powerless. We all just need to accept this situation.

This piece is about what you can expect from me, and where the focus of this blog and my social media presence will be.

Let me start by saying that I do intend to shift the focus more toward the issues of the blue collar base that elected Trump. Yes, I will continue to bring attention to the environmental devastation that this administration will bring, but I just feel that focusing in on issues that only matter to liberals isn’t the best use of my platform at this time. There will be plenty of outlets who will be laser focused on those issues. We are going to have a myriad of issues that are going to have immediately dire consequences, and they’re going to be issues that we never thought we were really going to have to deal with (like what’s about to happen to social security, the repeal of a bunch of LGBTQ rights, Obamacare, etc). This won’t be a major shift in the content I provide you, but it will definitely be a shift.

I will be very very cautious about posting anything that resembles speculation about what Trump is going to do. He’s an extremely volatile person who has clearly demonstrated two things about himself:

• He doesn’t have any real convictions on most issues (for example he was pro life until he was anti choice) so his views turn on a dime.
• He doesn’t understand very much about either domestic or foreign policy issues.

I saw an article about how Trump’s wall is already turning into a fence yesterday. As I read the story, I learned that congressional republicans are meeting with Trump with a proposal to turn the wall into a fence. I won’t be sharing stories like that, because they don’t contain anything substantive. I will be posting more about things that have happened, and what they mean to you. Events will be unfolding in a fast and furious way over the next six months. I don’t see much value in anticipating the next terrible thing, when I can spend that time delving deeply into the ramifications of the terrible thing that has already happened.

I will limit the “character” stories. Trump is a terrible person. We all know that. I will be focused on the terrible things he’s doing to you, more than on the terrible person that he is. I will not be posting about the rape allegations unless something actually happens. I will not be writing about the groping, stealing, cheating, and general douchiness unless something tangible happens because of it.

Why the shift? Because I want to arm people who follow my content with information that can be discussed with republicans in the form of issues that are actually affecting them. I want you to be able to listen to someone who feels they’re getting screwed by their country, and be able to walk them through exactly why what’s happening to them is happening.

I will be writing more about my thoughts on the path forward. I’ve written about this in the past, but not recently. We have to work toward a constitutional amendment to remove corporate personhood and get money out of our political system. I will write more on this later.

I do not advocate this insane notion of petitioning the electoral college to go rogue. The electoral college is an inane system that we need to fix legislatively. But asking them to take matters in their own hands will come back to bite you in the ass, and it’s just as destructive to our democracy as cheering on a senate that won’t let a democratically elected president seat a Supreme Court justice. I’m not interested in further deteriorating what’s left of our system to solve an immediate problem. Part of living in a developed country is that you sometimes have to eat a shit sandwich that your fellow citizens have prepared for you. I suggest you stock up on breath mints.

Trump won under our asinine system, and we need to accept that.

We all need to start communicating with our local and state legislators because that’s the only place where anything good could happen for the next two years. I will need your help on this, since I can’t be in every county of every state. Please share important legislative issues that are happening locally around you. I will take a look at them and share to my social media outlets.

As a sunny optimist, I believe that the suffering we’re about to experience will bring us to a much better place. Political shifts come in cycles. During the primaries when Hillary was winning almost exclusively with people over fifty, I said that the baby boomers were never a particularly liberal generation. They were once proud Reagan Democrats. They weren’t all that liberal because they didn’t have to be. The homes they grew up in, the college money they had, the relative equality of opportunity that they enjoyed was made possible by FDR’s flaming liberal policies. Conservatism is a luxury item that people (both democrats and republicans) tend to buy when they can afford it. You don’t have to fight for something that you already have. And even liberals’ capacity for empathy is limited. Hence the sudden realization that black people are being killed by police all across the country, despite the fact that they have been telling us this for decades. Now that we can see it, we can empathize. Frank Luntz referred to millennials as “terrifying liberal”. That’s because they don’t have the opportunities that the boomers had. It’s cyclical. After four years of Trump, “terrifying liberal” is going spread beyond the millennials. My generation (Gen X) is split pretty evenly. We’re not going to be split evenly a year from now, I promise you that.

But we have to play the long game, and not try to find instant gratification like that crazy electoral college thing. We also need to stop with the #notmypresident crap. This is what they did to Obama. Stop being petulant. After every election, about half of us get a president we find appalling. That’s just life. You can oppose Trump, you can expose all of the sleazy and destructive things that he does, you can speak out against him every day but don’t be a child about it. If we do this, after they did this, it will become a normal thing to delegitimize a president who was legitimately elected. Peaceful protest is good, and I completely support it. But petulance is not. Wait for him to do things that warrant protest, otherwise you just become background noise.

We need not to give birth to a lunatic left that resembles the (now) entirety of the right wing. Lunacy grows like pancreatic cancer. That’s the really bad kind that spreads quickly and always kills you, in case you’re not familiar. You need to stop engaging your lunatic #jillnothill friends who were sharing breitbart links in an effort to demonize Hillary. They’ve lost their minds and moved so far left, that they’ve actually looped around and joined the ugliest parts of the right. The only way to stop this particular cancer is to quarantine it. They are dark, hateful, and batshit crazy. Trust me, they will only cause you grief.

Now I’m going to say something seemingly contradictory: you should listed to opposing opinions. As long as someone is willing to have a respectful discussion with you, and provide credible links for what they say, you should make an effort to listen but only if they’re not crazy. Sharing links from fringe sites and disregarding actual journalism is a sign of crazy. If someone is willing to have an intellectually honest conversation with you, you should be able to engage them and consider what they say.

And for the love of god, stop projecting motives on people. When I posted stories demonstrating that Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were dolts, it’s because they were dolts. It had nothing to do with my advocacy that we needed to save the republic by voting for Hillary. I was very adept at making that point as a stand alone, if you recall. I don’t view politics emotionally. I form every opinion and make every observation with no emotional attachment at all. I remember when the second half of the Nevada primary happened, and Bernie ended up winning because Hillary’s (she won the first half of that primary) delegates didn’t show up. I posted the results and shared my opinion that I didn’t think it was fair even though I was still supporting Bernie at the time. If something is fair when it works for you, it’s fair when it works against you. This is not complicated. If a private email server enraged you when the Bush administration did it, it should have enraged you when Hillary did it. This isn’t complicated. I was enraged both times, and still concluded that I had to vote for Hillary in the general. Mind blowing, I know. But I sincerely wish it weren’t. None of us, not you, not me, and not anyone we know are uncomplicated. We are all a mix of good, evil, rational, nuts, and every combination of character traits that exist in the human race. If you don’t understand why someone would be enraged about Hillary’s emails and then advocate for supporting her: listen to them. And if they give you an explanation, listen to it. Stop projecting your bullshit on other people in order to award yourself an imaginary intellectual victory because that’s where communication breaks down.

I did a lot of blocking of self professed liberals through this election cycle, and I’m sure you did too. Don’t be a douchey liberal, that’s all I’m asking. If you don’t like something someone posts on social media, debunk it. Don’t name call. You’re not tearing them down, you’re demonstrating that you’re a douche.

I’m going to stop here for now, but I have a lot more to say regarding the election. For now, please go to:

http://www.wolf-pac.com

and

our revolution.com

These will both give you clues on what I plan to advise in terms of a path forward.

So I’ve started to look at the data that’s available right now. Please note that we don’t have anything resembling all of the data that we will have in the coming weeks so I reserve the right to change my analysis as new information becomes available because that’s what I do. I change my opinions as more information becomes available to me. More people need to learn to be open to new information, and allow their thinking to evolve based on new facts as they materialize.

So what the fuck happened on Tuesday? Well, it was a confluence of events (some unforeseen and some planned) and bad judgment. Before I get into all of that, I want to say something. Yesterday, I had to endure a day of hateful finger pointing, absurdly unfounded gloating, vitriol and general douchebaggery. None of it was intended to be productive. It was all intended to make the person doing it feel superior by shitting on someone else because they didn’t agree with them every single step of the way to election day. Trump’s deplorables let their freak flags fly, and a lot of so-called liberals behaved deplorably. It was a generally appalling day.

Let me be clear: I will never be compelled to shit on someone who thought they were doing the best thing, but turned out to have bad judgment. I’m specifically referring largely to Hillary primary supporters, but also other groups of people (I will elaborate later). Shitting on people who are shell shocked and dismayed isn’t particularly liberal or inclusive in my opinion, and it isn’t going to “teach” anyone to have better judgment. Those of you who did that yesterday are deplorable, and you’re going down the same road that republicans embarked on over thirty years ago.

This post is not about finger pointing (well there will be a little of that, but I’m doing my best to limit my inclination to be small and petty). This post is about unpacking what happened in a productive and (hopefully) instructive way so that we can learn something and figure out how to move forward.

I’m going to walk through the events that all led up to this, and then I will get into the election data. The first event in the shit storm chain happened over three years ago, when the Supreme Court gutted part of the Voting Rights Act. Remember all of the fuckery that happened in the democratic primary with voter rolls being scrubbed, polling places being closed en masse and everything else that people attributed to Hillary rigging the primary? Well that wasn’t Hillary, it wasn’t the DNC, and it wasn’t done with the intention of rigging the primaries for any particular candidate. Trust me, the five right wing Supreme Court justices had no idea (nor did they care) who would be running in the democratic primary and neither did the republican election officials that made moves to suppress the vote. They were laser focused on the general elections, where they know that republicans only win when voter turnout is down. I looked into every situation where fuckery happened in the primary (Arizona, New York, and all the rest). In every instance, I figured out that the wheels to suppress the votes had been in motion before Bernie ever announced he was running.

Did these voter suppression tactics cost Bernie the primary? I don’t know, but do know that not every state was in exactly the same situation. The hard data simply isn’t there to inform me in a way that I feel comfortable making that call. I don’t believe that the results in New York (for example) were impacted in any significant way by the scrubbing of the voter rolls. Hillary won New York in the 2008 primary by a slightly larger margin than she won in 2016. Those who were scrubbed were very likely to vote in roughly the same proportions as those who got to vote. I’m speculating (so take that for what it’s worth) that Bernie may have lost a few points in states like Arizona, where 2/3 of the polling locations were gone. Why do I think that? Because Bernie’s base was largely made up of first time voters who aren’t used to the idea of spending four hours casting a vote. Yes, some people become more determined to vote when voting becomes harder, but many more people simply don’t have the luxury of that determination because they have work, kids, or a myriad of different things that are more immediately urgent in their lives than voting.

We had eleven states where democratic voter turnout set records. None of those states took the opportunity the Supreme Court gave them to suppress votes. I believe that we would have seen much higher turnout in several more states, had SCOTUS not fucked us. And I believe that increased turnout was because of Bernie’s candidacy. You will see why I believe that when I share the general election data. Does that mean that I believe that Bernie would have won the primary without the SCOTUS decision? I earnestly don’t know, and I’m not going to project my pro-Bernie emotions into my analysis. It’s possible (and in my opinion likely), but the evidence to make that proclamation isn’t there so I’m not going to make it.

And then there was the voter suppression in the general. 300,000 people in Wisconsin alone showed up to vote, but weren’t allowed to because of the voter ID laws that Wisconsin passed in order to prevent people from voting.

So the first factor was voter suppression. The second factor was that Hillary simply wasn’t a good candidate. Her untrustworthy numbers were very bad going into the primaries, and they just got worse. I kept hearing over and over again from Hillary supporters that it wasn’t her fault that people didn’t trust her, and that the distrust was a product of twenty years of republican propaganda. That’s definitely true, but it didn’t change the fact that people don’t trust her, and I never saw the value in handing her the nomination to make it all up to her. Trustworthiness numbers always go down for every candidate who is running for office, and they keep going down through the whole election cycle. That’s just a fact. Bernie’s trustworthiness numbers went down too, but he didn’t start with such a massive deficit to begin with. Assuming that his trustworthiness numbers were going to drop at the average percentage that every other presidential nominee’s numbers drop, he would have still been significantly higher than past presidents elect. Hillary’s were always going to be far below previous presidents elect because they started off so low. Her primary supporters dismissed a very significant fact because they were emotionally invested in her.

She also ran a terrible campaign more focused on “he’s the devil” than “here’s what I plan to do for you”. She was trying to appeal to moderate republicans, rather than Berniecrats. Well guess what? There aren’t any moderate republicans, because they all stuck with Trump. She thought that moderate republican women would vote for the. They didn’t.

That brings us to the unbelievable and terrifying events that are next in the shit storm chain.

Russia. That was real. Donald Trump was working directly with Vladimir Putin, and just because Hillary and the DNC focused on that fact in their messaging didn’t mean it wasn’t true. This is the problem with the lack of critical thinking that goes on in America. All of the die hard Bernie or busters suffered from a particularly virulent strain of broken logic that very much resembles what’s been going on with the far right. The DNC and Hillary worked together to tip the scales in her favor, therefore Russia isn’t working with Trump! What the fuck kind of backward thinking is that? Kurt Eichenwald had the smoking gun that proved that Trump was working with Russia. Trump repeated some very stupid reporting that only appeared in one of Putin’s propaganda outlets (and only for a couple of days before it was taken down) and one very small Turkish outlet. The evidence was incontrovertible and yet on my very Facebook page, I had some Stein supporters sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “LALALALALALA”. These are people who dismissed a very significant fact because they were emotionally invested despising Hillary.

And then we had the FBI. This is something I promise I will be writing more about in the future, but here’s the short version. We learned that the New York bureau of the FBI was working to manipulate our elections in order to select Trump to be the next president of the United States. Basically, the New York bureau of the FBI did to America, what the CIA does to other countries to manipulate their elections. That should terrify every American, but almost no one noticed because of their emotional investment in the outcome of the election.

Now we come to election night. The bottom line is that Hillary got nearly six million fewer votes than Obama got in 2012 and nearly seven million fewer votes than Obama got in 2008. There wasn’t a massive surge of Trump voters on the republican side either. He got nearly a million fewer votes than Romney did in 2012, but slightly more votes than McCain got in 2008. This is where both Hillary and Trump’s untrustworthy numbers come into play. A lot of people on both sides stayed home. Again, I don’t have the hard data on what I’m about to say, but I’m pretty confident that I will within a few weeks. I believe that moderate republicans stayed home in 2008 because of Palin (Nichole Wallace couldn’t have been the only one), and more of them stayed home in 2016. But I believe that Trump had a tranche of first time or seldom-ever voters in his back pocket. These would be the KKK and the “alt right” types that don’t vote. They made up for the moderate republicans that didn’t show up or voted for Hillary. Hillary simply didn’t have such a tranche.

Now let’s look at the third party voters. This was a pretty small number of people who were so emotionally invested in not voting for a major party candidate, that they were happy to let the house burn down. In the end, most people came to their senses. Gary “what’s Aleppo” Johnson got 4,042,291 or 3.2% of the vote. Little Equally Clueless Jilly Stein (quantitate easing for everyone!) got 1,207,141 or .96% of the vote. Did that matter? Here’s where I have some hard data and some educated assumptions to present. We know that Hillary got more of the popular vote, so we have to look at some specific states.

In Pennsylvania, Trump got 68,236 more votes than Hillary did. Pennsylvania hasn’t voted for a republican for president since 1988 so right off the bat, this tells you how bad a candidate Hillary was. She absolutely cost democrats a senate seat in Pennsylvania. But let’s look at the third party votes. Gary Johnson got 142,653 votes. Jill Stein got 48,912 votes. I think it’s fair to say that all of Stein’s voters would have voted for Hillary, had they not let their emotions tell them that they had a third (totally fucking unviable, sorry) option. I have a handful (not enough to create a gospel) of data showing that Gary Johnson was getting more votes that would otherwise have gone to Hillary, than he was from Trump by either a 3-1 or 4-1 margin. Again, I saw this on my own Facebook pages with some very confused Bernie supporters shifting to Johnson. So let’s assume the lowest 3 -1 percentage, with half of them staying home (I’m trying my best to skew my assumptions in Trump’s favor here). That would be 23,775 more votes for Trump and 96,422 more votes for Hillary. Hillary would have won Pennsylvania by 4,411 votes.

Ohio wasn’t close enough for me to have to do the numbers. Hillary would have lost Ohio either way.

In Florida, Trump got 119,770 more votes than Hillary did. Stein got 64,019 votes. Johnson got 206,007 votes. Applying my formula from above, Hillary would have won by 12,919 votes.

I don’t need to do the numbers on any other states because Pennsylvania and Florida would have put her at 277 electoral votes. We wouldn’t be in this mess had people (just like in 2000) not decided that this was the right time to get cute with their votes, despite the fact that the polls clearly demonstrated that the dolt they were voting for, wasn’t even in the stratosphere of viability.

This election was so close that if any one of the factors I went through weren’t present, it would have gone the other way.

To be clear, I have concluded that the polls weren’t wrong. The data regarding who was actually going to show up to vote was. And that’s usually where most of the error in polling lies. It’s true. Do a little research of your own, if you don’t believe me.

In the end, Michael Moore was exactly right in his belief that Trump was going to win the election and he was exactly right in his reasoning. I was right too, until I was wrong. Voters in America on both sides of the aisle are angry and deeply resentful of the establishment. Back in March, I cautioned against running a corporatist against a populist and I believe now more than ever that I was right. I miscalculated when I thought that Trump was so awful, that Hillary’s corporatist history wasn’t going to cost her the election. I still don’t know if Bernie could have won the primary if it weren’t for SCOTUS, but I’m positive that he would have crushed Trump in the general. He’s far more trusted, and has nowhere near the misogynist, business failure, scummy grifter…. I could go on and on….. baggage that Trump has.

So that’s what I believe happened on Tuesday.

 

 

 

I’m exhausted. I didn’t get any sleep last night, other than maybe two hours of fevered nightmare sleep (no really, I’m not being hyperbolic).

That said, exhaustion and shock doesn’t make for a state of clear thinking. I don’t know what happened last night yet, and neither does anyone else. We need to wait for more information that could take days or weeks to materialize. Any analysis you hear at this point is largely a product of projection, so I’m not going to offer you any just yet. I would rather offer clear headed analysis based on empirical facts, than to offer analysis ahead of the pack.

I will say this: my social media feed is full of self proclaimed liberals and progressives pointing fingers in one direction and directing their vitriol in that direction. There’s absolutely nothing to be gained by that sort of behavior. If you’re angrily pointing your finger at someone, just know that there’s probably an angry finger pointing at you. Many factors went into what happened last night, just as I pointed out a few days ago in regard to the 2000 election. If you’re angry or finger pointing, you’re not thinking clearly. What’s worse, you’re turning yourself into an angry red faced Trump supporter (who doesn’t support Trump), blaming “others” for what happened to you.

I understand that emotions are running high, but there’s literally nothing good that will come of this. We need to calm down, figure out what happened and learn some lessons. I understand that it’s way too soon for that ‘learning lessons’ part, but maybe reigning in the anger toward whoever you’re blaming for this would be a good idea right now?

As I said in the piece I linked to earlier in this post, there were definitely a myriad of different factors that led to this.

We all need to take a few days to calm down and not turn into the people who have disgusted us with their hate and anger over the past year and a half.

I’m probably going to take a social media mental health break day. You might want to consider doing the same. Maybe I’m going to do what I felt like doing a month ago, by posting cute pictures of animals on social media today.

Just stay calm and stop turning on each other, because I find that more troubling than Trump.

I will be back when I have something well reasoned and unbiased to say (don’t worry, it won’t be more than a few days) about how to move forward. Getting people to divorce emotion from politics has been one of my primary messages, and it’s a message that’s more important today than on any other day.

During the primaries, I told you why Hillary wasn’t a strong candidate, and why Bernie was clearly the better choice against Trump. And then when Bernie dropped out, I told you that Hillary was the only rational choice. When the situation changes, you have to realign your thinking based on that new information. That’s what sentience is all about: using your brain to recalculate your position as new information is presented to you. If you’re being emotional in that process, you’re probably not making intelligent calculations. If your positions aren’t constantly evolving, then you’re not thinking.

I never lionized Hillary while I was advocating for her because I didn’t have to turn her into awesome sauce in order to see that she was the only rational choice, given our circumstances at the time. I also never demonized her by posting any bullshit story about her that depicts her as the devil. I always told you the truth about what’s right with her, and what’s troubling about her because I don’t need to create a neat little package of monolithic thinking to make it easier for me to do what needs to be done.

I say all of that to let you know that when I start to unpack what happened here, I will do it with my brain, rather than with my heart. You’re not always going to like what I say (hello Jill Stein supporters), but you should know that I say things with as much objectivity as a human is capable of.

So if you want simple political analysis that points in one direction to either blame or credit a situation, you’re following the wrong page. If you want some nuanced thinking that is sometimes right and sometimes completely off the mark, but always thoughtfully reasoned, then you came to the right place.

I just need a couple of days to muster up some of that “thoughtfully reasoned” thing I work toward. I highly recommend that you all take a couple of days too. Anger isn’t the path you really want to take. Just look at videos of Trump rallies to see where that will get you.

So I’m just going to embrace a state of uncomfortably numb for a few days because I’m the Bitchy pundit. Not the unhinged, red-faced angry pundit.

 

Let me say off the bat that this is not going to be a nail biter. Hillary is going to end up with somewhere in the 320 electoral vote range. She’s actually going to do a little better than Obama did last time around.

Four years ago, I told everyone that it would all be over by 11:30 EST. The nervous among you didn’t believe me (and really, why would you?) but that’s fine. It was over a little before 11:30, and we didn’t even care how Florida voted. This time around, I can’t tell you what time the official call will be made.

But I can tell you when and why you can or should start drinking.

Once Pennsylvania is called for Hillary, you can start by pouring yourselves a glass of pre champagne bubbly (I recommend prosecco). It’s not a done deal at that point, but losing Pennsylvania means that Trump’s chances of pulling this off are so small that he can hold it in his tiny little baby hands.

Now if New Hampshire is called for Hillary (I believe with about 70% certainty that it will), you can start to eye the Veuve Clicquot you have waiting to celebrate with.

Trump is going to win Ohio. Do not panic, unless he also takes New Hampshire. At this point, you might want to take a small shot of whiskey or tequila to numb yourself, just a little.

If North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania are all called for Hillary, you can turn off your TV, open a magnum of Veuve and let the celebration begin because it will be over. O.V.A.H. So over, that she’s going to exceed my 320ish electoral vote prediction.

If Trump takes North Carolina in addition to Pennsylvania, you might need to increase the numbing dosage of your tequila or whiskey, but know that he still has a hard road ahead of him.

So to recap the key bellwethers on the east coast and what they mean:

PA, NC, NH for Hillary = election is done and she’s going to be the next president.

NC, NH for Trump – it’s going to be a long night and he’s still not likely to win, but there’s a chance it could happen.

If a minor miracle happens and Florida manages to count its votes in a timely manner (you know, like every other first world country does) and it’s called for Trump, it’s time to take three more shots of your numbing agent and also start foraging for Xanax. I will be pulling out a defibrillator to get the sinus rhythm back into my heart.

But I’m very certain that won’t happen.

I’m not going to go state by state, but if Trump wins North Carolina and New Hampshire, we’re all going to have to wait until Colorado is called to breathe a sigh of relief because that’s where she will have gotten to the 270 she needs. Trump will have to sweep virtually all of the tossup (Michigan, Maine, Virginia, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona) states to win. That’s just not going to happen.

I don’t think it’s going to get as far as the western states, but if it does, Colorado is the end of the road for Trump.

So everyone stay calm. This isn’t all going to go horribly wrong on us. I was very concerned about the transit union workers’ strike in Pennsylvania but now that it’s over, I’m positive we’re going to be just fine.

Tonight, we celebrate the fact that  we managed to save the republic from cinnamon Hitler. Tomorrow, we begin the process of pushing Hillary to the left and keeping her honest about some of the promises she made to stave off Bernie’s very real primary threat. We didn’t get Bernie, the way some of us wanted, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make sure that Hillary feels the Bern for the next four years.

I have several friends who have been in a panic over the possibility of Trump winning for a couple of months now. They have been texting me on a daily basis for weeks, wanting me to talk them off the ledge. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Not because I was trying to keep them calm, but because I was positive that there was absolutely no chance that Trump was going to win.

Well, that’s no longer the case. I can see his path to victory now. Just like in the 2000 election, it’s going to involve a perfect storm. So many people love to point the finger in one direction and proclaim, “THAT’S why Bush became president in 2000”. Anyone who does that is wrong. I’ve lived long enough to understand that in most situations in life, when something terrible happens, there’s seldom one reason why that terrible thing happened. There are usually a number of contributing factors. In 2000, we had the perfect storm with Gore running a bad campaign, ridiculous butterfly ballots in Florida that made it impossible to figure out who you were voting for, Nader voters who decided to get cute with their votes in a tight election, Jeb Bush quietly scrubbing the voter rolls in Florida for a couple of years before the election, and then subsequently the partisan right wing hacks on the Supreme Court. All of these things were factors in what happened in 2000. What happened wouldn’t have been possible if a single one of these factors weren’t present.

I have a sick feeling that we’re looking at another perfect storm situation. All of the polls that have been taken over the past five days have tightened to the point where literally either candidate can win. I’m not going to go into a wonky state by state analysis of what’s going on because it’s complicated, and I can make my point without boring you with the details.

I will say this:

• Trump is very likely going to win Ohio.
• Florida can go either way.

Hillary has to win Pennsylvania to stop Trump. Now there are a few other states (Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan) that need to fit together like puzzle pieces in varying configurations for her to win, but she must win Pennsylvania, or her chances of stopping Trump go down significantly. The polls tell me that she’s going to win Pennsylvania, but they’re within the margin of error, which in not good.  What the polls don’t tell me, is that the public transportation (SEPTA) union in Pennsylvania is on strike. That means that the busses, subways, and trolleys that low income people depend on to get around aren’t running, which effectively throws the polls in Pennsylvania out the fucking window.

Remember the scrubbing of the voter rolls in Florida that I mentioned earlier? Well, republicans have quietly been scrubbing voter rolls just like Jeb did for a few years now so that’s another factor in play.

Now I know that four days worth of polls don’t constitute enough data to know what’s happening. I understand that you need an aggregate of the polls over a period of a couple of weeks to get an idea of what’s really happening. But we don’t have a couple of weeks. As someone who believes in data, I have to believe the best available information before me right now. I believed all of the polls that said that Bernie would do much better against Trump than Hillary would. Why did I believe them? Well for one, all of the polls said the same thing and also because that was the best information available to me at the time. And it was probably correct, because this election against the most ignorant, spectacular career failure, sexual assaulter of a candidate should not be close. And all of the primary Hillary supporters who kept insisting that she would clean his clock were wrong. They were wrong because they used conjecture to refute data, and that’s never going to turn out well for you.

Now I can dwell on their fuck up. I can dwell on how the DNC put their fingers on the scale in her favor because she was always going to be the nominee. I can dwell on the sleazy tactics they used on Bernie (like calling me a “Bernie Bro”). I can dwell on everything that I didn’t do to put me in this situation. I can dwell on everything that I know is corrupt and broken about our elections, but none of that dwelling is going to change the situation before me.

That’s a fact.

One of two people is going to become the President Elect on Tuesday night. It’s either going to be Hillary or it’s going to be Trump. It’s not going to be anybody else. No matter what you do on Tuesday, you’re enabling the one who wins to become president. You can stay home, but then you just enabled the candidate that others (and possible a shut down subway system) chose. You can vote for your cat, or someone else who is definitely not going to be president, but then you just enabled the candidate that others (and possible a shut down subway system) chose. Whatever you do on Tuesday is going to enable either Trump or Hillary to become president.

That is just a fact.

You can tell yourself all the grandiose tales about your “conscience” and “picking evil” you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are going to enable either Trump or Hillary to win on Tuesday. No one else is going to be the next President Of The United States. The difference between you and I, is that I know who I’m enabling. You don’t. I have looked at the two options before me, and I have used my brain to make a calculation on who will damage my self interest less.

We very might well have another perfect storm situation on our hands. Looking back at everything that went into creating this storm isn’t going to change where we are today, and it’s not going to change the fact that every American is participating in the election of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. Personally, I can’t think of anything more stupid than being the hapless enabler. Let me repeat: whether you stay home or vote for someone who definitely isn’t going to be president, you are enabling one of the two major party candidates on Tuesday.

It’s time to decide. You can decide which candidate will benefit your self interest. You can decide which candidate will damage your self interest less. Or you can decide to be a hapless enabler for the eventual winner of this election, without knowing who you’re enabling when you cast your vote. No one is going to respect your “conscience” if you choose the latter.

It’s time to choose.

I am currently contemplating hauling my happy (sarcasm) ass to Pennsylvania to campaign for Hillary. Not because I think she’s an awesome candidate. I was an adamant Bernie supporter in the primaries. I’m not thinking about campaigning for her because I think she’s going to do anything good on my core issue: campaign finance reform. I don’t believe she’s going to do anything about ending the planet destroying practice of fracking. I don’t believe she’s ever going to stand up against a shitty trade deal. I don’t believe that she’s going to do a number of different things that are important to me because she’s simply not as liberal as I am, and because she’s being paid by corporations whose interests will always come before mine.

I do believe that she will do some things to not completely fuck me over, like nominating Supreme Court Justices like Sonya Sotomayor who will stand up for my civil rights. I do believe that she’s going to so something good on the issue of the minimum wage. Will she fight as hard as I want her to, or go as far as I would like? No, but it’s going to be better than the big fat nothing that Trump will do on this issue.

I’m thinking about campaigning for Hillary in order to save the republic from the absolute fucking disaster that is Donald Trump, and frankly, I resent having been put in this position so I have something to say to people who voted for Hillary in the primaries: It’s time for you all to get off your asses and clean up your mess. You voted for her, despite the fact that not some, not most, but all the polls clearly told you that Bernie was going to be a much stronger candidate against Trump that Hillary is. You ignored me when I told you that putting a corporatist up against a populist was a very bad idea. You all kept saying stupid things like, “he hasn’t really been tested yet and his poll numbers will go down once he is”. Right, cause Hillary wasn’t really trying to win the primary and didn’t bother with all that pesky opposition research. She deployed an army of paid trolls to pollute the internet with nonsense like accusing the most liberal part of the electorate of being misogynistic “Bernie Bros.” She colluded with the DNC to get every advantage she could, but she didn’t look for any dirt on her opponent. Right. You kept saying that “it will be fine, she will kick Trump’s ass.” Well guess what? She’s not, and now it’s time for you do everything you can to fix this shit show you helped to put on for us.

If you live within 500 miles of a swing state, it’s time for you to get into your cars, put on your most comfortable shoes, and spend every weekend between now and November 8th convincing as many people as you can that  of all the bullshit you all slung about Hillary’s fabulousness in the primaries is actually true. Up and at em. If you have the means to take a vacation, you need to invest that vacation money into flying to a swing state to campaign. I’m sorry, but you guys need to put your backs into this election to make sure that your fabulous candidate can beat the two bit grifter she’s basically tied with right now.

If you can’t afford to get yourselves to a swing state, no problem: you can sign up to phone bank from the comfort of your living rooms. You should all plan on making a hundred calls a day on every Saturday and Sunday between now and the election.

It’s time for you to proactively tell those sweet little lies you told yourself during the primaries, to swing state voters. You broke it, it’s time for you to buy it. We have a serious lack of enthusiasm on the democratic side. You need to stop assuming that everything is going to be fine, and start proactively working toward making sure it’s going to be fine. Ohio and Florida are not looking good for Hillary right now. Pennsylvania, who hasn’t voted for a republican since 1988 is too close to get comfortable with.

Hillary is in trouble here, and it’s time for her supporters to stop with the denial and start working hard to get her elected. If you gave her your vote in the primaries, it’s time to give her your weekends until the election. Don’t want to admit that you may have made a giant mistake? No problem, I understand that admitting mistakes is hard. Tell yourselves that it’s time to spread the word about how fabulous you’ve always known she is. Spend your time telling people in swing states how right you’ve been all along.

I don’t care what you tell yourselves. I need you to spring into action. I get calls almost every day from friends who need to be reassured that Trump isn’t going to win. You need to do your part to mitigate the anxiety that many of us are experiencing.

If I can take time out of my life to make sure that Hillary is elected, then you should be able to do that too. Finish what you fucking started. More importantly, you need to spend at least as much time on this as I am, so as to lower my level of resentment toward you.

Let us not forget that my level of bitchiness should be one of your primary concerns. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Up and at em. We need to save the republic now.

So you’ve all figured out by now that I’m supporting Hillary in the election, after a year of die-hard Berning. I planned on explaining my calculations in September, when everyone had a chance to calm down a little bit after the primary. Well, here we are so here I go. This one is going to be longer than my usual bite sized posts, so I hope that you will bare with me.

First let me start by saying that my opinion of Hillary hasn’t changed at all. I see her now, as I’ve always seen her: she’s a run of the mill corporatist democrat who, like every other corporatist democrat will put the needs of her donors ahead of the needs of the people. I have never seen her as a criminal, Satan, or the worst thing that could possibly happen to this country. She is a corporatist democrat, very much on the same spectrum as our current corporatist democratic president. She is an entrenched part of the establishment corporatocracy, and the only reason why some of you despise her and tolerate or even like President Obama, is that she’s been around for twenty more years than he had been when he became president. A long record is much easier to demonize and twist than a short record is.

I have the same issues with her that I’ve always had. The giant pile of Wall Street cash, her hawkish foreign policy views, her terrible votes in thinly veiled corporate giveaways like the Panama Trade deal (cause precisely no one seriously believed that opening up trade with a country whose GDP was equal to that of News Corp’s was going to create a glut of American jobs), and  a slew of other issues you can scroll down on my Facebook page to read.

I have always advocated voting in your own self interest, and I always will. Bernie was by far the best choice for my own self interest, and he still is (more on that later) but he didn’t win the primary and he’s not the nominee. So the question before me now is: what is in my own self interest, given my current options. Answering that question should not be done emotionally. Yes, the system was rigged against Bernie.  I wrote about this before we saw the DNC emails. None of the fucked up things that happened in the primary change the situation that we’re in now, and punishing Hillary isn’t in my self interest. Stopping Trump, who most of us agree is horrific on a level that makes me regret ever having said, “it can’t get worse than this” during the Bush years. Punishing her means foisting Trump on myself. That would not be a rational choice.

Trump must be stopped, but that’s not even my primary reason for supporting Hillary. Before I get to my primary reasons, let me address the dumbest of all dumb arguments that I’ve heard in the past few months, “You’re voting out of fear and that’s the only reason you’re supporting Hillary”. You bet your incredibly dumb ass that I am! Fear of real threats is how rational people think, and if more people in Germany had been more seriously fearful of what they were seeing in the early 1930s, Nazi Germany may never have happened. Being fearful of something that you know is destructive is the most reasoned thinking you can have. Don’t make that stupid argument to me. Your lack of critical thinking skills shines brightly when you do. I recognize that Trump must be stopped because I don’t approach politics with my hurt fee fees, and I can accept that the person I’m supporting now played dirty against the candidate I really believed in.

I still want Bernie, and the fact of the matter is that supporting Hillary is the best way for me to get some Bern in my government. Bernie is now one of the most powerful senators we have. The forty-six percent of the vote that he got in the democratic primary has garnered him a lot of political capital that would evaporate if Trump is elected. He won’t have any power in a Trump administration. He would have a lot of power in a Clinton administration (especially if democrats take back the senate). That’s just a fact, and we all watched him drag Hillary to the left during the primaries. Let’s give him the power to use our voices to keep pulling her to the left as president. Trump doesn’t give a flying fuck about your voice, and Bernie won’t have one at all if Trump is elected. That should be the only argument that needs to be made to liberals to convince them, but I’m not done yet.

Bernie’s candidacy showed us that there’s a groundswell for liberal change coming, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have the numbers we need yet. The only way to stop an election from being stolen, is for it to not be close enough to steal. Now let’s assume that with no hard evidence at all (you know how I fucking hate to assume things without evidence, but I’m going to do it this one time just for you) that everything the DNC and Hillary did erased enough votes that it actually cost Bernie the election. Here’s what I believe we need to do to make sure it’s not close next time: elect Hillary.

At this point, you think I’m nuts but let me show you the data I’m relying on to make that assessment. As of 2013, the largest chunk of the electorate (by far) self identifies as “independents”. We have 25% identifying as republicans, 31% identifying as democrats, and 42% identifying as independents. Do I think that there’s a large block of people out there who sometimes vote for republicans, and sometimes vote for democrats? No. I think that those people vote for the party they’ve always voted for, but are so disgusted by that party, that they don’t want to be affiliated with them anymore. During President Obama’s first five years in office, six percent of democrats stopped wanting to be affiliated with the democratic party. During that same time period, three percent of republicans stopped wanting to be affiliated with the republican party. We have twice as many democrats leaving the democratic party during a democratic presidency, as we have republicans leaving their party. Here’s why I think that is: republicans can blame Obama for what’s going on with flat wages and income inequality because he’s president. They can still hang onto their party until the next republican president comes along and they have to one to blame but republicans. Democrats are being let down by the guy they voted for and are starting to see that the democratic party doesn’t represent them. The best way to keep this trend going, is to give them another democrat. A Trump presidency is only going to coalesce liberals around the democratic party.

If you want to keep Bernie’s revolution (no, I’m not saying that Bernie started it but he’s the one that gave it a megaphone) moving forward, you have to stop Trump from becoming president. This is the primary reason why I support Hillary. I’m not interested in taking two steps back before we can take another step forward. I’m playing the long game for my own self interest.

I am now going to give third parties more words than they’ve earned from me, what with the lack of seriousness they’ve demonstrated. “Where’s Aleppo”. Okay, we’ve dispensed of Gary Johnson so now on to Jill Stein. She’s an idiot (go ahead, click on it and judge for yourself). I hate to be the one to break it to you, but she’s a Herman Cain style idiot with less education than that highly educated idiot Ben Carson. No objective person can read that interview with her and not conclude that she’s an idiot. She wasn’t even asked any complicated questions about foreign policy or the economy. She was asked questions about topics that are in her own fucking platform. She clearly has no grasp of her own issues. I personally know two progressive podcasters whose Youtube subscribers exceed the number of votes she got in the last presidential election. They have both requested interviews with Stein, and she has declined every time. Why would  she be turning down opportunities to get her message out to a self selected progressive audience? Because she doesn’t want anyone to realize that she’s an idiot. Either that, or she’s not running for president. I realized she wasn’t actually running for president when I went to the events section of her website after the primaries ended, and didn’t see any campaign events. She didn’t start campaigning until August 25th of this year. She’s not trying to be heard.

Here’s a fun fact about Jill Stein: the second time she “ran” for governor in bright blue Massachusetts, she tied with “blank”. What do I mean by “blank”? I mean that people showed up to vote, cast votes on all of the down ballot issues and candidates, but found their gubernatorial choices so distasteful that they just left that line on their ballots blank. My only question is: did she not bother to campaign (as she has in two presidential elections), or did she campaign to the point where people realized that she has no idea what she’s talking about?

Forget the fact that neither the libertarian nor the green party are not taking themselves seriously with these clown candidates for a minute. Third parties are not viable in our current campaign finance system, and the great irony is that people who vote third party know that better than anyone else. Your “protest vote” is utterly meaningless, and the major parties don’t care what you do because they’re always going to win. Voting third party is literally putting the cart before the horse, which is why they haven’t moved forward at all in the past forty years. You have to change the system before a third party ever has a prayer of being viable.

No one cares about your “conscientious” third party vote. If your conscience leads you to be complicit in a Trump presidency, you need to recalibrate your conscience because sitting back and allowing horrible things to happen means that you own a piece of those horrible things. Just like the Germans in the 1930s. Yes, Hillary is a terrible candidate. Yes, I know she doesn’t represent your values. No, she will not be the only one to blame if Trump becomes president. Everyone who failed to show up to vote, or burned their vote on an idiot candidate will own a piece of every horrible thing that a Trump presidency brings.

Bernie is the only sitting legislature that can keep the issue of campaign finance front and center (where it should be). But let me repeat my earlier point: in order to get Bernie, you have to suck it up and swallow Hillary. If you don’t believe that Bernie can have an effect on Hillary and all the other corporatist democrats in congress, then you never really believed in his ability to do anything he says he wants to do.

I’m voting for Hillary for the same fundamental reason I supported Bernie: I’m voting my own self interest.