by Max Humana, May 8 2016

So here we are, the 8^th of May  2016, and the race for the POTUS’s soon-to-be-available throne is much different from this time last week. What a difference a Tuesday makes! Following an absolute drubbing by ‘his people” aka religiofascist evangelical conservatives, in Indiana during the primary election this past Tuesday, the sociopathic lunatic theocrat lying Ted Cruz dropped out of the race, thankfully taking his job-busting company-crashing fellow lying lunatic Carly Fiorina with him. Evidently the fact that a state with the nearly peerlessly cretinous Mike Pence as governor, and an affirmedly strong religious conservative population, chose a Day Glo-tinted bankruptcy-ridden misogynistic, racist, bigoted and colossally uniformed demagogue over him, their crusader in shining leather armor, was the flaming sword message Cruz needed to get him to finally just end the suffering. Not his suffering, mind you, that of everyone else in the country who had to listen to his nonsense since the primaries began. That a horrific demagogue like Cruz lost to a horrific demagogue like Trump says a lot about conservatives, evangelicals and Indiana on a number of levels, but that is a separate discussion.

Shortly after Cruz ended his holy crusade for divine leadership (er, campaign for President), ole ‘wild hands’ Kasich himself dropped out of the race. Or, rather, Kasich formally dropped out of the race, since he had been mathematically eliminated a very long time ago, say about the same time humans invented the wheel. For some reason, he had continued to insist he was some sort of ‘moderate alternative’ to those ‘other guys’, the continually dwindling field of dangerously misguided jabbering primates someone once called a very strong group, or some other sort of Orwellian, ‘two plus two is five’ term. Hope is not a course of action, and denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, but when people are power-mad, sometimes it takes a few blows to the head to get the point. In this case it was evidently the string of ‘single digit midget’ polling numbers that finally got Kasich to do the right thing and just put the microphone down and let the nice people take him away.

So now you and I, that is to say we the people, are left with three choices. One is a frightening, conniving, deceitful, flip-flopping, pandering, hubristic, hypocritical, militaristic, shameless, ethically bankrupt plutocrat who, if elected, can be guaranteed to pursue policies that will keep us in war or get us into another one, and will keep making the rich even richer and the poor even poorer. That you can’t be sure if I am referring to Clinton or Trump says all that need be said about how abjectly pathetic our nominating processes and our two major parties are. That it applies equally to both Trump and Clinton should make every American angry beyond words. At this point the most meaningful difference between the two is their external coloration.

That we have a population that gleefully and ignorantly drinks the poisoned Brave New Kool Aid both parties dispense, and line up like gelded sheep on the paths which the powers-that-be deign to offer us commoners, is again another story for a different day.

These two candidates for the highest office in the land, whose fingers could be on the nuclear codes, who could potentially select several Supreme Court justices, and who will be relied on to set the tone for our country for the next four years, are quite understandably despised and distrusted by many, many millions of Americans.

Clinton has been able to come this far in the primary by being shielded, protected and indeed practically carried aloft since Day One over the heads of the unwashed masses like some sort of royalty, by legions of sycophants, donors, superdelegates, proxies and persons in power within the Democratic National Committee. This disgusting display of favoritism, elitism and antipopulism was actually admitted to by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has been doing all she can to carry Clinton across the finish line, regardless of the ethics involved or the fairness of the process. She is far from alone in this hijacking of a major part of our national democracy, but she bears the majority of the blame.

As for the candidate, Clinton has been unbelievably shameless in stealing as many of Bernie Sanders’ talking points as she could, parroting them like a Marco Rubio doll stuck on its “Copy Bernie!” setting. If you played Bullshit Bingo during the last several Democratic debates, and took a drink every time Clinton said the word “Obama” since she discovered it resonated strongly with the African American demographic, you’d have missed the second half of the debate due to having to have your stomach emergency-pumped in the ER. She gives the entire country an in-your-face “F-You!” when asked about her serenades of (I mean speeches to) Wall Street, and even laughs directly at those asking the question. She is currently undergoing an FBI investigation for misuse of the information she had access to while Secretary of State. If even a tiny part of what is alleged to have occurred is true, she should have never entered the race in the first place.

Just to set the stage for the uninformed or those deliberately ignoring the facts, here is the damning background. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer by education and training. She was a congressional legal counsel and worked in the civilian law community. She is very clear on the principle of client-lawyer privilege and the need for absolute discretion and care with information of all kinds. She was the First Lady of Arkansas for over 11 years. She was the First Lady of the United States for eight years. She was a United States Senator for New York for eight years. Her last major posting was as the United States’ Secretary of State, from 2009 to 2013. Every person serving in the federal government is required to take training on handling information of all classification levels. Even aside from that, after being exposed to information and information security policy at the very highest levels for decades, there is absolutely no way that she could possibly be believed if she said anything less than she knew exactly what she was doing with her server escapade, and the classification level of each and every email she sent and received. It does not matter if there is a flaming red stamp on the document or if it is not even labeled.

Maybe those who have not served in government do not understand this, but it is 100% IMPOSSIBLE that she did not know exactly what she was doing, and the risks she was taking. If you handle the information, you are responsible to judge it and handle it accordingly. If her excuse is that the information wasn’t stamped as sensitive or classified, thus she had no idea it was not indeed sensitive, she failed to do her job and this is yet another example in the long list of extremely serious judgment failures for which she continues to avoid responsibility.

Bottom line, had any other person anywhere in any branch of federal uniformed or civilian service done the things she has alleged to have done, he or she would have been at the very least been reprimanded and/or disciplined, and potentially subject to firing for a civilian employee, or nonjudicial punishment for a military servicemember. But this is Hillary Clinton, and she is shameless. She feels she is made of Teflon and will never be held to actual account for what she did. And as long as the uninformed population lets her get away with it, she will. But she is shameless, and should have never run in this campaign, or at the very least should have pulled out during this investigation. But she is shameless, and intends to press on no matter what happens, regardless of whether she should or not.

As for the orange competitor from the other side of the political monkey cage, he has fought through both the clueless and galactically incompetent group of gibbering primates formerly known as the ‘strong group of Republican primary candidates’, and has also had to fight directly against the entire Republican establishment, to include Fox News, the RNC and numerous other formal and informal groups and persons. Far from being protected in a cocoon by his national committee, Trump has been in a knife fight from day one, with people lined up to stab him in the front, side and back at will. That he has managed to essentially become the nominee at this point says something very significant about the conservative electorate in the United States. It is a group of angry primates who desperately want a nonpolitical and unapologetic angry alpha male to finally, and once and for all, get rid of Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, criminals, blacks, Hispanics, and everyone else all ‘Real Americans’ can’t stand. They want someone who will stand up to every nation on earth and kick sand in their faces. Trump is a walking, talking handgun fetish. So many conservatives have such inferiority and insecurity complexes that they cling to their guns like metal pacifiers, and think that now they finally, FINALLY have a chance to have one of their own in charge, that they are not going to miss this opportunity. He’s like a conservative’s wet dream of combining David Duke with John Wayne, and the angry conservatives intend to use Trump as their political handgun and watch him blast away. So the alpha male it is. Regardless of the actual facts, that he is completely clueless about governing, governance and pretty much everything else it takes to be President, the conservatives have spoken. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Republican! It’s a Trump! Kudos to the lucky parents! All your hard work has paid off, and now you have this to deal with for the rest of your lives.

But wait, we still have one candidate who we haven’t talked about. And oh boy, he has plenty of problems of his own. He isn’t a strange color. He doesn’t insult people. He won’t stab you in the back or go back on a promise. He won’t lie to your face or laugh in it. He doesn’t have any scandals either today or at any time in his career. He isn’t under any kind of major criminal investigation. He’s actually kind of boring. All he does is talk about helping the poor, and health care, and jobs, and the economy, and education, and equality, and a whole lot of boring stuff like that. And to make it worse, he continually points to the truly boring fact that he has consistently supported all these positions for his entire career! I mean, who actually cares about that anymore? All we care about is Ratings! Scandals! Insults! Bernie Sanders gets practically no air time, few interviews, and no significant attention from any news network. And for good reason. He’s kind of like Mom. Mom will always be Mom, and you just expect her to be there for you all the time, both boring and dependable. She gets her one big day a year, but the rest of the year we want excitement! It’s much more fun to tune into the screaming orange monkey show to see how far and in what direction and at whom he is going to throw shit today!

So Sanders is being almost completely ignored by the news media, is being fought by the DNC as hard as the RNC is fighting against Trump, and is boring to many people, despite being the only candidate who is actually seeking to overturn the status quo in a good way, and make the country operate in a way beneficial to most Americans. Trump wants to keep out Muslims, deport millions and build a wall between us and Mexico. Beyond that, and something about ‘winning’ and things being ‘yyyuuuugge’, everything is pretty foggy, though it is a nice shade of orangey fog. Clinton wants to maintain the status quo at all costs. She may parrot Sanders’ language during the primary but if she becomes the candidate in the general election, forget about it. She’s as far from a revolutionary as you can get without actually being dead. It is a guarantee that she will be a ‘caretaker’ at best, and that she and her cronies will work hard behind the scenes to enrich themselves and retain power for their sycophantic minions. Even if she had the desire to implement some of Sanders’ policies, she flat out doesn’t have the strength of character or personality to do anything but maintain the flow of dollars and power to her pet special interests.

And unless the FBI does its duty, it is likely to be Clinton and not Sanders who makes the cut on the Democratic side. So the two parties would be offering us Clinton and Trump. Think about that for a moment, if you can. Clinton and Trump are likely to be our choices from the two major political parties in the United States of America in 2016. I was reflecting on how over 320 million people became hooked on the horns of this cosmically unwelcome and wretched dilemma. The choice is existentially bad. As in “Well, Uncle Sam, here’s your choices. You can take burning at the stake, or drawing and quartering. If you don’t like that, you can also have either drowning or beheading. Your choice; what’s it gonna be?” bad. It’s a modern day ‘Scylla or Charybdis’.

It’s not quite a Solomonic choice, although it is a guarantee that if Clinton and Trump were brought to any such ultimate decider who had to decide what to do with the baby America, they would both say to chop it in half rather than let it live under the other’s rule. It’s not quite a Sophie’s Choice, because one of them won’t just go away if they don’t get picked. It’s not even a Hobson’s Choice either. There isn’t a “none of the above” on the ticket, and since Obama is term limited, he’s out. Does that mean Uncle Joe Biden fills in until we figure it out? It sure better be him, because Paul Ryan is about as bad an option as death by exposure or being stung to death by a swarm of Africanized honeybees. His first acts would likely be to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to everyone except Republicans in order to kill off as many Democrats as possible, and to remove regulations on all polluting industries in blue states to accelerate that final solution.

Actually, thinking about having to choose between Clinton and Trump made me think of disgusting things I have stepped on in my life. While I have been a lifelong progressive and do feel that Clinton would be half a proton’s diameter better than Trump as a choice as our eventual commander in chief, the mental image I get when thinking of these two is that of stepping on gum (Clinton) or dog crap (Trump) in brand new shoes. Both are exceptionally irritating and cause me to have to scrape the offending material off my shoe. They are both sticky and disgusting, but one smells worse.

So how did we get here, and what do we do now?

How we got here is actually quite simple, though due to the continuing decrease in educational quality and quantity in our country, and the continuing general dumbassification of the electorate for a number of reasons, it is unfortunately too complicated for most Americans to understand. If they could figure it out, they would have by now. So we need to just skip straight to the very necessary question of what do we do now. This assumes that Trump is not some sort of clever Trojan Horse who will mutate back into his former Democratish self once elected, and take a galaxy-sized pivot to the center once installed in the Oval Office. It is a certainty that Clinton will continue to be Clinton, as there are decades of proof that that specific leopard never changes its spots.

So what to do? Simple. When you go to vote in November, if Bernie Sanders is on the ballot, vote for him. If he is not on the ballot, just skip past the names Clinton and Trump, and WRITE IN BERNIE SANDERS. That’s all you need to do! If enough of you do this, you will be doing your part to shift political power from Washington to your house, your loved ones, and you. You will indeed be helping the revolution happen, and you will be laughing back into the faces of power who’ve been laughing at you. Now that’s the power of the ballot box in action.