I'll Never Vote for Hillary Clinton

maporsche wrote:

I don't care if you like Clinton or not, I just can't see how you can possibly prefer Trump/Rubio/Cruz over Clinton. I still don't believe you actually do.

I never said I preferred those lunatics over Clinton. But then I'm not voting for them either, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Not voting for someone you think would make a bad president is not the same as voting for someone you think will make a worse one.

Your argument only makes any kind of sense if you think one candidate will destroy the country.

If Trump wins the nomination I won't vote for him, but I can assure you I don't think HRC will make a better president than him. As much as I think she will hurt the nation, I trust in the system to keep her reigned in.

People get way to whipped up about candidates and comparisons between Trump and Hitler are as ludicrous as comparisons between Sanders and Stalin.

It's not habitual of me to defend Joe, but his take on the election and his vote is entirely defensible.

HuffPo writer: Republicans can never not be racist

Quote:

This is because the standard, both in the media and in popular culture – is applied differently to Republicans than it is Democrats. In a recent exchange with Wolf Blitzer, Newt Gingrich aptly described this as “selective media outrage.” It’s not that outrage over comments like those made by Nugent is necessarily misplaced, it’s that many are rightly curious as to where the outrage is when substantially similar comments are made from the other side of the political spectrum.

So, Mr. Hutchinson, would you apply the same standard of perpetual racism you accuse Republicans of to your fellow Democrats?

You select a few examples and damn an entire group, which party fought desegregation? Which party fought to keep slaves?

McGentrix wrote:

You select a few examples and damn an entire group, which party fought desegregation?

I think you know the answer to this but I'll go ahead and address it. The group that strongly championed segregation currently calls themselves Republicans. The original group that supported segregation called themselves Democrats, but the national Democratic party repudiated them and so they walked out of the Democratic convention in 1948 and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, nicknamed the Dixiecrats. (Note that under the threat of a significant division in the party, the Democrats chose to stick with the principles of expanding civil rights and let the bigots walk, something the Republican party should consider.) When their rebellion fell short, the Dixiecrats nominally returned to the Democratic party, but their leaders (including Dixiecrat Presidential candidate Strom Thurmond and super bigot Jesse Helms) led the move to the Republican Party and when Nixon signaled the Republican party would let their bigotry slide the movement begin in mass. Dishonest (or perhaps self deceiving) Republicans will say that Democrats championed segregation, so I say again - Thurmond, Helms and many others left the Democratic Party because it would not tolerate their bigotry.

Real Music wrote:

If my choice is to vote for Hillary Clinton or the eventual republican nominee, I would clearly have to vote for Hillary Clinton.

There will be other choices.

Real Music wrote:

To not vote is not a choice I would make. To not for one candidate is not that much different than actually voting for the other candidate.

And there you're wrong. If leftists (I won't use the terms "liberals" or "progressives," as those terms are largely meaningless now) could coalesce around a single candidate - say, the Green Party's nominee - and show, by their numbers, that they are a force to be taken seriously, then the Democratic Party might be nudged into adopting a more leftist agenda. We've seen that happen many times before in US history - such things as the income tax, direct election of senators, and women's suffrage were all advocated by third parties before being adopted by a major party. More recently, Ross Perot's insurgent candidacy in 1992 made the presidential race all about the issue (or non-issue) of the budget deficit, which politicians are still yammering about today.

If Clinton is the Democrats' nominee, a vote for a third-party candidate won't be a vote for her Republican opponent. It will be a vote for principles that Clinton and her party cannot be trusted to advocate in office. It will be a message that leftists cannot be ignored or taken for granted by the centrists who control the party. That's a message worth making and a ballot worth casting.

It is a long-held political maxim that the Republican Party fears its base while the Democratic Party despises its base. This year's presidential contest has proved that. It's about time that leftists got out of their one-sided, abusive relationship with the Democratic Party.

Sorry if the response wasn't fast enough for you, I don't live online. At least I didn't tell you to get a quarter and try again.

First, I will say that the Republican party prior to the 70's was actually very pro-civil rights. I grew up a Republican and that history was part of that. That the Democrats completely rejected the segregationist policies of the Southern branch of the party is also part of the record and they did it at great potential cost, a cost the Republicans never had to face (since they had no presence in the South prior to the 70's). Prior to the '48 election, the walkout of the Dixiecrats was predicted to completely throw the election to the Republicans. It was huge when Truman beat Dewey anyway.

You say there was no move to the Republican party. I was there (as a Republican) and I know that you are absolutely wrong. When I was in civics class in the 70's, the teacher basically said that you might as well register Democratic because otherwise you couldn't vote in the Democratic primary where the final candidate would be chosen. As I moved up through high scho0l and into college, I watched the massive move to the Republican party as a result of Nixon's Southern Strategy. Really loathsome politicians at the local level all underwent conversions and started running on the Republican side where they could make it out of the primaries to the general with their version of "states' rights" and coded words for racial segregation. As a Republican at the time, it was shocking to see who was calling themselves a Republican all of a sudden. It's easy to find the national leaders like Strom Thurmond who changed parties, but he wasn't he only early adapter. You can find others with ease. Charles Pickering who said "the people of [Mississippi] were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention" because their segregationist beliefs were not respected, Bo Callaway (House member and Sec of the Army), Albert Watson (representative from SC and last person to run an openly segregationist gubernatorial campaign), it is not hard to find others. As Lee Atwater pushed the Southern Strategy harder and the South found more and more national pushback against their continued resistance to desegregation, the move accelerated. Jesse Helms moved officially in '70 along with Georgia's Bob Barr. Trent Lott, John Connolly (who won a very close gubernatorial election as a Democrat against a Republican who had also switched parties), John Jarman (OK Representative) and even sweet ole Elizabeth Dole. Perhaps our most famous KKK politician, David Duke, ran as a Democrat in the 80's but got nowhere - until he changed his affiliation to Republican and got elected to the La. House.

It is not hard at all to find where all the serious segregationists went in the 60's and 70's. They left the place that had become completely hostile to them and went were they were wanted and loved. If you want to claim that the overall Republican party was more progressive than the overall Democrats in 1940, I won't argue that although I think the non-Southern Democratic party was very progressive. If you want to argue that those who stood most in the way of civil rights in this country were not effectively banished from the Democratic Party in the 60's and 70's and ended up with successful careers as Republicans, the data is clearly and overwhelmingly against you.

You say Democrats are ignoring their history of poor civil rights support. I'd counter that you are ignoring the Republican's current poor history of civil rights support and Trump's rampant intolerance towards women and minorities. Excusing today's Republican failings by pointing to 70 year old Democratic failings doesn't work very well, especially when all those disaffected Democratic bigots migrated over to the R side of the column.

We both agree to disagree.

(I think our country sits so far to the right at this time that a significant shift to the left won't even get us close to the center.)

Do you agree that if all of the far-leftists in America did what you a proposing (hoping?) they do, and put their support behind a third party candidate (Sanders), resulting in a Sanders loss, a Clinton loss, and a Trump/Rubio/Cruz win that literally millions of Americans and millions of those around the world will become more poor, have less job prospects, lose more freedoms, have their rights restricted, and in general be more harmed (in various ways) than if Clinton was president and Sanders returned to Congress?

Debra Law wrote:

There is no difference between Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio.

This may be the most inaccurate post posted in the history of time.

Not equally unfit.

It's been moving right for so long, any change in direction is not possible.

What "change you can truly believe in" specifically is worth all that suffering?