Not voting for Hillary is still a valid choice.

Allow me just a few moments at the start, will you please?

“You’re a Trump Troll!”

“You must be a privileged white male who hates everyone except yourself!”

“Why do you want to help Trump win?!”

There, I think that covers the general tone and tenor of a lot of the comments I’m going to get on this piece. So that being said, commencer la diatribe!

First things first — Congratulations Hillary! It looks like when the dust settles, thanks to your primary victories in New Jersey and California, you should have the delegates you need to wrap-up your Democratic Party presidential nomination. I mean, that includes superdelegates which are pretty much just the establishment picking one of their favorites, but whatever, YAY! You did it!

But I’m still not voting for you in the fall.

No, it’ s not because I think you cheated, even though I do strongly believe that you benefited most greatly from the DNC’s machinery being finely tuned for your frequency though. Closed primaries are nothing new, and yes people should be up on their state’s rules for primary voting, but let’s be real here — you, Hillary Clinton, didn’t have a cakewalk. You were challenged, rather stiffly, by Bernie Sanders, and the simple fact is we may never know if the majority of Americans — regardless of their party affiliation or preferences — would have chosen him over you, and that is sort of the whole point of superdelegates and closed primaries, right? Right.

Real people voted for you, and a few more million voted for you than Sanders. You won fair and square, or as close to fair and square as you can get in a system where you have specially-chosen people who effectively get to vote twice, and with a system specifically designed to only let certain Americans participate at this stage in the game. But I am no conspiracy theorist, and I know you didn’t “steal” anything.

But I’m still not voting for you in the fall.





I’m also not a sexist. I believe in true gender equality, and had Senator Liz Warren or Tulsi Gabbard been running I probably would have tripped all over myself and maybe even volunteered to be part of their campaign (like they’d have me). This has nothing to do with your gender, Ms. Clinton. I know that women are more than capable of leading people. I know that they are more than capable of doing just about anything a man can, even peeing standing up as long as they have a funnel handy or don’t mind a little piss washing their legs for them. Women are fucking awesome in my book. Real warrior queens who we literally couldn’t survive as a species without.

But I’m still not voting for you in the fall.

Why? Why am I not casting my vote for BLUE NO MATTER WHO this year?

Well, for starters, as I said weeks ago when I finally decided to be “Bernie or Bust,” I still live in California. If this state goes for Donald Trump, I will eat my own hat and wash it down with my entire wardrobe. I feel confident in saying that I could vote for my own testicles this year and no one would suffer for it. So you can save your breath and spare me all the hand-wringing over me helping Trump become president. That’s unmitigated spin.

I’m also certainly never going to cast a vote for someone who in one breath denounces Bernie Sanders for having a common sense view of gun manufacturers’ rights to not be prosecuted for making legal products while in the other breath she’s helping Clinton Foundation donors make international arms deals with foreign entities. It would seem to me, that Madam Secretary Clinton has and had zero problems using her connections at the State Department to move guns all over the place, so it’s like she only cares about innocent people being caught in the crossfire in this country. That’s not the kind of leader I will ever, ever vote for.

Oh, and before I get accused of parroting “right-wing propaganda,” here’s the super-conservative rag Mother Jones, with the story:



As far as I can tell, big money in politics is still a problem in this country. Electing someone who has made more money than most of us will ever sniff in our lifetimes making a handful of speeches to super-wealthy, super-powerful financiers won’t fix that in all likelihood. I cannot in good conscience vote for someone who represents what I feel is the biggest threat to the integrity of our government just because she’s not Donald Trump. That bloviating fuckwit is far too convenient a Heel for me to simply give over to paranoia and take the blue pill sight unseen.

Maybe if Team Hillary really needed my vote, they shouldn’t have been rude, condescending and presumptuous about who I am. Maybe they should have remembered I helped elect Obama. Maybe they should have in fact been in favor of party unity from the outset and not insulted my candidate — and therefore me — with the ultimate in No True Scotsman fallacies by claiming he and I aren’t “real Democrats,” as if any of labeling shit matters next to actually making the country and the world better.

All the hand-wringing in the world won’t make Hillary a better candidate, and it’s not my fault she has faults.

No, I won’t be voting for you in the fall, Hillary. For all of these very reasonable, very rational reasons. I will get assailed for this, and I don’t care. My vote is my one, small way of making my feelings and views heard. Yes, I am a privileged white male to live in a state where I can do this. How is that my fault? And more to the point, how does voting for someone who so very clearly hold views that I feel are damaging to the country at large make me a better person? How does it fix a goddamned thing?

It doesn’t. It won’t, and that’s why I am never, ever casting a vote for Hillary Clinton, no matter how much I think Donald Trump is a piece of shit. One doesn’t have anything to do with the other. And if Congressional Democrats don’t have the stones to obstruct Trump like the Republicans obstructed Obama for eight years, then they are more worthless than I have already judged them to be.