You leave a comment. Do it now.

Anyway, I have shit to say.

First of all, I’m good and goddamn sick of the acrimony of this debate. I apologize if my post itself was snotty; I will try very hard in the future not to do that. So: I said it in the comments and I’ll say it again: if you can’t make your argument without using insults and name-calling, then you need to shut the fuck up or take it to some other blog where they get off on that sort of behavior. That goes for BOTH SIDES.

Even if you agree with me that the won’t-vote-for-McCain folks have a bad plan, take a cue from me and refrain from calling those people whiny titty-babies or any variation thereof. They AREN’T whiny titty-babies, they are intelligent people who have made a decision based on what they think is right, and if that isn’t a good enough reason to afford them the respect of not calling them names, I don’t know what is. The plan is what I am attacking, not the people.

I’ve been doing this blog thing and reading other blogs for a long time, and there are a handful of reasons I sometimes stop reading other blogs even if I like the blogger. One of those reasons is when they let their comment sections turn into dirty fights. That repels me like almost nothing else and I simply won’t have it here on my own blog.

Also, it should go without saying since I’ve said it a hundred fucking times, but any comment that insults me or calls me any sort of unpleasant name WILL BE DELETED.

I don’t give a flying turd if you want to explain how you disagree with me, which is so massively obvious if you’d just read all the other comments that very vehemently disagree with me, but I do give a flying turd about providing you the bandwidth to be an asshole to me on my own turf. This includes writing, “Rachel you’re full of shit,” or “I don’t give a shit what you think so bite me,” or “you are screeching spastically” and so on. I don’t know how to be more clear about it: disagree all you want. Question my conclusions, my logic, my facts, whatever, but do it in a way that wouldn’t get you punched in the nuts by Rupert if you said it to my face in his presence.

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A perfect example of how to manage this would be frequent commenter MightySamurai. He thinks I am utterly and completely wrong about this entire issue and quite a few others, and he has detailed that wrongness in dozens of comments over the last few months. But not once has he felt it necessary to mischaracterize my statements or my tone, to invite me to bite him, or to write anything else that made me want to punch him in the nuts, even though he is constantly telling me I am wrong. See? It’s just not that difficult. And commenters like PhysicsGeek, who also vehemently disagrees with me but worries I’ll be pissed that he’s lost his temper a few times - I’m not talking about him, either. To respond to people who are calling you stupid and retarded by calling them raving jackasses is FINE.

I want this distinction to be crystal clear: the people I’m busting ass on right now are those who pop into the comment threads and drop a dickhead bomb on me or someone they disagree with by saying shit along the lines of, “Those I disagree with are idiots and pussies.” Regulars like PhysicsGeek never do that, even when they lose their tempers. Which, I don’t even have language to express how much I appreciate that fact.

Second of all: some people need to work on their reading skills and mastery of archives.

It’s a rookie mistake to make assumptions about a blogger based on one post when there’s a whole year of recent archives on the same subject that completely contradict your assumption. It’s your call but I’m trying to help you to not look like a fool here.

For the edification of any new readers or other bloggers who want to comment on my posts about politics: I AM NEITHER A REPUBLICAN NOR A CONSERVATIVE. So stop saying I am unless you like saying things that are provably untrue. I understand that it’s hard for some to wrap their brains around because we’re all so used to label identification, but I do not belong to any party, I never vote straight-party tickets, and I don’t make decisions based on what party a candidate belongs to.

It is true that the candidates that scare the shit out of me THE MOST are Democrats because they tend to be socialists and want to take my guns and want me to feel guilty for being white, but it’s also true that plenty of Republicans scare the shit out of me, too. I don’t “like” any of them. Not one. Elections aren’t about liking candidates, they’re about what is going to happen to your city, county, state, and country based on what any given candidate will do once in office.

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I’ve never voted for anyone that I “liked” because there’s never anyone I “like” on the ballot. Particularly at the national level, the only options that have ever been on the ballot since 1990 when I turned 18 have been Shit and Shittier. I don’t like voting for Shit, but if I don’t, I’m enabling Shittier. I’d rather enable Shit than Shittier, seeing as how I don’t have any choices not involving Shit.

And that’s the third thing, this whole issue of lesser-of-two-evils.

Seems to me this is the biggest barrier between a lot of us. Many of you who disagree with me keep saying that you simply refuse to vote for someone you genuinely do not support. I get that point, I truly do. I just see different results of applying it. Some of you believe that in order to restore the Republican party to what you think it should be, you have to show them that you won’t support a RINO like McCain. Fine. But my question is, what data have you used to arrive at the conclusion that whatever Obama does in office will be so easily remedied the next time you get a conservative in office, or that the next time you have that chance, the candidate will be any less liberal than McCain? Whatever forces gave McCain the nomination this time around will very likely still be in place in 2012 and 2016. And why do so many of you keep talking about “4 years from now” as your timetable for that awesome Reaganesque conservative in the wings? What makes you so sure Obama wouldn’t get reelected? Clinton and Bush both did, even though a good half of the country utterly despised each one of them. How can it be worth the price of 8 years of a raving socialist with almost zero experience and a harshly negative attitude towards people like you and me (bitter gun-clingers), because McCain is not “Republican” enough? Shit, it could end up being 16 years, depending on who he picks for VP.

Finally, regarding principles.

I understand that some of you will not vote for McCain because of your principles, and I do not question your principles. I disagree with your conclusions about what will follow your application of them. I have principles, too. One of those principles is that it is my duty to exercise my franchise as a registered voter, so I vote. But to me, voting for anyone other than one of the two who WILL BE the next president is pointless and would make me feel like I was wasting my franchise. I would not feel like I am being effective if I sit it out, vote only the down-ticket, vote third-party, or do a write-in because I know that there are only two people who can possibly be president at this point in time: the Democrat and the Republican. I sit down just like you do and I evaluate how to apply my principles to the facts on the ground in order to arrive at the most desirable outcome. It’s never an actual desirable outcome, it’s more like the least undesirable outcome. The conclusion I have come to is that since I’m getting one of these assholes as my next president, my principles dictate that I must do whatever I can to make sure the bigger asshole loses because I do not have faith that allowing the most liberal Senator in the country to become president for 4-8 years will be less horrible than allowing a measurably less liberal Senator to do the same. Particularly when I consider national security.

But that’s only my choice and I see no reason to assault anyone else on a personal level because they make a different choice, as long as they’re doing so according to their principles, which based on my readers’ opposing comments, are sound principles even if they differ in application from mine. Like I said in the other post, I could very well be wrong about this entire thing and it wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t for a goddamn minute think that anyone who has given this as much thought as I have and came to a different conclusion is a retard, dumbass, butthole, or anything else like that. In fact I respect you for giving it any thought at all, which is more than can be said for 99% of the voters in this country. I respect how intelligently most of you frame your arguments and I even respect how you will not back down no matter what I say, because you feel in your guts that you’re right, just like I do. We need more of that gut-trusting, even if we disagree, because ultimately, our goals are all the same here. We want hard-left liberals to stop fucking up America, we want the hard-leftward shift to come to a screeching halt because we believe that shift is dangerous. You don’t have to be a right-winger to feel that way and I am living proof of that. If half of us think we can accomplish the same goal one way and the other half think we can accomplish it another way, I don’t see that as a bad thing. If we all had the exact same plan and that plan turned out to be wrong, we would be screwed.

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