And so we come to the end of this indecent campaign, one that has degraded us as a nation and as individuals, one that has amped up to ear-splitting all the things that made the last few election cycles so despicable, not so much an exercise in democracy but an exercise in endurance, like 600 days of hazing where your reward at the end of being whipped and spit on and forced to eat dog food until you vomit is you get to go on living with the very people who laughed as you shit yourself. Through it all, through the long-forgotten "Bernie Bros" and the heartening sight of watching Ted Cruz take off his pants while Trump laughed at his dick, we on the left have had to hear from our comrades that they are just agonizing about voting for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in order to stop Republican candidate and rotting poison factory Donald Trump.
"She's in the pocket of Wall Street," we heard. "She is too hawkish." Both are significant and important complaints against Clinton, with real world consequences. And while it would be easy to simply dismiss them with, "Yeah, but what are you gonna do?" I'd rather acknowledge it and say, "I hear you. But those don't overcome the reasons why I am gladly voting for her."
For me, voting for Hillary Clinton comes down to four things, all of equal significance.
1. Supreme Court picks. If Republicans get to choose the next two or three Supreme Court justices, then the nation is fucked for at least a generation. Even as conservative as the court has been, even as it has dicked over our politics with Citizens United, helped make guns flow freely like sewage in a canal, shit on the workers' rights and immigrant rights, and more, it could be far, far worse. A shift of one justice, one Ginsberg, with a Republican president, and it's goodbye Roe v. Wade, goodbye First Amendment protections, goodbye environmental regulations, goodbye Affordable Care Act. Any liberal goal you want, dear, deluded Jill Stein voters, is over if the court shifts any further right. That ain't hyperbole. That's the stated goal of Republicans: reverse a bunch of shit that has made the nation progress. (Note: since Republicans have decided to continue being dickheads about the court if Clinton wins, get the fuck out and vote to change the Senate.)
2. Climate change. This one is about as easy as it gets. Only one candidate understands the reality of our fucked beyond fucked climate while the other wants to break any agreements on the reduction of carbon emissions and end federal funding of clean energy development. If you want anything done to at least slow down the rising seas and extreme weather, you have to vote for Clinton or you're saying, "Yeah, I don't a give a fuck because Killary is something-something-I-wrote-in-Bernie-because-I'm-a-self-indulgent-douche." The one issue that matters more than any other this election, the one that crosses so many other issues, like economic stability, treatment of the races, class divisions, hunger and poverty, was swallowed into the vortex of emails and Trump's buffoon show. This one is goddamn life and death.
3. First woman president. No, I don't wanna fuckin' hear from Democrats, "I think we should elect a woman president, but not this one." Because of
4. Character. Yeah, motherfuckers, character. Here's the deal: You know what character is? Character is when you come from a middle class background, work your way through an elite education, get involved in the feminist movement, become a lawyer, work for civil rights and for liberal political candidates, marry a guy who becomes a governor then not a governor then governor again, and then stay by him when he runs for president while every woman the guy ever fucked is paraded in front of you, get attacked because you're not some traditional Betty Crocker-approved housewife dancing with the washing machine, become First Lady and, because you tried to get health insurance to all Americans, you are ripped to shit by Republicans and not a few Democrats, had every financial transaction you ever made pored over by special prosecutors and the Justice Department, been accused of murder, accused of cocaine-fueled lesbian orgies, accused of being a Lady Macbeth, accused of every sin depraved cocksuckers could think of, and still stood there when your husband, the motherfuckin' president, had his dick dragged out to be pilloried for two years, and when you could have just told everyone to go fuck off, you immediately ran for the Senate, won, and worked for firefighters and veterans, working with the very ratfuckers who tried desperately to destroy you, ran for president only to be defeated by a younger man, the kind of thing that has happened to women in the workplace since forever, agreed to be the younger man's Secretary of State, worked your tits off to bring the United States back to sanity in the world in the wake of the ass-fucking that George W. Bush had committed, only to see yourself dragged constantly before the some of the same and some new cocksuckers and accused of every fuckin' crime they could conjure out of even your farts in the wind, left office and joined your husband working for a foundation that has done unalloyed good in the world, only to see those cocksuckers degrade your work, and, sure, yeah, you made some money, like your husband had, especially since these same cocksuckers had driven you into millions of dollars in debt for trying to get you indicted, ran for president again because you have shit you want to get done, shit you've been working on your whole life, shit that you think will make people's lives better and more secure, facing down another man, while a new generation of voters only knew you as that "corrupt" and "criminal" woman who somehow had never been arrested or indicted for a crime, but you push on, and find that, finally, at last, as the Democratic nominee, you are forced to run against a walking, breathing obscenity, a megalomaniac who calls you "the devil" and vows to have you put in jail if he's elected, who undermines everything that you have ever fought for, going back to those feminist core beliefs 50 years ago, and facing a media that won't let go of the past, that acts like any act you commit must somehow be corrupt and criminal to an infinite degree, and you have overcome all that, all those lies told by liars, all that hate spouted by the ignorant and the opportunistic, those who want to write the crimes of the last 25 years on you, even though you have taken responsibility and admitted wrong for every mistake along the way, even for those things that weren't mistakes, you are not only still in the race, but are going to, in all likelihood, win.
Yeah. That's who I want for president. At the end of this brutal campaign, I will walk into that booth tomorrow and vote for Clinton not because I want to say, "Fuck you" to Donald Trump and all his voters and all their shit beliefs. But because I want to vote for this woman.
