doubleplusundead

Well, Election Day is tomorrow and it really can’t come a moment too soon.

Oh, don’t get me wrong–I’m not looking forward to it. It’s going to suuuuuuuuuuck. But I just want the voting to be over.

Note that I said “the voting.” I point that out because the whole thing isn’t going to be over, even if one of the two candidates has a clear victory on Tuesday. No, the more fervent acolytes of the loser will be screaming bloody murder for years to come about cheating, rigging, dirty tricks, stabs-in-the-back, and the like. This is to say nothing of the possibility that one candidate mounts some sort of sore-loser legal challenge, like Gore did in 2000. We’ll be dealing with this shit for a long while.

Actually, I won’t be dealing with this shit, because I officially washed my hands of this godawful clusterfuck of a pornographic clownshow on June 7th. That was the day I marched down to my polling place, cast a vote for Ted Cruz–who I can’t stand, by the way–and promptly quit the Republican Party. I’d been a member of the GOP since my eighteenth birthday, 22 years prior, and had voted for its nominee in every presidential election since. That included one lost cause (Dole), one winner (Bush), and two guys I really didn’t believe in but vastly preferred to the alternative (McCain and Romney).

But this year…no. Fuck no. I can swallow my pride and vote for someone like McCain, who was an honorable man but had shit for conservative credentials; or for Romney, who was in every conceivable way a better man for the job than Obama but far, far down on the list of people I would have chosen to run. But Trump? This fucking clown? This guy who had been a Republican for all of five minutes and who has never shown any inkling of having a single principle, much less one or two that I might share? No.

And that’s one of the many, many, many things that burns me about this situation. I’ve seen countless people who were fucking pissed in the aftermath of 2012 that a RINO like Romney had cost us the election because he was a rich weirdo who wasn’t conservative enough gushing over Trump and his MAGA bullshit, as if the guy wasn’t the goddamn embodiment of a Republican In Name Only. And I’ve heard people I used to respect greatly as conservatives excuse all kind of shit from this fucking orange grifter for the sake of pure political expedience. Like the time I heard two people who shall remain nameless but who really should know better talking about the reaction to Trump’s “my African-American” comment on a podcast as if everyone else was wrong for cringing at it. Give me a fucking break.

Those guys were people who will tell you that they only support Trump because they hate Hillary so very, very much, but I’ve seen both of them act quite a bit like the True Believers in the ensuing months, and that’s a group I want nothing to do with. I’m sorry, but if you count yourself among the Pepe-humping hordes of the Alt-Right, I want nothing to do with you. I believe that political correctness is a cancer, but if you’re in the habit of Photoshopping people into gas chambers or screaming about “White Genocide,” we were never allies in the first place. Go ahead and call me a CUUUUUUCK–I don’t give a shit. I’m sorry that you’re upset that “DEY TUK UR JARB,” but the sad reality is that the world is changing and you are going to lose if you don’t find some way to adapt that’s a little more realistic than shining up your jackboots and putting your duskier-hued neighbors back in what you think is their place. That Wall is never getting built and Mexico is not going to give your tiny-handed savior a single peso in the unlikely event that he wins. You’ve been conned.

No, I can’t support this man. He’s a decrepit old con artist. A liar and a fraud. A carpetbagger. A soulless asshole who has never loved anything that did not have his name attached to it. A person who has spent his entire life in the pursuit of money and power to the exclusion of anything good or enduring. A vain, litigious bully who is incapable of admitting an error. An ally of Nancy Pelosi and Planned Parenthood. Why in the world would I, a free man, chose to waste my vote on such a candidate?

Well, the question inevitably arises, what about Hillary Clinton? My answer is that she’s the exact same person, only with a different set of genitalia. Tell me where the description I gave of Trump differs from her in any substantial way.

I despise Hillary Clinton, but I spend much more time savaging Donald Trump. Why? Because he hijacked the party I felt at home in despite its many, many, myriad faults and turned it into something cheap and ugly. He conned a plurality of angry dimwits into giving him the keys to the Party of Lincoln and Reagan and turned it into this:

This vulgar shitheel and his merry band of red-capped torchbearers came along and proved every fucking pajamaboy and SJW exactly right about the GOP being the home of plutocrats and Nazis, and that was it for me. They literally booed the notion of following one’s conscience at the convention, though that ended up being a rather hollow gesture in the end, seeing as how Sen. Cruz ended up on the Trump Train with the rest of the go-along-to-get-along sellouts in the party.

There was never any chance that I would vote for whoever the Democrats nominated, and we all knew, in spite of all the Feel The Bern nonsense, that it was going to be Hillary. I could have conceivably held my nose yet again and voted for several of the approximately 22,468 Republicans who ran, but you guys just had to Burn It Down. Which, hey, I get that. You’re pissed. But maybe you don’t shoot at the firefighters who show up to take care of the aftermath of what you’ve done, m’kay?

So, on Tuesday, it’s Fuck It Time. I’ll march back to that same polling place where I parted ways with the GOP this summer and write in Sweet Meteor O’Death on my ballot. Granted, I have the luxury (if you can call it that) of living in deep-Blue California, a place where the Dems could run a ticket of Hitler’s Brain in a jar and the ghost of John Wayne Gacy and clobber any Republican in a landslide, so it’s not like my vote matters anyway. And if you live in a state where it’s close and you feel like Trump really might not be worse, on balance, than Hillary, I’m not telling you not to vote for him. I’m not telling anybody what to do. I’m just done. I’m washing my hands of this whole thing.

If you want to chastise me for “virtue-signalling” or some such thing, go right ahead. I don’t give a shit. I’m not trying to impress anybody. Hell, I’ve even had some lefty friends accuse me of helping Trump by refusing to throw in with Hillary. And I even got accused of being a Russian dupe by some of these people, who would probably physically spit at the mere mention of the name Joseph McCarthy. Good times.

We deserve what we get, and whoever wins, what we get is a whole lot of shit and pain. The next few years are going to be bad. We did this. We did this to ourselves. I hope we survive. Me, I’m going to try to keep my head down for the next four years and do what I can to help people and be a better person. This has been a long and angry screed, and I hope you know, if you’ve read this far, that I don’t like feeling this way about my country.

But after I vote, I’m thinking Arby’s.