A: Hello, and thank you for being interviewed about this. You’ve said that if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination that you’ll abstain from voting or vote for a third party candidate. Do you stand by that?
B: Yes I stand by that. I might even vote for McCain, but I doubt it. One thing is for sure I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton.
A: Doesn’t that seem kind of short sighted? I mean, what if that helps McCain win. He wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years. Also, McCain will be appointing Supreme Court justices. He looks like he would be a horrible president. Maybe rival Bush in the sucking department.
B: So?
A: You want four more years of Bush? You want Iraq war blood on your hands?
B: I honestly don’t see much difference between McCain and Clinton. And if I vote for Clinton what am I really voting for? More politics as usual? More Democratic triangulation and realpolitik? I’ve had it with the Democrats standing for that. I feel like I did my part for the party in voting for John Kerry and see what happened? Do I have blood on my hands for that vote? I guess so.
But as Dick Cheney said, those Americans chose to take part in that conflict. They could have taken Cheney’s example and opted out. As Joe Galloway noted, “(According th Cheney our volunteers chose) to squander their lives in a war of choice.” As for the Iraqis. My heart goes out to them and it is comforting to me that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Tony Blair will be barking in hell for eternity, but I’m taking off the hair shirt if Clinton gets the nomination.
As for the court, we’ll have a large majority in the Senate so say McCain picks Rush Limbaugh to sit on the bench. If the Senate Democrats roll over for McCain like they have Bush whose fault will it be that Limbaugh gets to join Scalia? Why shouldn’t the Senate Democrats just provide McCain with a list of five people and say – if you want to appoint someone to the bench, pick one of these five people.
They wouldn’t of course and that is another reason for voting against Clinton if she gets the nomination.
A: What do you mean?
B: This primary campaign has put me in a nihilistic frame of mind. If Clinton gets picked by the Democrats to be their nominee it tells me that there is nothing much worth saving in the Democratic party. I get the feeling that it needs to be totally demolished in order to be rebuilt from the ground up. Maybe another republican President could finish off the currently useless incarnation of the once great Democratic Party.
Knowing what we know about Clinton and Obama, if Clinton wins I will be of the strong opinion that the Democratic Party is a house that can only be fixed by an earthquake, tsunami or a raging fire. An earthquake and a raging fire followed by a tsunami would be perfect.