"Keep Calm and Vote Green: Fascism is not coming"

Thanks to Paul Street at Truthdig for telling it like it is, using the boy who cried 'wolf" analogy:

Every four years, liberal-left politicos scream wolf about how the Republicans are going to wreak plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and war-mongering hell if they win “this, the most important election in American history.” The politicos conveniently ignore the plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and military-imperial havoc that Democrats inflict at home and abroad in dark, co-dependent alliance with the ever more radically reactionary Republicans.

Democrats fail to acknowledge their preferred party’s responsibility for sustaining the Republicans’ continuing power, which feeds on the “dismal” Dems’ neoliberal abandonment of the nation’s working-class majority in service to transnational Wall Street and corporate America. They commonly exaggerate the danger posed by the right-most major party and (especially) the progressivism of the not-so-left-most one.

It’s not that the liberal and progressive politicos lie about the presence of wolves. The wolves are out there. But they include Democratic wolves in fake sheep’s clothing joined with Republicans in what Washington journalist Mark Leibovich calls “the ultimate Green Party.” The nation’s capital, Leibovich notes, has “become a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made. … ‘No Democrats and Republicans in Washington anymore,’ goes the maxim, ‘only millionaires.’ ” 

I watched Bill Maher last night (something I haven't done much ever since he came out as one of those Paul Ryan/Chris Christie/chicken or fish fuckwads).  One of the panelists was Lanhee Chen, a Republican who cannot vote for either Trump or Clinton.  His response to Maher regarding who he was voting for began with "I live in California, just like you" before he was interrupted and attacked by World War Z author Max Brooks with "Supreme Court".

Chen gets most everything about policy wrong IMO, but gets it right about the Electoral College; Maher and the rest of his panel (save the odious Neera Tanden, who gets it completely and exploits the fear factor associated with not voting for Clinton) do not.

The more American liberals and progressives (vote for the lesser evil; it has a track record, after all), the more the Republican right wing is emboldened, the further the Democrats move into ideological and policy territory formerly held by Republicans, and the more dire the American and global situation becomes. LEV is a viciously circular, self-fulfilling prophecy that itself holds no small responsibility for the ascendancy of horrible Republican presidents and other terrible things like the tea party and Donald Trump phenomena. [...]

I am not so inured to the quasi-neofascistic evil of the Trump phenomenon and the ugly prospects of a Trump presidency—especially on the ecological level—that I cannot understand why many fellow leftists would mark a ballot for the hideous imperial corporatist Hillary Clinton to block Herr Trump. The intra-left bloodletting that takes place on a regular quadrennial schedule over the difficult question of how best to respond to the United States’ plutocratic electoral and party system certainly does not serve the progressive left cause. Let us join together after the latest quadrennial extravaganza to build and expand a great popular movement with a list of demands and the introduction of an election and party system that deserves passionate citizen engagement.

The debate is Monday.  Clinton's polling has gathered strength again.   Don't be one of those cowards who is too scared to vote for a better Democratic Party -- by voting for the Green Party -- in a non-battleground state.