>Well, he did go on record saying that the elections were rigged...

And he was right, but not in the way he intended.

>Not that I was overly thrilled with either option, so I didn't give
>either my support.

Then you failed in your basic responsibility as a citizen. The only time not voting is ever appropriate is if you're in a banana republic where they're going to shred your ballot if it doesn't have the "right" choice on it anyway, or actively engaged in armed, extralegal insurrection against the government.

Many, many people view voting as some kind of personal moral and consumer choice. They insist they won't vote for anyone who does not 100% reflect their values and that if this results in suboptimal outcomes, well, maybe next time the political parties should give them someone they agree with.

That's bullshit.

Voting is about two things; politics, and power. It is about making the decision that is best for the country, for you and your fellow citizens, regardless of how morally validated it makes you feel. It means that if your only choices are the guy who will cut off everyone's heads, and the guy who will cut off everyone's arms, you vote for the arm-cutter because you can live through that. Declaring "I'm going to write in the guy who isn't going to cut off any of my appendages at all!" or "these guys suck, I'm going to stay home" is a failure on your part to responsibly block the legions of head-cutters.

I get it. You don't like our system. But absent it being changed, you largely have to work within it. We aren't Germany or Israel, with various proportional-voting schemes in place. In those countries, you have the election, and then you form the governing coalition.

We do it the opposite way around here. The governing coalition is formed prior to the election, not after it. The candidates presented by the Republican and Democratic Parties are the result of coalitional politics, determined by their primary voters and jockeying among interest groups. Once the compromising is done, you end up with a compromised candidate. If you want to vote for someone who makes you feel good? Win the coalition fight. Join a party and fight to make it reflect you, and when you incur the inevitable losses in that regard support your coalition partners anyway because they're still better than the alternative and one day, when you win the intra-coalition fight, you will make the same demand of them.

A guy who voted for Trump because he really, sincerely believes Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster at Mena Airport while high on cocaine and had the body dumped in the Whitewater development and is conspiring with Huma Abedin (her sekrit lover) to impose sharia law and appoint an all-Muslim Brotherhood cabinet succeeded at his citizenship obligations in a more complete way than you did. His beliefs are grotesquely and completely wrong, but he weighed the candidates and decided "Trump might be a fascist but he's the lesser evil compared to the Hildebeast."

You could not be bothered to even get to that point.

You washed your hands.

-Merc
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