• run up massive deficits we have no idea how we're going to pay off;



• done everything possible to insure that the rich get richer at the expense of the working and middle classes;



• turned the government bureaucracy into a branch of the Party, operating not for the good of the country or its citizens but for the aims and purposes of the Party and their clientele;



• corrupted the political process in a massive institutionalized manner that goes far beyond any recent political corruption in living memory;



• used our fears and concerns about terrorism and other issues of national security as a device to gin up fear and provoke support for their party and their policies;



• ignored every military and diplomatic lesson we've learned in the past forty years to sink us into yet another unwinnable war;



• spied on us in direct contravention of the law and the Constitution;



• ignored science and scientific evidence whenever it contradicted the dogma of their ideology;



• allowed a major American city to be devastated and done practically nothing about rebuilding it;



• lost us almost a decade of progress we could have been making in alleviating our dependence on fossil fuels;



• rolled back the environmental protections that help keep our air and water clean;



• weakened the complex framework of international institutions that we put into place after World War II to prevent future global wars and improve cooperation and coexistence between countries;



• run our reputation as a country into the ground, so that anti-Americanism is rampant;

and basically just up and wrecked the place, shitting on our rights and liberties, and favoring authoritarian schemes over egalitarian solutions and corporate interests over those of the people.

And in the face of that, you are saying that you can't hold your nose and vote for X? Even when for all practical purposes if you do not vote for the Democratic candidate you're helping to elect the Republican candidate, because, buckaroo, that's the way things work in our system as currently constituted?

If that's your reasoning, if you can look at the state we're in and recognize that we're truly fucked, and yet cannot bring yourself to do the only practical thing with your vote that will help to alleviate the problem, then, I'll say it again, you are an idiot. And, more than that, since you're not part of the solution (getting rid of the people who are deliberately ruining this country by moving it towards their own vision of what it should be), then you are, that's right, part of the problem -- and you're an idiot.

I don't want to hear about your principles, I don't want to hear about the lesser of two evils still being evil, I don't want to hear about how the two parties are basically the same, I don't want to hear any of those really lame and pitiful excuses, I want to hear only one thing from you, how sitting out the election or voting for a third party is going to help throw the goddamned Republicans out of office. If you can't do that -- and you can't -- then you are truly worthless and the rest of us are just going to have to save the country for you without your help.

Let's put the proposition directly on the table right now, a good two years out from the next general election: I don't care if you're a devoted Kossack, or a high-minded devotee of MyDD or if you call yourself a liberal, a leftist, a progressive, a socialist, a communist, an independent, a moderate, a centrist or a contrarian, if you don't vote for the Democratic candidate, you are helping to elect the Republican candidate, and if you're helping to elect the Republican candidate, you are helping to continue the ongoing screwing of America, and you that makes you worse than an idiot.

That's my proposition, and I stand by it.

Update: It should be obvious, but let me be clear that I'm not talking about people strongly supporting whatever candidate they think the Democratic Party should get behind in the effort to overthrown the Republican stranglehold on the Federal government, or working to make the Party reflect their own personal views as much as possible -- those are legitimate political acts that no one should denigrate (disagree with, certainly). I'm talking about when the jousting is over and one candidate has been selected. Those who don't unite behind that candidate, the one and only hope in our system of driving the Republicans out of office, are the idiots I refer to.