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Election 2016, and why #ImWithHer and #NeverTrump

Note: This was originally posted a little over a week before election day. It is edited to have my list of posts in the series at the top:
Hello, all.  I haven’t blogged in some time, but I thought that this election season was too much to pass up.  I’ve written several posts, and I’m going to put out one a day for the next week or so.  I plan on coming back to this post to update it with links as I do.

The overall idea behind these posts is why I voted for Hillary Clinton in this election, and why, to me, this was a positive decision and easy to make.  Against Trump and all of his flaws, Hillary was by far the winner.  I’ll cover why some of his scandals matter, why hers don’t, why third parties were not a viable option, what the Republicans have given up in throwing in with Trump, and finally my positive reasons for voting for Hillary.

I don’t want to hide the ball. I’m a political moderate, with strong social libertarian views and moderate views on fiscal items likes spending, regulations, and the debt. In another era, I would be a swing vote, but today being moderate means I’m most closely aligned with Democrats.

But these blogs won’t be about the policies, except in passing, mainly because I don’t think people are voting about policy, and I know that the discussions I see have little to do with policy. On my way to vote, I saw an older gentleman holding a Trump/Pence sign on the street corner – which is not just fine, but great – but above that sign was another that said, “A vote for Hillary is a vote for,” followed by a picture of a devil. People call her, literally, “evil.”  If you ask for specifics, there is a bunch of judgmental terms and conspiracy theories, often accompanied by such literary gems as “Killary” or “Hitlary” and references to the “Clinton body count.”

To be fair, those on the left are also not discussing policy. It is about Trump’s “locker room talk” video, his crazy focus on items that make him look unhinged in late-night twitter tirades, etc. I would love to talk policy, but it’s just not what this election is about.

Here is what I will be talking about:
I’ll come back to this post and edit it to have links to the above when they are posted. And tonight I’ll push out two posts: this one and the one on the GOP giving up the moral high ground.

One final note: I link to a lot of sites in these posts. Sometimes I tried to find “neutral” sites, but often I did not. My litmus was whether they showed the empirical evidence, so sometimes I have liberal sites like DailyKos, sometimes conservative sites, etc.  I often wanted to find an aggregate of links on a particular subject, so I would search by a biased phrase like “trump flip flop abortion.” Unsurprisingly, those words did not show up as often in neutral sites as they did in biased ones. So, for those that want to debate the sources, do so by showing that the information is wrong, not by an inverse appeal to authority.  (Well, do what you want, but I will just refer you back to this point.)

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