The Great Triangulator.

I'll hold her accountable

for supporting fracking.
For accepting money from the worst corporate enemy of the environment, Monsanto.
For supporting H1b visas that deny trained Americans STEM jobs.
For outsourcing blue-collar factory jobs to the third world to deny even MORE Americans jobs.
For supporting a minimum wage keeping a middle-class from regrowing, keeping people trapped in a cycle of poverty.
For fostering the destruction of Syria, Libya, and Iraq during her career, wasting thousands of American lives and ruining an entire generation of Middle Eastern children.
For accepting money from the banks who destroyed the economy and had to be bailed out.

I swore to defend the Constitution when I enlisted, but when I'm supposed to entertain the idea of having no faith in the Commander in Chief, I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do.

That's what I keep hoping for

but I'll be damned if I take a bullet because Hillary decided she wanted to "intervene" in another Middle-Eastern company. I'll be damned if I lose a limb because Hillary wouldn't know "defense of the Constitution" if George Washington hauled himself out of his grave and swatted her with a rolled up copy of that hallowed document. I'll be goddamned if I give my life for the same type of thing that makes me apologize for being an enlisted American in this day and age.

Hardly slander when

her record would state that she is for:

Destroying the environment via fracking, the reprehensible shit Monsanto has done, H1b visas denying trained Americans STEM jobs, outsourcing jobs to the third world to deny even MORE Americans jobs, a minimum wage keeping a middle-class from regrowing, keeping people trapped in a cycle of poverty, the destruction of Syria under her watch as SecState, bailing out her fucking corporate overlords with the PEOPLE'S TAX MONEY-- it isn't slander. It's issues that me, and people like me not only cannot ignore, but will not condone in the White House.

I frankly don't give a damn.

In my eyes, he's doing what's necessary-- do I find it slightly distasteful, yes, but he wouldn't have the same swell of support if he ran from outside. And if he ran from outside, y'all Weathervanes would be bitching that he's running as a spoiler. Y'all can't have it both ways either.

At least this way, some things can change. But from where I sit, voting for wars, voting for privacy violating, Big Brother shit like the Patriot Act, like SOPA, like the TTP, lying, conniving, accepting Wall Street dollars to fuck Main Street-- that is no more Democratic Party than Sanders is.

A real long-term political movement needs people. We'll see who's willing to walk their talk if that time comes. I don't know how he'll sell his government ideas or how a European socialist will make it, but we're going to try. As for the Republican attack machine, Bernie's a classy enough guy to pull off defense without stooping to the nasty Republican/Third-Way style of attacking that has come to define modern politics-- and even if he can't field them, he's got more than enough people ready to walk by him. Us, not me. Sure, I don't have all the answers, but it's better than nothing but doubt-- which I would have were it only Clinton running.

Y'all can't have it both ways either.

If I had the chance to go to college for free

I never would have squandered the past four years, and the next two years on this drivel. And now? I've got a bad knee, I'm stuck in a dead end job for the next two years, deployed once in support of cleaning up an intervention that Clinton supported, and I'm burnt out enough that when my name came up for another deployment, they didn't want me going because my head's screwed.

The military needs to be downsized harder. Fraud, waste, and abuse need to ACTUALLY BE CHASED, instead of token offerings being given that when reports go up, do nothing. More General Officers need to be fired. The F-35 needs to be scrapped for a better, more cost efficient design. The military is a fucking food processor that we've been stuffing money into and next to none of it goes to the personnel, or the bases that the personnel work on-- my supervisors have been saying for the past four years that we've been having to do more and more for less and less.

All thanks to the greedy sons of bitches in Congress, and the people that support them.

There is a chance I will die trying to escape student loan debt.

I joined the military so I could go to college without having massive debt weighing on me like so many of my friends and peers. I graduated in the top 50 of a senior class of about 300; the salutatorian(however the bloody hell you spell that) somehow has a good $60,000 debt. Probably just because we are from El Paso or something, and have a record for not having great schools. I dunno.

But I decided to sell my conscience for college, and sold my body to the government. And I've watched Syria and Libya go up in flames under a feckless Secretary of State. I like to assume ignorance rather than malice, and I'm trying to not be cynical-- but I don't think anyone can blame me. Since I was able to actually vote, I've tried hitting the streets to put Democrats in power, without really researching what they were about. Fuck, when Clinton announced she was running for President, that first day, I had a momentary Pavlovian reaction. I heard the bell, and I started drooling.

But then I started researching. The more I dug up, the more disgusted with myself I felt. Here I am, a biracial black and white guy in El Paso, Texas-- now stationed out in Virginia-- reading about all the shit Clinton has done that I can't condone, and I felt disgusted. Name recognition alone nearly made me sell my conscience for the second time in 3 years.

Given her foreign policy track record? If Clinton or any other Republican comes into power, there's a good chance that I will be expected to kill. Terrorists, I have no issue with. Hell, we made that bed in the Seventies, if not earlier-- it's fucked up that the younger generation has to contend with that, sins of the father kind of thing-- or in this case, I suppose it's more "sins of the country". But what I can't abide, is that we may be sent to kill innocents. She's voted for that kind of thing before. Slinging around military power is the heaviest thing that a President could consider doing-- and I'll be goddamned if I vote for someone who might put myself or my countrymen and women back in the situation of having to kill innocents and be told we're making America a safer place, only to be lining some fuckin' bureaucrat's pockets. I'll close with an excerpt from a track that just seems to sum up the days I'm living in.

"You are the smoldering vessel of punishment born to do nothing but justify us;
Give us your empathy we’ll give you lust, let yourself go my son time to grow up.
Give up your childish obsession with questioning anything we don't tell you is irrelevant;
Everything you've ever been is replaced by the metal and fire of the weapon you clutch."

*Mutter.

"Fuhrer" is father, and I don't think we're seeing Bill running again any time soon.

Onto the topic at hand, however, lmao no. I've said it before, I'll say it again-- I will have no part of putting a corporate gofer into the White House. Goldman Sachs and their ilk fucked us once. Last thing I plan on doing is putting in someone taking the very same money that was kicked back to Goldman Sachs in the first place. Or someone who voted for a war that crippled an entire region under the guise of "interventionism". Or someone who let two countries descend into terrorist coups. Or someone who is more than willing to maintain an alliance with the same people who created the sect of Islam that is currently claiming that they will destroy us. Me, this has a little bit to do with what you call "dreams", I'll give you that, but I'm also a millennial who took to the streets in 2012 for Obama until I realized that he dismantled his grassroots organizations.

I don't believe in dreams, I believe in gathering a team, and smashing and grabbing, and wheeling people out to guillotines if they get too comfortable in their corruption. The way I see things, this is a better outcome than setting a city on fire, and a hell of a lot better than cold nihilism. Senator Sanders is the reason I'm not an outright nihilist right now, and I plan to go to the wire and past it if it means fixing this country-- but I do not see anything being "fixed" other than the 1% getting more kickbacks if Hillary is the nominee. I don't see anything being "fixed" other than the rest of the middle east that hasn't been fucked up yet. I don't believe in anything being "fixed" other than more American blood shed in the name of profiteering.

So next time, attack the issues themselves, not people who are idealistic enough to actually want to get into the streets and change things.

Did anyone just see that?!

The numbers showed Clinton with a .8 lead, and then the numbers shifted HARD, and she's just got a .2 lead again. Did I miss a bunch of incremental changes, or did a whole district just go in for Sanders?

Can someone explain to me what matters?

I've had my faith in a lot shaken tonight. A lot. Hell, it's safe to say I'm not even thinking clearly right now, but... What do you do when one candidate supports... Say 90% of what you believe in, and while the other one supports maybe 20 or 30; or at least says they support 20 or 30% of what you believe, they also have made decisions reprehensible enough that you can't trust them whatsoever? When it's literally become a matter of conscience to oppose them?

My faith in a lot has been shaken tonight, and I don't know what to do from here. To be honest, I'd love to parley with a Clinton supporter who isn't full of snark; which is probably really out there of someone like me to ask, but... How the hell do you do it? In all sincerity, how does one reconcile that kind of internal schism?