I have never in my life cast a vote that I subsequently was ashamed of, and I'm too old to start now.
I'm only 28. I've voted all of four times in my life (not counting the primaries). I've
already gotten to the point where I'm ashamed of whoever I vote for. People left right and sideways want to tear the party apart because of Donald Trump. I left the party because of this kind of stuff. You guys talk about coalescing the party, but this doesn't do it. You want unity, but this doesn't do it. People want what's in the best interests of this party, of our country, but this is furthest from. People demand loyalty but never give it.
Where was this vigorous fervor when taking on Obama and his cronies?
Excuse me? Did you sustain head trauma and get amnesia? Did you really just accuse ME of being lackluster about taking on Obama and his cronies? ME?!
And who the **** is "you guys" talking about "coalescing the party" and "unity"? Who in the hell do you think you're talking to?
I could not possibly give less of a shit about the Republican Party. Like all institutions, it's a tool, and at the point where it stops serving its purpose, it becomes useless and should be discarded. But I DO give a shit about my country, and I will not give it that pusillanimous clown as a President just so I can vent my spleen and get a warm fuzzy about being on the "winning side".
There's a difference between being disappointed in the person you voted for, and being ashamed of having voted for him. I have had occasion to be disappointed, because everyone's human and has feet of clay, but there is no realistic way I can believe I would not be ashamed of voting for Donald Trump from the moment I did it, and only get more ashamed as he capered in front of the entire world like a court jester who's suddenly been crowned king.
I am not going to watch the only party that has a possibility of reflecting conservatism descend into this.
Don't get me wrong, ma'am, I respect your wisdom and experience, so the remarks hitherto are not meant to be offensive, but with all due respect,
if this is what conservatism is as of now, I want none of it. If you guys want to tear this party to shreds over the fear of one man, do it on your own. I will not watch as a party based on values and principles abandons those things in an attempt to rig the process. This does not represent even one modicum of conservatism. In essence, conservatism has already completed its descent into the depths of treachery and deceit. There is no need to reflect on it, because it has already happened.
You misunderstand. The point is that this ISN'T conservatism. Not the GOP leadership, and sure as hell not Donald Trump. I, and people like me, are not the ones who want to tear the party apart OR are on the verge of tearing it apart without even realizing it, and you need to learn to think past the delusion being thrown up that there's only Donald Trump and "establishment" and "liberals" out there.
Donald's bitterest opponents are the ideological conservatives who have made up the base that the GOP leadership has taken for granted for so long, the people who got angry and fed up with being lied to LONG before the Johnny-Come-Lately, bread-and-circuses Trumpettes came along. To be sure, there's some overlap as people have given into despair and decided "**** it all, burn it down", but the conservatives who oppose Trump are actually the least destructive of the three groups in the GOP right now. It's not that we give a damn about the party one way or the other; it's just that this is not a time in America's history that we can afford someone like Trump as President, or the power vacuum and chaos caused by the collapse of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, as with the replacing of the Whig Party, it seems that crisis and the death of political parties kinda go hand-in-hand.
I once believed the party valued "free and independent thought," but when they're uniting against one person who believes differently than they do on a few issues, to stop him instead of the one person they should be uniting to stop (aka Hillary), they don't value free and independent thought whatsoever. This rigid state of mind will kill the party on its own. You won't need Donald Trump for that.
I can see it now, members of the Republican party establishment, like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII, drinking their ceremonial last cup of sake before they are sent off to die.
Again, you're making the mistake of thinking this is an "either-or" situation, where anyone who opposes Donald Trump is automatically "establishment" and "looking to rig the system". While I recognize that a brokered convention is part of the legitimate rules of Republican primaries if there's no clear winner, I think it would be disastrous, and I certainly do not approve of a plan to deliberately engineer one for the purpose of injecting a hand-picked leadership yes-man. I would be among the first to revolt against such a move.
What I AM saying is that if Trump becomes the nominee, then he and his followers will go it alone in the general election without my help and support. There is absolutely no chance of my vote ever being cast for him. I will write in a candidate who I can genuinely believe would be a good President, because Donald Trump is not, and never could be, that person. And that's what most members of the #NeverTrump movement are saying: that we consider the election lost at the point that Trump becomes the nominee, no matter who wins the general.
If you have to win by backing someone who, in your heart of hearts, believe is a terrible choice and will be a terrible President, have you really won anything at all?
After losing every other time before, it has indeed come to that. So I'll ask you this: since when has me voting for the nice guy gotten me anywhere? Do you honestly think voting for a guy who makes the same promises as the men before him will change anything? What have we won thus far?
So you'd rather just settle for the empty, meaningless victory of "I voted for the guy who won. He destroyed the country, but hey, I was on the winning team"?
When did I ever suggest voting for a guy who makes empty promises? Once again, you are projecting, "Oh, you hate Trump, so you're all about supporting the establishment." One of the things you learn as you get old(er) is that life is rarely black and white, either-or. It stubbornly refuses to be that simple.
It's a hard fact of life that sometimes, there is no trophy, no triumph, no glory and conquest at the end of the battle. Sometimes all you ever win is knowing, in your heart of hearts, that you fought for what was right and you didn't betray your conscience, even when it would have been easier or more comfortable or let you claim to have "won". That's one thing Donald Trump, with all his braggadocio about being a "winner", has never understood: sometimes it's not about "winning"; it's about drawing a line and saying, "This is where I will stand, no matter what", and going down fighting. Sometimes you have to tilt at windmills, because sometimes the battles most worth fighting are the losing battles.
Joss Whedon actually said it very well: When nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do.
