Deplorably

Anyone who nodded knowingly when Hillary Clinton made her declaration concerning a proportion of supporters of Donald Trump belonging in "a basket of deplorables" should take a look at what Paul Street had to say on Monday, at Counterpunch


Hillary Clinton’s Basket of Deplorables
Snip:

“Deplorables?” How about Madeline Albright, the noxious woman who championed the mass-murderous bombing of Serbia and told the nation on CBS News that the death of half a million Iraqi children thanks to U.S.-led “economic sanctions” was a “price worth paying” for the advance of U.S. policy goals? She is Hillary Clinton’s very good friend and was former First Lady Clinton’s choice as Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State. She is a fierce advocate of dangerous Western aggression against nuclear Russia. Hillary has put her to work the campaign trail this and last year. She’s dreadful.

Another gone one is Henry Kissinger. “Among the war profiteers, bankers and industrialists that Mrs. Clinton counts, opportunistically or not, among her friends” .........

The author goes on to identify other members of Hillary's own deplorable basket, outlining their deplorability factors: John Podesta, Ken Salazar, Robert Rubin, Tim Kaine and her husband, William J. Clinton.

And, from Mr Street's last paragraph:

I am not so inured to the neo-fascistic evil of the Trump phenomenon and the horrific prospects of a Trump presidency that I would not at least entertain the possibility of following Reed's [Adolph Reed, Jr. ] advice to “vote for the neoliberal warmonger” HRC to block the Donald. Still, whatever I or other radical lefties (a very small part of the total U.S. electorate) do or don’t do on the Electoralist High Holy Day, Democratic politicos will have no legitimate business blaming “the left” if Trump beats the odds and triumphs over the Clintons. The main fault will lay with the Clintons and other deplorable dollar Democrats, who have opened the barn door for right-wing white-nationalist fake populism and who will have given the game away to the rightmost of the two reigning capitalist parties. It won’t be with left progressives who couldn’t bring themselves to mark a ballot for either of the reprehensible major party options in this deplorable double dumpster-fire of a presidential election.

Living in reliably Red Oklahoma, never likely to be a swing state this side of the far horizon, and bearing in mind the peculiar Electoral College system in place in the USA, I have the luxury of "voting my conscience"; yet I cannot do so because neither Jill Stein nor Bernie Sanders will appear on our Okie ballot papers, nor will the opportunity to write-in either of those names. I could choose Libertarian Gary Johnson as a protest vote against the "big two", knowing full well that he has little to no chance of winning. Extra support for Johnson, for Okies the only alternative to Clinton or Trump, might push a message through that the people of Oklahoma are angry about not having the same variety of choices people of most other states enjoy.

There will be no presidential choice I can even half-heartedly support, so simply leaving the presidential choice box empty will be my best plan. Considering the flippin' frustrations I encountered in order to become a citizen of the USA, eligible to vote, the situation itself, in Oklahoma, is deplorable!