Election Day

The Wolves are in Brooklyn tonight to face the Nets, and rest assured we’ll have a game thread and a recap and all the good stuff.

But of course, something much more important is happening today in the United States. It’s election day, and I urge you to vote.

More specifically, I urge you to vote for Hillary Clinton. She is far from an ideal candidate, and will undoubtedly be far from an ideal president. But she’s smart, she’s been working seriously in public policy for more than half her life, and, importantly, she actually exhibits a modicum of human empathy.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is the inevitable result of the modern republican party, a hate-filled, insensitive lout who is the embodiment of the current direction of the party.

The party itself can no longer claim to be the voice of fiscal prudence; instead it has become the tool of corporations (even more than the democrats!), with it’s rank and file apparently, if this election season is to be believed, driven by intolerance and hatred.

Trump, who personifies the former, has had no problem stoking the latter into a disturbing frenzy. He is a misogynist and a bigot, a man who was born to privilege and has spent most of his life failing upward. He has had no qualms about leaving ruined small businesses in his wake of bankruptcies or about suing anyone and everyone into silence and submission.

He has committed sexual assault and bragged about it. He has slandered immigrants and soldiers. His entire adult life has been about self-aggrandizement and self-gratification. There is literally nothing about him that suggests he’s qualified to be president of the United States, and frankly I find the idea that it’s even possible he could be elected grotesque.

The republican party (with the recent complicity of the Supreme Court and their gutting of the Voting Rights Act) has been engaged in various voter suppression tactics for many years. Now there are legal tactics, laws designed to make it harder to vote, laws that disproportionately effect minorities and the poor. To the extent that I’m worried about today’s outcome, it’s because of this.

We must not let that blatant racism and perversion of our process win the day.

Vote.