If you based your conception of political reality on mainstream media, you would thoroughly believe that Hillary Clinton is this presidential election’s ‘lesser evil’. Given that most journalists have a background in the humanities and conservatives are basically an endangered species in the soft sciences, this doesn’t come as a big surprise. It should. Given what we know about the history of Hillary Clinton as Senator and Secretary of State, only the most war-hungry, corporate welfare-endorsing neoconservatives have any business being With Her this election.
If you care about women and children, don’t vote for Clinton. Hillary was the only Democratic senator to not only back the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fib, she also added a few lies of her own, stating that ‘Saddam Hussein had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary” to Al-Qaeda, an accusation that even many fervent supporters of the invasion recognized as ludicrous.’ ‘Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.’ It’s nice that she cares about American children, though. Not to mention the American soldiers whose lives were wasted. It did however make some weapons dealers very wealthy. Coincidentally ‘governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records.’
Despite all the foreign mayhem and destruction Clinton helped realize, Hillary is on record for arguing that ‘Obama’s Middle East policies, which — despite including the bombing of no less than seven countries in the greater region — have not been aggressive enough.’ ‘Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”’ It should come as a warning that hawks endorse Hillary. ‘She also befriended former general and CIA Director David Petraeus, infamous for his links to torture and death squads. In 2014, Petraeus insisted Clinton would “make a tremendous President.”’
Yet, somehow, Trump is the bigger threat to world peace. Not Clinton with her disastrous foreign policy track record, but Trump — whose ‘criminal record’ according to the media consists of having a big mouth, marrying younger women and firing people— is the one not to be trusted with the US Nuclear Arsenal. Only in an echo chamber of academic proportions where identity politics reigns supreme and shameless bias passes for philosophy could anyone come to the conclusion that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be ‘better’.
Even though Trump is the lesser evil, it is still an evil to vote for evil, albeit lesser. To quote an actual philosopher: “Politically, the weakness of the argument [of the lesser evil] has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”
If you’re still afraid of ‘wasting’ your vote, ask yourself this: is it worse to waste your vote on something you believe to be good than to make it count for evil? Ask not whether you should choose the lesser evil, ask why you should accept a system that forces you to choose evil at all.