... rather than comparable. The policies she and her husband have supported not only created the current crop of neoliberal and neoliberalism by completing the transformation of liberals into centrists, but completely turned the Democratic Party into just another tool of the robber barons. Hillary serves the exact same masters as Trump, and the only major difference between the two is their public style, not their policies or worldview. Hillary never encountered a war she didn't like, presuming she didn't cause it in the first place. What she did to Libya as Secretary of State is a prime example, and her making light of how the coup she supported as Secretary of State literally threw Gaddaffi into the arms of a mob that graphically beat him before killing him by sodomizing him with a spear -- and then having the unsettling audacity to joke about it in a public interview by saying, "We came, we conquered, he died" -- is the sign of an absolute sociopath in addition to being a relentless warmonger who has presided over more innocent deaths and destruction in the Middle East than any Republican president.

Then, there is the rollbacks on the social safety net and the 1994 Crime Bill under her husband's administration that put more young black men in jail while subjecting more of them to poverty than every before, which Hillary fully supported by calling such young men "super predators." Then there was her husband's Telecommunications Act that got the ball rolling for the monopoly on corporate control over the media we are now seeing. Then there have been the numerous documented instances of her caught lying, and her presiding over the sabotage of Bernie Sanders' primary campaign. Sanders would have been much more likely to defeat Trump than Hillary, who offered nothing to American other than more of the same we got from her husband, Obama... and Bush.

Hillary is a Democrat in name only, and you wouldn't be overlooking or downplaying all of the above, or simply calling her "problematic," if she did all of the above while running for office as a Republican.

Votes to the Greens did not help Trump win. The Democrats supporting the same world order the Republicans do, their promotion of awful centrist politicians like Hillary, their Clintonian transformation, and their marginalization of the true progressives that support the party instead of the centrists who dominate it, pushing uber-divisive identity politics over addressing the economic issues, and their sabotage of Sanders' campaign is what enabled Trump and his own brand of identity politics to rise to power and win in the first place.

Attacking the Greens and pushing the "lesser evilism" doctrine by trying to convince progressives that they have no choice but to support the Democrats' centrist candidates of choice is what prevents true progressive candidates from being able to win. It perpetuates the cycle we are trying tot break, and acquiescing to it and accepting defeat is not the way to make significant chance. At least, not if you truly want that change in the first place.

As for the red-baiting thing, don't get me started on that. That revival of the Cold War nonsense is being pushed on Trump, on Stein, and everyone else the Democrats disapprove of -- whether progressive, conservative, libertarian, flat earthers, whatever -- as their excuse of choice to do two things: take the blame away from Hillary being a horrendous choice (just as the next Democratic candidate in 2020 will be) and trying to push the Clintonian agenda of a confrontation with Russia so Hillary's many campaign and Clinton Foundation donors who are war profiteers in the "defense" industry can make a killing in profits just as they make a killing in human lives, since the American economy is heavily fueled by war. Not only that, but Hillary and her ilk are well aware that perpetual war is the best way to constantly justify the government taking more and more rights away, and bringing centrists in line with supporting anything the government does, something they would not be as quick to do if it was Republican politicians pushing the same legislation.

Yet even the most intelligent centrist "liberals" and Democrats continue to fall for the New McCarythism and revived Cold War hook, line, and sinker. I'm not certain I'm the one who needs to wake up here, Marky.

Look, I know you're an Asperger

Thank you for the diagnosis, Dr. Marky. When did you get your Ph.D?

who is probably unable to compromise on anything ever,

You mean, how I compromise by agreeing to obey the law and work within the system to make the changes I believe should be enacted? I guess unless I refuse to take my "compromising" as far as you do, so as to support no change at all on any level -- including agreeing to compromise by supporting war mongers and fascists who simply carry a different brand than another wing of the same fascist engine -- then to you, I am totally incapable of compromise at all.

As I have told you before, Marky, this is the deal: there is a big difference between compromise and compromised. I do not require total agreement with someone in order to support or work with them, but I do require agreement on a basic level or at least a shared set of basic goals and principles, to do that. Centrist, war-loving, and war-profiteering politicians like Hillary are diametrically opposed to those principles. Her lip service to liberal social issues, which is often contradicted by the policies she actually supports, does not constitute common values with me. She supports the same world order as Trump, a world order you know I oppose; and I judge someone or something as fascist based on their policies and actions, not simply what brand they wear on their sleeve.

but there comes a time when you have to be realistic.

I do not define "realistic" as an acquiescence to the prevailing world order, i.e., the belief that any possible chance can only be of the most superficial sort. Anything is possible to accomplish if enough people get behind it, and accepting that such will "never happen" is accepting defeat before the battle even starts.

If Dems don't take this country back in November, we will slide further and further into fascism.

What the Dems need to do is purge the DNC of the centrists who control it, and accept true progressives into their constituency. Otherwise, the only change we will get amounts to window-dressing. In the meantime, I believe it's very possible to encourage the great majority of people in this country to demand that change/overhaul or work collectively to build a viable alternative. If we keep believing en masse that is not possible and that the Democrats as they are today is the only game in town, they will have no reason to change. The Democrats' love of perpetual war and continued rounds of imperialism is only going to promote the very type of fascism you say you are against. War does not breed civil freedoms anywhere in the world.

You're smart enough to know that. Democrats aren't perfect,

There is a big difference between being merely imperfect, and rotten to the core.

but they haven't sold us out to the worst components of the population either,

They corrupted and twisted the liberals of the past into the centrists and SJWs of today with their support of big business and identity politics respectively, with the former being the same thing the Republicans are doing and the latter being the mere flip side of what Trump is doing -- which is appealing to hatred, bitterness, and anger that sets different sections of the labor class demographics against each other, each demanding revenge and entitlements over the other.

or to a foreign dictator.

That red-baiting is, again, a bunch of nonsense that is doing the same thing the Democrats did during the 1950s, which is an easy way to manipulate centrists who are unquestioningly loyal to the Democratic brand (no matter what the Democrats do) as well as rationalizing the war profiteering machine. And the Democrats, including Hillary, have long been in bed with many foreign dictators who do business their way. This includes the uber-dictatorial and misogynistic Saudi Arabian regime, who are huge contributors to the Clinton Foundation and regular honored visitors of the U.S., and some of the biggest supporters of terrorism worldwide. But they're good for business, so I suppose that merely makes the "imperfect" rather than dictators or fascists. Putin is a dictator, but he isn't one of "our" dictators, and using him as a scapegoat of choice is a very easy sell to get the Cold War mentality going again.

Seriously, most Republicans should all be in jail at this point, not in office.

Only if that means they should be in jail simply for being Republicans, considering there is no major policy differences between the neo-cons in that party and the neoliberal centrists that control the Democrats. Clinton is as guilty of as many war crimes as Bush was, yet she was promoted and allowed to run for the Oval Office during a time when she and her foundation were being investigated by the FBI. That is something the Democrats and its centrist supporters would not be tolerating if it was a Republican candidate who was being similarly investigated.

The only difference we were offered was Trump's "childish" posturing with Kim Jong or Clinton's equally "childish" posturing with Putin, both of which were equally foolish and amounted to no choice worthy of the definition "choice" in the first place. No matter who gets in office next, if it's either a Republican or a Democrat, we're looking at a third World War that will include American butting heads with a rival armed with nuclear weapons. So, yeah, I do think we need to stop believing that we're stuck with either one or the other.