William Horton in Facebook:

I am very angry tonight, at two different but related things. And if anyone wants to defriend me for expressing that anger, don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out.

The first I’ve already posted about multiple times today. The President of the United States – the President of the United States – thinks that when a police officer shoots a guy seven times in the back, in a car with his kids in it, when a police officer kneels with his knee on an unarmed man’s neck for over nine minutes while the man stops breathing, when police officers fire so many shots into a woman’s apartment where she’s asleep in bed that they not only kill her but send bullets into the neighbor’s apartment, that when a police officer shoots a man in his car with his girlfriend and her four-year-old child looking on because he has “wide-spaced nostrils”, well, that’s because the police officer choked, like a golfer missing a three-foot putt. And even when one of the most lunatic-fringe Fox News personalities suggests, oh, maybe you don’t really mean to compare police killings to golf, he doubles down on it. That makes me furious. I don’t understand why it doesn’t make every Republican in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives furious. I don’t understand why it doesn’t make every voter in the country furious. And if it doesn’t make you furious, I don’t understand who you are.

The second is this. Today, I’ve seen people post about how, oh, well, they’re just not motivated to turn out for Biden, he doesn’t offer anything to real progressives, etc. I listened to a radio discussion about people who didn’t like Harris because they didn’t like what she did as a DA and Attorney General, and so on and so forth – the Democrats didn’t give us Sanders or Warren, and so we might as well just stay home.

I’m no particular fan of Biden. There is a way in which I’m fearful that the Democrats have done what the Republicans did with Bob Dole in 1996 – faced with a highly vulnerable incumbent, they chose a candidate that was least well situated among the mainstream candidates to defeat that incumbent. (That is a carefully phrased sentence, because the Democrats could have offered up candidates that were much less well situated than I think Biden is. I am a fan of Harris, for multiple reasons, and only regret that she faltered out of the chute for lack of a competently organized campaign.)

But here’s the thing. This is not a race like Nixon-Humphrey, or Ford-Carter, or Bush 41-Clinton, or McCain-Obama, or Romney-Obama, or even Bush-Gore, where even if (as happened in some of those races) the less desirable candidate won, the country was still going to be led by someone committed to the basic principles of American government. This is not a race where if you don’t like one of the two major-party candidates, you can stay home or throw away your vote on John Anderson or Ralph Nader or Ross Perot or someone and still have the comfort of knowing that things would still be within normal limits for the next four years.

This is a race where the choice is between a left-mainstream Democratic ticket and an incumbent, allegedly Republican, President who is utterly corrupt, utterly unprincipled, and utterly uncommitted to anything resembling the basic principles of American government. This is a race where indulging your pique that Sanders or Warren didn’t get the nomination and staying home, or voting for some throwaway candidate, makes it perilously likely that we will give another four years to the man who thinks police killings of unarmed Black men and women are missed three-foot putts, the man who thinks there are good people on both sides of white supremacist rallies, the man who has turned the Department of Justice into his personal Tonton Macoute, the man who has mortgaged our national security to Vladimir Putin. This is not a case of “Oh, the hell with them. If they won’t vote for my man McGovern, let’s see how they like four more years of Nixon.” If you claim you think Trump is a dangerous madman, but say you can’t get behind the only other choice that is on the ballot because Biden’s not left-wing enough for you, then that makes me furious too.

This isn’t a game. There is one way to cast your vote that gives America a chance to defeat the man who makes James Buchanan look like an overlooked candidate for Mount Rushmore. There is one way to cast your vote that gives America a chance to send the most venal, corrupt and frankly stupid President we’ve ever had back to the golf course for good. If your ideological purity means more to you than that, I don’t know what to say. Except that I don’t understand who you are either, other than someone who talks a good game about Trump but apparently just doesn’t mean it when it counts.