Hillary's Republican Neocon Fan Club Explained

Some far left critics of Hillary Clinton would have voters believe that she would rush the nation to war and that she is too "hawkish" in the foreign policy realm. Such criticism, of course, ignores Donald Trump's comments about disbanding NATO and loose talk about using nuclear weapons - apparently against Middle East foes.  As a piece in Vox argues, Clinton is not the hawk that some would paint her to be and, like Obama, she has had to deal with the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War and other fool's errands launched by Bush/Cheney before Obama ever was sworn in as president. Moreover, given Trump's purported agenda, Republican neocons supporting Clinton really have nowhere else to go than to support Clinton.  Their motivations and policies should not automatically be attributed to Hillary Clinton.Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump has found ways to alienate some members of all factions of conservative politics, but neoconservative intellectuals, operatives, and policy hands have been the most heavily represented element in the ranks of anti-Trump Republicans.

That’s largely because unlike social conservatives or free marketers, Trump hasn’t even tried to court neoconservative support. On the contrary, he’s gone to substantial lengths to exaggerate the extent of his historical differences with them, pretending to have opposed regime change operations in Iraq and Libya that he in fact supported.

Under the circumstances, it’s natural that Hillary Clinton would fish in these waters as she seeks the broadest possible coalition of support against Trump. But things like leading neoconservative Robert Kagan organizing a fundraiser for Clinton gives pause to liberals in ways that Clinton garnering support from Republican businesswoman Meg Whitman doesn’t.

When Obama became president, he tapped Clinton to serve as secretary of state, in which capacity she served as a de facto leader for more hawkish elements of the administration, as opposed to officials such as Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes who’d backed Obama in the primary.

During Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign against Bernie Sanders, Clinton ran clearly to the left on a range of domestic issues to lock down interest group support in her favor. On foreign policy, where there is little in the way of interest group pressure, she did not — choosing instead to praise Henry Kissinger and hit Sanders from the right on Iran and Cuba.

This record raises suspicion that there is more at work than an alliance of convenience, with the Intercept’s Rania Khalek writing of a “Clinton-neocon partnership” that “has grown steadily over time” for reasons that go beyond Trump.

But despite the fears of her left-wing critics, Clinton is no neocon. Nor is there really much evidence to back up a broad-brush notion that Clinton is especially “hawkish” in a generic sense. Clinton’s record overwhelmingly reflects continuity, for better or for worse, with longstanding aspects of American foreign policy.

Critics of the status quo will find plenty to dislike, but there’s no reason to believe her administration would represent any kind of dramatic departure in foreign policy — not just in the Middle East but around the world.

Neoconservative thinkers and politicians such as John McCain and Marco Rubio favor a coercive approach to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, confrontation with leftist regimes in Latin America, and a ratcheting up of American involvement in proxy conflicts with Russia in former Soviet republics. Last but by no means least, they endorse a hard line on China, seeing toughness and resolve as likely to succeed in intimidating China into good behavior.

It’s simply not the case that Clinton shares this worldview.

Were she running against a conventional Republican rather than Vladimir Putin’s favorite American politician, her dovish approach to Russia — and Putin’s ultimate spurning of her overtures — would be a key GOP talking point.

Nonetheless, she continues to support diplomacy with Russia aimed at reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles, and has generally stood by Obama’s reluctance to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military.

Clinton favors a diplomatic approach to the North Korean nuclear issue, addressed Chinese adventurism with quiet (and effective) multilateral diplomacy, and worked publicly and privately on behalf of the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening to Cuba. And Clinton, like Obama but unlike any Republican, regards fostering international cooperation on climate change as an important foreign policy priority.

She’s not an ardent anti-imperialist, obviously. But she is not a neocon in Democrats’ clothing. She’s a wonky mainstream Democrat who has a lot of respect for America’s military and diplomatic professionals, who sees foreign policy as about trying to use the full range of tools to advance a wide range of objectives in a complicated world.

Clinton does differ from Obama in at least one important specific way — her view of the alliance system prevailing in the Middle East.  The US–Saudi Arabia alliance has always had an odd-couple dynamic to it due to the massive gap between US and Saudi ideological commitments, but during Obama’s time in office it’s become a truly bad marriage. Obama and his core team of longtime advisers have been increasingly vocal about their discontent with the Gulf monarchies.

The Obama administration sees these countries as engineering a fundamentally irresponsible regional policy that helps fuel international terrorism and then deploying their considerable financial resources to push a political agenda inside the United States rather than to solve problems constructively. Obama’s statement in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the Saudis need to learn to “share” the region with Iran was a strikingly bold on-the-record remark, but entirely consistent with things he’s said more quietly for years.

The Saudis, for their part, have grown increasingly paranoid that Obama secretly dreams of orchestrating a reversal of alliances that would see the United States partner with Iran.
In the immediate past, this friendlier disposition to America’s traditional Gulf allies has, operationally, lent a “hawkish” cast to Clinton’s record. It made Clinton one of the members of Obama’s team who was most eager to intervene in Libya, and it’s left her consistently to Obama’s right in terms of eagerness to be involved in anti-Assad military action in Syria.

But this is a consistent difference in assessment of America’s allies, not a consistent difference in assessment of the merits of regime change.

[A]ll of this cannot be evaluated without considering the context of Clinton’s opponent. Donald Trump is not a particularly “dovish” thinker on national security issues. He’s promising a large, unspecified US military buildup, a policy of routine torture, and the use of military force to plunder foreign natural resources. In a sense, he’s clearly well to the right of George W. Bush or any other major contemporary politician in terms of embracing violence as a solution to problems.
But at the same time, his proposal (if you can call it that) to abrogate the terms of NATO and turn it into s

The fact that stepping completely outside the bounds of longstanding bipartisan US foreign policy consensus would lead some foreign policy–focused Republicans to support Clinton shows that she is broadly inside that consensus, not that she’s some kind of super-hawk.

The consensus itself, of course, is by no means above criticism and has long had its critics on the left. They’ll find plenty of reason to be unhappy with Clinton. But once Trump fades from the scene, so will the conservative hawks who’ve spent the past seven years hammering the Obama administration and are now flocking to Clinton more out of desperation than anything else. 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 3

July, 2016 - 10th Temperature Record-Breaking Month in a Row

Out on the campaign trail Republicans are continuing to describe climate change as a myth or unsubstantiated claims.  Meanwhile, July, 2016, was the tenth (10th) record breaking temperature month in a row.  This is based on records going back 136 years.  As a piece in Slate notes, apparently the only way to secure a meaningful response to the threat posed by climate change is to vote climate change denying Republicans out of office at all levels. Defeating Donald Trump is a good first step, but here in Virginia, gerrymandering protected Republicans also need to go down to defeat next year. Here are article highlights:

October. November. December. January. February. March. April. May. June. And now July.

For the sixth seventh eighth ninth 10^thmonth in a row, we’ve had a month that has broken the global high temperature record.

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, March April MayJune July 2016 was the hottest MarchApril May June July on record, going back 136 years. It was a staggering 1.28°C 1.11°C 0.93°C 0.79°C 0.84° C above average across the planet.^* The previous March April May June July record, from 2010 20142015 2011, was 0.92° 0.87° 0.86° 0.78° 0.74° above average; the new record beats it by a full tenth of a degree.

As you can see from the map above, much of this incredible heat spike is located in the extreme northern latitudes. That is not good; it’s this region that’s most fragile to heating. Temperatures soaring to 7° or more above normal means more ice melting, a longer melting season, loss of thinner ice, loss of longer-term ice, and most alarmingly the dumping of billions of tons of fresh water into the saltier ocean which can and will disrupt the Earth’s ability to move that heat around.

What’s going on? El Niño might be the obvious culprit, but in fact it’s only contributing a small amount of overall warming to the globe, probably around 0.1° C or so. That’s not nearly enough to account for this. It’s almost certain that even without El Niño we’d be experiencing record heat.

Most likely there is a confluence of events going on to produce this huge spike in temperature—latent heat in the Pacific waters, wind patterns distributing it, and more.

And underlying it all, stoking the fire, is us. Humans. Climate scientists—experts who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding how this all works—agree to an extraordinary degree that humans are responsible for the heating of our planet.

That’s why we’re seeing so many records lately; El Niño might produce a spike, but that spike is sitting on top of an upward trend, the physical manifestation of human induced global warming, driven mostly by our dumping 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year.

Until our politicians recognize that this is a threat, and a very serious one, things are unlikely to change much. And the way I see it, the only way to get our politicians to recognize that is to change the politicians we have in office.

Is Trump Turning the Electoral Map Blue?

Many Republicans are telling themselves that Donald Trump's seeming sinking fortunes in poll after poll are due to the man's vulgarity, blatant ignorance on national security issues, and generally unappealing personality.  This may be partly true, but these same Republicans need to wake up and realize that Trump is merely the embodiment of the agenda that the GOP has been pushing for decades, an agenda that relies on racial hatred, religious extremism, homophobia and xenophobia as it the hooks to get working class whites to vote against their own economic interest.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at Trump's and the GOP's plunging fortunes.  Here are excerpts:

Throughout the election, Donald Trump has challenged conventional wisdom about how to run a campaign, flipping the script on what makes a successful politician. He has also, in the process, flipped the electoral map—and not in his favor. According to a series of new surveys, Hillary Clinton has gained a double-digit lead over Donald Trump in several battleground states, turning what were once purple or red states reliably blue.

Clinton’s post-convention bump is starting to look like a launching pad. . . . . he polling in each state represents a sea change from four years ago, when president Barack Obama won Virginia and Colorado by slim margins, nearly lost Florida, and was defeated by 4 points in North Carolina. “These are supposed to be battleground states, but right now, they don’t look that way,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, told The Wall Street Journal.

Even the possibility of a third-party spoiler couldn’t dint Clinton’s lead, which widened after a month of seemingly non-stop gaffes by the G.O.P. nominee.

Friday’s survey is the most dramatic in a series of recent polls showing Clinton pulling away from Trump nationwide, with the RealClearPolitics aggregator giving her a 6.3-point lead over Trump and a 6.4-point lead if Johnson and Stein are included. Trump, meanwhile, has promised to “just keep doing the same thing I’m doing right now.” There’s still three months to go until Election Day, but at this rate, Clinton’s headed for a landslide.

The problem for the GOP is that even if Trump loses, the blame will be thrown on him rather than taking a much needed look at - and acceptance of - the fact that what the GOP is peddling is the real problem regardless of what the Christofascist/white supremacist base of the party will say. 

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Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

The Ongoing Stigma of Male Intimacy

Yes, things have come along way for LGBT Americans over the last 10 to 15 years.  Perhaps the most notable, of course, being the extension of same sex marriage nationwide.  Despite these advances, there remains an effort to stigmatize same sex intimacy, particularly male intimacy, particularly by Christofascists and their "family values" organizations and their political whores in the Republican Party dating back to the days of hate merchant Sen. Joe McCarthy.  But the problem doesn't stop there.  As noted, NBC has been accused of a form of homophobia in its coverage of gay athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games.  Then, of course, there is the ongoing homophobia across Hollywood and the difficulty faced by out actors.  A piece in Salon looks at the problem.  Here are highlights:

What’s the matter with a hug? Nothing, unless it’s between two men. 

Last week, the U.K.’s Daily Mail raised its proverbial eyebrow at an embrace between Chris Mears and Jack Laugher, a pair of British Olympians who had just won the gold medal for the 3-meter synchronized dive. In a photo of the two, Laugher appears to pounce on his diving partner, wrapping his arms around Mears’ neck. The moment is sweet and a bit silly, the kind of rapturous gesture that doesn’t seem out of the question when someone has earned the highest possible honor in his sport.
But to the Daily Mail, there was something questionable — even girly — about their prolonged cuddle, contrasting their elation with a more subdued exchange from the Chinese team. “Britain’s victorious synchronised divers hug for joy after winning gold,” the Mail wrote, “while China’s bronze medalists settle for a manly pat on the back.” Twitter users decried the gaffe as distasteful, but the Mail is hardly the only outlet to express discomfort at a display of affection between two men, even heterosexual ones.
Kory Floyd, a researcher at Arizona State University, suggests that the maximum length for a male-on-male embrace is one second, and anything longer is coded as being romantic or sexual in nature.  To put it bluntly, men shy away from hugging one another not because it’s “unmanly” but because they’re worried about being perceived as gay.
 Following last week’s controversy, Laugher’s girlfriend went so far as to make a public statement about her boyfriend’s sexuality. (After all, the Olympic partners do share an apartment together.) The stigma surrounding male-to-male intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the lavender scare of the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who some speculate was a closet homosexual himself, led a purge of gay employees from government offices, as it was believed that queer people were inherently communist sympathizers. In McCarthy’s America, gay people became a pathologized class of individuals, with homosexuality classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973. (In many countries, being transgender is still defined as such.)
Before the postwar era, homosexuality was on the minds of few Americans; many might have associated being gay as the effect of a biblical plague, the curse of Sodom. Gay people weren’t a real-world threat. When France decriminalized sodomy in 1791, homosexuality as a lived identity wasn’t thought of. Homosexuality was defined as a behavior not a discrete way of being. Openly gay writer Marcel Proust didn’t introduce the concept into French literature — in his expansive “In Search of Lost Time” series — until 1913.
Without the cloud of anti-gay suspicion around male friendships, same-sex intimacy was extremely common in the 19th century, when it was customary for men to walk around holding hands and even sleep in one another’s beds.

The most famous example of this is President Abraham Lincoln, who shared a bunk with his best friend, Joshua Speed. Carl Sandburg, the revered American poet, was the first to suggest that there had been anything sexual between the two men. He wrote euphemistically in “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,” a 1926 biography of the 16th president, that their kinship was defined by “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.”
 Lincoln’s sexuality remains an open question, but expressions of affection that break with modern notions of homosociality were many and varied. Daniel Webster, who served as the secretary of state under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, was known to refer to some of his male friends as “my lovely boy” in correspondence.
The best illustration of changing gender mores is in “Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography,” a book by John Ibson, a California State University, Fullerton professor. . . . . Reviewing Ibson’s collection, Alecia Simmonds of Australia’s Daily Life wrote that the lack of similar patterns in relationships today is not merely a product of homophobia but the emergence of women in public life. “The photos in Ibson’s collection were taken during a time when life was incredibly gender segregated,” she said. “Your primary emotional identification was with people of your own gender.”
Women have taken the place of other men as the objects of that affection, as outlets for the male need for human touch and intimacy. A 1997 study from Purdue University showed that 75 percent of men relied primarily on women — particularly their wives or girlfriends — as their sole source of close companionship. While relationships between women were often confessional, based around conversation and disclosure, the study showed that male friendships were less intimate and more driven by activity.
These findings correlate with the overall reality of male friendships: A 2006 survey in American Sociological Review showed that adult heterosexual men have fewer friends than any other population in U.S. society. As Salon’s Lisa Wade has previously suggested, it’s not that straight men don’t want more friends. They do. “Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it,” Wade wrote.  
Not having those desires met can have a deeply detrimental impact on heterosexual males. In a 2013 essay for The Good Men Project, writer Mark Greene called it “touch isolation.”

“American men can go for days or weeks at a time without touching another human being,” Greene wrote. “The implications of touch isolation for men’s health and happiness are huge.”  Gentle platonic touch is key to the early development of infants, Greene noted, adding that it continues to play an important role throughout men’s and women’s lives for their “health and emotional well being, right into old age.”

Men’s desire for intimacy from companions of the same sex is repressed at a young age, Greene said, but this is reinforced throughout their lives through stigma — the suggestion that there’s something less than masculine or abnormal about male-to-male intimacy. When two Russian men filmed themselves walking the streets of Moscow holding hands, they were repeatedly harassed by passersby — called “bitches” and “faggots” and even told to leave the country. Another man forcibly ran into them, hoping to start a fight.
Things are changing, however, along with the advent of a new generation that views homosexuality in a more positive light, thus lessening the shame around potentially being seen as gay.

In a 2014 study published in Men and Masculinities, British researchers Mark McCormack and Eric Anderson found that 98 percent of college-aged men surveyed in the U.K. had slept in the same bed with another man. And 93 percent of those surveyed said they had cuddled a male classmate. “They don’t realize this is something that older men would find shocking,” McCormack, a professor at Durham University, told The Huffington Post. “It’s older generations that think men cuddling is taboo.”
The shifting tides are evident in the embrace of friendships that skirt the line between what might have been considered outré even just a decade ago.  Real-life best friends Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart went on an extremely affectionate tour of New York after finishing their 2014 run in Broadway’s “Waiting for Godot” in a honeymoon that inspired a million BuzzFeed lists. Members of the former One Direction boy band were often known to affectionately kiss one another or slip their hands into each other’s butt pockets. Those public displays of affection weren’t jeered. They made the band’s female fanbase go apeshit.
It might seem like The Daily Mail’s homophobic flap is a reflection of the current cultural era, but this lingering distrust of close male friendships is increasingly behind the times. Hugging it out doesn’t just feel good. Embracing the bromance makes the world a better, cuddlier place.

Tuesday Male Beauty - Pt 3

How Virginia Ceased to Be a "Red State"

Virginia population change - the areas in blue are the GOP strongholds

Since my early days in the Republican Party there has been a sea change in Virginia politics and elections - at least outside of carefully gerrymandered districts to favor the GOP (for the record, the gerrymandering occurred well after I left the Republican Party).  The new reality is that for Republicans running statewide, especially at the presidential level, Virginia is an increasingly hostile state.  Why?  The rapidly changing demographics of Virginia and the rising voting strength of the so-called "urban crescent" that stretches from the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., south through Richmond and then on to Hampton Roads.  The population of this urban crescent exceeds that of the rest of the state and can, therefore, out vote the GOP strongholds in rural Virginia.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this major - and in my view, very positive - change.  Here are excerpts:

A little more than a decade ago, President George W. Bush won Virginia with ease for a second time — an eight-point victory that was never in doubt.

Over the subsequent eight years, nearly the opposite happened: Barack Obama won the state twice, becoming the first Democrat to win here since Lyndon B. Johnson’s victory in 1964.

Now, Virginia appears to be drifting out of reach for Republican Donald Trump; he trailed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points in an NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll released Friday. Analysts are contemplating taking Virginia off the list of presidential battlegrounds entirely and tucking it neatly in the column of safely blue states.
 Where uncertainty remains is whether that status applies only this year, because of the steady decline of Trump’s campaign, or whether it is a sign of a longer-term problem for Virginia Republicans that will extend beyond presidential races in years to come.

What is clear is that the demographics of the state have shifted dramatically in the space of a single decade, with populations of educated, high-income professionals as well as immigrants and other minorities — all voters who tend to choose Democrats — growing in urban areas. These shifts reflect national trends, Pew research shows.

[Trump] also has alienated large swaths of the electorate that have become deciding factors in Virginia races: women, minorities and educated professionals.  David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report predicted that Trump is at risk of losing by a landslide in the vote-rich suburbs of Northern Virginia — and that no amount of support in the less-populous rural regions could counteract that.

Even Virginia Republicans acknowledge the challenge. Trump counts few Republican elected officials among his vocal supporters in part due to some of his more inflammatory comments, which have alienated groups including women, Muslim Americans, Hispanics and those with disabilities.

Here’s another way to look at it: From the 1992 to the 2012 presidential elections, the population of Northern Virginia grew from 1.5 million to 2.2 million. And it grew with an influx of a particular kind of voter; in that same time period, in Fairfax County alone, Democrats’ lead over Republicans in Fairfax grew from three points to 15 points, according to election returns, with Obama garnering nearly 6 in 10 votes.

Now, Democrats rely on what may be fast becoming a fail-safe formula: Focus on turning out voters in the “urban crescent” of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads and the college towns of Charlottesville and Blacksburg, and it becomes really hard to lose. Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) used this playbook to defeat Republican Ken Cuccinelli II in the 2013 governor’s race — and Clinton is on track to do the same this year.

Even with the relatively high turnout of a presidential year, there simply aren’t enough Trump voters to overtake Democrats’ edge in the north. 

While things are looking more and more positive in Virginia, the same trend is happening in states like North Carolina - and even in Texas.   The demographics that favor Democrats are steadily growing and the GOP has done nothing but alienate these voters. 

Longtime Utah Republican Leader to Vote for Hillary

As noted in a previous post, Donald Trump appears to be in serious trouble in Utah.  Adding to Trump's problems is an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune by David Irvine (pictured at right), the former chairman of the Davis County Republican Party and a former Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives, which sets out why Irvine, a life-long Republican, will vote for Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016.  While I applaud the Republicans now fleeing the GOP and/or Trump, the sad reality is that, if they had resisted the GOP's cynical embrace of racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant animus, homophobia, and other forms of misogyny, the party base and overall atmosphere that made Trump's nomination possible would never have occurred.   Perhaps, better late than never is about all that can be said for these Republicans who for far too long closed their eyes and held their noses.  Here are op-ed highlights: 

I spent the past few weeks tramping through the ruins of lost empires. There's a Planet of the Apes surrealism to ancient Corinth, and it's hard not to see parallels between the Delian League and NATO. Delos, Ephesus and Mycenae are the rubble of once-powerful civilizations. . . . It's impossible to survey the deserted landscapes and not ponder the causes of decline and collapse. . . . .Americans like to think we are exceptional, but that's a fraught assumption.

 

An airport layover in Dusseldorf left me with some time to kill. There were a couple of women sitting nearby reading German newspapers, which prompted me to ask them what they thought about the American election and Donald Trump. Their responses were carefully measured, but here's the gist: "Why would your country elect such a dangerous person — not just such a danger for you, but such a danger for the rest of us?" "He's just not a serious person; he doesn't seem to know much about the rest of the world." "He is a crazy man."

I've been an active Republican for all of my adult life. That this venerable political party, once home to visionary thinkers and leaders, could hand its presidential nomination to Trump, who seems not to know how much he doesn't know and could not care less, is unfathomable to me. It is unfortunate that so many of those who claim to be leaders of the congressional and presidential wings of the Republican Party have long since made their Faustian bargains and are actively endorsing a totally self-centered know-nothing who behaves like the caricature of a banana-republic dictator.

There's a point where this failure to withdraw an endorsement becomes a self-indicting embrace of a demagogue's values.

Trump is riding astride the Four Horsemen of Calumny he has resurrected from an earlier and equally dismal Republican playbook: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. Then-Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-Maine, coined the phrase on June 1, 1950, as the first in the Senate to oppose Sen. Joe McCarthy. Smith's "Declaration of Conscience" laid out four fundamental American values that McCarthyism and now Trumpism seek to trample: (1) the right to criticize, (2) the right to hold unpopular beliefs, (3) the right to protest and (4) the right of independent thought.

Some retired military flag officers, for whom I have high regard, contacted me about endorsing Hillary Clinton, which I've agreed to do. There's irony here, because 98 percent of them are either Republicans or unaffiliated voters. That they feel so strongly about this election says a lot.

We see this as a matter of high stakes when it comes to national security and which candidate has the temperament to make critical decisions about war and peace. Trump revels in being a bull in a china shop, but that mentality scares seasoned national security hands to death.

Elections are always gambles; candidates are rarely perfect.  . . . Most Utahns loathe Trump, for admirable reasons. Yet we live a political reality that unless Hillary Clinton gets more electoral votes, Trump and his tweeting fingers will be moving into the White House, where the nuclear codes also reside. There have been Utah voices urging Utahns to either not vote or vote for a third-party candidate — on "principle" — but it's really a binary choice.

It's entirely possible that this election could turn on Utah's electoral votes. Recognizing that reality, every Clinton vote is crucially important. A non-vote or a Johnson vote is a vote for Trump.

 I totally agree with the last sentence.  Trump must be stopped.