On June 2, 2016, I wrote Part One of this post.

Yeah, so I’m still here. I did all the checking before the election and the path out no longer exists for someone my age, without marriage and/or migration to another country as an ex-pat with the clothes on my back, and that’s so far from impractical it’s not even worth discussing. So I’m here. And I’m pissed.

Wasting my time with fact-free members of the “Let’s Pretend” Party or the “Screw You, I Got Mine” Party isn’t going to move us forward. The bold fact is that there are NO Third Party candidates strong enough to garner more than a hundred votes to every thousand in any House district, and the two Independents in the Senate vote with Democrats because there are ONLY two of them.

The only Independent in the whole House lives on the Northern Mariana Islands and he can’t vote because it’s a territory, not a state.

This rich fantasy life, brought to you by Ralph Nader and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, is the most vile congregation of uneducated idealists I have ever connected with and that’s saying something, given my 46-year history as an aware citizen of the US.

Blind assumption that if we just push a little harder, everything will collapse and we will somehow reach the new day of the Green forgets that Gary Johnson (a Libertarian who is only one step removed from the GOP, and that step is to the RIGHT) was the guy who came in Third in the 2016 election. Stein was a distant fourth in all but two of the races, in which case she was FIFTH or even SIXTH.

As for the rest of us, who understand pragmatism and the U.S. Constitution, we have our work cut out for us. We are at eight months, two weeks, give or take a day, to THIS YEAR’s election. If we want to see change, we’d better start stepping up that game.

Leave the Greens to their delusional fantasy world and step around them. Do not engage. It’s not worth your time or energy to try and convince them that they are complicit in where we are today. Stop wasting your breath trying to convince them that they bought all the propaganda the GOP have sold them, and then some. They refuse to hear that they are complicit in this, that Russia took advantage of naive wishful thinking precisely because they could.

THIS is the reality we’re dealing with. Either we wipe the GOP out, completely, or the Russians win. And if you think their interference was restricted just to Trump supporters, pay attention to this nugget at the bottom of this article from CNN.com: The unwitting: The Trump supporters used by Russia:

Trump supporters were not the only people duped by the Internet Research Agency. As CNN has previously reported, Black Lives Matter activists and Muslim groups were also targeted.

Micah White, a co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, also fell victim to the Internet Research Agency. In June 2016, he gave a telephone interview to the website Black Matters US, which was run by the group.

He told CNN last fall that Russia’s ability to successfully mimic American grassroot movements was concerning.

“If it is true that a Russian-based activist group is indistinguishable from an American-created activist group, that will have negative impacts on our ability to create social movements that are positive, that actually benefit ourselves and not some sort of foreign power.”

Think I’m kidding? This came out in September of LAST YEAR:

Russian-funded Facebook ads backed Stein, Sanders and Trump

At least one touted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who Clinton says “may well have thrown the election to Trump.

Just stop. It’s like playing Pigeon Chess. Save your energy for the fight that’s coming!

If you want to push the Democratic Party to the left, by all means, do it. That’s what the Primaries are for. That is, if you’re registered in the Party. If not, you get no right to complain. That’s how Party politics works, whether you like it or not.

At the end of the day, if you don’t want a Republican in office, vote for the Democrat. You don’t get any other choices here.