It’s a big day. I don’t have adequate words to express how big — but this country just told its daughters what other nations before it have said: you can go all the way to the top. You can be a nominee for president and soon, I believe, the president proper, because I’m with Hillary Clinton. She’s got my vote in the general, which admittedly may sound like faint praise given her opponent. Honestly, a lawn chair would have my vote. I’d vote for a bowling ball covered in dog shit and pubic hair before I vote for Trump. But even if the GOP had a more-human, less-lotion-soaked-Hitler-merkin on their side, I’d still be voting for Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a strong leader. I think she’s done a lot for this country and for the world through charity. I think she’s smart, savvy, a good speaker. I think she understands compromise and coalitions. I’m proud to have her as our candidate. She is easily one of the most qualified candidates we’ve ever had, given the number of roles she’s occupied. And she’s been vetted left and right, often by Republicans wanting to knock her back every time she blinks funny. Little did they know, they were just toughening up her chitinous exoskeleton. None of the scandals stuck. Their messaging failed to prevent her candidacy. She’s still here, and I’m with her, and I hope you are, too.

(If you wonder just what the fuck she’s done, well, I got a website for you.)

It’s funny, I remember in the 90s that HRC was accused of being too progressive — some liberal lawyer who wanted to ruin America with her BASICALLY COMMUNIST values. And now we’ve gone the other way with it, where we worry that she doesn’t pass the progressive purity test. And as a women, she faces criticism that men generally don’t or won’t get. Certainly there’s a vanity to politics, but she seems to catch more heat for whether she smiles or doesn’t smile, whether she’s too loud or not loud enough, whether she wears clothes appropriate enough (too dowdy, too matronly, too expensive, too mannish). The fact she persevered in both 2008 and now again eight years later is pretty amazing all by itself. She’s earned so far the lion’s share of the popular vote — 15.5 million people is no small scratch.

Also she did an episode of Broad City, which in my mind is good as gold.

GOLD, PEOPLE. PRECIOUS GOLD. Because seriously, Broad City.

I recognize she is not the perfect candidate, but the perfect is the enemy of the good — further, I’ve never met a perfect candidate. I like Sanders and I adore Obama, and at the end of the day, each are politicians, and each have stances or actions that I just don’t dig. You don’t get into this big game without some blood on your hands. (We all love FDR, and conveniently forget that he put Japanese-Americans in internment camps.)

Politics can’t be a game of polarities, because that’s how nothing gets done. It’s a game of elasticity and compromise. I think Sanders rocked up a helluva campaign — historic, really, both him as a candidate and with his top-notch grassroots campaigning. (And I hope now to see that campaign pivot to continue pushing that agenda across all the tickets, both in supporting Hillary and in pushing her to be a better candidate for the common man.)

At the start of today, I see a fair amount of joy and anger in equal measure this morning on THESE HERE INTERNETS, and I think that’s okay and understandable — primary season is tough and it divides us for a time and we back one candidate with our hearts and often enough with our wallets, so to see it go one way over another makes us worry. The anger’s normal, and nobody should shame you for it. The joy is normal, too, and likewise, you shouldn’t be made to feel bad for that kind of pride. With hearts on sleeves, I know that the primary season has left things a bit heated, but that’s okay. I think it’s also vital to remember that at the end of the day, we had two real candidates. Two candidates who could’ve run this country well and who each ran a really spectacular campaign based on actual values rather than discussing dick sizes and walls and being basically horrible to each other. That side is a urinal on fire. Our side, no matter how much we disagree on the minutiae of these two candidates, is the real deal.

My hope is that in the coming weeks we’ll see unity start to emerge, and bridges we set on fire will cool down and get some much-needed repairs, because coming up in the general election we have to defeat an ACTUAL SEPTIC SYSTEM who gained life and sentience upon being struck by lightning. We have a Cheeto-fingered, tanner-drinking, democracy-dismantling Hutt-slug to beat back in the general election. Further, we have a Congress to overturn, and we have to act like we can paint the road the blue from one coast to the other. If we want a progressive agenda in place, then we have to start building that infrastructure now — Sanders showed very clearly that this country hungers for a progressive, common man approach to politics, and to earn that out means we’re going to have to do more than elect just one person — we’re going to have to take it all the way down to every itty-bitty district, to every voter.

Be well. Find joy. Express anger. And soon, I hope, we unify.

I’m with her.

Comments off, because c’mon.