Yep. I was madder than hell at Perot voters at the time, but in retrospect, I'm grateful to them because they helped put Clinton in on a plurality, which was a good thing and would have been as good if Bush41/Dole had won. It blows me away that in spite of the fact that Bill Clinton was held in such low regard that never was he able to muster more than a minority to vote for him, pretty much everybody buys into the MSM myth that he was "popular."
Exactly the same feeling here. One of life's lessons that even my own old ego has to accept in hindsight. Re-examining that era is critical to understanding how we got here today. Remember 4 years earlier in 1988, I'll bet you were even madder at ( going from memory here ) Pat Robertson, Dupont and Buchanan for what seemed at the time as a crazy attack on the (R)epublicrats. But they had paid attention closer than I did at the time at Reagan's 2nd term, when his handlers asserted themselves and left him as a figurehead while they penetrated the government bureaucracy.
I remember saying that Social Security ( Perot lockbox full of IOU's ) shouldn't be a hill to die on, and that Bush's no-new-taxes was a blip. What actually happened was that the enemy fleshed out their strategy to rollover (R)epublicans at will. The (D)ummycrats got Bush to go back on his pledge, they promised they would unite around the tax hike, and then they stabbed him in the back and hung it around his neck in the next election. It was the prototype passive-aggressive strategy that only a masochist like Bush and the (R)epublicrats could fall for.
And they did solve Social Security, in the worst way possible by importing low-wage immigrants to fatten up the front-end which makes the books look better and extends out the crash date. Every hamburger flipper or hotel room cleaner on the books, no matter how little they get paid, contributes 7.5%, as does the employer, and the result - Social Security is fine until the year 20xx. Meanwhile the (R)epublicrats cheered this because it had the simultaneous effect of keeping operating expenses low and profits high which pleased Wall Street talking heads, and had a positive effect on the bottom line and the price of their real product - paper, that is, stock price. A classic win-win for the insiders and an enormous time-bomb for America. Later they figured out another way to dress up the bottom line, erase the Reagan jobs explosion through layoffs at home, offshoring and hiring foreign slave wagers, and Wall Street without fail, dutifully cheers and runs up the stock price of these efficient corporations.
Reagan's pro-America face of the GOP and "conservatism" got quickly redefined as open borders, illegal aliens, "free" trade and NAFTA. That kind of sh!t happens when a large enemy like the Soviet empire vanishes and leaves a vacuum for the bureaucrats to fill.
So the cost of these uniparty actions is much of what we are facing today, but that is nothing compared to what our descendants will face. We're worse than 21st century Greece with a coat of lipstick and a disguise. Morally, we're every bit as decadent as ancient Greece and Rome, with our own Caligulas and Neros. Except that we have clowns that celebrate them rather than get fed up and remove them. So we may even be worse along in a shorter period of time than those historical examples of democracy and republicanism.
1992, or perhaps 1986 to 1992 is redefining itself as a uniparty watershed moment. The point in time where the uniparty establishment made the beltway their own fiefdom, like a feudal estate, with King and castle and a noble aristocracy pitted against the vast fruited plain of serfs.
Is this really a historic time of change with outsiders about to topple the uniparty? It sure could be but I can't predict it. After the false starts with Buchanan and then Perot, there was the 104th Congressional sweep in 1994. TEA Party advances in 2010 and 2014. But these popular insurgencies have never coincided with the Presidential quadrennial years. If it does happen, it will be despite massive use of force and dirty tricks from the GOPe and their (D)ummycrat allies.
Now, I only vote for what I'm willing to be accountable for if it wins. My tagline was a long time figuring out. I'm partly responsible for how left the GOP has gone, and I'm applying what I've learned from that mistake.
Trump looks more and more like a really awful option. If he's the nominee, I hope we have a very strong 3rd party candidate.