The stakes

My inclination is to take Heather Wilhelm's view:

Don’t like your two major presidential choices? Focus on down-ballot races and local contests. Feel compelled to cast a vote for president? You could vote for libertarian Gary Johnson; alternatively, you could write in Willie Nelson, who would probably be like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, but more fun. One thing is sure: When you’re invited to a two-party party, and it’s obviously broken, dysfunctional, and filled with questionable hosts, sometimes the clearest message to send is simply declining to show up.

Then again, Kurt Schlichter makes a starkly compelling case:

Donald Trump is a vulgar clown posing as a conservative, unmoored to any coherent ideology. He has generated unprecedented opposition and the contempt of people across the political spectrum. He is unbound to any principle other than his own appetite for adulation. And those very factors that make him so appalling also make him America’s only hope.
Now we need to suck it up and pull the lever for this jerk. I don’t need to hear why Trump sucks again. I know why he’s terrible. I’ve written about it at length.
But the Hillary Clinton charade of July 5th – a date that shall live in infamy – and the subsequent rubbing of normal Americans’ noses in the heap of droppings progressives have piled upon the rule of law make plain that there is something much more important at stake here than fussy distaste over Trump’s aesthetic failings and his myriad misjudgments.

And Hot Air's Ed Morrissey - and, more significantly, the NYT's David Sanger - points out that, along with the rule of law being pissed on, national security has been alarmingly compromised:

 now that Hillary Clinton has been made safe from prosecution for putting national security at risk in order to thwart legitimate Congressional and court oversight on the State Department during her tenure, the New York Times can acknowledge the obvious. Foreign governments had almost certainly gained a valuable stream of intelligence on American operations abroad — but they were smart enough not to leave evidence of it:

When the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Tuesday that his investigators had no “direct evidence” that Hillary Clinton’s email account had been “successfully hacked,” both private experts and federal investigators immediately understood his meaning: It very likely had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work.

Mr. Comey described, in fairly blistering terms, a set of email practices that left Mrs. Clinton’s systems wide open to Russian and Chinese hackers, and an array of others. She had no full-time cybersecurity professional monitoring her system. She took her BlackBerry everywhere she went, “sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Her use of “a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent.”

In the end, the risks created by Mrs. Clinton’s insistence on keeping her communications on a private server may prove to be a larger issue than the relatively small amount of classified data investigators said they found on her system. But the central mystery — who got into the system, if anyone — may never be resolved.

“Reading between the lines and following Comey’s logic, it does sound as if the F.B.I. believes a compromise of Clinton’s email is more likely than not,” said Adam Segal, the author of “Hacked World Order,” who studies cyberissues at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Sophisticated attackers would have known of the existence of the account, would have targeted it and would not have been seen.”

As the Times’ David Sanger notes, it’s even more of a certainty, thanks to Comey’s specific allegation that Hillary routinely sent and received e-mails through her private system while “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” That means Russia and China, Sanger deduces, among other places. A failure to have seized on the opening provided by Hillary would have been an embarrassment even to a second-rate intelligence service, let alone those of the top rank.

So yes, Comey has made it clear that some — or perhaps all — of the information entrusted to Hillary for safekeeping has wound up in the hands of our enemies. How many operations have been blown as a result? How many people have lost their lives? Have our sensitive SIGINT capabilities been compromised? Sanger’s report doesn’t address those questions, but at least his reporting is at least in the vicinity of the real issues of Hillary’s catastrophic intelligence failures over four years.

Wow.

You can't come to your decision about what to do that first Tuesday in November without looking squarely, unflinchingly, at that.

The choice is akin to that of the folks on the upper floors of the Word Trade Center towers that sunny September morning in 2001: burn or jump.