The unthinkable has happened. We the people of the United States of America (well, 9 percent of us) have managed to nominate who many voters consider to be the two least palatable simultaneous presidential candidates on record. As a result, America will soon be forced to choose between a cackling career criminal and an angry, demagogic blowhard. Naturally, both parties are (or soon will be) in full attack mode - the candidates simply cannot run on their own merits when their merits are so greatly outnumbered by their flaws. Given that the end is obviously near, we may as well have a good time of it. Let's have a look at the nincompoops that we might be handing the keys to the highest office in the nation (and possibly the world).

In the blue corner, we have Hillary Clinton. Hillary's main shtick is that she has a record of being supportive of women and children. Maybe she is - so long as those women don't include Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broaddrick, Eileen Wellstone, Regina Blakely, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Kathleen Willey, Kathy Bradshaw, Sandra Allen James, et cetera, all of whom accused her husband of sexual harassment or rape. Hillary allegedly played some role in silencing Bill's victims (command-F "Capitol Hill Blue 10/18/00" here) - an accusation that would contradict her stated beliefs about sexual assault. She's also knowingly defended a guilty child rapist in court by attacking the 12-year-old victim's credibility - and laughed about it later. Granted, lawyers sometimes have to lie, but some might say that her later willingness to make idle banter and chuckle about the incident indicates that she was making light of it. Additionally, she has taken huge sums of money from countries with terrible human rights records, including Saudi Arabia, which subjugates women, executes homosexuals, and carries out many other injustices.

Naturally, if asked about some of these things, there's a good chance Hillary would flatly deny them, as she is a liar - and quite possibly a compulsive one, at that. Most people have heard about her testimony before Congress and the American public wherein she told lie after lie after lie after lie after lie... after lie. She's also taken a great deal of criticism after ostensibly lying to the families of the victims of the attack in Benghazi in order to support a narrative that was verifiably fabricated to save face for the administration. However, her dishonesty is hardly limited to such large matters. In fact, she's long claimed to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, a mountaineer who was on the first climbing team to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. One problem - when she was born, he was just Ed, an obscure New Zealand beekeeper. He didn't make the trip until she was five years old. She also told Dateline in November 2001 that her daughter Chelsea had gone out for a jog around the World Trade Center and stopped for coffee when the first plane hit on 9/11, though it turns out that she was actually safe in her apartment near Union Square when she first heard the news. She also claimed to have left the White House with Bill "not only dead broke, but in debt." As they were leaving the White House, they bought a seven-bedroom house in D.C. - this seemed to indicate that they weren't exactly in dire straits. Perhaps the most laughable example is her account of her trip to Bosnia in the '90s. According to her personal testimony, which she gave at least three times, she landed "under sniper fire" and she and her guards "ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." Video later surfaced showing her calmly strolling out of her aircraft, stopping to greet a little girl, posing with a group of students on the tarmac... you get the picture. Not a whole lot of sniper fire and running for cover.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, there is evidence to suggest that the Clintons have engaged in unspeakable levels of corruption over the 23 years since Bill took office. I can't afford to go into too much detail here, but but the basic pattern shows foreign and domestic entities donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation (or paying similar amounts for speeches) and then receiving political favors, be they in the form of legislation or simple lip service. This practice has led to the Clintons supporting human rights violations in Rwanda, giving control of 20 percent of the US's uranium production capacity to Russia, pivoting 180º on their support of the Keystone pipeline, supporting the destruction of rain forests in Colombia, and many other things, all while raking in millions upon millions of dollars. The extent of the corruption is unfathomable, and you can watch this short documentary for free on YouTube for much more detail. She's already received $48.5 million from Wall Street hedge funds this cycle, and when pressed on the Clinton Foundation's alleged corrupt dealings, she indicated that Bill would continue to head it up were she to become president.

In the red corner, we have Donald Trump. If you've watched the news over the past year, you've undoubtedly heard dozens of cringe-worthy, even infuriating stories regarding Trump. Many of these deal with the first (and most obvious) of his major character flaws - the fact that he is insensitive and tactless. Who could forget the time that he mocked a disabled reporter? Or the time that he denigrated POWs for being captured? Or the time that he claimed a female journalist "had blood coming out of her 'wherever?'" Even recently, when he was attacked by the family of a soldier who sacrificed his life in the Iraq War, he took the opportunity to insult the family's Muslim culture. The man clearly has either no capacity to hold his tongue - or worse, no interest in doing so. In many cases, he says that his "Trumpisms" are justifiable, claiming that he's fighting political correctness. When asked if he regretted his comment regarding John McCain and other POWs, he responded in the negative, claiming that it provided him a boost in the polls. The man only cares about his polling numbers and derives his morality from popular opinion, which - sorry, populists - doesn't govern ethics.

Secondly, Trump is an authoritarian strongman with an ego the size of the country he hopes to govern. One of his more well-known phrases is as follows: "I alone can fix it." That's not the sort of thinking that America was founded upon nor the type of thinking that brought it to be the great nation that it still is today. Our nation is built on the backs not of self-aggrandizing autarchs but of normal people - people who, though they come from disparate backgrounds, are united by a devotion to the ideals of freedom and self-determination. It seems that this devotion is at a low, as Trump has run a surprisingly successful campaign of demagoguery. Though his policies are hardly as extreme, this is exactly the sort of agitation that has led to the democratic rises of tyrants throughout history.

Also, true to his self-centered strongman persona, Trump has a preoccupation with destroying his enemies at all costs. Take, for example, the chaos during Ted Cruz's speech at the RNC. Cruz couldn't give an outright endorsement to the man who had tacitly called his wife ugly and claimed his father had conspired to kill JFK, so he did what he could by delivering a veiled criticism of Hillary and telling voters to vote their conscience and not simply stay home. The RNC and Trump campaign had seen and okayed his speech, and they allowed him to give it. Trump, however, had his supporters from the New York delegation begin booing him, and walked out into the crowd just as things were getting loud. The whole fiasco may have actually lessened Trump's convention spike, but he was able to shiv Cruz, and that's all Trump cared about. Listen to a more in-depth analysis here (3:45). Further, Trump has said that, if elected president, he would use $20 million to create PACs to ensure that his rivals in the election, Kasich and Cruz, wouldn't hold office. Yes, this man would spend $20 million against members of his own party that he's already beaten. This extreme sort of petty spitefulness does not speak well to his character at all.

Now, more than ever, people are throwing around the phrase "lesser of two evils," stating that they will vote for their party's candidate simply because it isn't the other party's candidate. While I understand why people might do this, the strategy seems short-sighted to me. Our ability to vote is one that should never be taken lightly - it's one way of making our voice heard and telling the government what views and values we hold. If both parties see large voter turnouts, the Democrats will reason that they can get away with nominating even the most corrupt candidates and the Republicans will reason that they sacrifice their principles by nominating other Trump-like characters. Voting for your party, even when you find your candidate so disagreeable, is tantamount to telling that party that it has power over you and has license to do whatever it wants. On the contrary, if both parties notice that significant portions of their voter base either stay home or choose to vote third-party, it will send a clear message that we as Americans will not stand for the sort of things we are seeing. While it may seem to make sense to vote for Trump in order to beat Hillary (or vice versa), one has to remember that the world will not end in four years and that America still has a future to look toward, regardless of the result. Candidates such as these are the reason that checks and balances exist, and while the office of the presidency holds considerable power, it is not absolute. In the end, your vote is your own, and you may use it as you wish - just remember the significance of what you do and don't abandon your values without consideration.