Ted Glick was writing mash notes to Barack Obama. That may surprise readers of his previous "Progressive Beware" of Barack piece where he railed against Barack for his support of the nuclear industry and the laughable 'clean coal.' And it might be surprising for those who know that Teddy's a Green and really should be using his time to promote Green candidates. Or his planning to do multiple articles the last weekend before the general election?
I-Need-Attention Benjamin took her tired act to a Hillary Clinton event on Wednesday and still sobs that most of the press didn't identify her in the next day's write ups. Though she never fasted in the summer of 2006, she's always been starving for attention. What better way for a Communist, Green or Democrat (we're never sure what her party i.d. is from day to day) to do so than by screaming like a bag lady about the children of Iraq and Iran at Hillary? Don't hold your breath for Benjman to do the same with Barack.
What's really happening, as Betty's older sister likes to ask?
What's really happening is that the Green Party is demonstrating it is both idiotic and not a real national party.
They're using their limited space to sing the praises and encourage a political candidate from another party. Think hard and tell us what Democratic writer would be rooting for a Republican presidential candidate? Let's use the most generic of Democratic writers, Eric Alterman. Search your brain for his piece on Al Gore or John Kerry in 2000 or 2004 where he wrote in it, "I'm really rooting for Bully Boy." He never wrote those pieces because, whatever his other faults, Alterman's a Democrat and not a complete idiot.
It is idiotic for a Green to write mash notes to Barack.
For starters, there are Greens who will run statewide or municipal races and get little to no press so if the Green writers are so hard for something to write about, they could use this time period to promote candidates like Jason Wallace, an Iraq veteran running on the Green Party ticket for the 11th Congressional District in Illinois. Do they think Wallace and other candidates don't need the attention? Do they think they can wait until months from now to start promoting his candidacy?
Why the hell are Greens picking sides in a Democratic presidential race to begin with?
It's idiotic. The Democratic race for the presidential nomination has come down to two candidates currently locked in a dead heat: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. If you're a third party, you're supposedly hungry for votes. When Greens like Teddy write their I HEART Bambi pieces and rip apart Hillary, when they maintain that Barack will most likely receive the Democratic nomination, they should realize that they are telling any Hillary supporter, should she not receive the nomination, that they don't want their votes. They don't want the votes or the support.
Whichever candidate gets the nomination, there will be some people -- as there always are -- who will say, "I won't vote for ___." Their vote is up for grabs. Green 'leaders' have made it very clear that they are no different from other Hillary Haters and perfectly willing to utilize sexism and smear the first woman candidate for president the country's ever had who's stood a real chance at getting the nomination. Teddy and others love to dismiss her accomplishments and refer to her as "Billary." That's really sexist.
And sends a loud message that Green Party 'leaders' are ASSHOLES.
And dumb ones at that.
Last week, Gina and Krista polled The Common Ills community as to who they would support if Hillary didn't get the nomination and Cynthia McKinney should have had a lock on their votes. She didn't even poll 1%. Some optimists voted undecided (3%) because they were waiting for McKinney to finally disown Teddy's remarks that she was only running for 5% of the vote. 97% stated they would vote for Ralph Nader.
That could have been Cynthia's 97%. She lost it for two reasons. First, stating she was only running for 5% of the vote. Second, by the sexism in both her own campaign and the Green Party's. (Posting an endorsement by a man who's made it his business for over four decades now to smear and ridicule the feminist movement wasn't a wise move.)
People look for cues, they look for signals. And the signal the Green Party has sent by allowing their public losers to be its face has been "We're a Homophobic, Woman Hating Party."
Teddy Glick and I-Need-Attention Benjamin and the Green who e-mailed us have never, EVER called out Barack's use of homophobia to scare up votes in South Carolina. The White Mamas love to call out perceived racism but they ignore sexism and they ignore homophobia. Maybe they're "Green" because they're so full of s**t. We understand it does make the grass grow when used as fertilizer.
Nationally, the Green Party is a disgrace.
A smart party would have been looking to pick off the supporters of whomever does not get the nomination. Unless the Green Party is betting on that person being Hillary, they've played a bad hand, a losing hand, and, let's face it, as Joshua Frank has so often outlined, that's the only hand the national Green Party has to play.
What a pack of losers. When Jess finishes law school, he plans to, if he hasn't left the Green Party, look into legal challenges on a number of the leaders (Green who is e-mailing us, that's why Jess has no interest in talking on the phone with you). He feels they blew 2004 (and that's why he voted for Nader in 2004 and not the Green Party nominee). He feels they blew it by choice and he feels they're blowing 2008 by choice as well.
The rest of us? We can't figure out if they're working so damn hard to shoot themselves in the foot out of trickery or stupidity.
But we do know that a third party, a real one, doesn't exist to promote another political party. We do know that they don't gather support by attacking someone already under attack. We do know that hopping on a high horse to lecture about racism (and not notice the very real racism that has been at play in this campaign cycle) while ignoring overt and admitted homophobia as well as the very prevalent sexism only makes you look like the small-minded hypocrites you are. We do know that stating "most Whites are racists" isn't going to lead the majority of the population to your party.
The reality appears to be that Green media 'leaders' aren't really Greens out of any political party desires. They're 'Greens' because they're Democrats but they want to have a little superiority so they identify as Green. Come election day, they'll vote Democrat and continue to fraudulently (mis)lead the Green Party. Meanwhile actual Greens will wonder why the hell the party never achieves anything?
It's because of the 'leaders.' They're not wanting to build a political party. They want to run a Democratic 527 and pretend they're a political party to the grassroots while really they want to play mini-power brokers in the Democratic Party. "I can deliver X number of people!"
Two-party rule will never be broken by a 'third party' which is nothing but an auxiliary to the Democratic Party. When the Green membership gets fed up enough with their leaders allowing the party to play Democrats Little Sister, they may be able to be a real party. For now, it's all pretend and play acting.
Cynthia McKinney will most likely be their nominee. That's Ms. 5%. That's what she's running for, five percent of the vote, that's what she's defined as 'victory.' Dream small, Cynthia, dream small.
Back when McKinney used to boast that she would run a real race, there was some anger among community members over the fact that Ralph Nader's public flirtation with another run had some of the same Greens writing their 'Please reconsider Cynthia' columns months earlier in attempts to cajole her into reconsidering a run were suddenly dropping Cynthia like a hot potato and embracing Ralph. That did happen. They cheered Ralph like crazy.
Then Ralph, rightly as C.I. pointed out, announced he wasn't going to run on the Green national ticket. That's due to the fact that Ralph Nader wants to run a real campaign. He's not interested in the nonsense that Green 'leaders' are proposing each election cycle: Run for a tiny percent of the vote and don't tick off Big Brother Democratic Party.
But before Ralph made that announcement, when the rush from Cynthia to Ralph took place among Green 'voices,' we called it out here and noted that Cynthia was being treated like she just wasn't good enough. We noted the "she."
So it's really no surprise to see the Green 'leaders' and 'voices' make all their anti-woman statements about Hillary. It's really no surprise because they are a sack of s**t pack of sexists. Cynthia wasn't good enough for them if they could have Ralph. They couldn't have Ralph so they'll settle for Cynthia. And these same voices, who now want to pen column after column on Jeremiah Wright, while saying that it's a non-issue people should stop focusing on, never examined their own racism and sexism at play when they were trying to hump Ralph's leg mere months ago.
We loved the angry posts when Ralph announced his run and that he wasn't seeking the national Green Party's endorsement. We enjoyed their snit-fits. They had already made it clear that Cynthia McKinney, an African-American woman, wasn't good enough for them. Now it appears they're stuck with her. So maybe that's why they're so focused on praising Barack?
Unhappy with their own nominee, they want to lecture others about racism. They ought to look closely in the mirror at their own tired, pale faces before pointing the finger at anyone else.
Cynthia McKinney explored running for the Green Party nomination and then decided against it. When she did they publicly begged her to reconsider. The woman not only ran for the nomination, she switched her party affiliation from Democrat to Green. And yet when there was a chance (C.I. said, as they were drooling, that there was no chance Ralph would run for the national nomination) they could have Ralph, Cynthia was no longer good enough for them and they started penning their mash notes to Ralph. That was the perfect example of the intersection of racism and sexism. So maybe they should consider writing about their own issues because they clearly have a boatload of them.
Especially if you wrote publicly begging Cynthia to reconsider her decision not to run and then you wrote excited mash notes to Ralph publicly, you really have some explaining to do as to how that happened. So if you're serious that you think racism is an issue -- with "most Whites," but not yourself, you might consider writing about the racism and sexism you displayed when you thought the Green Party had a chance at Ralph and rushed to shove Cynthia to the side.
There are rumors that Cynthia's actually using the Green Party run to build another political party (the Reconstructionist Party), if so, good for her. After the way she was treated -- after being begged to run for the nomination -- she shouldn't trust her Green 'friends.'
Rank in file Greens need to, as Jess is doing, stop donating money to the party until the national leadership starts imposing some discipline. No Green 'voice' needs to be cheering on Barack Obama when the Greens will have their own political nominee. If all of the leaders aren't corrupt, they can demonstrate that by making it very clear that the Green Party is not supporting whomever the Democratic nominee is. But we think (including Jess) that the national party won't do a thing. We think that they're not a real political party.
They proved it in 2004 and you could have written that off as bad strategizing but they're already giving every indication that they intend to repeat their party destroying tactics of that cycle.
For the record Teddy couldn't even get the support of the people of New Jersey when running for office. We're not talking votes, we're talking donors. In fact, if you left out his family members across the United States, he had a problem getting donations period. He's a real loser, an established loser. At some point, if the Green Party wants to make clear that they don't set out to be losers, they might try presenting other voices to the public.
Coco Chanel famously said, "Dress shabbily and they remember the dress. Dress impeccably and they remember the woman." The same can be said of the public voices a party choose to utilize.