Monday, August 19, 2024

Media: The embarrassments of the 2024 presidential campaigns

The 2024 presidential election plays out like a wheel series.  Give it a week and each campaign will come even more into focus.  Take the Trump campaign where the news emerged last week that former US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard -- or, as Trina calls her, Trashy Garbage -- was advising Donald Trump.  Make sense, in 2017, she advised Bashar al-Assad so she has a history of playing footsie with brutal dictators.

 

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The week's most political embarrassing moment, however, took place on Saturday as the US Green Party held both a coronation and a viewing of the corpse.  The coronation was for political failure Jill Stein and the viewing of the corpse was for whatever remains of the Green Party.

 

The Green Party of the United States?  It arrives on the national political map in 1996 as the Association of State Green Parties and has its greatest success in 2000 when Ralph Nader is their presidential candidate and Nader wins 2.8 million votes.  It was the high moment of the party which morphs into The Green Party of the United States and never, ever again has the same impact. 


Every four years, they serve up the lie that they're trying to build a national party.  And then they disappear for three years.  No one epitomizes this "catch you later" platform than the hideous Jill Stein.


The party's 2012 presidential nominee and 2016 presidential nominee more than Jill Stein who is now the party's 2024 nominee because nothing screams "NOTHING LEFT!" louder than a political party willing to run the same nominee three times.  The Grand Old Party also suffers from this fate and it speaks just as poorly for them.


The choice of a nominee sends a message to voters.  


Selecting 74-year-old Jill Stein sends the message that: We're not building a future, we're stuck in a geriatric past.  Long before the noted deaths of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein -- deaths that took place while one elderly woman sat on the Supreme Court and the other elderly woman served in the US Senate -- Americans were already feeling unrepresented by a government made up of the extreme elderly.  In a country where the minimum age to run for president is 35 and not 70, Jill's coronation isn't reassuring anyone. 

 

Nor are her press stumbles.  For example, she's been citing a 900+ pages Senate Intelligence Committee report, insisting it praises her, and it doesn't.  But she knows the lazy media's not going to go through the text and footnotes to a 900+ page report.  She and her campaign also lie that she has 45%  of Arab American voters who will be voting for her.  She doesn't.  She's basing that claim on one poll, taken in July, before Kamala Harris was the DNC official nominee.  More to the point, the organization in question, The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, is an organization that represents some Arab Americans, not all.  Its membership isn't that large and its rules do not require that you be Arab American to become a member.  But if Jill didn't have lies, she wouldn't be able to speak.


In her acceptance speech on Saturday, she insisted, "We are rising up and we are unstoppable."


She wishes.  What is she?  An eternal failure whose own campaign website doesn't provide a text for yesterday's acceptance speech probably because she served up more lies than even Donald Trump.  For example,  "In the last election in 2020, one out of every three eligible voters chose not to vote for the two candidates that were rammed down their throats.  This is a revolution in the making."


One-third of eligible voters (not registered voters) did not vote in 2020.  It wasn't due to "the two candidates that were rammed down their throats."  Howie Hawkins, for example, was the Green Party's presidential nominee and he got 400,000 votes.  The Libertarian Party's presidential nominee was Jo Jorgensen and she got 1.8 million votes.  They weren't the only candidates in the presidential election but, along with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, they made up the top four vote getters.  If people in 2020 wanted to vote for someone other than "the two candidates that were rammed down their throats," they had the opportunity to do so despite the lies of Jill Stein.

 

A month after the 2020 election, Domenico Montanaro (NPR) reported on the 80 million eligible voters (again, not registered voters) who elected not to vote in 2020

 

To better understand what motivates these nonvoters, NPR and the Medill School of Journalism commissioned Ipsos to conduct a survey of U.S. adults who didn't vote this year. The Medill school's graduate students did deep dives into various aspects of the survey here.

Nonvoters' reasons for not voting include:

  • not being registered to vote (29%)
  • not being interested in politics (23%)
  • not liking the candidates (20%)
  • a feeling their vote wouldn't have made a difference (16%)
  • being undecided on whom to vote for (10%)


Yeah, Jill's lie isn't backed up by actual facts or data.


She's a grifter and a fake ass.  She fails at everything.


Including picking a vice presidential running mate.  She offered the slot to Abdullah Hammoud who had to remind her that, per the Constitution, he was too young to qualify as a running mate. After that fiasco, Jill and her campaign let the press know that her pick would be a Palestinian American -- see NBC NEWS, THE GUARDIAN, ALJAZEERA and THE NEW REPUBLIC.


And then she picked . . . Rudolph T. Ware III.


Who?


That's the question you have to ask about a minor character who's WIKIPEDIA page is a violation of the very openness and transparency WIKIPEDIA says it promotes.  How else to describe a webpage with multiple revisions including 16 -- that in violation of transparency -- can't even be pulled up any longer?  


Who's Rudolph?  Someone who goes by "Butch" now.  Why?  Who knows?  When was he born?  Who knows?  Is he married?  Who knows?


Jill announced Butch was her running mate on Friday.  And they still can provide you the basics.


In fairness, Jill refuses to provide her own basics -- like explaining her marriage or that she has two kids.


Equally true, the most recent press release at her website right now is "Jill Stein files FEC complaint against CNN for violating corporate contribution rules and coordinated communications with Trump and Biden campaigns. Seeks injunction against upcoming debate"  which was released . . . June 20th.  Two months ago.  This is a serious political campaign?  On her YOUTUBE channel, you'll see she releases a video every week.  That's her idea of running for president and it's another reason why she's such a joke.

 

And not only is the text of the speech not posted, it's also not wanted.   On YOUTUBE, currently, the video of her speech that she has posted has only  916 views.  No one's interested in her failed campaign.


If they were, they'd be calling out the shell game she's trying to pull off.  She said she'd name a Palestinian American as her running mate.  Apparently, all approached rejected the idea of being the prop intended to give depth to the ultimate Karen and that's how she ended up with 'Butch' who, for the record, isn't Palestinian and also isn't Arab.  He's African-American and he converted to Muslim.  Only in the world of political theater -- and bad political theater at that -- does Butch qualify as Palestinian American.


Jill spends a lot of time whining about how mean Democrats are and how they try to keep other people off the ballot.  We're just supposed to listen to her whines and pretend she's rightfully aggrieved.  One of today's whines?  She can't get on the ballot in New York state.  Why? Because of a rule from when Andrew Cuomo was governor.  Here's the Green Party on that, "A source tells us Andrew Cuomo has SUCCEEDED in inserting the same language into the 2020 New York State Budget to kill the Green Party that was struck down by a judge in March." And that reveals the fraudulent nature of the national Green Party.  That's from their March 20, 2020 press release.  Over four years ago.  They had four years to address this through the courts, via ballot action, what have you.  Lazy Jill shows up every four years to do nothing but whine.  Nationally, the Green Party is inactive unless it's a presidential election year.


And last week saw a New York judge rule that Robert Kennedy Jr could not be on the ballot in New York.  Why?  He lied on his paperwork.  He doesn't live in New York.  He tried to put a lie over and that's why candidates face lawsuits.  


Or take independent presidential candidate Cornel West's removal from the Arizona ballot.  AP reported last week:

 

When Denisha Mitchell was asked why she filled out paperwork to serve as an Arizona elector for the independent presidential candidate Cornel West, her first response was “What?!” Her second: What’s an elector?

“I was shocked and surprised by it all. I didn’t even know what an elector was,” Mitchell told The Associated Press on Friday. “The crazy thing is it was all forged. None of it was my handwriting. It was definitely not my signature. My email was wrong, my address was wrong.”

Mitchell’s case is the latest example of dubious tactics used in an effort to qualify West, a left-wing academic, for the ballot in states across the U.S. It’s also among the more egregious. It’s an effort that West himself apparently knows nothing about. His campaign did not immediately respond for comment Friday evening.


You won't hear Jill Stein condemn Junior for lying about his residency or condemn whatever group collected signatures for Cornel's campaign.  Doing so would be admitting that there is a reason, a justified reason, for the legal challenges that come about every four years.  It would also be admitting to how they do nothing for three years and then spend a presidential election year pretending otherwise.