Wednesday, March 9, 2016

A Footnote To This Morning's Post

I should note that Maine has one of the "biggest" Green parties in the country, the Maine Green Party boasts that Maine has the highest percentage of Greens of any state.  And they have actually won a few elections here (though they've lost many times more than they've won) and they do have the potential to act as spoilers in our elections.  If you were puzzled as to why I've spent time on this. 

And, for the record, if Bernie Sanders were to be the nominee, Greens wouldn't uniformly support him.  The Colorado Greens have released a statement in response to Oklahoma Greens  that includes this:

However, we do have stark differences in our platform from even the Sanders campaign. Because we are a global party as well, we are very concerned about our country's destabilization of peace around the world and perpetuation of wars for oil. We believe it's time to finally de-fund the military industrial complex and instead redirect those funds toward things like a guaranteed minimum income, jump-starting a green economy and providing free education from preschool through graduate school.

Instead, Sanders has voted over and over for continued funding of the Iraq war, even though he initially voted against its authorization, for increased funding every year of Israel's apartheid regime ... and in 2014, he even voted to gut "food stamps" by $8 billion, all decisions which punish the most vulnerable people on the planet. Additionally, after an auspicious start in 1963 with civil rights activism, Sanders has neither sponsored nor co-sponsored any civil rights-related legislation during his entire congressional career, missing the bus on racial justice completely.

Even just with these few issues, we find the prospect of Sanders as president just as untenable as a Hillary Clinton as president. We believe the American people, and the entire world, need something different. The Democratic Party has been the party where grassroots movements go to die, and we see the Green Party as the electoral tactic for these movements, when they choose to use that tool.

Bernie Sanders isn't pure enough for them, I doubt anyone who has a political record would be pure enough for those guys or their like on the preening, play-left.  When you're playing let's pretend you don't have to take, you know, things like the exigencies of actually governing and legislating into account. 

It also notes that the national Green party they are affiliated with will kick them out if they endorse anyone but the real, true, official, Green Party presidential candidate.  I don't know how many of those "national" Green parties there are in 2016, their organization has never been straight-forward and clear.   I've got no problem with the Green Party enforcing party discipline like that, that's the business of Greens, at least when they don't do what Greens in Maine did last Sunday.  But it's clear that Bernie Sanders would be attacked by some of the Greens.


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