Monday, August 18, 2003

Get Republicans Elected Every November (GREEN) Party

This is a typically hyped up and alarmist story coming as it does from Faux News - Green Party Happy to 'Spoil' Democratic Presidential Run in 2004

However, it does serve as a jumping off point for me to vent more of my anger at the so-called Green Party.

You can blame butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida; you can blame Republican-led efforts to purge black “criminals” from the voter rolls; you can blame Gore for losing his home state of Tennessee and Democratic stronghold West Virginia. All of these are legitimate factors that led to the short-circuiting of our democracy in the 2000 presidential election.
But without a doubt, all of those issues would have been moot and beside the point if Ralph Nader had not run his kamikaze campaign against the Democrats that year.

I was upset with the Green Party long before the 2000 election debacle in Florida. The Greens had been instrumental in helping Republicans to maintain their majority control of the U.S. House or Representatives by helping to defeat Democratic candidates in New Mexico in 1996 and 1998. As this story makes clear Opportunity For Democrats To Regain Majority Begins With New Mexico Election - May 27, 1998 the Democrats loss that year could be directly attributed to the New Mexico Green Party.

The Green Party masquerades as a political party that is especially concerned with the welfare of our environment - and yet on a practical level their biggest accomplishment to date was to assist in the defeat of the first true environmentalist to run for the presidency. So the party’s name is clearly an oxymoron and thus the necessity for a more accurate understanding of the group’s acronym.

Many voters of a liberal persuasion have been tempted in the past to vote for Green Party candidates, especially in races where there is not a Democratic candidate in the race. But this is a mistake, because the more support the party recieves the better it is able to accomplish the one thing that it is good at - helping to elect Republicans. If they were truly committed to doing the things that they say, they would work to re-energize the Democratic Party from within and push it in the direction they think it needs to go - just like the religious conservatives have done with the Republican Party.

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