I had decided not to participate this time around. I consider myself disenfranchised by the paucity of candidates worth anything but billions of unearned dollars that could be put to better use, in the hands of people who ought to be serving long sentences.

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First, my bias: I had decided not to participate this time around. I consider myself disenfranchised by the paucity of candidates worth anything but billions of unearned dollars that could be put to better use, in the hands of people who ought to be serving long sentences.

Now this: "Jill Stein: The Grifter Who May Hand Trump the White House Again"

I find this to be quite annoyingly dishonest. I'm not attacking Hartmann, just the assumptions that seem to underlie his argument.

Stein never handed No. 45 anything in the first place, and in fact may hand him his famous hat this time around. But let us start with the most un-serious and gratuitously derogatory allegation. A "grifter?" Who! Come here: do you even know what that word means? if she wanted to make easy money, like on books and speaking engagements, she picked the hardest way to go about it. A real grifter would lose a Republican primary.

And looking at the competition, she would have to do an awful lot of grifting to catch up with both Hillary Clinton and No. 45. As a "grifter," Jill isn't even bush-league (pun accidental, but leave it).

So much for that foolishness. And it is foolishness: having read his stuff for years, I know Hartmann's not so dumb he believes that tripe. No: he's suffering from (or maybe just implementing) quadragintaquinquephobia (fear of 45). There are many, many reasons to fear No. 45 as No. 47, but this is the Chicken Little variety, the blind terror designed to start stampedes. It's a bit late in the game for that. Everybody's already terrified who's going to be. Give it a rest.

Now let's look at his version of the "spoiler" trope.

This argument only works if you buy the tired line that third parties merely subtract voters that would otherwise put this or that candidate over the top. But the premise is patently false, and disrespects voters.

Voters don't have to spend their vote at all. It's not an either-or, red or blue proposition. They don't go, "Oh, dear, there's only two candidates, I guess I'll have to pick one." We're told to think like that, but we're told all sorts of stupid stuff.

For the undecided, there's a lot of material from which to work out what the offerings are. After all, nothing has appealed to them thus far; wouldn't they be all the more more likely to read it with a properly jaundiced eye?

Hartmann argues:

"In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes."

Dazzling as these numbers are, they're irrelevant. They don't show that Stein took away Clinton's shot at power. They do show that Stein speaks more effectively to a lot of voters' real concerns. But if Stein won more votes than Clinton lost by or No. 45 won by, so what? Apples and bananas. It doesn't follow. But with words like "pulled in," we're supposed to think Stein took those same votes away from Hillary!

Balderdash.

It's one of those arguments with something left out or distracting, in hopes you won't catch it as you try to compare numbers that are totally unrelated. Like that old riddle:

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

Whether or not we do the math, the answer is none: anyone you meet is coming the other way.

The old "spoiler" trick is based on the baseless assumption that all the voters voting must vote for some candidate. Whereas, Stein "pulls in" voters who weren't going to vote at all, but now see a real alternative.

That's a logical gap even AI could drive a self-driving truck though.

I remember what was done to Bernie (my Senator, by the way) that got Clinton on the ticket. I remember how she proceeded with alacrity to drive voters away at every opportunity. "Deplorables,"for gosh sakes. Stein didn't need to cause the Democrats to lose with Clinton on the job. (I half expect her to get switched in again, even at this late date. October surprise!) But I'm just jumpy.

America is about to elect a president of the Military Industrial Complex (MICIMATT). Maybe you think it really matters whether Wall Street or War Street wins. The reason I don't hold out much hope for a Stein/Ware victory is that a mere president can't stop it anyway. But I like the idea that for once, just for one time, a president would actually try. And maybe I believe the story about how JFK really tried. To be charitable, maybe Biden and Harris believe it too. Who knows what No. 45 believes? Arrogance and courage are two words we have for two very different qualities.

I like Dr. Jill Stein, and I like Dr. Butch Ware. There are people I love, that I don't like this much. I've read and watched them enough to see that they aren't phony corporate sock-puppets like all the professional politicians. I saw the video of Jill being violently taken down by cops, for standing with students exercising their Constitutional rights of free expression. So I don't really want them in harm's way. I just want them to resonate.

But enough of my philosophizing, there's a little more work to do here on Hartmann's heavily-loaded hit-piece. He quotes Stein, and you could be forgiven for seeing a tinge of anti-Semitism (Palestinians are Semites too) in his choice of excerpts:

In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700or 0.23 percent in 2016.

In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.

Now you really have me hopeful for the Greens. But then I'm one of those who, like Palestinian-American voters with families now buried under rubble in Gaza, see a Democrat administration committed to blowing up schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, museums, markets, bakeries--and every living person in the blast zone.

With Stein's numbers, we're now in a position where not voting will guarantee endless slaughter without even a "pause," but voting for Jill and Butch is at least a gesture of resistance. A meaningful gesture, dammit: our sacred vote.

It's not complicated. Voters are drawing the line at genocide. The Israeli expansion, which is clearly aimed at forming a "land bridge" from Europe to Asia, is only possible with the backing of the USA, which is not only "ironclad" but solidifying in Congress. And neither of the "two" parties is even hinting that they will stop it.

So whining that Stein/Ware is polling so high in Michigan shows something entirely else. It shows you think your vote doesn't matter.

I shows that you think Muslims have too much voting power.

It shows that indeed, the Democrats are in deep trouble, and tone-deaf as to why.

It shows that those votes will not be stolen from the corporate parties, but earned by Jill and Butch.

It shows that those votes are not "going to" No. 45. They are going to the Green Party, or nowhere at all. And both major parties are fine with that.

A three- or four-way race means the major parties have to work to get more votes than they would with only two choices, where you only have to win by about three percent. Because polarizing the electorate washes out most of the votes.

That's what I call "grift."

It matters what We, the People express with our ballots. If I vote Democrat or Republican this November, I will go into the record books as supporting the mass extermination of an entire ethnic group. It would be best if the record showed that a large majority of Americans drew the line there.

Our parents fought a world war over that. What are we doing? Being "good Americans"?

You could say I'm a single-issue voter. This year, that's exactly right. And my ballot was mailed to me last week. Now I think I will use it. Maybe it will count.

What will really count is that I used it at all. The key word in "lesser of two evils" is "evil." If those are my choices I'm going to write in Mickey Mouse.

Authors Website: https://attentionage.com

Authors Bio:

I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay tuned...