The Life in My Years

“Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn’t be racing to begin with.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

Disclosure: This past June, I left the Democratic Party and registered as an Independent. I have no intention of rejoining any party until the electoral process becomes more democratic and the Democrat Party itself changes its nomination process.

It’s the quadrennial election, and to the surprise of nobody, Jill Stein is back and running for president. Jill has become the political mosquito whose name shows up on my sample ballot once every four years in October.

In a few weeks I’ll be getting my sample ballot, and I’ll open it and puzzle over some candidates who I’ve never heard of (and after election day will probably never hear of again).

They’re the independents, squatters who managed to finagle themselves onto a state ballot, or, if they’ve been really resourceful, a few state ballots. They’ll garner a few votes from family, friends and the hopelessly dissatisfied. For them, there is no there, there; no path to the White House, unless they book a tour. And yet, every four years a small herd of the hopeless hopefuls trot down a short trail that ends at the November precipice.

Noiseless ciphers, they’re not unlike the tree that falls in the unpopulated forest.

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It’s the third and fourth party candidates (the Greens and Libertarians) who also fall every four years, though not always so softly. They have potential, not to rise to the presidency, but certainly to affect the outcome of the contest.

Most of the time the vainglorious third party candidates are little more than a worrisome side-show headed by a gadfly who proposes a platform consisting of some genuinely good ideas, coupled with promises hatched from a recipe comprised of one part good intention and a dump truck full of naivete, flights of fancy, ignorance of political reality, and maybe a little too much Chardonnay. More often than not, third party runs make about as much noise as a waterlogged firecracker, but there have been examples of when third party candidates turned into tripped electoral landmines.

The two most recent were Ralph Nader who, in 2000, helped by a fictitious character named hanging Chad, managed to divert enough votes from Al Gore to put George W. Bush over the top, and then in 2016, when Gary Johnson and Jill Stein pushed Donald Trump over the goal line (with a little help from James Comey).

I’ve heard the arguments that both Gore and, in particular, Hilary Clinton could’ve/should’ve run better campaigns but the fact remains that in both of those elections the knowingly frivolous candidates succumbed to misplaced vanity and shaped history (and not for the better).

And so here we are, less than two months away from election day 2024, and Jill Stein is back and once again she’s wearing the Green jersey.

Not satisfied with having a hand in birthing the hell spawn that is Trumpism, and apparently not contrite (proud in fact, if you take Stein at her word) about bearing some responsibility for the worldwide, yes worldwide, chaos that Donald Trump has wrought, she’s decided it is not in her, and more importantly, America’s best interest, to just remain in shamed seclusion and sit this one out.

Yes, Jill is back. Well, why not. In 2012, Jill ran for president and was but one of the noiseless ciphers. It was in 2016 that Jill (along with Gary and James) made a name for herself. It was in that year that Jill secured her spot, or more accurately, blemish in history. So why not; another quadrennial, another go, even with the threat of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Project 2025 and the hellscape that they promise (and oftentimes with their very words). Why not shoot for destroyer of democracy this time? Like they say, go big or go home.

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What the hell, go for it Jill. Whaddya got to lose?

Oh, yeah, the election.

And Jill knows that. How does she know that? Because as of this writing, she’s only on the ballot in 34 states and her campaign expects that she’ll top out at 40. Stein knows that she’s not going to win because she knows very well and good that her chances of carrying one single state in which she’s on the ballot are about the same as … Ohhh, me towing a ‘57 Cadillac up Mount Whitney using a rope clenched between my teeth.

So why is she running? Fuck if I know. Go ask her.

And you know what she’ll tell you? She’ll say, “we have a path to victory.” She said as much in February of this year in a campaign video. “We have a path to victory, and we are a force to be contended with,” she said. Well, I guess now we know why her platform includes the legalization of hallucinogens.

In the video she claims, “I think the proof is in the pudding. Our campaigns have been very successful. I think in 2012, which was the first time for us, we were on in maybe 42 or 43 states. But then our second time through in 2016, we were on in 47 states, and the states where we weren’t on were very low population states, so in both of these elections, we could have won the election.” Right, and as Mike Myers so aptly put it, “Sh’yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.”

“Very successful?” Really? Jill has an optimistic definition of success. No – check that. She’s deranged. In 2012, Stein received 469,015 votes. In 2016, she was just short of receiving a million more votes than she received in 2012.

Still, in 2016, Stein lost the popular vote to Clinton by 64,396,298, and received 0 ( that’s zero as in not a single fucking one) electoral votes. After such dismal showings, to claim that making it on the ballot in 47 states translates to a potential win is simply phantasmagoric (I needed that 10 ton word to aptly describe her 10 tons of delusion). At her current rate of success, she should, assuming the voting population remains static, be competitive in about 250 years.

By Stein’s logic, when I buy a Powerball ticket (or 47 Powerball tickets, one for each of her states) I have a path to riches. The rub is that the path is so faint as to be nearly invisible. But that’s where the logic stops. If I buy a lottery ticket I’m out a buck. If Stein’s path to victory is the mirage that it’s always been, then the country gets fucked – again. And lest we forget, this time around her expected 40 states is shy of her previous high water mark. Way to grow your party, Jill. In fact, since she’s assigned herself as resident party boat anchor, the party membership has flatlined.

For her part Stein and her staunch apostles have denied any responsibility for Trump’s 2016 victory but the numbers say “liar, liar – pants on fire.” In three battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Stein’s vote total exceeded the margin between Trump and Clinton. But I guess I’d lie too if I’d helped swing the Champagne bottle that christened the S.S. MAGA. I guess that makes Jill just another election denier.

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This time as in 2016 and 2020, one of the choices is a would-be authoritarian; a racist, unaccomplished illiterate who has no respect for authority or the Constitution. The world lived through, and somehow managed to survive the one Trump term because Trump unwittingly (and miraculously) hired people for his administration whose fealty to the Constitution exceeded their loyalty to Trump.

This time we’ve been warned, by Trump himself, and by the probable members of his administration, that MAGA is coming back bigger and badder than its past iteration, and with an aggressive plan as opposed to the last term which was marked by disarray. A second Trump administration will be filled with the minnions and true believers who will be unencumbered by small details such as, decency, order, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

This is the time to sit it out, for the good of the country and the world. This is the time for people of opposing views to understand the threat and to come together to defeat that threat.

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There’s historic precedent. In Belgium, in 1937, a threat by the right wing Rex Party was thwarted when the centrist Catholic Party collaborated with the Liberal and Socialist parties to thwart the authoritarian threat.

In Finland, in 1930, the rise of the extreme right Lapua Party was stymied when a collaboration of three parties formed what was called the Lawfulness Front, which then joined forces with their archrival Social Democrats.

History has shown us what happens when rivals fail to recognize a threat and act accordingly and in concert. During the same interwar period when Belgium and Finland were rejecting authoritarians, Italian and German moderates and liberals failed to take right wing extremists seriously. They thought that they could use the men who they considered to be right wing buffoons and then simply dispose of the pretenders when their shelf lives expired. They erred and the result was cataclysm.

The good news is that level headed Republicans of some stature are following the examples set in 1930s Belgium and Finland, and are stepping forward to endorse Kamala Harris. Long time conservative writer, George Will, Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney have announced that they are voting for Harris. Make no mistake, Harris and the Cheneys are political archrivals. The only small patch of common ground that they share is the belief that Donald Trump can never again occupy the White House. They believe that it’s better for the country to gut out four years of policy they abhor than to risk burning the whole thing down.

This is the time for Democrats, Independents, and level headed Republicans to come together to save what is left of our teetering democracy.

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What this is not the time for are quixotic, vanity challenges by candidates who most of the electorate considers to be unserious.

“Not serious.” That was how progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who herself has been a third party candidate and who decries our current system, described Jill Stein in a recent video in which she also termed Stein to be “not authentic,” and indeed “predatory.”

A damning article in The New Republic labels Stein as a “malignant narcissist who’s killing the Green Party.” The article goes on to describe an interview with Angela Rye on The Breakfast Club in which Stein figured that the number of members in the House of Representatives is 600 (give her a break, she was only off by 165 as the actual number is 435). I wouldn’t expect the guy next-door to know the number but I would expect the would-be President to be somewhere in the ballpark because she might want to be able to keep track of how many fucking votes her pet bill has in Congress.

Looking at Stein’s platform one has to wonder just how serious she can be when she promises that her administration will “Abolish the Electoral College, and elect the president via national popular vote using ranked-choice voting.” That’s a nice goal that I could get on board with but the President doesn’t get to do that. Maybe she and Trump can get together and take a basic civics class to bone up on just how the government that they would like to lead, actually works.

In a November, 2023 interview with Newsweek, Stein was asked, “One of the biggest attacks that you get from Democrats is that you are the reason that Donald Trump became president in 2016. Now that you’re throwing your hat in the ring for 2024, people are already saying that you’re going to do the same thing to Joe Biden in 2024. How do you respond to that?”

Her response was enough to turn stomachs. “First, I take it as a great compliment that I am that powerful, that I singlehandedly decided the election and could decide this one. You know, thank you, I wear that as a badge of honor. Are Democrats scared? Yeah, I think they’re scared.”

Later, during the same interview she continued her baseless protest that she was not the spoiler in 2016.

On the subject of democracy, Stein, in her platform, says, “Our democracy is on life support. Belief in our political system is at historic lows and the number of Americans who feel that neither establishment party represents them is at a record high … “

A large reason that belief in our political system is at a historic low is because the man who she helped put in office has spread a viral contagion of election denialism. If Jill Stein is so concerned about saving democracy, she would follow the examples of Belgium and Finland, and she would follow the lead of the Cheneys and other notable Republicans who have said they will vote for Harris.

Was Jill Stein discussing democracy in 2015, when she supped up borscht at at table in Moscow with Vladimir Putin and Q-anon conspiracy theorist and election denier Mike Flynn? Could that have been the start of a lasting friendship? Maybe, because as was recently reported, when Stein was asked by Mehdi Hassan, a number of times and ways, if Putin is a war criminal she just couldn’t bring herself to outright denounce ol’ Vlad. Instead she did the Moscow two-step.

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A recent ad by Jill Stein accuses Kamala Harris of genocide in Gaza. The ad is a reprehensible misrepresentation and willful ignorance of how things work. Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s Vice-President, whose job description can be succinctly described in one sentence, “Sit down, shut the fuck up and don’t do anything until I (the president) give you something to do and don’t you even consider contradicting my policies.”

Stein and her apostles view the pragmatic world of politics through an idealistic, unserious lens. They apparently believe that, just as people are starting to vote, there’s no political price for Kamala Harris to pay if she uncouples herself completely from the Biden Administration. Can she distance herself? Certainly. But to completely disavow the policy of the administration that she currently works for would be political malpractice.

But let’s consider the scenario in which Harris repudiates Biden’s Gaza policy. Let’s imagine that in mid-September she promises to cut off all aid to Israel once she takes office. Now, she’s put Netanyahu on the clock. He now has a four month deadline in which to finish the job. The hell that Netanyahu has unleashed to date would be nothing compared to what he would loose on Gaza before mid-January.

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I would like to believe that Jill Stein is a smart, thoughtful, reflective person but I find it difficult, no, impossible, given that she’s aware of what Trump has done and what he promises.

I would love to have been inside her thoughts when she considered running again. What questions ran through her mind? Did she at any time consider the question that I used to ask my young children, “If you do this, what is the worst possible thing that could happen?”

In the end I don’t believe that Jill Stein asked herself any serious questions, or considered the ramifications of her run. If she believes that she can win, then she’s just plain “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” and if she knows she hasn’t a prayer to win then she’s simply selfish and vain. I vote for the latter.

In 2000, Ralph Nader made his own doomed run. Would he have made that run knowing that George W. Bush would mire the nation into a made up war that would cost between one million and two million lives and wind up spawning ISIS; or that he would so badly botch Katrina that people in the so-called richest country on Earth would perish under the blazing Louisiana sun waiting for help; or that he would run the nation into the worst economic recession since the great depression? Sure, Bush was in way over his head but did anyone foresee just how bad he really would be?

Stein’s case is far different. In 2016, when Trump was ascending, Stein had a caution light flashing in front of her. Now, eight years later she’s running through the flashing red light and blaring klaxons. And only because – she can. Maybe it’s just a sick hobby. Maybe she’ll be back at it in four more years when she’s 78. Maybe she’ll see that “clear path” when she’s, oh, 90 or 94. Hell, make it 102.

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Stein is all vanity, as it is with the people who are voting for her. It’s electoral masturbation for whatever the reason that gets them off; stick it to the man, or stick it to the two major parties, or just upset the system because the system sucks (and yes, the system does suck).

Some voters are going to vote for Stein because of the Gaza war, in sympathy with the Palestinians. Because voting for the clear third place finisher will help a single solitary Palestinian.

We all know what Trump means for the Palestinians. We aren’t certain about Harris. The Harris policy would begin in mid-January. And while the point can be made that Harris hasn’t repudiated Biden’s policy, the point can also be made that we don’t know what her policy would be come mid-January. And in point of fact Harris herself doesn’t know for certain what it will be in four months. In geopolitics the swirling winds are always changing and uncertain.

The Stein voters insist that they’re voting their conscience. They believe themselves to be the keepers of morality even though they’re willing to sacrifice Ukraine. They know better than the rest even to the point of risking an outright national abortion ban. They’re the Quixotes who are alright with the deportation of millions of immigrants (many here legally) and the upsetting of the Constitution.

They’re own twisted, self consumed “logic” (and I use that word loosely), tells them that it’s okay if the country elects a man who, along with his running mate pushes specious rumors that Hatians in an Ohio town are eating the community cats, and that the running mate has literally admitted that it’s okay to spread that whopper just because it might make a smidge of political hay. It’s no biggie that the possible next President stated, not once, but twice in a nationally televised debate that Democrats are allowing full term babies to be executed. What could possibly go wrong if we hand the keys to the country to a man who, when asked how he would fund universal child care, vomited a word salad of non-sequiturs that began with “child care is child care?”

In the end I have to question whether they’re the moral humanitarians they claim to be. How can they be when they say they abhor the hell that’s going on in Gaza while being perfectly willing to blithely toss millions and millions of other innocents into various corners of a Trump constructed hell.

In the end, is it really about Gaza? Listen to them. “Oh, but my conscience,” they say. “my conscience.” “My,” that’s the operative word. Their “conscience” vote won’t spare one single Palestinian. And while they can accuse politicians of having blood on their hands as regards Gaza, if Stein gifts Trump another win, it will be Stein and her acolytes who will have to deal with the blood stains of their own making.

I’ve heard it said that maybe we deserve another Trump presidency. Who is this “we?” The 12 year old forced to carry her incestuous father’s child to term? The family thrown into poverty because Trump’s tariffs sent prices through the roof? The journalist who gets roughed up a bit for criticizing his orange highness? Maybe “we” means the children and future children who will struggle under a Trump spawned Supreme Court that will rule for decades to come. Or maybe the “we” was Amber Nicole Thurman, who, because of a Georgia law that was enacted after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, was denied a simple dilation and curettage to remove fetal tissue. Doctors fearing prosecution watched for 17 hours as the organs of the young mother of a six year old shut down one by one until they finally took some action – too little too late. You want penance, create your own but leave the innocents, the collateral damage, out of it.

Voters of conscience burned the midnight oil to find a litany of faults in Biden/Harris (and make no mistake, I was never on board with Biden’s run for reelection). Fair enough. But it seems quite clear that choosing Stein was a spaghetti on the wall decision.

How can someone in good conscience put a person in the oval office who, after making three runs at the presidency, is flumoxed when asked how many members make up the house?

Did they hear Stein’s statement in 2016 that Clinton was a greater danger to the nation than Trump? Apparently she doesn’t know who gets to nominate Supreme Court Justices.

Stein supporters hate the notion of big business backing candidates and apparently think that Stein would never dirty herself with corporate money or deal with supliers to Israel, but their consciences never led them to learn that Stein has taken money from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, McKinsey, and Lockheed Martin (a defense contractor by the way, which has supplied both the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets to Israel. and just this past June signed a $3 billion deal to sell 25 more F-35s to Israel).

After all the heavy lifting that their consciences did digging dirt on Biden and Harris, those consciences put down the shovel and said, “Ah, what the hell, I’m spent, I’ll just go with Jill.”

The irony in “voting their conscience” is that they’re voting for someone who, in making this run, knows full well the ramifications and probably knows that she’s a phony and an attention seeker. That is narcissism and a lack of conscience.

They are all contrarians without a cause – and, in absolute fact, in their laziness, without a single microscopic thread of conscience.

“VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.