Editor’s Note: I’ve always loved and respected Thom Hartmann. That’s why reading his blistering criticism of Jill Stein (excerpt below) was hard for me. I did send him an email explaining why I disagree with him. I sent it not to try to persuade him, but just to make peace with my own conscience, which leaves me still unable to vote for genocide. If you read the excerpt from Thom Hartmann’s article below, be sure to go to the original in Common Dreams and read all the comments following it. Very eye-opening. Seems like 90+ percent disagree with him. Speaking of those comments, this one is among my favorites: “Voting out of fear is the mark of a dictatorship. Voting your conscience is the mark of a free society.” Don]

Jill Stein’s Dangerous Game Could Put Fascist Trump Back in the White House

By Thom Hartmann

Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.

Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.

As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:

“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.

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.

Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.

The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.

Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:

“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 10,700—or 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.”
I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.

Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.

[…]

READ THE FULL THOM HARTMANN ARTICLE HERE:

 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/jill-stein-green-party-trump/a>

ONE EXAMPLE COMMENT FROM A READER (“DARA“) OF THOM’S ARTICLE: