Failed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton suggests she would have gone to war in Syria by now, but Democrats still can’t grasp why some “peace” voters defected to third parties, as Nat Parry explains.
By Nat Parry
In the latest installment from The Election That Will Not End, a renewed attack on third party supporters for supposedly enabling Donald Trump’s surprise victory last year is making headlines, with political commentator Bill Maher leading the charge against those who could not bring themselves to supporting the Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine Democratic ticket in Election 2016.
Comedian Bill Maher.
Singling out Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and leading academic Cornel West – who backed Stein in the general election – Maher suggests that they may be mentally defective for suggesting that Trump and Clinton both represented potential threats to the country and the world. “Have you lost your fucking minds?” Maher asks. “Go fuck yourselves with a locally grown organic cucumber,” Maher tells the “liberal purists” who allegedly cost Clinton the election.
This renewed assault on Stein ignores the fact that her share of the vote was statistically negligible and there were far more people who chose not to vote or had their votes suppressed. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, for instance, has shown that tens of thousands of voters may have been improperly purged from the rolls in key states such as Michigan, which likely had a greater effect on the electoral outcome than Stein’s vote totals. The analysis also rests on the flawed assumption that all of Stein’s votes would have gone to Clinton had the Green Party not been competing.
Nevertheless, the attacks on Stein and West represent the latest salvo in a rather undemocratic and disingenuous effort to shame individuals who have decided to reject the limited choices offered by the two-party system and are exercising their democratic right to build independent political movements. This right is enshrined in a number of international human rights accords agreed to by the U.S. government, but apparently is still rather controversial in the…