There are those in whom we have great respect across most of their lives.  Then suddenly they seem to abandon reason.

Why should anyone vote for Jill Stein?  Great question and one I’d never investigated up to now. So I looked.

Shocked. In her views she is no different than Clinton?  Don’t believe it?  Here is her questionnaire compared with Hillary’s, filled out..

Check it out. When it comes to individual rights, both were identical except for their belief in God. Hillary would keep “God” on money, Jill would be against it. On domestic issues, they agree on everything. The small distinction is that Hillary does not agree that marijuana is a gateway drug,  Jill “strongly” does not agree that it is. A very small degree of separation between them. On economic issues they are identical across the board. in both their choices and levels of degree in which they support them.

Only in international relations and defense is there is some gap of difference. One should expect such from someone who has represented our nation around the world  versus someone postulating their positions from the couch in their living room.  Even here the differences are often only in degree of being against or strongly against..  Hillary is definitely not a Republican as she is sometime called by leftists.  The only major difference one can quantify between these two candidates  across the whole spectrum, is that Hillary does not believe in isolationism or running away from every conflict, and Jill Stein does.

That means there has to be something else motivating Stein voters.  What could it be?

It could be personal dislike.  Many people do vote off of their emotions and therefore they may not like Hillary not for anything she has ever done, but just in how she fills out a pantsuit.  Rumors are that Susan Sarandon doesn’t like Hillary because George Clooney does. Such dislike if true certainly is not misogyny, easily ruled out when comparing against the gender of Jill Stein, (but perhaps a factor when compared against Gary Johnson).

It could also be a religious fervor for third parties.  “Woo hoo, I’m a Green Party/  All the bad stuff you Democrats and Republicans have done to the globe does not reflect on me/ Since my party has never held responsibility, we are clean of all your bad decisions/ Buy voting Jill I’m clean as snow”..

Or it could be a European specialist highly familiar with the third party system across the pond and wishing to implement that system here…

Or it could be someone who just doesn’t care about anything (historians called them anarchists 100 years ago) and is happy watching the world burn.

But we CAN rule out some other reasons.

Ones support for Jill Stein is not for the candidate herself.  Most people know very little about her. Is she bi or straight?  See?  You don’t know.  What personal experiences make her more qualified than either Hillary Clinton or Gary Johnson, or Donald Trump or Evan McMillian? See?  Speechless.

To pull the lever or push the button for Jill Stein means that you are voting for a superfluous cause, a sprite of your own imagination.  As in for example: “I’m voting to make the world more liberal.”.

Ok, having been there, that is understandable and the first sane thing you may have said… Because if that is what you believe, voting for Jill Stein is at least one way of expressing it.

But what does that vote get you?  Right now she is on track to come close to her last attempt at the presidency, 4 years ago… 469,501 voted for her… 0.36% of the vote.  This year it may be less.   That is less than 150 people per each county in the entire United States… That per county level is fewer than the numbers that vote in one ward or precinct.

So what statement are you trying to make by voting for someone who averages out to 150 voters out of every single county?  The analogy might as well be “not voting”, such a correlation seems “right-on” here.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard over and over and over and over that if you are a current Trump supporter and vote for Jill Stein it is a vote for Hillary and vice versa.   That keeps getting said because there is some truth to that.  If you were in a three way and the two others got serious with each other, you get shut you down; you lose out.  Same way in a general election… To matter as a person, as a voter, you really can’t be casting your vote to someone who when they ran before, against the same two machines, against the same two ideologies, with the same candidate on the same platform, only muster 3 out of every 1000 people.

Imagine if those 3 activists, instead of being on the outside in a club of their own, were arguing their cases inside a party that will take in 550 our of every 1000 people. Do you have a better chance to win friends and influence people over to your cause?  Of course you do…

Being a partner of one of the most powerful influences on our national destiny, you have far more clout in achieving your aims and dreams, than you would many miles away, crawling to the surface of a dark Scottish loch….*(Police reference)

So what sense does that make to anonymously state your liberalness by voting on a third party?

Now there are times for a third party, don’t get me wrong… On local levels a third party, even Greens, can field a better candidate than the other two local party apparatus’s can muster … Because smart concerned local people sometimes don’t belong to parties.  I’ve supported many such candidates because I want to make the world a better place.  So don’t misinterpret this piece as anti-third party…

But the difference there is that those candidates offered a quality choice, something completely different from the other two available options.  That is not the case here.   Jill Stein is the same as Hillary and yet Stein couldn’t handle the presidency.  In her defense, very few people can. Jill has never held elected office. In fact the argument can be made, that since Trump (who also has never held elective office) would have the backing of a majority of people, he could get enough cooperation and though he knows nothing, the system would respond by putting in his party’s people who could handle things “under” him…
But the Greens in that spot would face animosity.  Instead of voting for Jill Stein this time, Greens need to get serious.  They need to remove themselves from only offering simply an ineffective vanity campaign, and look to begin offering a real one. Which means they need to lobby a top named Democrat or two to jump and pull their high talent and followers across the divide, so their party immediately has clout on the national stage.  Fronting Bernie is what I’m talking about.

Simply put.  Politics is about power and who gets to make the decisions.  Bad as the process can sometimes be for liberals it still beats the historical precedent of war.  We are so much better off to decide our differences without war.   But it is idealistic to think that politics is anything less than a war that decides who wields power…

This year the decisions between the two powerful candidates could not be more stark. The competence level between the two power candidates could not be more stark.  If you think Global Warming should be stopped; if you think national parks should be off limits to oil and gas drilling;  if you think we should save the Monarch Butterfly with government intervention; if you think we should lable GMO’s;  if you think we should pursue the kind treatment of farm animals;  if you think we should accelerate the making of electric cars; if you think we should honor native American’s requests not to uproot their ancestral land simply to benefit some investors; …..

Your vote for Jill Stein, face it or not, is a vote against all of the above…  You actually take away the clout you could have influenced from the left wing of the Democratic party, and removed it completely out of the equation… So when Democrats have to vote inside their caucus to determine their stance and future actions, because you or your candidates were not there to push the liberal agenda, when those votes get taken, results tend to be weighted towards the more conservative of the Democratic party, simply because there were more of them to vote because you and your contingent removed yourselves from the action. …

That is how, a vote for Jill Stein, makes it harder to achieve your objectives than had you either voted for Hillary or Trump…

You say the Democrats are not left enough?  Well if anything Bernie shows us, that was because the left had up to then, abandoned acting politically to influence the party…

No one is going to tell you how to vote.  You may be so mad at the first paragraph these words down here never see the light of day… But if it does, add it to you plate as you decide over the next few days how badly you really desire to influence your own future and save the planet…

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