#ActualFlatticus vs the Green Party

I had said that I wasn't going to write much more about prolific Twitterer Actual Flatticus, aka Alan Smithee — profiled extensively by me already — short of breaking news, but, a light bulb popped in my head a few days ago, on Chris Chopin's hatred (no other word for it) for Jill Stein, and possibly for the Green Party in general. And, since Tuesday is election day, with a Green gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey, Green candidates for the lege there, and a number of big-city Green municipal candidates, it was time to write again.

That light bulb?

The infamous butterfly ballot.

Chopin was old enough to vote in 2000. Lived in Palm Beach County (presuming he didn't live in Miami-Dade to attend University of Miami Law).

Palm Beach County, the home of Theresa LePore and her infamous butterfly ballot. And, if he was living in Miami-Dade at the time, that was the site of the infamous "Brooks Brothers riot."

That said, it was also a state where Ralph Nader, carrying the flag for a coalescing Green Party, ran fairly hard, leading to David Cobb pushing for the "safe states" strategy in 2004 — a strategy I was ambivalent about at best at the time, and reject outright now, along with the entire AccommoGreen mindset of him, Stein and others.

Sidebar: Per Wiki, going by percentage of total vote in each state, and setting aside the three where Ralph wasn't on the ballot, Florida was actually one of his lower-performing states anyway, refudiating Cobb, Stein, et al. Of the 47 states where Nader was on the ballot, Florida was 38th for him. Hell, he did better in Texas. If nothing else, that probably shows that many Greens had a safe-state mindset.

Anyway, Flatty was there. He knew GP issues, at least in broad outlines, long before 2016, unless he was having some lawyer's snow in the men's room then going to Margaritaville on the beach rather than writing in Donald Duck. The fact that he, unlike his big GOP-donating daddy, gave bupkis to federal-level Dem candidates OR the party his entire life adds a bit to the "poseur" idea.

On Twitter, we have the record of him dissing primarily Stein, but also the party.

He couldn’t stand Jill Stein, for whatever reason. Rather than pick something truly nutty, like her sexist Mother’s Day comment, rather, in my time w/him on Twitter, he picked on her idealism, saying she “declared war” on Saudi Arabia as his reference to her quite reasonable call for an embargo on arms sales to KSA. (This is one reason why I said above that he didn't seem to think that deeply outside dark money and national health care; certainly, I didn't hear deep thought from him on foreign policy issues, beyond the true enough "Hillary is a warmonger." He may have expressed it elsewhere, but not to me.)

More Twitter evidence he hated the Green Party. And more here, though this, plus my interactions with him, make me wonder how much of this was Green Party hatred in general, and how much was misogyny toward Jill Stein as a female Green Party presidential candidate.

Flatty also may have believed Stein was an anti-vaxxer. I myself said that her stance seemed pandering at times. But not unbelievable. 

And, then there's the irony of the arrogant Flatty calling Greens arrogant. And bully boy calls one of them "whiny." Guess that's the champion debater!

More here on how he hated Greens having a principled foreign policy.

One of my blog posts after the death of Chopin said that voting Green would be in the idealistic spirit of Chopin. On further hindsight, as I get even more skeptical of his legacy, I don't think so.

Was he pissed Gore lost? And, I don't know who was on his 2016 ballot, but if he wanted real change, in 2000, besides Greens, he had the Socialists and two different batches of Communists.

Related to that, I'm still debating how much weight to put on the word "parody" in his Twitter precis, versus two other options.

One of those options is he was somewhere between an agent provocateur and a high-priced troll girl. (I see what I did there.)

The other is that he really was something like a double agent.

Anyway, whether he was, or was not, something like that, he WAS a slacktivist. No financial donations, for federal campaigns, to any candidate or party. Rejected acting outside the duopoly.

And, in light of Sutherland Springs, I can say that, from what I remember on that subject, at a minimum, he was NOT close to hardcore on the good side of gun control.

Note: Here's a list of Greens running Tuesday, Nov. 7.