Saturday Morning Essay: Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party, for President of the United States of America: Because Why the Hell Not?

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Okay, in today's email:

Wally --

I need you with me on this one.

Tonight's deadline is our biggest yet, and I need everyone pitching in.

Give $75 or whatever you can:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Today

Let's go,

Barack

First of all, I like the hip, colloquial language. Why shouldn't these solicitations be fun? They should be. But can I tell you what I thought when I read it? I thought, first of all, that throwing some money into Barack Obama's campaign might be a good way to get me on a different kind of list. You know what I'm saying? Mr. Obama, for all his wonderful qualities, claims the right to assassinate American citizens (a) with no prior warning, (b) with no charges filed, (c) without due process of any kind, and (d) without revealing the official reasoning, apparently contained in a memo written by his Office of Legal Counsel, that permits him to whack Americans according to subjective standards of his own making. So far, it seems, this awesome power will only be exercised against Americans who happen to be out of the country, but logically speaking (to the extent that such a qualifier means anything in such a context), there's no reason the power needs to be so limited.

Thus, your faithful blogger, who enjoys the fairly regular ramble along the sylvan byways of his home town, might one day find himself, as he walks along the shore of the muddy slough we call a creek, trailed by a strange, ungainly aircraft which releases Hellfire upon his person; and then, there where once your faithful blogger stood, is a smoking crater. Waldenswimmer has been vaporized, along with two or three other exercise enthusiasts, a lady pushing a baby stroller, and the local high school crew team who just happened to be rowing by at that unfortunate moment. All of these Americans are "collateral damage" of the Predator strike, and will not be spoken of again.

Seventy-five bucks seems like pretty cheap insurance against such a turn of events. I pay a lot more for car insurance, and I have some control over what happens to me in my car. Yet I can't help but feel that this is a pretty unhealthy way for an American citizen to think about the relationship between himself and his Commander in Chief. Freaking sick, in fact. Should I use a campaign contribution to buy protection from Obama, Inc. ? Plus, Barack Obama doesn't really need my money for his campaign. He's asking for it because he needs cover for the absolutely gargantuan corporate donations he's going to receive. It looks bad (it looks like Romney, in fact) if he's seen as a sort of political NASCAR driver, emblazoned with decals from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase and Raytheon, and without any real money from the American commoners behind him. You know? So cash from individuals puts a better spin on things. That's what I would be contributing toward: spin control. Either way, the President will spend about one billion dollars in his campaign. He'll set "a new record."
I think we can all be proud.

It sounds as though Dr. Stein thinks the way many of us do. She worked on campaign finance reform in Massachusetts, succeeded in passing an initiative, and then the legislature repealed the measure. She then had an epiphany: you can't change political problems by working on single "issues" from the outside. You have to become involved in politics and throw the bums out. She's also a "sick care" reformer and an environmental activist; for example, she realizes that every human being on Earth now carries around pesticide residues in their living cells, carcinogens that sit there like time bombs. Whether they go off and become cancerous tissues is strictly a matter of chance. Maybe your immune system is a little depressed on the day a mutation occurs in a major organ. So long, but at least the wheat field was bug free!

I think I'll send the money to Dr. Jill Stein. Here's a question I have for myself: how big a mistake could this possibly be? Is it preferable to vote for the Republican Vulture Capitalist or for President Whack-A-Citizen? With or without me, one of those two guys will be the next President. Seriously, how much does it matter which one? I think it matters to two people: Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That might not be justification enough for my support.