The Green Party put on a love-fest for Bernie Sanders and his supporters at its convention where Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka were chosen to be the party’s candidates for president and vice-president, respectively. Stein and Baraka claim their that their campaign is a  logical successor to the progressive political revolution Sanders ignited.

Stein and Baraka may claim to “feel the Bern” now but before they jumped onto the Bernie bandwagon, they tried to stop it in its tracks.

Long before the Iowa caucuses, Stein blasted millions of Americans who gave an average of $27 to Sanders’ campaign on the grounds that “every dollar, every phone call, every door-knock on behalf of Bernie is basically a dollar, a phone call, and a door-knock on behalf of Hillary.”1 Baraka went further than Stein, accusing Sanders supporters of strengthening “racist cynicism” and claiming that a President Sanders would order the U.S. military to commit war crimes.

There’s a word for when politicians do 180-degree flip-flops for self-serving reasons: opportunism. Here are some examples:

  • John Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it.
  • Hillary Clinton was a life-long free-trade advocate until she ran against Sanders.
  • Stein and Baraku hated on Sanders and his supporters until they wanted our votes.
  • Stein was for Brexit before she was against it.
  • Stein said there is “no question” vaccines work while echoing anti-vaxxers that “real questions” about vaccines need to be answered.

We already have one presidential candidate peddling conspiracy theories and pandering to fringe lunatics, we don’t need another. If the lesser of two evils is unacceptable, so is the lesser of three evils.

Footnotes:

1. Remark occurs at 14:49 here and re-occurs almost word-for-word in another interview here.

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