To this day I still get emails from the Green Party, a depressing sight indeed as any of you familiar with third parties could attest.

But one I got today takes the cake, in which their rushing to embrace an apparent statement by Bill Maher on a recent broadcast that we need a “progressive third party”.

Dear Mr. Maher,

We were thrilled to hear you talk about us when you discussed the need
for a new party — a “first party” — during the June 19 broadcast of
‘Real Time.’

The only part you left out were the words “Green Party.”

Here’s what you said:

“We don’t need a third party.  We need a first party.  You go to the
polls and your choices are the guy who voted for the first Wall Street
bailout, or the guy who voted for the next ten.”

“Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the
military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control,
gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care –
legalizing pot — and steep, direct taxing of polluters?  These aren’t
radical ideas.  A majority of Americans are either already for them or
would be if they were properly argued and defended.”

“[W]hat we need is an actual progressive party to represent the
millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.
Because, bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans.”

Hey, Bill, we’re over here!  What you described is the GREEN PARTY!
We already exist!

Yikes!  Where does one begin?  The party that, as I know first hand, in no small measure destroyed whatever potential it had by its bizarre eagerness to embrace the legacy of the Black Panthers is rushing to embrace the left-neocon Bill Maher.  The unreconstructed Zionist Bill Maher whose only discussion of Jews in his Hitchensian documentary on religion was of Orthodox anti-Zionists.  The Bill Maher whose initial reaction to 9/11 was to attack Bush from the right along the lines of Frank Gaffney.

Just consider Maher’s bill of particulars which the Greens are rushing to embrace.  Gun control?  Gay marriage?  Pre-Reagan tax rates?  These of course are the particulars of Maher’s friends at Huffington Post, which has not been shy about running the likes of Mort Zuckerman on foreign policy.  These are also, of course, the issues by which Marty Peretz and The New Republic have been able to pretend that their liberals for the last 40 years.  I’ve suspected for a long time that we might see an unholy alliance of the liberal blogosphere and The New Republic at some point, but this is what the Green Party wants to bank its future on?!!!

I guess the Greens won’t be going the way of other small left parties before them but rather will opportunistically jump on every new thing that comes its way like the Libertarians.