The Ultimate Tool

I should preface this by saying that I'm the type of person that left-wing third parties are attempting to pry away from the Dems. I've got a fingerhold on the left-flank of the party. I voted for Nader twice (in '96 and '00), but I've since come to the opinion that the only institutional entity that has even a chance of stopping the GOP assault on, well... everything, is - for the time being, for better or worse - the Democratic Party. I might be convinced otherwise, but if the Greens are running candidates like this, they won't change my mind any time soon:

In an interview yesterday, the Green candidate Carl Romenelli didn't flinch when I noted his campaign was funded entirely by GOP money. "It's quite possible," he said. "We received a lot of money from Republicans." Romanelli made the ballot, you'll remember, due to a voter signature drive funded by $66,000 from 20 conservative donors. The private company he hired was able to roust up over 90,000 signatures despite there being fewer than 20,000 registered Greens in Pennsylvania.

But Romanelli disputed the notion that he was being used by supporters of incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) in order to draw votes away from their Democratic challenger, Bob Casey. He said it showed that there was "enough mutual respect" between himself and his donors to have "a free and open debate."

"I respect the fact that people on the complete opposite side of an issue could respect my point of view," he told me. As Justin wrote yesterday, that respect came from an unlikely pool of GOP lobbyists and extremely wealthy donors.

There's two possibilities here. Either Romenelli is completely clueless and honestly believes that GOP donors are financing his candidacy in the interests of political pluralism - in which case, he's a complete idiot - or he's running to willfully derail the Democratic candidate, Bob Casey (who's certainly no "blue state" dream candidate). Either way, this is a black eye for the Green Party and its hopes for any sort of political relevance.