If there is one thing I cannot stand about the left, it is the attitude of sniveling righteousness with which various of our activists pick apart our candidates for deviations from the liberal Canon of Approved Positions. The glass is never half full, but always half empty, and the outrage flows the more freely the more likely a Democrat seems to win. Waiting in the wings, of course, is that cesspool of disaffected liberals unwilling to ever compromise on anything – the Green Party, untainted as it is by the actual exercise of power. Politics, in that small spectrum of the populace, is not the art of compromise; it is the craft of sticking ever harder to one's own positions, blissfully disregarding the question of whether or not majorities will ever be found to coalesce around them. Who needs compromise when you can bask in your own purity, secure in the knowledge that you'll never be called upon to legislate?

One would think that after the debacle of 2000, the Greens would have slunk away in shame and horror over the atrocities they helped make possible. But that would be disregarding the quasi-evangelical desire they have for bellowing their moral superiority from every available rooftop.

Here in New York, in a testament perhaps to the pragmatism that is the virtue of our state, the Greens are piteously irrelevant, even if they insist on running a full slate of candidates. For example, because Eliot Spitzer is too right-wing for their refined tastes, they're running some crusty non-entity in opposition, always on the look-out to gaining a statewide line. I'd suggest to anyone concerned about Eliot's bona fides a brief glance at a right-wing blog, where his election is the subject of despair bordering on apoplexy.

Further afield, the picture is more grim. Concretely, in a year when we have a chance to regain the Senate and finally throw a wrench in the gears of the most radical administration to ever lay waste this country, the Greens are running candidates in two races that promise to be close: Pennsylvania and Washington. In Pennsylvania, Bob Casey now has a Green to contend with to his left; said Green is on the ballot only because of republican support. The alternative to Casey is not that Green – it is Rick Santorum.

In Washington, the place where statewide elections are decided by a few hundred votes, the Greens are self-consciously setting themselves up as spoilers to deny Maria Cantwell another term. From a Green blog:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a story about Aaron Dixon's run for US Senate. The article says there is a chance that his run could throw the election to the Republican nominee.

Should this matter to Greens? Is using the power to turn an election to one party or another legitimate? Is it acceptable to use the limited power the system allows us to create conditions unfavorable to Democrats if Republicans also benefit?

Would many of us hesitate for a moment if the party being hurt were the Republicans? Of course not. So, what is needed is for more Greens to recognize that the Democratic Party is as unlikely to speak for what we value as Republicans.

Yes, because the Democrats – even in the age of Alito, Iraq, New Source Review, Katrina, and so on and so forth – are just not good enough. Why accept a lawmaker who you may agree with only 80% of the time when you can help elect one who will not vote your way at all?

It's time to call the Greens what they are: shameless tools of the status quo. They are worse than worthless: they are useful idiots helping advance the agenda of the radical right. The worst part is that they know this full well. A vote for a Green, in any race, anywhere, is a vote for more of what they brought us back in 2000. And we'll just have to live with that, because in the purity-driven universe of Green politics, the only thing that matters is the ability to be above it all on the sidelines, fiddling merrily as the country burns.