I don't feel sorry for Kermit the Frog. It shouldn't be "…easy being green" - or Green.

Back in 1968, I cast my first presidential and last third-party vote for the now-unremembered candidate of the Socialist Labor Party.

I have repented of that at considerable leisure; and I have more than once wondered whether others wasted - or did not even bother to cast - their votes similarly, and in sufficient numbers to throw Illinois' electoral votes to Richard M. Nixon.

I no longer have actual nightmares about the possibility, but perhaps I still should.

In Virginia's election last month, the Green candidate, Glenda Gail Parker, came uncomfortably close to handing Richard M. Cheney the casting vote to organize the U.S. Senate in the 110th Congress.

In Pennsylvania, the Republican national and state organizations and generous Republican contributors came within a hair of inserting a Green Party "spoiler," Carl Romanelli, into that Senate race, in an attempt to thwart the ejection of the execrable Republican incumbent, Sen. Rick "Man-On-Dog!" Santorum.

In the desert Southwest, Green candidates have been shielding Republican incumbents from their just desserts for several election cycles past.

As I've suggested to my Green Party acquaintances, "Just vote Republican. That, at least, has the virtue of honesty."

The most hilarious thing I've heard in the afterglow of Nov. 7 is that the Green Party gubernatorial candidate siphoned off votes which would otherwise have gone to Judy Barr Topinka.

No, Rich Whitney's victory for egoism and increased electoral annoyance simply expanded the Green Party's ambit for future mischief-making as a not-very-stealthy "stealth" adjunct of the Illinois GOP.

Politics is a serious business, with serious consequences, best left to serious people

John Jordan Moore

Bloomington