This Time Nader Needs to Be Scrutinized---A Lot!!

[BabsSong]

I may have given Nader the benefit of the doubt (though I thought him delusional) in 2000 because he may have honestly thought he could inspire a third party win. But I put him through the following scrutiny because something smells very wrong this time:

First, voters had a chance this time to further and nominate a Nader-like candidate, Dennis K (and to a lesser extent even Al Sharpton and Dean taking on the Dem Party). They chose not to. Nader now knows that it is impossible to win squat and, thus, this time he knows exactly why he’s in this race. He’s there to destroy the Dems.

Second, he knows this country is literally divided to the decimal point right down the middle. His argument that the Dems don’t need to fear him but need to run a better campaign and reach people also falls flat on its can. If the Dems begin to preach Nader like sentiments, the message obviously would fall on deaf ears of conservatives. Conservatives aren’t going to respond to wild, swinging liberal, populace messages. But, it would guarantee that a certain percentage of Dems deserted and voted republican. Again, Nader knows exactly what goading the Dems into taking that position would mean---big Dem defeat.

Thirdly, Nader wants to promote third parties. When we see the turnout Dems had this primary season because they are angry, a defeat because of Nader will turn even more people furious at third parties. He defeats his own crusade. Again, Nader knows this.

It’s one thing to be a fool. It’s another to be a fool used by one party to dilute the strength of another to secure a win. But it’s being a criminal fool to blow middle class America into oblivion, harm the lives of a few hundred million people, because one is a vindictive, arrogant fool who is getting back at the country because they won’t put him on their shoulders and crown him king. Nader knows full well what he’s doing.

[Skidmore]

1. Unfortunately, we have two arrogant fools who believe

they should be crowned king--Nader and W--twins separated a birth.

[qb]

2. My beef with Nader isn't that he ran in 2000

It's that he ran on the lie that there is NO DIFFERENCE between Democrats and Republicans.

Now he's running on the lie that he'll draw mainly independents and conservative voters. Yeah, right. I just saw a poll that showed Nader would take 2% of the vote entirely from Kerry.

He touts issues like a liberal, but he lies like a Republican.

[BabsSong]

3. Let me add to that....a poll saw today

This poll is the USA one (or whatever) where Kerry leads Bush like 53 to 42; but with Nader factored in it's 44 to 48. Most definitely it is not some even split between the two; it's very definite that the lion's share would come out of the Dems hide. And, you are right about the "no difference between the parites". Does he really think that Gore would have invaded Iraq? Does he really think Gore would have given the whole goddamn country away to the top 1% and on and on. That's total bullshit and Ralph knows it. And I'm sure his little repuke friends will make sure he gets on the ballots in all key states. What a pathetic little man who has lost everything he was once respected for.

[w4rma]

4. Some Scrutiny

'For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of "heightening the contradictions". It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.

Nader often makes this "the worse, the better" point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that the Reagan-era interior secretary James Watt was useful because he was a "provocateur" for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, California, last week: "After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anaesthetiser, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilise us.'"

Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. "When {the Democrats} lose, they say it's because they are not appealing to the Republican voters," Nader told an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, a few months ago, according to a story in the Nation. "We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes."'

That might make it sound like Nader's goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked "about leading the Greens into a 'death struggle' with the Democratic party to determine which will be the majority party". Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Representative Henry Waxman of California. "I hate to use military analogies," Nader said, "but this is war on the two parties."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,393674,00.html

'Last Thursday morning CNN showed Nader voters ecstatic and unapologetic about their part in the election mess. "I'm a part of history," burbled one woman.'
'Along with that woman CNN showed another Naderite who shrugged off the prospect of a Bush presidency with the following: "I believe things have to get worse before they get better."'
'That seems to me to adequately sum up the belief of Ellen Willis who, in a Salon piece supporting Nader last week, wrote: "More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home."'
Source: http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/15/nader /

'When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: "Bush."'
"If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win." - Nader
http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/200008/200008camp_nader1.html

The only prominent Democrat who Nader seems to believe offers the party any chance for redemption is Russ Feingold, the maverick senator from Wisconsin who cast a lonely vote against the Bush Administration's antiterrorism legislation. Feingold is a rare Democrat who consistently says things like, "Ralph Nader is talking about issues Democrats should be talking about." But the mutual admiration goes only so far. Nader rejects the idea of backing a Feingold run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. "I'll say a lot of good things about him, but we're not trying to build the same party," he says.

Nader admits he experiences "lots" of frustration with the Greens. He warns that the party is not running enough candidates to achieve critical mass at election time, and he says it must do so--even where that means challenging relatively liberal Democrats.

Does Nader worry, even just a little bit, that another candidacy might divide progressives and produce another Bush presidency? "Look, I'd rather be engaged in the nonpartisan work of building a civil society. For me, there has been a gradual commitment to getting involved in the electoral process, and I still cling to this civic, nonpartisan vision of how to do things," Nader says. "But if you do an acute analysis of why things don't change in this country, you come back to what has happened to the Democratic Party. When I look at how the Democrats have responded to Enron so far, it seems to me that we all have a responsibility to try to jolt them into an understanding of what is at stake. If Democrats respond effectively, there will not be much point to me or anyone else challenging them. But if they do not, something has to give. People realize that. People know what the Enron scandal means. This is a test. Are Democrats capable of addressing massive corporate crimes effectively? If Democrats cannot, if they are in such a routinized rut that they are incapable of responding, then how could anyone make a case that they should be given deference at the ballot box?"
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020225&s=nichols

Regarding Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Nader said that he is willing to sacrifice them because "that's the price they're going to have to bear for letting their party go astray."
In an interview with In the Times, 10-30-2000

In a recent Time magazine interview, when asked if he felt any regret about the 2000 election, Nader responded, "No, because it could have been worse. You could have had a Republican Congress with Gore and Lieberman." -- Time magazine, 8-05-02

"Let's see what really happens. Ashcroft is going to be a prisoner of bureaucracy." -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001

"I'm just amazed that people think I should be concerned about this stuff. It's absolutely amazing. Not a minute's sleep do I lose, about something like this - because I feel sorry for them. It's just so foolish, the way they have been behaving. Why should I worry?" -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001
http://www.damnedbigdifference.org/quotes