I’m sure that everyone who voted for Nader back in 2000 was sincere in their desire to help ensure the victory of the candidate so absolutely inimical to everything they believed in.
Seriously, I think that by now even Nader’s dog wouldn’t vote for him knowing what the consequences were last time around. And I frankly find it hard to believe that Ralph has developed such severe dementia that he does not see what his last run at the presidency brought about.
Hasn’t he done enough damage already. Seriously, would someone just lock him, Grover Nordquist and Ron Paul in Ford Pinto and push it backwards down a steep hill?
Liberals – it’s never their own fault. Have fun voting for longer wars in Afghanistan, no withdrawal from Iraq, no universal health care, bombing Pakistan and a much larger war budget. And get the fuck over it. Gore won the election. The fact that it was more important to him to preserve the veneer of “the system works” than to fight for his constituency should prove to any smart person that he didn’t deserve your vote in the first place.
I’m looking forward to your whining when Obama does exactly nothing of the nice progressive things you projected onto his agenda.
A: anyone who tells you that it’s Nader’s fault that Bush won is either a liar or a retard. Actually, that’s not entirely right — they might be both.
B: “Nader running for president for a third time” <– nice headline, AP. This is Nader’s fifth presidential campaign, but I won’t hold a complete lack of historical acumen against you.
Former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell:
“If you want to pull the party—the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking—to what you’re thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t…have…to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.” http://www.distantocean.com/2007/11/the-one-thing-t.html
[...] The Pavlovian attack-dog reaction of The Partisans to Ralf Nader’s latest presidential run is— though entirely predictable —nonetheless astounding. (Visit The Poor Man Liberal Fascism comment section for a sampling.) [...]
Sifu Tweety: I’m not promoting Ralph Nader in any way here. His 2004 campaign was, honestly, kind of embarassing — and I don’t expect much more of him this year. 2000 broke the man, IMO. Not only did he not achieve the 5% needed to grant federal matching funds to the Green Party in future campaigns (this was a clearly stated goal of the 2000 campaign), but he was immediately made into one of the biggest individual scapegoats in American political history.
But none of that renders the spoiler story worthwile or accurate.
I know what you meant. For the record, Nader isn’t my chosen anything. I have no vote (not a citizen), and I asked my friends who did in 2000 to vote for Gore. It is the Democrats who have a Nader fixation. Get the fuck over it, is all I’m saying.
Don’t worry about others; look at yourself and stop electing warmongers who promise health care and deliver NAFTA and welfare reform. Stop expecting “change” every two years or so and then being, like, totally surprised when you don’t get any but instead have the party bosses screw you over again.
It’s always some “traitors” – the Nader voters, or the “Bush dogs”, or lobbyists, or whoever is going to be responsible after November.
Who mentioned “ideological purity”? No one, before you. The problem is the lack of comprehension that the neo-liberal and right-wing politics of the Democratic Party isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. And this is something that has to be dealt with in some fashion. Going around blaming Nader or his voters for the world’s ills is not a reasonable way to do so, it’s a cop-out.
Sheesh, this one stinks of the ass you pulled it out of.
Nader was never anything but an exceedingly minor protest vote. He has never made the tiniest difference in deciding the outcome of any election. You’d do better to direct your ire at the towering intellects in Florida who cast obviously mistaken votes for Pat Buchanon.
I don’t support or defend Nader now and didn’t in 2004. I did support him in 2000, though I regret that now. My mistake that I feel worst about was allowing the Nader-Gore fight to allow the Bush flacks to make him seem like a moderate, which he never was. 2000 was not the right time for a protest vote.
One objection to Nader-bashing is the way it allows Democrats to ignore their own culpability, both in the Iraq War and with regard to the 2000 election. How many Nader-bashers know that there was enough suppression of black votes in 2000 to swing the election, and that Jesse Jackson and the NAACP wanted to make an issue of it but the Gore people called them off?
Democrats would rather lose and blame Nader than win and owe something to Jesse Jackson. (A lot of mainstream Democrats make a joke of Jackson, and they’re full of shit).
Some Democrats are reading their Nader-hatred back to his early career, and that’s bullshit. He did a lot of valuable work before 1980, and it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t accomplish much during the Republican administrations. What drove Nade crazy was the fact that Clinton, a corporate Democrat all the way, didn’t listen to him either. He owed Nader nothing, and he owed Nader’s corporate adversaries hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his career. I blame Clinton.
Nader (along with Chomsky, The Nation, and other leftists) was one of those who tried to warn the Democrats about the perils of media consolidation and the end of the fairness doctrine, and also about the dangers of Republican voter suppression. Enough Democrats didn’t listen to let the Republicans have their way, and that’s costing the Democrats even today. (Some of the Democrats were quite simply bought and paid for, and others may have thought that the changes would help their corporate faction in the Democratic Party against the hated liberal faction, which has indeed almost disappeared.) Not listening to people like Nader was what the DLC was all about, and they controlled the party from 1988 to about 2005.
From the beginning Nader refused to work within the two-party system, and that’s where he went wrong. But he still was able to do a lot of good work, and he only went bad in 1996 at the earliest.
John Emerson: I remember reading about the Gore campaign making some noise shortly after Election Day about Duval County, where thousands of ballots were thrown out by the Republican-dominated elections supervisor, but this issue faded from the news, and I guess from the Gore campaign’s concern, as the fight over the recount of South Florida ballots progressed and escalated.
I don’t blame Nader for 2000, nor his supporters, because the argument that we must have a two-party system and shouldn’t vote for whom we like, even as a protest vote, is not a view I like.
But here’s the question for 2008. Nader’s absolute best-case scenario is not an election where everyone ignores him and he has no effect, nor is it winning and enacting sensible policies. It’s that he does just well enough to hand the election to a party which is just fine with millions more dead in dumb wars.
Or look at all the good Democrats have done for us since…Raising the minimum wage to about half a living wage!…Okay, there must be more. Please remind me, or I’ll be too depressed.
Keeping any office out of Republican hands is a positive accomplishment. Gore could have taken office in 2001 and spent 8 years playing tiddlywinks and we’d be ahead.
Gore lost by around 750 votes. Nader got 97K votes in Florida. Bush got 200,000 votes from registered Democrats. 50% of all registered Democrats didn’t even bother to fucking vote in Florida.
Nader isn’t running as a Green. He’s running as an independent. And today, after spending four years, near as I can tell, under a rock, he has crawled out to announce his candidacy.
This among a field, long since winnowed, that consisted almost entirely of career politicians, people who’ve been busy serving (to whatever degree) as legislators these past two or four years. And favored non-candidate Al Gore has also been a busy little beaver of late, what with his nice presentation about climate change and all.
Which leads me to ask: Ralph— what the fuck have you done for me lately?
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes: can something be someone’s fault, and yet not exclusively someone’s fault? Can a condition by necessary, and yet not sufficient, to cause a certain outcome, or did I just say that 1+1=3? One suspects this is considered some sort of logical impossibility, at least when convenient.
I confess: I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Like Emerson, I wish I hadn’t.
OK, in Massachusetts where it didn’t matter, but still.
At the time, I thought that (1) the difference between Gore and Bush was small and (b) that a strong Nader vote would help build a broad progressive movement. Obviously, I was completely wrong on both counts. (Altho a comparison of Clinton and George H. W. Bush is a lot closer.)
To me, it’s the second point that’s really decisive. After 2000, Nader did nothing with his supporters. He just disappeared. All that energy that went into his campaign led to absolutely no lasting organizations. So, again IMO, the question of how big a factor Nader was in Gore’s loss is sort of irrelevant. Because there’s nothing positive to weigh against it.
The tiniest protest vote that was, if we can remember here, greater than Bush’s pre-recount margin of victory.
And, as Fish pointed out, considerably smaller than the number of registered Democrats who defected directly to Bush. Yet you never see this whinging — eight years later, no less — directed at them for their gutless apostasy. Funny, that.
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes: can something be someone’s fault, and yet not exclusively someone’s fault?
Sure. He played a part in things. So did Gore’s inability to carry his home state. So did three thousand blind Palm Beachers voting for Pat Buchanan.
So did the retard Democrats who, again, were gulled into voting for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. How many of them are going to go for Straight Talkin’ McCain this year, out of spite and/or ignorance?
Nader’s candidacy was a contributing cause to Gore’s defeat. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
If the ranting about the 2000 election were evenly distributed to all contributing causes in proportion to their importance, I wouldn’t need to be saying anything.
Some Nader 2000 voters have abased themselves sufficiently, some have expressed regret, but without expressing enough self-loathing, some are evasive, and some remain defiant. I think that Democrats should devote themselves to some mission other than trying to get confessions out of 100% of them. The dropoff of Nader votes between 2000 and 2004 (from something like 2.4% to something like .4%, correct me if I’m wrong) is a pretty good indication that most of us have gotten the word.
A lot of Democrats jump from condemning Nader’s candidacy (quite reasonably, on practical, tactical grounds)to rejecting the Green position on most or all of the issues which motivated them. I’m not willing to let someone make that jump.
22 posts later, and it turns out the one positive achievement of Democrats is…. that they are not Republicans.
I guess the real reason for Nader-bashing is that it’s fun. It distracts liberals for an hour or so from their own failure to actually elect any of their own and get anything done.
After all, if you’re reduced to claiming that Obama’s plans for bombing Pakistan and enlarging the army are probably not the biggest deal in the world, you need some kind of release. And let’s be honest, Nader is an easy target – as has been pointed out, there’s no conceivable good that can come from his run this time. I’m not worried it’ll cost Obama the election (it won’t), but it’s going to waste energy and money better invested in issue campaigns.
A butterfly in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Florida, but if he does, The Editors will track him down and stomp him. Fucking butterflies.
But when Nader began his campaign he knew he might help elect Bush, and he was willing to take that chance. It’s not merely a matter of the importance of his effort, but also his intent. And he knew from the beginning that the eventual outcome was one of the possibilities — in fact, if it hadn’t been possible, Nader’s candidacy would have made no sense. Not a good year for a protest vote.
But in an election as close as that there are a lot of other fucking butterflies to stomp.
By simply removing the Nader candidacy, and leaving everything else in place, Gore wins Florida by thousands of votes, and is elected President. One can also change a number of other variables and get this result, too; this doesn’t absolve Nader, any more than Nader absolves them.
Some Nader 2000 voters have abased themselves sufficiently, some have expressed regret, but without expressing enough self-loathing, some are evasive, and some remain defiant. I think that Democrats should devote themselves to some mission other than trying to get confessions out of 100% of them.
Nobody particularly cares about abasement – we aren’t at church. I think most Gore voters are pretty surprised at how the election hinged on tiny margins, and how huge a disaster Bush would turn out to be. I have been surprised by this and much, much more. Life is full of surprises, and that’s just the ways it goes, but the past is full of settled questions. The point is to recognize facts, draw the obvious conclusions from them, and apply these lessons to the future. The mass refusal to do this keeps open the possibility that the same mistakes can be repeated, and keeps them a topic of current interest.
There’s a mass refusal to not vote for Nader again? Where? See, this is the weird thing – he’s such a non-entity, and his campaign is such a non-issue. Nevertheless, we are all urged to learn the lesson over and over and over again, while numerous issues at least as big remain safely unexamined.
There’s no mass refusal to do this, The Editors. Most 2000 Nader voters didn’t vote for him in 2004. 2.4% in 2000 is hardly a mass anything anyway.
But there’s still only one that doesn’t believe it’s a butterfly.
It’s not true. A lot of the butterflies are right within the Democratic Party, and they’re only slowly being rooted out. Recent example: Harold Ford of the DLC just spoke at a Chris Shays (R) rally. The DLC has lost a lot of clout, but it still is a factor in the party.
There are dozens of mercenary consultants with no loyalty to the Democrats still collecting millions of dollars from the party. (Slightly off-topic, but I think that Carville’s mouth should be swabbed for second-hand Cheney semen.)
Those are two contemporary examples and are still significant factors (unlike Nader), and they both played as big a role as Nader did in leading the Democrats to defeat in 2000. And they sure as shit haven’t confessed anything yet.
Get over it. Your vendetta is stupid. Most of the people you thin you’re talking to are about where you want them to be already, and the others you might as well forget about.
John – I would argue that, while an admittedly ambiguous word, a group a few tens of thousands of times as large as Bush’s margin of victory in Florida may be described as “mass” enough to warrant consideration. It’s a million people, give or take. Elections can hinge on so much less.
Again, as for your other complaint, you might want to peruse the nearly 6 years of (admittedly scattered) posts on this website, and note that a vanishingly small percentage address the man you and others here think is the only thing we ever talk about (today – yesterday, obviously, my long-time monomaniacal obsession was someone completely different). You might also try any other weblog in existence, and note that – as a matter of mathematical fact – this is universally true. Noting this, one might ask oneself why one’s perception is so at odds with trivially provable facts about the world. One might further wonder why nobody accuses anyone of having a vandetta against (say) Mark Penn, nobody flies into a rage when people disparage him (or the people who hire him), and nobody has ever bothered trolling or otherwise baiting Mark Penn fanboys. Again, nobody cares if you hate yourself or not, and, as nobody thought you were infallible anyway, nobody would think the less of you if you admitted you were human and sometimes reevaluated your beliefs in the face of unexpected catastrophe. Or just didn’t so strenuously object to occassional mention of things which might suggest to you that it was so. It’s just not a realistic expectation to have about people, especially when there’s childish sport to be had.
The Editors comes back to the issue sufficiently often to be annoying. At least Alterman keeps it down to two words every week or two.
My primary reason for objecting to this stuff is that harping on Nader is done out of proportion to Nader’s importance, and at the expense of other issues. I specifically mentioned Jesse Jackson’s being called off by Gore’s people because it’s an issue of equal or greater importance which is disappearing from memory, whereas tens of millions of people know that Nader threw the election to Bush. That butterfly has been sufficiently stomped, thank you very much.
My second reason for objecting to this stuff (here and elsewhere) is that it often or usually comes along with an unawareness of what the Nader voters issues were, and often enough with a centrist DLC / Blue Dog take on many of those issues. I don’t have links, but it’s my memory that from time to time The editors has gone that way too, though less so more recently. I’m not an expert Editorologist, but I’ve been a regular reader for years.
The Editors comes back to the issue sufficiently often to be annoying. At least Alterman keeps it down to two words every week or two.
John, it remains trivial to prove you wrong. Not more than ‘two words every week or two’, but once in the past month plus – that one and only example being this here post. Which I didn’t write. And which is explicitly troll bait. It’s slightly harder to run the nemubers for the full term of the blog, but not much. So: your perception of reality has just been unambiguously falsified. You have been shown to be wrong, which is something that happens to every human every single day. So now you have to choose again: more grimly entertaining contortions? Or a pause for reflection? The 11-year-old bully in me hopes you go for #1, but my better self really wishes you’d just take a deep breath and relax. I’m feeling kind of teased out.
Well, what’s at stake is whether you do it often enough to be annoying to me, and my memory is that you do. I’m not an Editorologist, but if ever become one I’ll get back to you and explain.
My apologies for confusing Sifu and The Editors, though.
Well, John, that leaves the question of why a posting frequency of ‘almost never’ is such an intolerable irritant to you. I leave you to sort it out for yourself, because this whole exercise is seriously depressing the shit out of me.
I don’t like Nader not because of the 2000 election, but because I’ve worked for my entire working career within the orbit of the kind of groups that he founded. Which have generally bad conditions for workers, something which goes back directly to his influence.
For the 2000 election, though, I remember a sequence of events which puts the blame more clearly on Nader than those thousand or so votes in Florida. Late in the campaign, I remember Gore giving speeches on global warming in order to shore up his left credentials among the kind of voters who might go to Nader. And he lost West Virginia because, I think, that scared off the coal miners.
The kind of people who are always going on about “we must pull the party to the left! Without an alternative third party, they’ll know we have nowhere to go” have a) evidently never heard of primaries, b) no sense of timing at all. Everyone knew that Gore, if elected, was going to do something about global warming. But that’s not good enough for the people for whom nothing the Democrats do is ever going to be good enough.
I might add that my response to Sifu’s ever-so-nuanced critique of Nader was much more reasonable than Sifu’s post deserved. The response desired was apparently, “Yeah, Nader is still a fucking moron!” I gave a different response, and that pisses you off.
Your site can be searched back how far — two months? I did try a Google search. This has been a live issue for me from the beginning, just as it has been for you, and I remember not liking a number of things you said about this and similar topics in the unarchived past. I’ve been a fairly regular reader for several years.
For the 2000 election, though, I remember a sequence of events which puts the blame more clearly on Nader than those thousand or so votes in Florida. Late in the campaign, I remember Gore giving speeches on global warming in order to shore up his left credentials among the kind of voters who might go to Nader. And he lost West Virginia because, I think, that scared off the coal miners.
Jesus, Rich. Is this the worst dirt you have? Gore may have lost W. Virginia because he mentioned global warming, and that’s Nader’s fault?
I might add that my response to Sifu’s ever-so-nuanced critique of Nader was much more reasonable than Sifu’s post deserved.
John, you were being trolled. IIRC, you aren’t remotely as stupid as your acting this afternoon – far, far from it, if memory serves. So stop trying to make me stick my head in the oven. Please, if not for you, then for me. This is excruciating.
Your site can be searched back how far — two months?
To the first post ever. Archive.org. It’s not as easy as a Google search, but it’s possible. Easier than both is to just quietly admit – admit to yourself, no further abasement is required or desired – you’re completely overreacting and fucking move on. I would be happy to help you compile the statistics from the Internet Archive, as my time permits, but be aware that this offer comes from the polar opposite of generosity and kindness. Afterwards, I’ll go look at car wrecks and cancer kids.
By simply removing the Nader candidacy, and leaving everything else in place, Gore wins Florida by thousands of votes, and is elected President.
I believe this is true. I also believe that if you fight voter suppression efforts in Florida, this is also true. If you change the butterfly ballots in Dade county it is true. If Gore runs a better campaign it is true. If our media elites didn’t run a systematic smear campaign against a pretty smart guy and elevate a proto-simian, it is true.
Only one of these possible alternative universes is anti-democratic however.
Quite apart from everything else, I’m still waiting for someone to convince me that Gore/Lieberman would’ve been significantly better than what we got.
Remember, we’re talking about the pre-retirement Al Gore, not the one who suddenly grew a nutsack. Oh, and Joe Lieberman. You know, the biggest Iraq hawk there is? And they would’ve been working with a Repub congress.
Yes, I’ll grant you less horrid SCOTUS appointments, and probably less disregard for science. But this hypothetical fantasy utopia many folks have conjured up is really quite silly.
Come on, The Editors. You guys troll me and I’m unreasonable?
I’ve heard Sifu’s kind of comment many times, normally by shitheads. I always respond to it if reasonably possible. It’s my belief that people who put a lot of weight on this stuff have other problems.
Seriously, you are angry because I objected to this post instead of simply agreeing that Nader is a fucking moron? The intelligent, thoughtful thing to do is just agree?
Nader’s candidacy was a contributing cause to Gore’s defeat. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
eh? 1000 of the ~80,000 voters voting Nader and not Gore were certainly sufficient!
I don’t blame anyone here, let alone Nader. He had a right to run.
If less than 1000 Nader voters in NH and FL are unhappy with the outcome of their protest votes, more power to Nader voters in their campaign to move the discourse in this country more to the left.
Me, I don’t like the costs involved. . . you know, the present $9,000,000,000,000+ national debt, ~30M people who bought 2004-2007 now underwater on their mortgages, 4000+ US KIA in Iraq, “Heckuva Job Brownie”, Alito & Roberts on the court, etc etc.
Voting, and not voting, has consequences. Choose wisely.
I still didn’t post this, John. You can say it tomorrow and it won’t have happened then, either. And nobody has ever trolled reasonable people. Reasonable people understand how pointless it is. That just the nature of trolling.
Seriously, you are angry because I objected to this post instead of simply agreeing that Nader is a fucking moron?
I’m not angry, John. I’m depressed and despairing of the future of humanity. If I were Dr. Phil I’d start talking to you about ‘projection’. But I’m not Dr. Phil, so I’m just going to look at you, without saying anything, and with a really pained expression on my face, and hope without hope that you’ll stop.
The good thing about the electric oven is that after a few minutes your face sticks to the coils, so you can just kind of relax and let events run their inevitable conclusion. All the second-guessing is what really hurts.
I’m willing to sign a truce, shut up and leave. I do not want to dedicate myself to Editorology, and for whatever reason, I’m finding the Wayback Machine to be extremely user-unfriendly at the moment.
Attitudes toward Nader are markers of factional differences within the Democratic Party, and you and I are in different factions. In 2002 swore an oath to vote for the Democratic candidate in the future regardless, and I’m keeping to it. But there’s a lot of crap that goes along with Nader-bashing that pisses me off.
Oh, and one other thing. We’re on the cusp of a new era of Democratic dominance, and none of that would’ve been possible without the last eight years. Yeah, I’m pretty much saying that the New Deal couldn’t have happened without the Great Depression.
And no, that’s not a rationalization. But maybe in the long run, Gore did us all a favor by running a shitty campaign in 2000.
86 followed by 92 makes no sense, dude. It’s a good thing that Bush got elected even though he started a war in Iraq because it’s ushering in a new era of Democratic dominance even though the Democrats did nothing to stop the war. What?
Uh no, I was objecting to your assumption that things would’ve been different re:Iraq. We have no evidence of this whatsoever.
But more to the point, the Democratic dominance I’m talking about is a direct backlash against the past eight years. I’m talking about better candidates and more progressive platforms. I’m talking about throwing out the DLC types, which is slowly beginning to happen.
And finally, the AIDS crack was uncalled for. Nowhere did I say that the disaster which has been the last eight years was “a good thing”. I was simply making an objective observation about current reality. I made no implicit judgement as to its goodness or badness.
I’ve been using your internets for some time now, with great success. But today I noticed they were depressing and horrible and make me pray for death. Can I have some better internets now?
What exactly is anti-democratic about removing a certain variable for the purpose of analysis? I’m afraid I don’t follow.
Not for the purposes of analysis (if that is the only reason theeditors brings it up, my point was wrong), but as envisioning a scenario where GWB doesn’t get elected. I chose words poorly, less democratic is better than anti-democratic. There are lots of ways to get better election outcomes than to suggest we are better off without 3rd party candidates (instant runoff comes to mind).
The Editors didn’t start this. Sifu Tweety Fish did.
Well, Sifu refers to himself and The Editors as “we”, after all.
I’m afraid I’m in the same boat with John Emerson above. I got suckered in to what I mistook for a serious discussion, and now I’m being played for a fool. Oh well, live and learn.
Yes, Me. “We” are not your monkey. “I” wrote the post. I understand my use of the singular might have been confusing, but no, really: I wrote this post. That’s why it has my name on it. The poor Editors had nothing to do with it until he woke up this morning and was confronted with bleak, soul-destroying anomie.
I confess. I not only voted for Nader in ’00, I actually *attended Green Party Meetings* here in Spokane for awhile. Until I realized they weren’t trying to build a successful political party, but instead, perfect their formula for Nader Narcolepsy, whereby entire convention halls could be placed into a coma after 15 minutes of Nader drone-rant and procedural knitting.
Remember the political meeting scene in Life of Brian? Like that, only not funny, boring costumes, and no popcorn.
“Quite apart from everything else, I’m still waiting for someone to convince me that Gore/Lieberman would’ve been significantly better than what we got.
“Remember, we’re talking about the pre-retirement Al Gore, not the one who suddenly grew a nutsack. Oh, and Joe Lieberman. You know, the biggest Iraq hawk there is? And they would’ve been working with a Repub congress.
“Yes, I’ll grant you less horrid SCOTUS appointments, and probably less disregard for science. But this hypothetical fantasy utopia many folks have conjured up is really quite silly.”
Thith thpeakth twooth to me. (I have affected an internet lithp, yeth?)
The great thing about Buth ith that he ith rethponthible, ok, blamable, for the path theven yeath of thit.
And we can vote for Obama. A man who at leatht deliverth a truly thtirring thpeech.
I not only voted for Nader in ‘00, I actually *attended Green Party Meetings* here in Spokane for awhile. Until I realized they weren’t trying to build a successful political party
I can’t believe I fell for the Mac-PC thing. I think you guys screwed up on the chomsky one, you should have shifted to Serbia vs. Croatia, or maybe Turk vs. Armenian. Jesus H. What is in the water over here?????
“my friend is planning on going on vacation to the former Yugoslavia. I told him to avoid the disgusting and vile Serbia while frolicking in the delightful Croatia. Our other friend said that Croatia is like if you made Hostel The Movie a country but Serbia is a 24 hour party with natural wonders. I wonder who is right? Discuss.”
The question of Nader’s blame for 2000 is, like so many subtle and zen-like questions, best considered through the metaphorical lens of football (no, not that kind). What Gore/Nader 2000 is most like, you see, is Korea v. Italy in the 2002 World Cup round of 16.
You’ll all remember, I’m sure, that Korea won 2-1 in extra time after a series of extremely dodgy calls by ref Byron Moreno. The Italian nation rose up in fury that they wuz robbed, the always entertaining Giovanni “Ich habe fertig!” Trapattoni going so far as to suggest Moreno was carrying out a Sepp Blatter-ordered hit job in order to ensure Korea’s progress to the next round. (Actually, given that Blatter is the jackal-born son of Satan Himself, that last part is easy to believe.) Moreno’s refereeing got even worse back home in Ecuador after the World Cup, BTW, and less than a year after the KOR/ITA fiasco he was force to retire in disgrace.
So, then, who is to blame for KOR/ITA 2002? Moreno, or the Italy team?
Moreno was astonishingly bad; he stood out as bad in a field of WC refs that was, on the whole, outstanding for its badness. We may never know whether he was deliberately spiking Italy’s guns or whether he was merely a good-faith incompetent. But if a Hugh Dallas or Markus Merk had been on the pitch that day instead of Moreno, it’s a virtual certainty that Italy, not Korea, would have gone on to the quarter finals.
But still, I think any fair obsever has to say that, if you are an Italy manager, player or supporter, you can only blame yourself; because:
1) you are Italy, and if you cannot beat Korea by two clear goals in the face of even actively hostile refereeing, then go home and cry about it alone in your room; and
2) fuck the Azzurri anyway.
But if you are not Italy, then I don’t think there’s any way you can argue with a straight face that Moreno did not cost them a match that should have been theirs. The game puked him out as soon as it could after his appalling WC2002 performance, and rightly so. Let his name and memory be erased.
Now all you need to do is substitute “Gore” for “Italy”, “Nader” for “Moreno” (and, I suppose, “Rove” for “Blatter”) and so on*, and the key to understanding the 2000 US presidential elections is in your hand.
* Except for the “fuck the Azzurri” part, of course. Gore doesn’t deserve the same level of contempt as the Italian national team. Nobody else deserves that.
Ah. Liberal Fascism at its finest. If we spend enough time talking about Futbowel (or however it’s spelled in the Liberal demon tongue), we won’t even need France to invade.
Holy Shit! 127+ comments debating Ralph Nader? And all the while Jewish pirates struggle for the cultural recognition they deserve? Priorities, people…
Dear Editors: No need to put your head in the oven. Ralph’s delusional cult has no power this time. (By the way, it is a religious cult. That’s why reason is useless with them.) George Stephanopoulos got it exactly right today. He said “Yesterday was the highlight of Nader’s 2008 campaign.” End of story.
Of course if I’m wrong, I’ll hop on the first bus to Montreal on November 5. Vive le fascisme liberal!
I think it’s safe to say that if Gore had been elected in 2000 we would not have invaded Iraq in 2003.
Yeah, we could have continued crushing the Iraqi people under our sanctions instead! Madeleine Albright thought the price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was worth it, and who am I to disagree with her?
What’s your point? Are the pirates any less relevant? Do you prefer discussing Ralph Nader to Jewish Pirates? Will Ralph Nader even acknowledge the broken Jewish Pirates pension system that he helped bring into being?
There were plenty of other people running for President in 2000.
At least 10 of them dwarfed Nader’s final vote count in Florida, yet I never see people climbing over eachother to smear them, and blame them for The Retard getting elected.
(ps: I see the “your candidate’s supporters are a CULT” meme is currently being barfed-up here too)
Then there’s the Tennessee 2000 results. VP for eight years, senator and congressman for 15 years prior. Still loses his home state (which would have given him the victory w/o America’s Wang) by 3 points.
Also, Sifu and the Eds.’ semiannual Nader-bashing conveniently ignores how many votes this Bush person took from Gore. Looked at quantitatively, they obviously have a pro-Bush agenda. Pro-Tennessee, even.
Here’s a thought, Sifu and Eds.: maybe JE et.al. don’t care at all about Nader and are just trolling you masterfully.
Now we’re getting somewhere!
There were plenty of other people running for President in 2000.
At least 10 of them dwarfed Nader’s final vote count in Florida, yet I never see people climbing over eachother to smear them, and blame them for The Retard getting elected.
Is this just a virtual dick-slapping contest complete with fake-trolls and unfunny inside jokes, or an actual thread about an actual topic of actual discussion?
Okay, Volum, but you didn’t say “at least 10 candidates got enough votes to cover the gap between Bush and Gore”. You said “at least 10 candidates dwarfed Nader’s final vote count“, which is not just wrong, but hilariously wrong.
“Is this just a virtual dick-slapping contest complete with fake-trolls and unfunny inside jokes, or an actual thread about an actual topic of actual discussion?”
It’s thread of an unconventional nature with intent to cause grievous mental confusion to the Great American Public.
Sifu:
“Also, this is neither here nor there, but what is a dick-slapping contest? What does one slap, with what? And who on Earth wins?”
It’s where a bunch of lonely and portly men (grown babies) take out their peckers and slap eachothers with them.
Everyone wins!
And for the fish-in-a-barrel that this thread has been, I feel pretty cheated. In-jokes, snarks or whatever, but blatantly hooking your readers for a fake discussion is pretty gay (have I said the word “retarded” too much in this pseudo thread?) especially over a topic where people to this day still point their poo-covered finger in the wrong direction.
“… a topic where people to this day still point their poo-covered finger in the wrong direction.
If your participation in this thread was an attempt to fly the Nader flag, you should have quit before starting. Thanks for the chuckles, tho, and making me wonder if you’re really a Nader-hater trying to make his supporters look bad.
If Nader hadn’t taken so many votes away from Bush, there wouldn’t even have been the appearance of a contested election and we’d all have nothing to complain about now, so I think you owe him. Big.
OK, I know this is all just troll soup, but I still have issues.
HOW CAN WE STILL FIGHT THESE FUCKING BATTLES WITHOUT MENTIONING ELECTION REFORM? There need never be another spoiler candidate again. IRV just fixes it, or, if you prefer, there are other voting systems, ALL of them better than what we’ve got. If you are a citizen – right, left, or center – and not a corporate entity, PR flak, or political consultant, you cannot help but want that.
Yeah, Bush has done enormous damage to humanity in just 8 years, but changing the system would last as long as the constitution will, and it would mean candidates who listen more EVERY TIME.
I voted for Nader in 2000 (in a state that went safely Gore). And when the circus started, I was actually happy about it for a while – I thought that Gore would win it in the end, and, by focusing attention on the horrible broken system, I thought the whole thing would boost the cause of reform.
I honestly still cannot get my head around the fact that people would rather fight about “your fault – no it isn’t” than just fucking fix the problem once and for all.
Nader defenders don’t make me angry, and even “Nader is Satan” doesn’t make me angry. But this particular flavor of troll soup where everybody ignores the elephant makes me LIVID.
[...] Back in February, on the occasion of Ralph Nader again declaring his intention to run headfirst into a brick wall for President, Sifu Tweety Fish of The Poor Man Institute decided that, a sufficient amount of something having somethinged, that the time had come around to annoy Nader supporters. [...]
February 24, 2008 at 8:15 am
I’m sure that everyone who voted for Nader back in 2000 was sincere in their desire to help ensure the victory of the candidate so absolutely inimical to everything they believed in.
Seriously, I think that by now even Nader’s dog wouldn’t vote for him knowing what the consequences were last time around. And I frankly find it hard to believe that Ralph has developed such severe dementia that he does not see what his last run at the presidency brought about.
February 24, 2008 at 8:39 am
You’re right: it’s not dementia; it’s hubris.
February 24, 2008 at 8:40 am
Hasn’t he done enough damage already. Seriously, would someone just lock him, Grover Nordquist and Ron Paul in Ford Pinto and push it backwards down a steep hill?
February 24, 2008 at 8:46 am
Nader! Because even the memory-impaired deserve a voice.
February 24, 2008 at 8:54 am
Liberals – it’s never their own fault. Have fun voting for longer wars in Afghanistan, no withdrawal from Iraq, no universal health care, bombing Pakistan and a much larger war budget. And get the fuck over it. Gore won the election. The fact that it was more important to him to preserve the veneer of “the system works” than to fight for his constituency should prove to any smart person that he didn’t deserve your vote in the first place.
I’m looking forward to your whining when Obama does exactly nothing of the nice progressive things you projected onto his agenda.
February 24, 2008 at 8:56 am
pipelines
February 24, 2008 at 8:58 am
There! That’s what I like to see, christian.
February 24, 2008 at 9:00 am
Happy to be of service ;).
February 24, 2008 at 9:07 am
I disagree in every detail, obviously.
Well, no, I agree that Gore won the election.
February 24, 2008 at 9:08 am
Disagreement is the Gleichschaltung of liberal fascism.
February 24, 2008 at 9:09 am
I demand condemnation of Ross Perot who, without him entering the race, we would have had 4 more glorious years of George HW Bush. Oh, wait.
February 24, 2008 at 9:09 am
And by the way, obviously I’m not looking forward to Obama doing nothing. I hope to be surprised.
February 24, 2008 at 9:29 am
A: anyone who tells you that it’s Nader’s fault that Bush won is either a liar or a retard. Actually, that’s not entirely right — they might be both.
B: “Nader running for president for a third time” <– nice headline, AP. This is Nader’s fifth presidential campaign, but I won’t hold a complete lack of historical acumen against you.
February 24, 2008 at 9:36 am
Dayv, you’re being too harsh. It only takes a somewhat childish view of causality to claim that Nader is responsible for Bush’s win.
February 24, 2008 at 9:46 am
Former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell:
“If you want to pull the party—the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking—to what you’re thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t…have…to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.”
http://www.distantocean.com/2007/11/the-one-thing-t.html
February 24, 2008 at 10:08 am
Keep the faith, fellas.
February 24, 2008 at 10:10 am
Faith in the Democratic Party? Nah. That wouldn’t be smart.
February 24, 2008 at 10:18 am
No, I meant faith in the idea that your chosen savior was anything other than a self-obsessed poison pill thirty or more years past his sell-by date.
February 24, 2008 at 10:25 am
But you gotta admit, Sifu, that Green Party logo behind Nader in that picture is awesome. Very fast-passed NBA action. Where amazing happens!
February 24, 2008 at 10:26 am
[...] The Pavlovian attack-dog reaction of The Partisans to Ralf Nader’s latest presidential run is— though entirely predictable —nonetheless astounding. (Visit The Poor Man Liberal Fascism comment section for a sampling.) [...]
February 24, 2008 at 10:31 am
Sifu Tweety: I’m not promoting Ralph Nader in any way here. His 2004 campaign was, honestly, kind of embarassing — and I don’t expect much more of him this year. 2000 broke the man, IMO. Not only did he not achieve the 5% needed to grant federal matching funds to the Green Party in future campaigns (this was a clearly stated goal of the 2000 campaign), but he was immediately made into one of the biggest individual scapegoats in American political history.
But none of that renders the spoiler story worthwile or accurate.
February 24, 2008 at 10:31 am
I know what you meant. For the record, Nader isn’t my chosen anything. I have no vote (not a citizen), and I asked my friends who did in 2000 to vote for Gore. It is the Democrats who have a Nader fixation. Get the fuck over it, is all I’m saying.
Don’t worry about others; look at yourself and stop electing warmongers who promise health care and deliver NAFTA and welfare reform. Stop expecting “change” every two years or so and then being, like, totally surprised when you don’t get any but instead have the party bosses screw you over again.
It’s always some “traitors” – the Nader voters, or the “Bush dogs”, or lobbyists, or whoever is going to be responsible after November.
February 24, 2008 at 10:34 am
Yes, that’s the problem with the Democratic party. The demand for ideological purity. Good call.
February 24, 2008 at 10:39 am
fast paced with fast passes
electoral pragmatism, the new paranoia of the politically naïve
February 24, 2008 at 10:45 am
Who mentioned “ideological purity”? No one, before you. The problem is the lack of comprehension that the neo-liberal and right-wing politics of the Democratic Party isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. And this is something that has to be dealt with in some fashion. Going around blaming Nader or his voters for the world’s ills is not a reasonable way to do so, it’s a cop-out.
February 24, 2008 at 11:13 am
your chosen savior
Sheesh, this one stinks of the ass you pulled it out of.
Nader was never anything but an exceedingly minor protest vote. He has never made the tiniest difference in deciding the outcome of any election. You’d do better to direct your ire at the towering intellects in Florida who cast obviously mistaken votes for Pat Buchanon.
February 24, 2008 at 11:19 am
The tiniest protest vote that was, if we can remember here, greater than Bush’s pre-recount margin of victory.
But sure, plenty of blame to go around. And look at all the good the green party’s done since then!
*cough*
February 24, 2008 at 11:41 am
Or look at all the good Democrats have done for us since… oh… 1992.
Bad: NAFTA, Wars (various), Patriot Act etc., Defence of Marriage Act, more federal death penalty, welfare reform,…
Good: Raising the minimum wage to about half a living wage! Go Team! Okay, there must be more. Please remind me, or I’ll be too depressed.
February 24, 2008 at 11:55 am
And look at all the good the green party’s done since then!
They hold ≈300 local government positions countrywide. I would say that is a lot of good.
February 24, 2008 at 11:55 am
I don’t support or defend Nader now and didn’t in 2004. I did support him in 2000, though I regret that now. My mistake that I feel worst about was allowing the Nader-Gore fight to allow the Bush flacks to make him seem like a moderate, which he never was. 2000 was not the right time for a protest vote.
One objection to Nader-bashing is the way it allows Democrats to ignore their own culpability, both in the Iraq War and with regard to the 2000 election. How many Nader-bashers know that there was enough suppression of black votes in 2000 to swing the election, and that Jesse Jackson and the NAACP wanted to make an issue of it but the Gore people called them off?
Democrats would rather lose and blame Nader than win and owe something to Jesse Jackson. (A lot of mainstream Democrats make a joke of Jackson, and they’re full of shit).
Some Democrats are reading their Nader-hatred back to his early career, and that’s bullshit. He did a lot of valuable work before 1980, and it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t accomplish much during the Republican administrations. What drove Nade crazy was the fact that Clinton, a corporate Democrat all the way, didn’t listen to him either. He owed Nader nothing, and he owed Nader’s corporate adversaries hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his career. I blame Clinton.
Nader (along with Chomsky, The Nation, and other leftists) was one of those who tried to warn the Democrats about the perils of media consolidation and the end of the fairness doctrine, and also about the dangers of Republican voter suppression. Enough Democrats didn’t listen to let the Republicans have their way, and that’s costing the Democrats even today. (Some of the Democrats were quite simply bought and paid for, and others may have thought that the changes would help their corporate faction in the Democratic Party against the hated liberal faction, which has indeed almost disappeared.) Not listening to people like Nader was what the DLC was all about, and they controlled the party from 1988 to about 2005.
From the beginning Nader refused to work within the two-party system, and that’s where he went wrong. But he still was able to do a lot of good work, and he only went bad in 1996 at the earliest.
February 24, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Not to worry. Nader only got .38% of the popular vote in 2004.
February 24, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Where am I? What is this strange place? Who are you people?
February 24, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Is that a proposed Nader 08 campaign slogan, SEK?
February 24, 2008 at 12:29 pm
John Emerson: I remember reading about the Gore campaign making some noise shortly after Election Day about Duval County, where thousands of ballots were thrown out by the Republican-dominated elections supervisor, but this issue faded from the news, and I guess from the Gore campaign’s concern, as the fight over the recount of South Florida ballots progressed and escalated.
February 24, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I don’t blame Nader for 2000, nor his supporters, because the argument that we must have a two-party system and shouldn’t vote for whom we like, even as a protest vote, is not a view I like.
But here’s the question for 2008. Nader’s absolute best-case scenario is not an election where everyone ignores him and he has no effect, nor is it winning and enacting sensible policies. It’s that he does just well enough to hand the election to a party which is just fine with millions more dead in dumb wars.
That’s a heavy cost for an exercise in vanity.
February 24, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Berube had a big long thing looking at the Perot business. He actually didn’t swing he election to Clinton. He took votes from both Clinton and Bush.
February 24, 2008 at 12:37 pm
J– The fade wasn’t accidental. The Gore people refused to contest that. My source is Greg Palast, probably in the Guardian but also in his books.
This is the best link I can find right now. There’s better stuff out there, though.
February 24, 2008 at 12:41 pm
It was more for Sifu, but you know what? It does decent double-duty.
February 24, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Or look at all the good Democrats have done for us since…Raising the minimum wage to about half a living wage!…Okay, there must be more. Please remind me, or I’ll be too depressed.
Keeping any office out of Republican hands is a positive accomplishment. Gore could have taken office in 2001 and spent 8 years playing tiddlywinks and we’d be ahead.
February 24, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Thanks for the Palast link. Duval stuck in my mind because the GOP nastiness was particularly nasty there.
February 24, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Gore lost by around 750 votes. Nader got 97K votes in Florida. Bush got 200,000 votes from registered Democrats. 50% of all registered Democrats didn’t even bother to fucking vote in Florida.
Yeah, your right, it was Nader’s fault.
http://www.cagreens.org/alameda/city/0803myth/myth.html
February 24, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Nader isn’t running as a Green. He’s running as an independent. And today, after spending four years, near as I can tell, under a rock, he has crawled out to announce his candidacy.
This among a field, long since winnowed, that consisted almost entirely of career politicians, people who’ve been busy serving (to whatever degree) as legislators these past two or four years. And favored non-candidate Al Gore has also been a busy little beaver of late, what with his nice presentation about climate change and all.
Which leads me to ask: Ralph— what the fuck have you done for me lately?
Besides this, I mean.
February 24, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes: can something be someone’s fault, and yet not exclusively someone’s fault? Can a condition by necessary, and yet not sufficient, to cause a certain outcome, or did I just say that 1+1=3? One suspects this is considered some sort of logical impossibility, at least when convenient.
February 24, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Oh, and STF is King of Trolls. My hat goes: doff! doff! doff!
February 24, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I confess: I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Like Emerson, I wish I hadn’t.
OK, in Massachusetts where it didn’t matter, but still.
At the time, I thought that (1) the difference between Gore and Bush was small and (b) that a strong Nader vote would help build a broad progressive movement. Obviously, I was completely wrong on both counts. (Altho a comparison of Clinton and George H. W. Bush is a lot closer.)
To me, it’s the second point that’s really decisive. After 2000, Nader did nothing with his supporters. He just disappeared. All that energy that went into his campaign led to absolutely no lasting organizations. So, again IMO, the question of how big a factor Nader was in Gore’s loss is sort of irrelevant. Because there’s nothing positive to weigh against it.
February 24, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes
Um, dude, the sole purpose of this post was to provoke a fight. Try not to act shocked at the result.
I’m still glad I didn’t vote for Lieberman. Do enjoy his keynote at the Republican convention, won’t you?
February 24, 2008 at 1:51 pm
The point of bait is stick a hook in a fish’s head. The fish bites of his own choosing.
February 24, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes: can something be someone’s fault, and yet not exclusively someone’s fault?
No! Multivariable causality and various responsible parties are not cricket!
February 24, 2008 at 1:57 pm
The tiniest protest vote that was, if we can remember here, greater than Bush’s pre-recount margin of victory.
And, as Fish pointed out, considerably smaller than the number of registered Democrats who defected directly to Bush. Yet you never see this whinging — eight years later, no less — directed at them for their gutless apostasy. Funny, that.
Question for not-remotely-defensive Nader votes: can something be someone’s fault, and yet not exclusively someone’s fault?
Sure. He played a part in things. So did Gore’s inability to carry his home state. So did three thousand blind Palm Beachers voting for Pat Buchanan.
So did the retard Democrats who, again, were gulled into voting for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. How many of them are going to go for Straight Talkin’ McCain this year, out of spite and/or ignorance?
February 24, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I’m still glad I didn’t vote for Lieberman. Do enjoy his keynote at the Republican convention, won’t you?
Heh-indeedy.
February 24, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Nader’s candidacy was a contributing cause to Gore’s defeat. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
If the ranting about the 2000 election were evenly distributed to all contributing causes in proportion to their importance, I wouldn’t need to be saying anything.
Some Nader 2000 voters have abased themselves sufficiently, some have expressed regret, but without expressing enough self-loathing, some are evasive, and some remain defiant. I think that Democrats should devote themselves to some mission other than trying to get confessions out of 100% of them. The dropoff of Nader votes between 2000 and 2004 (from something like 2.4% to something like .4%, correct me if I’m wrong) is a pretty good indication that most of us have gotten the word.
A lot of Democrats jump from condemning Nader’s candidacy (quite reasonably, on practical, tactical grounds)to rejecting the Green position on most or all of the issues which motivated them. I’m not willing to let someone make that jump.
February 24, 2008 at 2:19 pm
22 posts later, and it turns out the one positive achievement of Democrats is…. that they are not Republicans.
I guess the real reason for Nader-bashing is that it’s fun. It distracts liberals for an hour or so from their own failure to actually elect any of their own and get anything done.
After all, if you’re reduced to claiming that Obama’s plans for bombing Pakistan and enlarging the army are probably not the biggest deal in the world, you need some kind of release. And let’s be honest, Nader is an easy target – as has been pointed out, there’s no conceivable good that can come from his run this time. I’m not worried it’ll cost Obama the election (it won’t), but it’s going to waste energy and money better invested in issue campaigns.
February 24, 2008 at 2:22 pm
A butterfly in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Florida, but if he does, The Editors will track him down and stomp him. Fucking butterflies.
But when Nader began his campaign he knew he might help elect Bush, and he was willing to take that chance. It’s not merely a matter of the importance of his effort, but also his intent. And he knew from the beginning that the eventual outcome was one of the possibilities — in fact, if it hadn’t been possible, Nader’s candidacy would have made no sense. Not a good year for a protest vote.
But in an election as close as that there are a lot of other fucking butterflies to stomp.
February 24, 2008 at 2:28 pm
But when Nader began his campaign he knew he might help elect Bush, and he was willing to take that chance.
Yes, and on Nader’s tombstone we can carve his own variant of Condi Rice’s epitaph:
“Who could have possibly predicted that I would help elect the worst president in United States history?”
February 24, 2008 at 2:29 pm
All the Nader voters who elected Bush in 2000 are now voting for (Obama/Clinton)(rotate)!!!!
February 24, 2008 at 2:34 pm
By simply removing the Nader candidacy, and leaving everything else in place, Gore wins Florida by thousands of votes, and is elected President. One can also change a number of other variables and get this result, too; this doesn’t absolve Nader, any more than Nader absolves them.
Nobody particularly cares about abasement – we aren’t at church. I think most Gore voters are pretty surprised at how the election hinged on tiny margins, and how huge a disaster Bush would turn out to be. I have been surprised by this and much, much more. Life is full of surprises, and that’s just the ways it goes, but the past is full of settled questions. The point is to recognize facts, draw the obvious conclusions from them, and apply these lessons to the future. The mass refusal to do this keeps open the possibility that the same mistakes can be repeated, and keeps them a topic of current interest.
February 24, 2008 at 2:36 pm
But there’s still only one that doesn’t believe it’s a butterfly.
February 24, 2008 at 2:48 pm
There’s a mass refusal to not vote for Nader again? Where? See, this is the weird thing – he’s such a non-entity, and his campaign is such a non-issue. Nevertheless, we are all urged to learn the lesson over and over and over again, while numerous issues at least as big remain safely unexamined.
February 24, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Your comments in this thread might a place to begin the investigation, Encyclopedia Brown.
Essentially every other post every on this or any other liberal weblog might offer a counterexample.
February 24, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I thought you wanted to poke a stick in a hornet’s nest.
Hopefully the moment has passed (please, God, please!), but you could have dissed R0n Pau7. Back in the day, that would bring ‘em out.
February 24, 2008 at 3:13 pm
There’s no mass refusal to do this, The Editors. Most 2000 Nader voters didn’t vote for him in 2004. 2.4% in 2000 is hardly a mass anything anyway.
But there’s still only one that doesn’t believe it’s a butterfly.
It’s not true. A lot of the butterflies are right within the Democratic Party, and they’re only slowly being rooted out. Recent example: Harold Ford of the DLC just spoke at a Chris Shays (R) rally. The DLC has lost a lot of clout, but it still is a factor in the party.
There are dozens of mercenary consultants with no loyalty to the Democrats still collecting millions of dollars from the party. (Slightly off-topic, but I think that Carville’s mouth should be swabbed for second-hand Cheney semen.)
Those are two contemporary examples and are still significant factors (unlike Nader), and they both played as big a role as Nader did in leading the Democrats to defeat in 2000. And they sure as shit haven’t confessed anything yet.
Get over it. Your vendetta is stupid. Most of the people you thin you’re talking to are about where you want them to be already, and the others you might as well forget about.
February 24, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Hey, obscure pop culture references are no fair!!
February 24, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Actuially, I think Sifu intended to dangle a worm in a hornets’ nest. A lot of the ensuing confusion can be traced to this.
February 24, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I was trying to hook a sleeping dog with a swizzle stick, and now look at the trouble I’ve caused.
February 24, 2008 at 3:27 pm
The moment to troll never passes. Trolling’s timing is eternal.
February 24, 2008 at 3:31 pm
John – I would argue that, while an admittedly ambiguous word, a group a few tens of thousands of times as large as Bush’s margin of victory in Florida may be described as “mass” enough to warrant consideration. It’s a million people, give or take. Elections can hinge on so much less.
Again, as for your other complaint, you might want to peruse the nearly 6 years of (admittedly scattered) posts on this website, and note that a vanishingly small percentage address the man you and others here think is the only thing we ever talk about (today – yesterday, obviously, my long-time monomaniacal obsession was someone completely different). You might also try any other weblog in existence, and note that – as a matter of mathematical fact – this is universally true. Noting this, one might ask oneself why one’s perception is so at odds with trivially provable facts about the world. One might further wonder why nobody accuses anyone of having a vandetta against (say) Mark Penn, nobody flies into a rage when people disparage him (or the people who hire him), and nobody has ever bothered trolling or otherwise baiting Mark Penn fanboys. Again, nobody cares if you hate yourself or not, and, as nobody thought you were infallible anyway, nobody would think the less of you if you admitted you were human and sometimes reevaluated your beliefs in the face of unexpected catastrophe. Or just didn’t so strenuously object to occassional mention of things which might suggest to you that it was so. It’s just not a realistic expectation to have about people, especially when there’s childish sport to be had.
February 24, 2008 at 3:32 pm
you might want to peruse the nearly 6 years of (admittedly scattered) posts on this website
I think those got deleted.
February 24, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Archive.org knows everything. Also, I’m working on that. Slowly.
February 24, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Oh, and Nader is King of Trolls. My hat goes: doff! doff! doff!
February 24, 2008 at 3:46 pm
The Editors comes back to the issue sufficiently often to be annoying. At least Alterman keeps it down to two words every week or two.
My primary reason for objecting to this stuff is that harping on Nader is done out of proportion to Nader’s importance, and at the expense of other issues. I specifically mentioned Jesse Jackson’s being called off by Gore’s people because it’s an issue of equal or greater importance which is disappearing from memory, whereas tens of millions of people know that Nader threw the election to Bush. That butterfly has been sufficiently stomped, thank you very much.
My second reason for objecting to this stuff (here and elsewhere) is that it often or usually comes along with an unawareness of what the Nader voters issues were, and often enough with a centrist DLC / Blue Dog take on many of those issues. I don’t have links, but it’s my memory that from time to time The editors has gone that way too, though less so more recently. I’m not an expert Editorologist, but I’ve been a regular reader for years.
February 24, 2008 at 3:52 pm
He didn’t today, though, John.
February 24, 2008 at 3:55 pm
John, it remains trivial to prove you wrong. Not more than ‘two words every week or two’, but once in the past month plus – that one and only example being this here post. Which I didn’t write. And which is explicitly troll bait. It’s slightly harder to run the nemubers for the full term of the blog, but not much. So: your perception of reality has just been unambiguously falsified. You have been shown to be wrong, which is something that happens to every human every single day. So now you have to choose again: more grimly entertaining contortions? Or a pause for reflection? The 11-year-old bully in me hopes you go for #1, but my better self really wishes you’d just take a deep breath and relax. I’m feeling kind of teased out.
February 24, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Well, what’s at stake is whether you do it often enough to be annoying to me, and my memory is that you do. I’m not an Editorologist, but if ever become one I’ll get back to you and explain.
My apologies for confusing Sifu and The Editors, though.
February 24, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Well, John, that leaves the question of why a posting frequency of ‘almost never’ is such an intolerable irritant to you. I leave you to sort it out for yourself, because this whole exercise is seriously depressing the shit out of me.
February 24, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I don’t like Nader not because of the 2000 election, but because I’ve worked for my entire working career within the orbit of the kind of groups that he founded. Which have generally bad conditions for workers, something which goes back directly to his influence.
For the 2000 election, though, I remember a sequence of events which puts the blame more clearly on Nader than those thousand or so votes in Florida. Late in the campaign, I remember Gore giving speeches on global warming in order to shore up his left credentials among the kind of voters who might go to Nader. And he lost West Virginia because, I think, that scared off the coal miners.
The kind of people who are always going on about “we must pull the party to the left! Without an alternative third party, they’ll know we have nowhere to go” have a) evidently never heard of primaries, b) no sense of timing at all. Everyone knew that Gore, if elected, was going to do something about global warming. But that’s not good enough for the people for whom nothing the Democrats do is ever going to be good enough.
February 24, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I might add that my response to Sifu’s ever-so-nuanced critique of Nader was much more reasonable than Sifu’s post deserved. The response desired was apparently, “Yeah, Nader is still a fucking moron!” I gave a different response, and that pisses you off.
Your site can be searched back how far — two months? I did try a Google search. This has been a live issue for me from the beginning, just as it has been for you, and I remember not liking a number of things you said about this and similar topics in the unarchived past. I’ve been a fairly regular reader for several years.
For the 2000 election, though, I remember a sequence of events which puts the blame more clearly on Nader than those thousand or so votes in Florida. Late in the campaign, I remember Gore giving speeches on global warming in order to shore up his left credentials among the kind of voters who might go to Nader. And he lost West Virginia because, I think, that scared off the coal miners.
Jesus, Rich. Is this the worst dirt you have? Gore may have lost W. Virginia because he mentioned global warming, and that’s Nader’s fault?
February 24, 2008 at 4:50 pm
John, you were being trolled. IIRC, you aren’t remotely as stupid as your acting this afternoon – far, far from it, if memory serves. So stop trying to make me stick my head in the oven. Please, if not for you, then for me. This is excruciating.
To the first post ever. Archive.org. It’s not as easy as a Google search, but it’s possible. Easier than both is to just quietly admit – admit to yourself, no further abasement is required or desired – you’re completely overreacting and fucking move on. I would be happy to help you compile the statistics from the Internet Archive, as my time permits, but be aware that this offer comes from the polar opposite of generosity and kindness. Afterwards, I’ll go look at car wrecks and cancer kids.
February 24, 2008 at 4:50 pm
By simply removing the Nader candidacy, and leaving everything else in place, Gore wins Florida by thousands of votes, and is elected President.
I believe this is true. I also believe that if you fight voter suppression efforts in Florida, this is also true. If you change the butterfly ballots in Dade county it is true. If Gore runs a better campaign it is true. If our media elites didn’t run a systematic smear campaign against a pretty smart guy and elevate a proto-simian, it is true.
Only one of these possible alternative universes is anti-democratic however.
February 24, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Then we are in agreement on the only question of substance.
Figures my oven would be an electric. Ah, well. Can’t be worse than this.
February 24, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Quite apart from everything else, I’m still waiting for someone to convince me that Gore/Lieberman would’ve been significantly better than what we got.
Remember, we’re talking about the pre-retirement Al Gore, not the one who suddenly grew a nutsack. Oh, and Joe Lieberman. You know, the biggest Iraq hawk there is? And they would’ve been working with a Repub congress.
Yes, I’ll grant you less horrid SCOTUS appointments, and probably less disregard for science. But this hypothetical fantasy utopia many folks have conjured up is really quite silly.
February 24, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Come on, The Editors. You guys troll me and I’m unreasonable?
I’ve heard Sifu’s kind of comment many times, normally by shitheads. I always respond to it if reasonably possible. It’s my belief that people who put a lot of weight on this stuff have other problems.
Seriously, you are angry because I objected to this post instead of simply agreeing that Nader is a fucking moron? The intelligent, thoughtful thing to do is just agree?
February 24, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Nader’s candidacy was a contributing cause to Gore’s defeat. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
eh? 1000 of the ~80,000 voters voting Nader and not Gore were certainly sufficient!
I don’t blame anyone here, let alone Nader. He had a right to run.
If less than 1000 Nader voters in NH and FL are unhappy with the outcome of their protest votes, more power to Nader voters in their campaign to move the discourse in this country more to the left.
Me, I don’t like the costs involved. . . you know, the present $9,000,000,000,000+ national debt, ~30M people who bought 2004-2007 now underwater on their mortgages, 4000+ US KIA in Iraq, “Heckuva Job Brownie”, Alito & Roberts on the court, etc etc.
Voting, and not voting, has consequences. Choose wisely.
February 24, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I still didn’t post this, John. You can say it tomorrow and it won’t have happened then, either. And nobody has ever trolled reasonable people. Reasonable people understand how pointless it is. That just the nature of trolling.
I’m not angry, John. I’m depressed and despairing of the future of humanity. If I were Dr. Phil I’d start talking to you about ‘projection’. But I’m not Dr. Phil, so I’m just going to look at you, without saying anything, and with a really pained expression on my face, and hope without hope that you’ll stop.
The good thing about the electric oven is that after a few minutes your face sticks to the coils, so you can just kind of relax and let events run their inevitable conclusion. All the second-guessing is what really hurts.
February 24, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I’m willing to sign a truce, shut up and leave. I do not want to dedicate myself to Editorology, and for whatever reason, I’m finding the Wayback Machine to be extremely user-unfriendly at the moment.
Attitudes toward Nader are markers of factional differences within the Democratic Party, and you and I are in different factions. In 2002 swore an oath to vote for the Democratic candidate in the future regardless, and I’m keeping to it. But there’s a lot of crap that goes along with Nader-bashing that pisses me off.
February 24, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Christ guys, first Mac v. PC, then the Nader-Gore wars. What’s next? Gun Control? Palestine? Why Your Favorite Pets Suck? Sheesh!
February 24, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Oh, and one other thing. We’re on the cusp of a new era of Democratic dominance, and none of that would’ve been possible without the last eight years. Yeah, I’m pretty much saying that the New Deal couldn’t have happened without the Great Depression.
And no, that’s not a rationalization. But maybe in the long run, Gore did us all a favor by running a shitty campaign in 2000.
February 24, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Those of us who didn’t die in Iraq, in any case.
February 24, 2008 at 5:21 pm
It’s a good thing there’s AIDS, because otherwise we’d have never come up with a cure for AIDS.
February 24, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Dear Matt
This was billed as “The final internet fight.”
Other subjects have been covered elsewhere.
However, I hate Ron Paul.
His childish “libertarian” sermons are only interesting to the three or four Ayn Rand fans who are more than 16 years old.
And why does anybody think that his nativist proto-fascism is “libertarian”.
February 24, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I should add that I might be hung over more than actually depressed. You still aren’t improving things any.
February 24, 2008 at 5:24 pm
The butterfly ballot was in Palm Beach County.
Only one of these possible alternative universes is anti-democratic however.
What exactly is anti-democratic about removing a certain variable for the purpose of analysis? I’m afraid I don’t follow.
February 24, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Those of us who didn’t die in Iraq, in any case.
True, and the brave Democrats in Congress certainly did do their best to put a stop to it.
Oh, wait…
February 24, 2008 at 5:26 pm
86 followed by 92 makes no sense, dude. It’s a good thing that Bush got elected even though he started a war in Iraq because it’s ushering in a new era of Democratic dominance even though the Democrats did nothing to stop the war. What?
February 24, 2008 at 5:29 pm
It’s a good thing there’s AIDS, because otherwise we’d have never come up with a cure for AIDS. Also, the cure doesn’t work.
February 24, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Uh no, I was objecting to your assumption that things would’ve been different re:Iraq. We have no evidence of this whatsoever.
But more to the point, the Democratic dominance I’m talking about is a direct backlash against the past eight years. I’m talking about better candidates and more progressive platforms. I’m talking about throwing out the DLC types, which is slowly beginning to happen.
And finally, the AIDS crack was uncalled for. Nowhere did I say that the disaster which has been the last eight years was “a good thing”. I was simply making an objective observation about current reality. I made no implicit judgement as to its goodness or badness.
February 24, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I don’t know if Nader’s `92 campaign counts. He had as much chance to win as any write-in candidate (like George Wallace’s corpse or Daffy Duck).
One thing that may change the 2008 dynamic is that Nader runs on corporate reform and touts the fact that he’s not beholden to special interests.
Both McCain and Obama are making that a central theme of their campaigns, as well.
February 24, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Shorter Ron Paul Supporters Everywhere: “Ron Paul runs Bartertown.”
February 24, 2008 at 5:42 pm
So you meant “did us all a favor” in the not-good sense? Anyway, I never said AIDS was bad. APOLOGIZE NOOOOOOOOWWWWW!!
February 24, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Dear Al Gore,
I’ve been using your internets for some time now, with great success. But today I noticed they were depressing and horrible and make me pray for death. Can I have some better internets now?
Love
The Editors
February 24, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Uh no, I was objecting to your assumption that things would’ve been different re:Iraq. We have no evidence of this whatsoever.
Along similar lines, Obama has failed to date to prove he is not a crypto-Muslim.
February 24, 2008 at 5:50 pm
#92 above was a non-sequitur because in 2000 the choice was between Gore and Bush, not “Democrats in Congress” and whatever.
I think it’s safe to say that if Gore had been elected in 2000 we would not have invaded Iraq in 2003.
February 24, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Shorter The Editors: I started a fight, and now everyone’s fighting.
Christ on His throne, you’ve been a drag ever since the Super Bowl. It was only a football game, dude. Now go draw some comics or STFU.
February 24, 2008 at 5:53 pm
So you meant “did us all a favor” in the not-good sense?
No, I meant “Maybe in the long run, Gore did us all a favor” in the complete, unedited quote sense.
February 24, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Well, that’s as clear as koan.
Shorter Me: You used to be funny, but now you’re just shrill. This is my fresh and exciting contribution to PMI discourse.
February 24, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Now go draw some comics or STFU.
We’re not your monkey, Tucker.
February 24, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Shorter The Editors: I started a fight, and now everyone’s fighting.
The Editors didn’t start this. Sifu Tweety Fish did. Not everyone is fighting. Some are trolling. Others are getting trolled hard.
February 24, 2008 at 6:01 pm
What exactly is anti-democratic about removing a certain variable for the purpose of analysis? I’m afraid I don’t follow.
Not for the purposes of analysis (if that is the only reason theeditors brings it up, my point was wrong), but as envisioning a scenario where GWB doesn’t get elected. I chose words poorly, less democratic is better than anti-democratic. There are lots of ways to get better election outcomes than to suggest we are better off without 3rd party candidates (instant runoff comes to mind).
February 24, 2008 at 6:12 pm
The Editors didn’t start this. Sifu Tweety Fish did.
Well, Sifu refers to himself and The Editors as “we”, after all.
I’m afraid I’m in the same boat with John Emerson above. I got suckered in to what I mistook for a serious discussion, and now I’m being played for a fool. Oh well, live and learn.
February 24, 2008 at 6:24 pm
No, don’t delete the archive.org posts!!! I need the kitteh pics!
February 24, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Yes, Me. “We” are not your monkey. “I” wrote the post. I understand my use of the singular might have been confusing, but no, really: I wrote this post. That’s why it has my name on it. The poor Editors had nothing to do with it until he woke up this morning and was confronted with bleak, soul-destroying anomie.
February 24, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I confess. I not only voted for Nader in ’00, I actually *attended Green Party Meetings* here in Spokane for awhile. Until I realized they weren’t trying to build a successful political party, but instead, perfect their formula for Nader Narcolepsy, whereby entire convention halls could be placed into a coma after 15 minutes of Nader drone-rant and procedural knitting.
Remember the political meeting scene in Life of Brian? Like that, only not funny, boring costumes, and no popcorn.
February 24, 2008 at 6:44 pm
This is a pretty impressive thread given the grass-is-green, water-is-wet, we-hold-this-truth-to-be-self-evident nature of the original post.
February 24, 2008 at 6:56 pm
“Quite apart from everything else, I’m still waiting for someone to convince me that Gore/Lieberman would’ve been significantly better than what we got.
“Remember, we’re talking about the pre-retirement Al Gore, not the one who suddenly grew a nutsack. Oh, and Joe Lieberman. You know, the biggest Iraq hawk there is? And they would’ve been working with a Repub congress.
“Yes, I’ll grant you less horrid SCOTUS appointments, and probably less disregard for science. But this hypothetical fantasy utopia many folks have conjured up is really quite silly.”
Thith thpeakth twooth to me. (I have affected an internet lithp, yeth?)
The great thing about Buth ith that he ith rethponthible, ok, blamable, for the path theven yeath of thit.
And we can vote for Obama. A man who at leatht deliverth a truly thtirring thpeech.
February 24, 2008 at 7:00 pm
“You guys troll me and I’m unreasonable?”
You fed Sifu raw meat. Unreasonable and unconscionable. With Mogwai comes great responsibility.
February 24, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Technically, that video was *awesome*, right?
February 24, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I love Ron Paul the same way I love Al Sharpton. I wish they’d run on a shared ticket.
February 24, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I swore to leave, but this is bullshit. It’s like a fratboy April Fools joke that no one else thinks is funny.
February 24, 2008 at 8:41 pm
The Democrats have not been deserving of our votes, and it’s not Ralph Nader’s fault.
He was right. I support him again.
February 24, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Sorry to break up the little love-fest here, but I have a serious question:
Is Nader running as a Green this year?
The Greens shunned him in `04, and it looks like they’re doing the same this year, but does anyone have official word on this?
February 24, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Here’s the current word from Nader’s campaign manager.
February 24, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I not only voted for Nader in ‘00, I actually *attended Green Party Meetings* here in Spokane for awhile. Until I realized they weren’t trying to build a successful political party
Right. That’s the crux of it.
February 25, 2008 at 12:06 am
Ralph Nader is an electorally insignificant force this term. So, go for it. The Green Party had to run someone anyway.
Obama is gonna beat McCain 2-1.
So long as no fucks up we should be fine.*
*famous last words.
February 25, 2008 at 1:43 am
I can’t believe I fell for the Mac-PC thing. I think you guys screwed up on the chomsky one, you should have shifted to Serbia vs. Croatia, or maybe Turk vs. Armenian. Jesus H. What is in the water over here?????
“my friend is planning on going on vacation to the former Yugoslavia. I told him to avoid the disgusting and vile Serbia while frolicking in the delightful Croatia. Our other friend said that Croatia is like if you made Hostel The Movie a country but Serbia is a 24 hour party with natural wonders. I wonder who is right? Discuss.”
February 25, 2008 at 6:19 am
The question of Nader’s blame for 2000 is, like so many subtle and zen-like questions, best considered through the metaphorical lens of football (no, not that kind). What Gore/Nader 2000 is most like, you see, is Korea v. Italy in the 2002 World Cup round of 16.
You’ll all remember, I’m sure, that Korea won 2-1 in extra time after a series of extremely dodgy calls by ref Byron Moreno. The Italian nation rose up in fury that they wuz robbed, the always entertaining Giovanni “Ich habe fertig!” Trapattoni going so far as to suggest Moreno was carrying out a Sepp Blatter-ordered hit job in order to ensure Korea’s progress to the next round. (Actually, given that Blatter is the jackal-born son of Satan Himself, that last part is easy to believe.) Moreno’s refereeing got even worse back home in Ecuador after the World Cup, BTW, and less than a year after the KOR/ITA fiasco he was force to retire in disgrace.
So, then, who is to blame for KOR/ITA 2002? Moreno, or the Italy team?
Moreno was astonishingly bad; he stood out as bad in a field of WC refs that was, on the whole, outstanding for its badness. We may never know whether he was deliberately spiking Italy’s guns or whether he was merely a good-faith incompetent. But if a Hugh Dallas or Markus Merk had been on the pitch that day instead of Moreno, it’s a virtual certainty that Italy, not Korea, would have gone on to the quarter finals.
But still, I think any fair obsever has to say that, if you are an Italy manager, player or supporter, you can only blame yourself; because:
1) you are Italy, and if you cannot beat Korea by two clear goals in the face of even actively hostile refereeing, then go home and cry about it alone in your room; and
2) fuck the Azzurri anyway.
But if you are not Italy, then I don’t think there’s any way you can argue with a straight face that Moreno did not cost them a match that should have been theirs. The game puked him out as soon as it could after his appalling WC2002 performance, and rightly so. Let his name and memory be erased.
Now all you need to do is substitute “Gore” for “Italy”, “Nader” for “Moreno” (and, I suppose, “Rove” for “Blatter”) and so on*, and the key to understanding the 2000 US presidential elections is in your hand.
* Except for the “fuck the Azzurri” part, of course. Gore doesn’t deserve the same level of contempt as the Italian national team. Nobody else deserves that.
February 25, 2008 at 6:43 am
Nader’s running again?
What, did Nader get replaced by the Zombie of Harold Stassen?
..which would be rather cool, and maybe I should consider voting for him…
Nah.
February 25, 2008 at 7:39 am
Zidane knew how to deal with the Italian national team.
February 25, 2008 at 7:43 am
Mrs Tilton Says:
Ah. Liberal Fascism at its finest. If we spend enough time talking about Futbowel (or however it’s spelled in the Liberal demon tongue), we won’t even need France to invade.
February 25, 2008 at 8:15 am
Holy Shit! 127+ comments debating Ralph Nader? And all the while Jewish pirates struggle for the cultural recognition they deserve? Priorities, people…
February 25, 2008 at 8:50 am
Dear Editors: No need to put your head in the oven. Ralph’s delusional cult has no power this time. (By the way, it is a religious cult. That’s why reason is useless with them.) George Stephanopoulos got it exactly right today. He said “Yesterday was the highlight of Nader’s 2008 campaign.” End of story.
Of course if I’m wrong, I’ll hop on the first bus to Montreal on November 5. Vive le fascisme liberal!
February 25, 2008 at 10:11 am
Dear Morty:
Slow on the uptake? That BoingBoing piece was two years ago:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/16/jewish-pirates-of-th.html
February 25, 2008 at 10:19 am
I think it’s safe to say that if Gore had been elected in 2000 we would not have invaded Iraq in 2003.
Yeah, we could have continued crushing the Iraqi people under our sanctions instead! Madeleine Albright thought the price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was worth it, and who am I to disagree with her?
February 25, 2008 at 11:03 am
Nader is older than McCain???
I did not know that.
February 25, 2008 at 11:11 am
“Well, what’s at stake is whether you do it often enough to be annoying to me”
The title of a recent Sifu post comes to mind: “This food is terrible, and the portions are tiny!”
Here’s a thought, Sifu and Eds.: maybe JE et.al. don’t care at all about Nader and are just trolling you masterfully.
Maybe.
February 25, 2008 at 11:11 am
Andrew:
What’s your point? Are the pirates any less relevant? Do you prefer discussing Ralph Nader to Jewish Pirates? Will Ralph Nader even acknowledge the broken Jewish Pirates pension system that he helped bring into being?
Seriously, what is your point?
February 25, 2008 at 12:35 pm
There were plenty of other people running for President in 2000.
At least 10 of them dwarfed Nader’s final vote count in Florida, yet I never see people climbing over eachother to smear them, and blame them for The Retard getting elected.
(ps: I see the “your candidate’s supporters are a CULT” meme is currently being barfed-up here too)
February 25, 2008 at 12:56 pm
“At least 10 of them dwarfed Nader’s final vote count in Florida”
The Florida 2000 results were a little different on Planet Earth.
Nader is just a “perennial presidential candidate,” Obama said.
February 25, 2008 at 1:05 pm
“The Florida 2000 results were a little different on Planet Earth.”
Sure, if you only post polls that show four others who ran. There were many more.
If you want to keep posting inaccurate results to prolong your retarded fight, go for it. It’s what you do.
February 25, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Stupid Uli, you forgot all the invisible candidates!
Don’t you know CNN is lying to you with their inaccurate polls of “election results” “reported” and “verified” by the “State of Florida”?
February 25, 2008 at 1:23 pm
“Stupid Uli…”
Volum knows this guy in Florida who heard that Milosevic got more votes than Nader, but Amerikkka secretly destroyed the ballots.
February 25, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Then there’s the Tennessee 2000 results. VP for eight years, senator and congressman for 15 years prior. Still loses his home state (which would have given him the victory w/o America’s Wang) by 3 points.
Thanks Tennessee!
February 25, 2008 at 2:23 pm
“Thanks Tennessee!”
Also, Sifu and the Eds.’ semiannual Nader-bashing conveniently ignores how many votes this Bush person took from Gore. Looked at quantitatively, they obviously have a pro-Bush agenda. Pro-Tennessee, even.
February 25, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Here’s a thought, Sifu and Eds.: maybe JE et.al. don’t care at all about Nader and are just trolling you masterfully.
Now we’re getting somewhere!
There were plenty of other people running for President in 2000.
At least 10 of them dwarfed Nader’s final vote count in Florida, yet I never see people climbing over eachother to smear them, and blame them for The Retard getting elected.
We’ve arrived!
February 25, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Hey Sifu
The CNN poll that Uli linked to, didn’t list all of the people who were on the Florida ballot.
And, as has been shown, the totals of those “other” candidates, was more than the difference between Gore & Bush.
I know you love being snotty to us lowly commenters here, but your condescending tone doesn’t cover up the fact that you’re just wrong.
February 25, 2008 at 2:49 pm
OK
Is this just a virtual dick-slapping contest complete with fake-trolls and unfunny inside jokes, or an actual thread about an actual topic of actual discussion?
Uggh.
February 25, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Okay, Volum, but you didn’t say “at least 10 candidates got enough votes to cover the gap between Bush and Gore”. You said “at least 10 candidates dwarfed Nader’s final vote count“, which is not just wrong, but hilariously wrong.
And for that, I salute you.
Your larger point… well, it’s sort of dumb.
February 25, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Also, this is neither here nor there, but what is a dick-slapping contest? What does one slap, with what? And who on Earth wins?
February 25, 2008 at 3:03 pm
“Is this just a virtual dick-slapping contest complete with fake-trolls and unfunny inside jokes, or an actual thread about an actual topic of actual discussion?”
It’s thread of an unconventional nature with intent to cause grievous mental confusion to the Great American Public.
February 25, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Sifu:
“Also, this is neither here nor there, but what is a dick-slapping contest? What does one slap, with what? And who on Earth wins?”
It’s where a bunch of lonely and portly men (grown babies) take out their peckers and slap eachothers with them.
Everyone wins!
And for the fish-in-a-barrel that this thread has been, I feel pretty cheated. In-jokes, snarks or whatever, but blatantly hooking your readers for a fake discussion is pretty gay (have I said the word “retarded” too much in this pseudo thread?) especially over a topic where people to this day still point their poo-covered finger in the wrong direction.
February 25, 2008 at 4:07 pm
“… a topic where people to this day still point their poo-covered finger in the wrong direction.
If your participation in this thread was an attempt to fly the Nader flag, you should have quit before starting. Thanks for the chuckles, tho, and making me wonder if you’re really a Nader-hater trying to make his supporters look bad.
February 25, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Go Ralph! Stick it to the man! My motto is, .08 in ’08.
Oh and by the way, to all Nader voters, past and present, please suck my balls. Thanks for G. Dubya, assholes.
February 25, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Will he ever get the point after getting less than 3% of the vote, that he is not popular?
February 25, 2008 at 10:48 pm
If Nader hadn’t taken so many votes away from Bush, there wouldn’t even have been the appearance of a contested election and we’d all have nothing to complain about now, so I think you owe him. Big.
February 26, 2008 at 1:19 pm
OK, I know this is all just troll soup, but I still have issues.
HOW CAN WE STILL FIGHT THESE FUCKING BATTLES WITHOUT MENTIONING ELECTION REFORM? There need never be another spoiler candidate again. IRV just fixes it, or, if you prefer, there are other voting systems, ALL of them better than what we’ve got. If you are a citizen – right, left, or center – and not a corporate entity, PR flak, or political consultant, you cannot help but want that.
Yeah, Bush has done enormous damage to humanity in just 8 years, but changing the system would last as long as the constitution will, and it would mean candidates who listen more EVERY TIME.
I voted for Nader in 2000 (in a state that went safely Gore). And when the circus started, I was actually happy about it for a while – I thought that Gore would win it in the end, and, by focusing attention on the horrible broken system, I thought the whole thing would boost the cause of reform.
I honestly still cannot get my head around the fact that people would rather fight about “your fault – no it isn’t” than just fucking fix the problem once and for all.
Nader defenders don’t make me angry, and even “Nader is Satan” doesn’t make me angry. But this particular flavor of troll soup where everybody ignores the elephant makes me LIVID.
March 4, 2008 at 9:31 am
I’m not going to vote for Hillary. I appreciate Ralph’s efforts to give me an alternative if I need one.
May the Creative Forces of the Universe stand beside us, and guide us, through the Night with the Light from Above (speaking metaphorically)
June 21, 2008 at 12:00 am
[...] Back in February, on the occasion of Ralph Nader again declaring his intention to run headfirst into a brick wall for President, Sifu Tweety Fish of The Poor Man Institute decided that, a sufficient amount of something having somethinged, that the time had come around to annoy Nader supporters. [...]