DAMN YOU NADER!!!!!!

ps I know there's another thread on this but I'm too angry to find it

(And I VOTED FOR HIM in 2000! Jesus.)

I think he saw Bush's numbers fall below 44% in every major poll of the last week or two, including the Fox poll, losing to the Democrats in every one. And he saw Bush look pathetic and weak and dishonest on Meet the Press. And he saw Nascar dads getting pissed at Bush taking over Daytona. And he saw the new meme developing - Bush is a liar whose administration's attempts to cover up the truth are becoming subjects of ridicule. And he saw job figures and consumer confidence continuing to decline, at historic rates even. And he saw two strong Democratic candidates. And he figured that it's safe to run, because he can try to pull the Dems to the left while not hurting their chances.

Leadership and charisma is also crucial to winning such an election - and it's hard to get past his Sloth-esque look of one eye being bigger than the other, the way he talks out of the left side of his mouth, and worst of all, his slouch.

Check out this from http://phillyimc.org:

"to the naysayers: rev.nazaright speaks on nader running again;"
By rev. nazaright

also, here's my open statement on nader's upcoming decision whether to run: (there has to be an alternative, we cannot be extorted into the lesser of the 2 evils, this is the time to stand firm thru the process & break the democratic party down & educate them on democracy!!)

ou can't blame a good guy, or those that support a good guy, for the fact that you're too pussy & corrupt to stand up to the bad guy. you must ultimately make the stand to oppose evil, whether your chance for this was in 2000, in 2004 or sometime further down the road of your complicity in this treason against humanity.

that will be the testament to our fortitude, as we wait for you to grow up & join the fucking fight, so you better start to ask yourself where might your integrity be found. and make it snappy, will ya?!

but in the mean time, don't you fucking dare be pissed at me because i do the right thing in this sea of shit that you help currently to perpetuate!! i am blameless, and ralph nader has my vote again!!

if you assholes had the heart to nominate kucinich or sharpton then i would've went democrat this time around, but kerry & edwards are just a joke & you know it.

hopefully next time your hindsight will work a little bit quicker, maybe quick enough to act against the next illegal war, but whatever the case my choice is made righteous in the name of freedom & justice & god!!

love & peace to all

ps down with bush!! down with delegation!! down with the electoral college!! down with your complacency & fear!!
THANK YOU & GOD BLESS REV. NAZARIGHT
-----

The comment entitled "have you no sense?" is mine.

Yes, which is why I'm voting Democratic.

that said, he'll be lucky to get 1% this time around. franken-kerry or not.

amen.

ralphie should hook up with bill bennett and joe lieberman, and form the Sanctimony Party. won't get any votes worth a damn, but all that hot air and sanctimonious humbug in one place at one time would be some sort of accomplishment!

Albert Gore, Jr. made absolutely no attempt to appeal to my vote. Had he made even small, but clear, concessions, he might have had it. Instead, he moved relentlessly to the right as his major strategy. Kerry has, in contrast, moved left toward the Dean positions. That may reverse itself as soon as the delegates are in his pocket.

This is a new election and new decision to make. I am going to keep my powder dry and decide my vote in October. In any event, it will never go to BushCo. If it appears there is any chance Oregon might swing to BushCo, I'll move to the right (to the Democrat) to prevent it as best I can. If Oregon is hopelessly lost to BushCo already, or the Democrat is far ahead, that would change matters. I'll make my calculations when the time comes.

I will not compromise my beliefs for no good reason, out of a misguided sense of loyalty to the Democrats. They've shown little enough loyalty to me lately.

What gets my goat is that my mental laser beam of hatred and anger that I usually keep focused on Bush is being diverted to Nader now. We must all focus our hatred on Bush.

i'm not too enthused w/ john kerry, and i'm probably not enthused for the same reasons that a lot of folks (naderites or not) are not enthused. i think that he's the last of the old guard, a konstantin chernenko to howard dean's mikhail gorbachev. dean was my candidate, and presuming that his name is on the ballot during the primary i'll still vote for him in the primary (thanks, DLC, for making NJ the LAST primary) so that he and his delegates have some juice at the primary. but if kerry is the nominee, i will vote for him -- not some vanity candidate who's equally unsuitable to be president as bush. and if said vanity candidate thinks he's gonna peel away the majority of dean supporters, he's in for a really nasty shock.

What has Gore done that anyone cared about? Aside from backing Dean.

Grow a beard?

Tipper?

damn washington insiders!

and to answer milo's question, here's one thing that gore has done since election 2000. speechifying may not be much in yer eyes, but again i ask: what has nader been doing for the past 4 years? other than whipping up some more kool-aid which apparently you will gulp down again?

http://www.scripting.com/images/koolAidPacketGrape.gif

I voted for the third-party candidate with the best chance of hitting 5%. If it had been the Libertarians or Reform Party (with someone other than Buchanan), I probably would have voted for them.

I don't care about Nader, I voted against two corporate-owned conservative major party candidates. But claiming that Gore has been an important figure over the last four years (until he doomed Dean) is just a joke.

When you look at mortality rates from the first 15 years of Saddam's reign, and you look at mortality rates for Saddam's post-sanction reign, and the difference is a half-million dead, something changed. The only difference is Desert Storm (another unnecessary war) and sanctions.

***
Anupama Rao Singh, country director for the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), made the estimate in an interview with Reuters.

``In absolute terms we estimate that perhaps about half a million children under 5 years of age have died, who ordinarily would not have died had the decline in mortality that was prevalent over the 70s and the 80s continued through the 90s,'' she said.

***
Hstencil, you seem to be assuming things that I never said. You can have weapons inspections and certain sanctions, without the entire thing. And when, after a few years, you realize that the sanctions aren't weakening Saddam, only killing people you stop them.

Nader's position was irrelevant. It's only relevant if I cite him as someone preferable to the Democrats. I didn't. This goes back to sym not paying attention and referring to my Nader love, or Eisbar's kool-aid - I'm not sure how many times I need to say "I don't care about Ralph Nader."

I voted strategically, just like people are going to strategically vote against Bush in November, regardless of who the Democrats nominate. I knew Nader wasn't getting elected, so I didn't care about his effectiveness as a politician or President. Neither did anyone else I know who voted for him. I voted for a third-party name. If he hadn't been on the ballot and no one else had a shot at getting 5%, I would have voted for David McReynolds.

***

As to "changing ANYTHING" - 'scuse me. What have leftists in the Democratic Party changed in the last thirty years. Not a goddamned thing. All you've done is sat by and watched as the party moved ever rightward, and became less and less effective. Any progressive in the Democratic Party is as sidelined as any Green, only you get to pretend you matter. The modern Democratic Party doesn't care about you.

Screaming and hollering on the sidelines is the only path left. As long as you aren't bothering to punish the Democrats for pissing on you, they have no reason to care. Progressives haven't got enough money to buy their interest, so their only power is the vote. They have to make Democrats earn that vote, or the democrats can just keep on playing GOP-lite.

"Anupama Rao Singh, country director for the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), made the estimate in an interview with Reuters.

``In absolute terms we estimate that perhaps about half a million children under 5 years of age have died, who ordinarily would not have died had the decline in mortality that was prevalent over the 70s and the 80s continued through the 90s,'' she said.

A UNICEF survey published in August showed the mortality rate among Iraqi children under 5 had more than doubled in the government-controlled south and center of Iraq during the sanctions."

What was the difference? Did Saddam suddenly become more of a monster? Or did Desert Storm and then sanctions lead directly to the deaths?

Since Saddam hadn't shown a great willingness to make life more difficult on his people previously (one of the higher standards of living in the area, no?), I have to think it's the second.

(* = this is NOT a slam on mcgovern)

What I said is that leftists have become useless as they threw in their lot with the Democrats, "to work from the inside." Working from the inside has gotten leftist/progressive causes exactly nowhere.

"The presidential election is about offering the american people a wealth of choices" says Pat

Pat supports Ralph running, surprisingly.

That's not surprising at all. One thing often unremembered about 2000 is that Buchanan was running as a third-party candidate as well (Reform) and that both were pushing for debate representation.

oops! now they're arguing! oh snap! TONIGHT ON CROSSFIRE!

it's astonishing to me that people will continue to assert the sameness of the two major parties, or seemingly conflate the notion that they are disappointed with the democrats (who isn't?) with the notion that that makes them no better than the republicans

politics doesn't take place in some platonic sphere, it takes place on earth

You want to bitch and moan? Bitch and moan that a sitting VP of a popular President during peacetime with a healthy economy couldn't beat a cokehead fratboy lightweight in his HOME STATE.

Amateurist, the sameness is there. Eight years of Clinton got us lower real wages, a wider wage gap, a stock market bubble that crashed the economy, no advances in civil rights, no cuts in defense spending, no national healthcare system, welfare rollbacks, on and on and on.

After Clinton, why on Earth would anyone who supports progressive causes back a party-hack Democrat or DLC stooge?

Dennis Kucinich's Congressional record shows that yes he actually DID stand up to the administration on these issues. The only Demo candidate (from Congress/Senate at least) whose voting record matched up with his campaign platform. Every day I get more and more pissed at America for not having taken him seriously.

Abortion rights - there you go, one issue where the Democrats in general are on my side. But then you have Al Gore and Dennis Kucinich, who jumped from pro-life to pro-choice because it impedes their careers. The Democrats would ditch a strong pro-choice position in a heartbeat, if it wouldn't cost them the women's movement.

Civil liberties - what were the PATRIOT votes again? Where have the fights been by Democrats? Who's Bob Barr working for again? Democrats really aren't better than the Republicans on-average about civil liberties, never have been (Asian concentration camps, anyone?).

For f*ck's sake.

What even the centrist Dems are not, however, is right-wing, and a vote for a Dem is a vote against the right wing.

No, Democrats don't have my vote. They have to earn it. You find me a candidate who actually makes me believe the Democrats aren't just going to roll over and continue to screw the working class (ie bring back Paul Wellstone), and I'll vote for him.

What's your argument, that I'm way out on the political fringe? Tell me something I don't know. Or tell me something I care about.

Why should I vote for a center-right party rather than the hard-right party? Why should I take part in that system? Why can't I, I don't know, hold out for a decent candidate - why is that wrong?

the greens ran a candidate against wellstone in 2002. and nader supported that candidate. who, it turned out, was to the right of both wellstone AND mondale.

I disagreed with his foreign policy goals.
I disagreed with his gun control stance. (But I can't stand the NRA, either)
I didn't respect his pro-choice position.
I disagreed with his stance on 'free trade.'
I disagreed with welfare reform.
I saw eight years of Clinton fail to bring about a living wage (or even move that way), saw a decline in real wages, saw an increase in the wage gap, saw the tech bubble (that I never trusted even then).

There has to be a better reason for a progressive to vote for Gore than "'cuz Bush sucked."

How do you make progress like that? By always voting for the lesser evil, aren't you ensuring that one of the evils is still running the show?

And Eisbar, I never said they should try to appeal to me, specifically. But yes, actually giving liberals and progressives a reason to vote would be important (ie winning in 2000). And maybe, just maybe, figuring out why half the people don't vote period. Appealing to the disenfranchised, a radical concept!

Actually Greenspan was warning folks that the dot-com bubble was a chimera at the time.

yeah, in 1996. two years later, he failed to raise margin requirements even when it was becoming apparent that investors were over-extended from dot.com speculating, thereby prolonging the bubble (and, arguably, leading to a greater crash than might've happened had he tightened the margin requirements).

There you go with that Ralphie stuff again. Do we need to cover my views on him again? But that was part of the point of going for 5% - a third party with some money has a chance to reach out far more than a third party with no money. (cf. Perot '92)

But anyway, a portion (1/3? I think) of Nader's voters simply wouldn't have voted at all.

http://www.mikehersh.com/Did_Nader_Help_or_Hurt_Al_Gore.shtml using poll numbers states:
1,326,159 (46%) would have picked Gore
   893,716 (31%) would have sat out the election.
   663,080 (23%) would have favored Bush.
2,882,955 (100%) total)

and blame greenspan as much for the dot-bomb as yer blaming clinton.
Which one was the Democratic Party's standard-bearer? Which one was elected?

and, of course, the fact that clinton had to face a GOP congress -- led by newt gingrich for 4 of those years -- had ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on what kinds of laws he could pass, or introduce.
Of course it did.

How is that an argument, though - "well, he had an opposition Congress, he had to roll over!" Bullshit. When it came to something that mattered to him (not being convicted in the Senate), he managed to put up a fight. What about the first two years, where was our great leap forward?

My mother has fallen out of love with Dubya, based on the weirdest things and nothing to do with him being a privileged fuckup and/or Iraq: a) the illegal alien amnesty, and not because it would create 20 million new Bush voters and b) the whole Mars thing, too expensive.

So, she might well vote Democrat for the first time (yeah I checked her label and it does say Made in Minnesota, WTF?) and is worried about Kerry being from privilege 'and more liberal than Ted Kennedy' plus 'the wife wants it more than he does'. She's liking the idea of Edwards 'knowing what it's like'. She misidentified the Independent candidate as George Nader.

Moms.

boo hoo

on all the issues i've cited they remain better than the republicans, often by quite a margin

they voted for the patriot act sure but would they have initiated such a thing? doubtful, though i'm thinking you'll disagree