Nader Revealed! His true motive in 2000 was to punish the Democrats!

This article explains Nader's sick motivation for giving the pResidency to *. Warning: reading may result in destruction of personal property! :grr:

snip -In the year 2000, Ralph Nader strapped political dynamite onto himself and walked into one of the closest elections in American history hoping to blow it up. He wanted to punish the Clinton-Gore Democrats for having betrayed him and the causes he believes in. His primary campaign mission was defeating Al Gore, but Nader concealed this from his supporters, even as he went after votes in swing states like Florida. On the day after election day, when everyone else was grim, and many Democrats were furious at him, Ralph Nader was a happy man.

The following essay presents evidence for this large claim and describes how I first learned this in the fall of 2000. Since the election, political discussions about Nader's campaign have often focused on its electoral effect. Did Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida defeat Al Gore making George W. Bush president? Most observers seem to agree that they did, but others insist that many factors defeated Gore. However, independent of the effect of the Nader campaign on the election results, one can ask about what Nader wanted to have happen. Now that he has decided to run again, in what promises to be another very close election, it is worth examining what Ralph Nader intended the last time. - snip

more here:




http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/Ralph-Nader-As-Suicide-Bomber.html

Thanks alot you egotistical bastard. Every good thing you've done in your life was negated by that act.

The question is probably moot. They're both bastards.

betray himself and our Republic: wonder what his just desserts will be in the big hereafter?

but there is no such thing as the hereafter.

Can you prove that? Just curious.

On the other hand, as no empirical evidence exists to prove it does exist, I think it's a safe assumption based on the lack of evidence that it does not exist. I cannot PROVE the Easter Bunny does not exist either, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

If you CHOOSE to believe there is no hell, that's fine with me. I CHOOSE to believe that there is a hell. Neither of us can prove we are right. Careful with your assumptions, please.

And BTW, hate to break this to you, but Ralph IS going to burn in hell! ;)

Haven't the Democrats been punished enough??

I just wonder why Nader, an Arab, thinks the Iraqis need punishing too. :shrug:

who then invaded their country pre-emptively killed tens of thousands of them, mainly innocent citizens. That would have never happened under a Gore presidency.

Happy Nader? :puke:

people on that basis. I seriously doubt he had any idea this would happen in 2000.

Or does he even care?

You may disagree with this, but I don't think it matters much now anyways. Kerry's gonna be stuck with Bush's fucking quagmire in any case, and I don't see UN or Arab League help forthcoming (who wants to pick up the ball after the world's military superpower just had it knocked out of their hands?). So whomever wins the election, the military operation will likely continue for many years to come, and Iraqis will keep getting killed. So I doubt Nader's candidacy will make a difference on that score. As an Arab-American myself I don't really feel like he's selling out Arabs for political gain.

It's a metaphorical description. See, in the Dark Ages, some religious nutcases wore shirts with bristly hair, maybe from warthogs or some such creatures, on the INSIDE. They wore them until it was deemed (by whomever??) that they had repented enough for their real and/or alleged sins. Again, I do not mean this LITERALLY. :eyes:

:thumbsup: :pals:

That's an old hit piece attacking Michael Moore and Ralph Nader.

A newer update of that article has been written by Harry Levine. It was published in the May 3rd issue of the Village Voice. In it Mr. Levine states: "On Friday, October 13, 2000, at Madison Square Garden, the largest of Ralph Nader's "super rallies" kicked his campaign into high gear. It was a great event in many ways. Fifteen thousand ticket buyers cheered songs, jokes, skits, and pep talks delivering timeless radical truths about wealth and power in America. Nader's speech was actually the low point, circulating randomly through riffs about corporate power, health insurance, the environment, and what Ralph Nader had accomplished.

But Nader also served up disturbing untruths. Most notable was his insistence that Al Gore and George W. Bush were "Tweedledee and Tweedledum"—they look and act the same, so it doesn't matter which you get. I went home angry. But it took me a while to understand that my progressive hero had turned suicide bomber—that Ralph Nader had strapped political dynamite onto himself and walked into one of the closest elections in American history hoping to blow it up."

and here is the link:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/levine.php

A response to Mr. Levine's hit piece,
"Behind The Anti-Nader Attacks" by Louis Proyect was published on May 24, 2004

Mr. Proyect writes:

"No matter how much the liberal and social democratic disillusionment with Senator John Kerry deepens, there is still no sign that the Anyone But Bush (ABB) crowd is ready to break ranks with their candidate. Whatever fervor is missing from their endorsement of Kerry, it is more than made up for by a well-orchestrated attack on Ralph Nader -- the only clear alternative to Bush and Kerry in 2004 -- that is now reaching a fever pitch.

In the May 3rd edition of NYC's liberal Village Voice, Harry G. Levine heaped all sorts of abuse on "Ralph Nader, Suicide Bomber." Since Nader is of Lebanese descent, Levine's attack has racist overtones on top of the usual "lesser evil" sermon. For Levine, Nader's runs for President have little to do with politics, but are just exercises in personal ambition: "Hand it to Nader -- he ran a brilliant campaign, approaching the loony task of punishing the Democrats by defeating Al Gore with typical hyper-rationality. A mad scientist in both senses of 'mad,' he devoted his enormous skills, knowledge, and reputation to a bizarre personal agenda. Nothing he has said since indicates he thinks he made a mistake."

It is singularly indicative of the ABB mindset that there is not one single mention of John Kerry in the entire article, nor the word Iraq. With the inability of the Democratic candidate to excite the liberal left (Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway has urged Kerry publicly to step down), why not flail away at Nader? And if you cannot find anything seriously wrong with his program, accuse him of personal ambition -- a fault that no sensible liberal would find in the Democratic Party standard-bearer.

http://www.swans.com/library/art10/lproy15.html

Well, people should read both Levine's piece and the response and make your own judgements.

blind?

Nader punished more then "democrats" he punished an entire world.

Nader used against the corporate and Republican world is turned against Democrats with so much at stake. The voting scandal, notwithstanding, Nader could have made the difference.

a Republican. No doubt in my mind about that one. Hey, where is good ol' Ross Perot this year? Let's get him to run too to hurt Shrubya like Nader wants to hurt Kerry

Maybe, just maybe he wants to win?

What? You say he couldn't possibly win under this system?

Then maybe he wants to alert people to the fact that the system needs an overhaul?

What? You already knew that?

But did you really _care_ before 2000? (I cared, but I wasn't frantic about it until then.) His running has brought more attention to our screwed up electoral system than anything else ever has, with the possible exception of Ross Perot (who doesn't seem to incur the same level of wrath as Ralph).

I am glad he is keeping election reform on the table but I am hoping Ralph backs off by November because yeah, it's too scary to consider another 4 years of *. (Assuming that the junta doesn't steal another election.)

overhaul! You,Ralph or me have NEVER seen this country in worse shape than it is today! Do you think America can stand four more years of Bushco?

regardless of their political affiliation to vote Dem at the federal level. (Gotta take the Congress back too if we want to really get things done.)

If Kerry doesn't try and straighten the country out after he is elected, I'll be one of the first people here to join a third party in 2008! I promise you that!

I plan to put his feet to the fire, big time! I did it to Clinton with a vengence! :D

There's so much to straighten out. Of course, he's got to have at least one branch of Congress or we're looking at Kerry having lame duck status. But he can certainly do a lot to heal international relationships and get US help in Iraq.

sent my letter to Kerry. No response other than the standard form type, which took WEEKS to get to me. No surprise there, though, as I know how busy he and his staff are.

But the second he is in office, I'm just going to keep after him on election reform and other issues near and dear to my heart. We know that the right wing will be contacting him all the time. We can't let him think that their beliefs are more important than ours, and the only way to do that is to be the LOUD MAJORITY.

It's fast and you know if they got it or not. E-mail sucks, imo.

No point in being bitter. See Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction to the Analysis of Strategy (South-Western, 2004), by Roger A. McCain pp. 314-316.

Disclosure: if you persuade your library to buy this book, I, as the author, will enjoy a modest financial benefit.

We seem to have a lot of writers around here, come to think of it.

It's the whole stratagy 'things must get worse before they get better' thing... "Can't let the Democrats win, because to fix the system we must let the Republicans destroy it".

I don't know Louis Proyect so I did a search to find out more about him. He's a socialist so I hope we don't experience any red-baiting against him. We can let Republicans and right-wingers do that sort of thing. Here's some info on Proyect:


Louis Proyect received his formal education at Bard College (BA, 1965) and The New School University in New York City (MA, 1967). On or about that time he joined the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP) where he organized sales of the party press, public meetings and gave classes on Marxist theory. He parted with the SWP in 1978. Instead of completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy (57/60 credits), he spent most of the 1980s in the Central American solidarity movement, first with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and then with Tecnica, an organization that sent skilled professionals to Nicaragua. In the early 1990s he joined the staff of Columbia University where he currently works as a computer programmer.

Proyect is the moderator of the Marxism List and maintains a scholarly site, marxmail.org, in the non-sectarian tradition of The Socialist Union, a group led by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman in the '50s. His work has been published in many journals and magazines such as New Politics, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Organization and Environment, Cultural Logic, Dark Night Field Notes, Green Left Weekly and Canadian Dimension.

Proyect has been contributing to Swans since February 2003. His book reviews, political columns and essays include:

It could be that because of this Bush* Cabal that America may really wake up and decide things need fixing. Nader had nothing to do with it except state the obvious. America seems very complacent to me and unless something really major were to happen they would not bother to raise their head away from the Surviver series. Bush* has made The Sleeping giant start to stir. People are beginning to notice all is not well. Nader is quite astute in some ways and a total fool in others. Let us just hope that the worst is over and not yet to come.

I fucking despise Nader.

Now Kerry throws him a crumb and he is all happy. It's all about his feelings of importance.

Has John Kerry thrown you a crumb to make you all happy?

He's ahead of bush*co in most polls, and it's looking like a potential landslide, not just for the WH, but also Congress. That's a loaf, not a crumb, my chum.

if you did, you would know how ridiculous your question is.

Let me ask a question first though -- WHY does ANYONE still think Nader is relevant as a "progressive"? We have the real article -- Dennis Kucinich, who has widespread admiration and respect as the leader of progressive America! Yet -- the media ignores the real article, and focuses on the Nader issue!

Dennis the The Man -- NOT Nader. Nader blew it, big time. As much as I agree with many of the issues he espouses, his conduct in the 2000 campaign showed him to be a breathtakingly poor strategist. He was so STUPID overall regarding the Big Picture that I would fear such an ideologically driven idiot to hold any position of power in our nation. If he could be so shortsighted about Bush and the meaning of the 2000 election, he sure could fuck up elsewhere, and make the same kind of ideologically-driven mistakes as George W has become famous for. We don't have to worry about that though, because Nader is irrelevant. Who needs him? We have a far greater and honorable and capable man -- Dennis Kucinich!

Nothing surprising in this article here though. It was pretty obvious what was going on at the time. It was *BIZARRE* how Nader gave George W a free ride, and focused his ire on Al Gore.

Repeat after me -- Nader is IRRELEVANT. We have Kucinich.

Something you can take to the bank -- the GOP is sending bucks to Nader. Next to registering yet more evangelicals, and scaring them about the imminent terror attack in which Osama bin Laden will set up a homosexual Islamic Communist government in the US -- Nader is part of their strategy to win in what is widely held to be a very close election.

Go, Ralph go! Away!

Not at the forefront where he ought to be. :( Wish the DNC used ranked voting in their primaries.

Kucinich is the real article. Nader is a spoiler, pure and simple.

what we need is organization, discipline, long-term strategy, and willingness to take risks. If progressives had that, the candidates wouldn't matter because we could hold any candidate to our agenda.

It seems that the DLC has pretty much marginalized both Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. They have tried to make them both irrelevant while Nader and Kucinich that have tried to reform the Democratic Party and make the DLC irrelevant.

Have Kucinich and Nader accomplished their goal or has the DLC been successful in their effort?

Sadly, the DLC has been successful. There seems to be a "consensus" that a progressive cannot prevail in an election.
Nevertheless, Kucinich has lots of support, and his ideas have a lot of appeal, even though people did not vote for him because of strategy.

Dennis might not be on the ticket, but he has established himself as a vital factor in American politics. That is a small, but impressive gain.

But all I am saying is "progressive" Nader needs to be told that he has passed his "Sell Out By" date, and is stale and irrelevant, and that we have a beloved and revered leader in Dennis Kucinich, who is fresh and vital.

shame on all the people who support his massive ego.

Hubert Flottz wrote:

"If Kerry doesn't try and straighten the country out after he is elected, I'll be one of the first people here to join a third party in 2008! I promise you that!"

And what if the Republican Party nominates someone far to the right of Kerry in 2008 (as they will certainly do) what will you do? Maybe it will be Anybody But --------! You fill in the name.

It casts a bright light on Nader's motives.

:kick:

it explains how florida was rigged by the bush cabal. no need to speculate about their motivations.

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the ?felon? voter-purge was itself felonious

Friday, March 1, 2002

by Greg Palast

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1