nader revealed

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

ze Village Voice

How the Great Crusader used the Green Party to get his revenge
Ralph Nader, Suicide Bomber
by Harry G. Levine
May 3rd, 2004 1:20 PM

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.

The next day I was invited to a fundraising party in Greenwich Village. There I approached Michael Moore and described how the campaign could use the Web to provide the latest data on battleground states like Florida, where Nader supporters should hold their noses and vote for Gore. When Moore realized what I was suggesting, he puffed up like one of those fish that expand when threatened, leaned into me, poked his finger into my face, and yelled: "You can't say that! You can't say that! You can't say that!"

Later I was introduced to Nader's closest adviser, his handsome, piercingly intelligent 30-year-old nephew, Tarek Milleron. Although Milleron argued that environmentalists and other activists would find fundraising easier under Bush, he acknowledged that a Bush presidency would be worse for poor and working-class people, for blacks, for most Americans. As Moore had, he claimed that Nader's campaign would encourage Web-based vote-swapping between progressives in safe and contested states. But when I suggested that Nader could gain substantial influence in a Democratic administration by focusing his campaign on the 40 safe states and encouraging his supporters elsewhere to vote Gore, Milleron leaned coolly toward me with extra steel in his voice and body. He did not disagree. He simply said, "We're not going to do that."

"Why not?" I said.

With just a flicker of smile, he answered, "Because we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them."

"Because we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them."
Dumbass.....
Sigh, he could be of use in Congress...but now..jeez...

Nader said so in those same words back in 2000.

The hard left has cultivated a hatred of the Democrats and of liberals in general that we ought not to ignore. They hate us far more than they hate the neo-Cons. I suspect it's a turf thing, but who knows?

Read Counterpunch sometime without the idea that you're "one of them." If you're not part of the radical chic cocktail party circuit, forget it -- you're NOT. Some of those people want to destroy us, thinking we are the only thing between them and a glorious People's Revolution. It works a lot like the Fundies' idea of bringing on the Rapture. They crave a secular Armageddon, and we are destined for their Lake of Fire.

--bkl

...which reinforces my view that the extreme left has a lot of the same bad traits as the Rethugs.

I'm now convinced that it's not an accident that a lot of the neocons themselves are former communists and socialists. Both ideologies involve seeing the world in a rigid, black-and-white point of view.

The True Believer:... sometime. ;)

There is a psycological term you should familiarize yourself with: "projection." Your post oozes all that you damn.

I'm quite familiar with the psychological term "projection". I'd also be interested to hear how you were able to read my mind based on a few paragraphs that directly refer to an essay written by Harry Levine.

Or, you might just have been too tired to compose a real reply to my short post, and decided to compel me to read your mind by invoking the memory of a bowel movement.

When a politician states, in public and on the record, that his aim is to punish a group of people simply for their beliefs, it does not fill my heart with happiness -- especially since I am a member of the group he wishes to punish. So if your sensitive nose dectected a whiff of shit, perhaps fear was its cause, and not projection.

If you took my post against Nader as a personal slight, you erred. I don't hold voting for Nader against anyone. My remarks were about Ralph Nader and the left's version of snobbery he exploited in 2000. I never blamed the Greens for the electoral debacle, either, but Ralph Nader is a different story. He has shown himself to be a profoundly cynical and destructive man -- and revels in it. If he's serious about reviving a centrist and moribund left, maybe he should look to the efforts of Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and the 50 million Democrats he punished four years ago.

--bkl

the poverty of the argument is demonstrated by the poverty of facts in the post that accused you of projection.

Are you listening, Nader supporters? If you read things like this and still drink the Naderade, remember that it won't just be you who's affected. It will hurt all of us. And when you finally realize that it will be too late.

This once-honorable man is so eaten up with hatred that he is willing to further bring down the U.S. to settle some imagined score between him and Al Gore from 2000. If W is re-elected, the rethuglicans won't be the only ones happy. Nader will be celebrating (and probably greatly rewarded) for having once again done his part.

And you want to enable this man and his agenda? Just like the Bushites enable their candidate and his agenda? There's really "not a dime's worth of difference..."

(BTW, thebigmansentme, thanks for posting this article. It's previously been posted, but not everybody saw it then.)

not politically, literally. he is one ugly motherfucker

...He was once a great ally to the Americn people, and now he has been blinded by his own desires of power. It's really, really sad.

Looks like one'a his campaign volunteers did a hack Photoshop job on his rather mishappen proboscis.


Even using Lucusfilm CGI, the man will still only be a jawa. UteeNee!

Sounds like something Bush would say.

And this is the second thread in GD today that proves it.