ABB

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph Nader: If Not Now, When?
by Gilles d'Aymery
& Jan Baughman
March 1, 2004

Kudos to Ralph Nader for not kowtowing to the immense pressure to stay 
out of the 2004 US presidential race. Of course, his decision is 
portrayed as evidence of his huge ego, and not of his great convictions, 
and the urban legends and propaganda claiming that the votes Nader won 
cost Al Gore the 2000 election are back in full force. It's worth 
remembering a few facts:

1) Al Gore won the election (48.38% vs. 47.84%, or 50,999,897 vs. 
50,456,002 votes for Gore and Bush respectively). The result, to make it 
short, was overturned by the US Supreme Court.

2) In Florida, 250,000 registered democrats voted for Mr. Bush.

3) If a) and b) are not enough to dispel the idiocy of make-believers, 
let's get into some rhetorical assumptions: Let's assume for the sake of 
argument -- and we are fully cognizant of the saying about assumptions 
-- that Nader had not run and Gore had picked up his votes. The only two 
states where it would have made a difference were Florida and New 
Hampshire, for a total of 29 electoral votes. Now, if you good people 
buy this baloney, you need at least to be consistent with yourselves. If 
this is the premise on one side, then you have to look at the other side 
as well -- with the very same assumption: Had Pat Buchanan not run, Mr. 
Bush would have picked up Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin for a 
total of...30 electoral votes. Get it?

4) And for those who enjoy hypothesizing, have you wondered what would 
have happened had Mr. Bush not run in the first place, or Justice 
Antonin Scalia had recused himself from the Florida decision? Look, the 
entire intellectual contortion is a sham, spurrious entertainment at 
best, but more likely a moronic and dismal belief on the part of 
"liberal incrementalists."

Additional information can be found on Nader's web site, 
http://www.votenader.org.

With all due respect to Mr. Dean and the lib-labs out there, could
you cease and desist? Fran Shor, we do not need to hear from you
that in 2000, it was, "if not now for Nader and alternatives to politics
as usual, when?" and in 2004, "our historic responsibility is to defeat
Bush." Do you have any sense or knowledge of history, Mr. Shor?
And the same question could be asked from patronizers such as Marc
Cooper, Todd Gitlin, Ted Glick, Norman Solomon, Lawrence Lessig,
Doug Ireland, Michael Bérubé, Paul Loeb (and that's just a sample),
the condescending editors at The Nation, and all these "good" people
who will whore themselves into yet another book contract, a kitchen
remodel, a vacation around the world, and a grant from the Ford
Foundation or George Soros -- or the CIA. What these people have
been up to for the past couple of years is a subtle but quite methodical
strategy to gut the Greens and defeat all efforts to break away from
the undemocratic bicephalous system (an issue that has largely been
ignored and should deserve further scrutiny).

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art10/xxx106.html

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