Monday, July 6, 2015

Darth Nader Strikes Back

It wouldn't be a Democratic presidential primary season without Ralph Nader showing up to depress the vote at best and at worst commit outright sabotage the Democrats in favor of the GOP like he did in 2000.  It seems 2016 will be no different

"I have always preferred the ink-and-paper, written letter method of communicating with elected officials,” writes Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, who has been writing letters to American politicians, with some success, for more than 50 years.

But he’s been disappointed with the last two administrations. “Rhetoric by both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would have you think that these presidents encourage and support citizens sharing their opinions with their commander in chief,” he writes in a new collection of his correspondences, Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015. But “once delivered to the White House, my letters could not penetrate the multi-layered White House bubble.” Perhaps, Nader says, if presidents these days didn’t spending so much time raising money, waging unnecessary wars and taking photo ops with sports stars, they might find more time to engage with a concerned citizenry.

Perhaps if Nader hadn't screwed the country in 2000 and cost Al Gore the state of Florida and the White House, we wouldn't need to have this conversation at all.  Here's just a taste of how much of a condescending asshole Nader has been to President Obama in particular:

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Never forget that Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida, most taken from Gore, when George W. Bush won the state by just over 500 votes is the reason George W. Bush was elected we ended up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and oh yeah the worst recession in 80 years.

So when this asshole starts running off at the mouth, remember he's why we got Dubya in the first place.

12 comments:

michael said...

Ralph Nader, unsafe at any speed, Chevy Corvair, I get it. But that was back in '65.

Ralph Nader is now at his nadir.

Maybe he should get with John Edwards and compare notes on how cruel this world is.

Please just go away.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

Wait a minute: that pissy little bastard is whining because the President of the United States does not take the time to read and personally answer his smart mouth little poison pen letters?

That is a new low, even for the naderite in chief himself.

One can only speculate that he is upset at Bernie sucking all the oxygen from the leftie bomb thrower bubble, leaving no attention/adulation for him - no legions of adoring fans for him, just the hollow boredom of reflection upon a life ill spent.

Scopedog said...

Jesus. The man pens a pissy letter like that (surprised he didn't use the "Uncle Sam vs. Uncle Tom" bulls**t) and he expects a response from Obama? As far as I'm concerned, Ralph Nader can go to hell. He still hasn't learned a goddamned thing since 2000; for him, he's the center of the universe and all must bow before him.

F**k him. With a McColluch chainsaw, if possible.

Odie said...

This is the same damn person who said that billionaires can save us and then wrote a book about it. What an A@$ hole.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

I admire the vigour of your rhetoric. Does Homelite still make chainsaws?

Horace Boothroyd III said...

After the passing of his glory days and the fading of his personal charisma, both of which were quite real once upon a time, Nader recreated himself as a union busting libertarian slimeball. The most productive thing he's done in the last three decades is crowd Lyndon laRouche out of the oddball political limelight - a bit like the dueling film crews in the Belgian flick Man Bites Dog.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

Thank you for bringing that up again. Your garden variety naderite would sooner cut off his own testicles and feed them to a two headed snake than admit that his idol contributed to the installation of Bush as president and the consequent series of disasters that rocked this nation and the world to their very foundations. Their excuses tend to be along the lines of "Gore was a terrible candidate who should have run harder to the left, and if he had at the same time run more to the right in Florida he would have picked up those 300K Democrats who voted for Bush so neener neener neener."

Lurker111 said...

Reminds me of what Dirty Harry said in one the movies: "He's a legend in his own mind."

Scopedog said...

Not sure, I'm afraid--but I also plead to paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from the fiml Heathers....

Horace Boothroyd III said...

Fair enough: one of those famous movies that I never actually saw.

Jim 'Prup' Benton said...

Without getting into the Florida debacle -- which was Nader's fault, partially, but also comes from Gore's personality, his running away from Clinton, his inability to win just one of the borderline states he lost, and maybe because he chose Joe Lieberman for VP (and think what HE would have been like after 9/11 and whether, with him there, we wouldn't have started a bigger war sooner -- Nader has been a disaster whose influence has been based on him being right ONCE -- and he has barely broken his pristine record since.
'
Can we just ignore him, maybe seal him in a space capsule with Ann Coulter and send it into orbit for a few years?

Horace Boothroyd III said...

We would love to ignore him, and all his little minions too, except that he and they keep thrusting themselves forward to demand attention. So attention we give them, taking a moment away from the serious business of holding off the Republican hordes (who just might sweep all three branches of the Federal Government, if events break for them the way they broke against Gore in 2000) because we would much rather smack that shit down today than in October 2016.

The thing about elections is, you plan your strategy and confront your choices and you make your decisions and then you rise or fall based on the decisions you made. Had Gore lost to a fair fight, we would have been disappointed but that is the business of politics. What people do not like, and can not forgive, is that Nader ran a deliberate spoiler campaign using his gang of alleged leftists to put Bush into office in fulfillment of a batshit theory of Heighten the Contradictions.

Heighten the Contradictions has never worked. Heighten the Contradictions will never work. Heighten the Contradictions is a lunatic theory dreamed up by irresponsible vandals who like to play revolutionaries, knowing full well that they will never bear the brunt of the disasters they provoke.

Then, in the aftermath, the naderites pranced around gloating that they had taught a lesson to the perfidious Democrats about the power of the Left AND AT THE SAME TIME sneered that they had nothing what so ever to do with Bush's victory and it was all the fault of Gore the Inept so SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

I like your suggestion about the space capsule, except that Ann Coulter is kind of washed up and forgotten - perhaps she lost her supply of virgin blood in which to bathe? Perhaps we could substitute Kathleen Parker, who is desperately trying to position herself as the reasonable voice of the reasonable Republicans.

You a Pink Floyd fan? Set the controls for the heart of the Sun...

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