Stop Me Before I Vote Again

(Sigh.) Anybody got two raw steaks, one for each of my freshly-blackened eyes ? I just got back from a Nader-bashing gangpile at Pandagon. (See a thread called "What She Said," I think it's called. To be fair, I don't blame the Michael Berube column that kicked the whole thing off. While I don't agree with everything the man says, he at least wasn't demanding that folks like me spend yet more time as every frustrated DP-ers whipping boy.) I think I'll spend the rest of the weekend blasting old R&B soundclips and stirring up a pot of spaghetti sauce, if it's all the same to you, Brothers.

Speaking of R&B, wasn't there a song that went "I might as well get paid for this kind of love ?"

Bah. >:

Nader-bashing is a staple of the wingnut Dems. They turn to it whenever the cognitive dissonance of supporting people who oppose everything they claim to want flares up. His activism and runs for office have the quality of lese majeste to them. We could have be having a well-managed war, security state and kinder, gentler gobbleization economics if only Ralph stayed home.

Berube is the ace of sly positioning, always just to the left of center. He bids a sad and wise farewell to the uncool kids with the commie sensibility all the time. He's one of the deep thinkers that led the liberal charge to support the war in Afghanistan.

I find it hard to get decent tomatos anymore, so I cheat on spaghetti sauce and buy it in jars.

"Gobblization." Heh.

J. Alva, I guess it aggravates me precisely because liberals are so quick to complain that we fringe-dwellers are peddling the attitude of "if you're not with us, you're against us." Berube has mentioned it vis-a-vis Afghanistan a time or two. But what is all the Nader-bashing from Dems if not an attempt to do exactly that? Hell, they got something like 90% of the 2000 stragglers to repent and wail for forgiveness four years later. You'd think that would be enough for them, but it's not. It's also hypocritical because it continues the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too crap foisted on us by their masters: The magical universe in which they piss on us and piss us off, because by gum, they don't need the goodwill of a few delusional stragglers to whip their masters into line. Yet, if they can't accomplish it, it's all our fault because they *do* need us. I wish they'd make up their fucking minds.

I splurge on the canned Italian plum tomatoes, figuring that three big cans yield enough sauce for at least a dozen dinners. That's how I justify the expense. Plus, since I'm jobless, there's ample time to watch the stuff cook all day.

Every Reich needs a scapegoat, and it's especially popular to piss on Arabs these days.

I think I saw an article during 2004 that made that ugly racist subtext as clear as can be: "Ralph Nader, Suicide Bomber".

Yep. Harry Levine wrote that POS for the oh-so-liberal Village Voice. Part of the Dean character assassination squad of '04 along with Doug Ireland, Alterman and a few other hired hands. Nothing like riling up the base with racist tripe...

Funny thing. My father died in December 2004. I don't know who he voted for in '04 or if he voted at all. He was very ill through most of '04. In 2000, though, he voted for Nader. I asked him why when he was so pro-Israel and, being a CNN/C-Span junkie, saw Nader on the air a lot more often than the average viewer. My father told me that Nader had appeared on some CNN show and told the host that war in the Mid-East was unacceptable to him. That as President, he'd never bomb his own people. My father respected that, despite his own pro-Israel views, because he appreciated politicians that eschewed bullshit and said what they really felt.

I think there was also a generational thing at work there. If my father were still alive, he and Nader would only be about six months apart in age. They both came from an era where ethnicity (other than WASP) wasn't considered compatible with success in the U.S. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them came to resent the customs of assimilation over time and wanted to become more vocal about how their antecedents influenced the way they looked at life in their adopted land.

I voted for Nader myself in 2000.

One of the last arguments I had with my mother who died in that year was over Nader. She was a lifelong Democrat who very much bought into 'lesser evilism' while I was left feeling nothing but an increasing...hole, a chronic feeling of being let down. Furthermore, if there's one thing that infuriates me like few other things in politicians, it's "Valuecrats"-ie politicians that are obsessed with shoving their morality down everyone's throats, invariably Christian or generically monotheist. I'm an atheist and was one for nearly 6 years when the 2000 election took place.

Nader was the only politician that year who seemed to really seemed to be saying much of anything I thought had meaning and wasn't a "Valuecrat". I remembered with loathing Tipper Gore's witchhunt against rock music in the 1980s, researched Lieberman and Lynne Cheney's witchhunt against free thought through ACTA, and Bush was absolutely atrocious.