General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRalph Nader is on Melissa Harris-Perry discussing the minimum wage
and the progressive agenda.
3...2...1 for attacks
onehandle
(51,122 posts)How's that?
99Forever
(14,524 posts)... so now if Scapegoat Ralph is for an increase in minimum wage....
... we'll have to be against it?
lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)reduced
99Forever
(14,524 posts)lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)99Forever
(14,524 posts)... your fucking opinion = reality!
Got it, your doooodliness.
lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)while running against Kerry.
He's an asshole. He thinks being in the spotlight will somehow keep him young. It won't. He's made himself quite the "legacy," though, with his shenanigans. Instead of being remembered as a crusader for consumer product safety, he'll be remembered as a gadfly-shitbird who took money from wingnuts who could give a shit about consumer product safety, nevermind the "little people" he also pretended to care about.
lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)Le Taz Hot
(22,271 posts)Incoming . . .
Ralph is more hated than Monica Lewinsky's blue dress...
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)deregulation
He was that way before lewinksky
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)who deal with reality not their imaginary dreamworld.
bobduca
(1,763 posts)"AIEEEEEEEE IF I SEE HIM I WILL PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE AND STUFF RAWR" -- Ralph Nader hating Internet Tough Guy just before assploding.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)Skidmore
(37,364 posts)a political tactic of highlighting the ills of the left. However, when that tactic of scorched earth politics leaves millions in dire straits with little realistic alternatives for a way up and out, then it is at best, cynical, and at worst, evil. He help to usher in the Bush years and entrenched them for a second term, and then he just disappeared for a long time. Convenient.
redqueen
(115,103 posts)He campaigned hard in states like FL and NH in the last days of the election.
He's not an idiot. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He's repeatedly said that he thinks it's better for his movement to have republicans in office, seriously fucking shit up.
How people can still support him, and still ignore reality and pretend that the above didn't happen - well, history will not be kind to him, or them. I'll just leave it at that.
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)Evil and those who supported him are right there with him.
arthritisR_US
(7,288 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)Seems like the only reason for this content free OP is to TRY and start a flamewar.
malaise
(269,022 posts)The flame war on Ralph was yesterday because his name can't be mentioned here without a war.
redqueen
(115,103 posts)..
During the 2004 election contest, a local AP story from Salem, Oregon, on June 25th, was similarly headlined "Pro-GOP Groups Seek to Aid Nader, Hurt Kerry," and reported, "Two conservative groups have been phoning people around Oregon this week, ... in hopes of putting Nader's name on Oregon's presidential ballot." Oregon was one of 18 tight "battleground" states in the 2004 Presidential election, and Republicans wanted Nader's name to be on the Presidential ballot in order to draw votes away from Democratic candidate John Kerry, and thus throw Oregon's electoral college votes to Bush, and so make Bush the winner, just as had crucially happened in 2000 in both Florida and New Hampshire. (Here is how Citizens for a Sound Economy explained it to their members accompanying their 27 June 2004 "Phone Script": "Liberals are trying to unite in Oregon and keep Nader off the ballot to help their chances of electing John Kerry. We could divide this base of support" between "the uber-liberal Nader and John Kerry," so as to produce a Republican win.)
The board of directors of one of these groups, the Koch brothers' Citizens for a Sound Economy, happened to have been headed by two longtime personal friends of George W. Bush: the former Republican House leader Dick Armey of Texas, and the former counselor to President G.H.W. Bush, C. Boyden Gray. It's virtually certain that these two men authorized this backroom campaigning for Ralph Nader's candidacy. Mr. Gray was an heir to the Reynolds Tobacco fortune. CSE was financed by the foundations of Richard Mellon Scaife, of the Coors family, as well as of the Koch families, and by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the J.M. Olin Foundation. Jane Mayer, on 30 August 2010, headlined in the New Yorker, "Covert Operations" (of the Koch brothers), and wrote: "'Ideas don't happen on their own,' Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. 'Throughout history, ideas need patrons.' The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public's support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but ... was sponsored principally by the Kochs."
On 5 July 2004, BusinessWeek (p. 53) similarly headlined "Bush Bigs Open Their Wallets For Nader," and reported that among Nader's largest donors was Richard J. Egan, who was a Bush "Ranger," having raised more than $200,000 for his friend, George W. Bush. Egan, whom President Bush appointed Ambassador to Ireland, contributed the maximum allowed, $2,000, to Nader, and Egan's son also did. Unknown other Bush contributors, whom the senior Egan had previously "bundled" into that $200,000+ for Bush, also contributed to Nader. BusinessWeek reported that Richard J. Egan denied being the same person as the Richard J. Egan who contributed to Nader. However, the magazine reported that the Richard J. Egan, whom the records showed to have contributed to Nader, happened to live at the very same address, and that only one Richard J. Egan happened to live there.
...
On July 9th, the San Francisco Chronicle headlined "GOP Doners Funding Nader: Bush Supporters Give Independent's Bid a Financial Lift," and reported that the Nader campaign "has received a recent windfall of contributions from deep-pocketed Republicans with a history of big contributions to the party," according to "an analysis of federal records." Perhaps these contributors were Ambassador Egan's other friends. Mr. Egan's wife was now listed among the Nader contributors. Another listed was "Nijad Fares, a Houston businessman, who donated $200,000 to the Bush inaugural committee and who donated $2,000 each to the Nader effort and the Bush campaign this year." Furthermore, Ari Berman reported 7 October 2004 at the Nation, under "Swift Boat Veterans for Nader," that some major right-wing funders of a Republican smear campaign against Senator John Kerry's Vietnam service contributed also $13,500 to the Nader campaign, and that "the Republican Party of Michigan gathered ninety percent of Nader's signatures in their state" (90%!) to place Nader on the ballot so Bush could win that swing state's 17 electoral votes. Clearly, the word had gone out to Bush's big contributors: Help Ralphie boy! In fact, on 15 September 2005, John DiStaso of the Manchester Union-Leader, reported that, "A year ago, as the Presidential general election campaign raged in battleground state New Hampshire, consumer advocate Ralph Nader found his way onto the ballot, with the help of veteran Republican strategist David Carney and the Carney-owned Norway Hill Associates consulting firm."
...
On 2 August 2006, Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker, headlined "GOP Donors Funded Entire PA Green Party Drive," and he reported: "OK, we've done it. We've nailed it down: Every single contributor to the Pennsylvania Green Party candidate is actually a conservative - except for the candidate himself. The Luzerne County Green Party raised $66,000 in the month of June in order to fund a voter signature drive. The Philly Inquirer reported yesterday that $40,000 came from supporters of Rick Santorum's campaign. ... Also yesterday, we confirmed that another $15,000 came from GOP donors. ... Today, I confirmed that" the entire remaining $11,000 also did.
....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html
...
This depraved indifference to Republican rule has made Naders old liberal friends even more furious. A bunch of intellectuals organized by Sean Wilentz and Todd Gitlin are circulating a much nastier open letter, denouncing Naders wrecking-ball campaignone that betrays the very liberal and progressive values it claims to uphold. But really, the question shouldnt be the one liberals seem to be asking about why Nader is doing what hes doing. The question should be why anyone is surprised. For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isnt about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of heightening the contradictions. Its not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. Its that hes actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Nader often makes this the worse, the better point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt was useful because he was a provocateur for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Clubs membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Heres the Los Angeles Times account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., last week: After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, Id rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us.
Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. When (the Democrats) lose, they say its because they are not appealing to the Republican voters, Nader told an audience in Madison, Wis., a few months ago, according to a story in The Nation. We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes. That might make it sound like Naders goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic Party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic Party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked about leading the Greens into a death struggle with the Democratic Party to determine which will be the majority party. Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green Party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Sen. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California. I hate to use military analogies, Nader said, but this is war on the two parties.
...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ballot_box/2000/10/ralph_the_leninist.html
arthritisR_US
(7,288 posts)nothing has changed my mind on him, if anything new information just solidifies my opinion.
kentuck
(111,098 posts)by which centrist DLC-type Democrats attack progressives everywhere. To them, Bill Clinton is a much better example of a "Democrat" than is Ralph Nader. You are to disregard everything Bill Clinton supported and signed into law, and pretend it was all good for the Democratic Party. Also, disregard the fact that more Democrats in Florida voted for George W Bush than voted for Al Gore. But, what about New Hampshire, they argue. Speaking for myself only, the reasoning ability of these folks is very suspect. Now, watch them jump like a chicken after a june bug.
reddread
(6,896 posts)Keep those commies down on the farm where they belong, and out of office.
Gosh, the memory of the Nader bashing meme must be kept fresh, and like Stalin it will be
maintained on ice until thawing is needed.
I actually doubt many people are stupid enough to fall for this, even those pushing the goods.
but the truth and the reality are the last things that matter to the greater faith.
Three major lies that wont lie down.
Your payment is lost in the email.
I wont do anything you ask me not to do in bed.
Bush won.
Response to kentuck (Reply #18)
redqueen This message was self-deleted by its author.
malaise
(269,022 posts)ReTHUGs and the Supreme Court stole that election. I wanted Gore to win big time but facts are facts.
Regularly I thank Ralph for my seat belt. I have no war with progressives and he's one.