Presidential Auction 2004

A little more on Ralph Nader coming into the race....

I may be out here alone on this amongst leftist blogs, but I don't see that there can be anything negative about Ralph entering the campaign. In fact, I think he will help Dennis Kucinich's effort to get and keep the real issues on the table and put forward truly progressive ideas. He will probably get more media coverage than Dennis has been able to garner, and it's also possible that this will spill over onto Dennis. Ralph's style is rather more aggressive, and he has had the experience of running a presidential campaign before. His presence in the campaign can force Edwards and Kerry to talk about progressive issues, and he will add some sparks to any debates - assuming he's permitted to participate!

Ralph's presence will force the top runners to defend their stands, which may show them up to be not much different than Bush. Of course there's that group of voters who are willing to accept anybody but Bush - and I'm guessing that's how they ended up with Kerry. We'll just have to wait and see how Ralph does. Since he's not running on the Green Party ticket, it's possible that the Greens will throw their votes to Kerry (or whichever Demwitocrat wins the nomination). This could play out in any number of ways. Ralph doesn't seem concerned about splintering the Bush opposition and permitting Double-face to stay in power, for reasons you will see when you read the following excerpts.

As I've said before: Instant runoff voting solves that problem anyway. Reform the voting process. (And the campaigning process.)

A few excerpts from Nader's MTP interview:

MR. NADER: Washington is now a corporate-occupied territory. There's a "For Sale" sign on almost every door of agencies and departments where these corporations dominate and they put their appointments in high office. The Congress is what Will Rogers once called "the best money can buy."

On the issue of having taken votes away from Gore which allowed Bush to win., Ralph makes the point I made in my earlier post - it was the Supreme Court who handed Bush the presidency.

I think the liberal intelligentsia has got to ask itself a tough question, Tim. For 25 years they have let their party run away from them. For 25 years they've let their party become a captive of corporate interests. And now they want to block the American people from having more choices and voices, especially young people who are looking for idealism, who are looking for a clean campaign, who are looking for the real issues in this country instead of the sham and the rhetoric that masquerades for political campaigning. ...Any number of third-party candidates in Florida could have affected the equation [in the same way]. Libertarians got thousands of votes, Buchanan got thousands of votes, Socialist Workers Party got votes. The Florida campaign was won by Gore. It was stolen by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush and their cohorts from Tallahassee to the Supreme Court. Two hundred and fifty thousand registered Republicans in Florida voted for Bush.

Returning to Nader's stand on the issues:

The corporate lobbyists are still swarming over Congress. Money is still pouring in from corporate interests. Washington is corporate-occupied territory, and the two parties are ferociously competing to see who's going to go to the White House and take orders from their corporate pay masters. So they may be different in their mind, they may be different in their attention, they may be different in their rhetoric. But in the actual performance these corporate interests and their political allies are taking America down. They're taking our country apart: massive poverty, massive child poverty, massive consumer debt, environmental devastation. That didn't occur, that didn't get worse under the Democrats? So, basically, it's a question between both parties flunking, Tim: one with a D-, the Republicans; one with a D+, the Democrats...... ...MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that Al Gore would have invaded Iraq? MR. NADER: He would have. I think he was a hawk. He may have done it in a different way. He and Clinton got through Congress a regime-change resolution as a pillar of our foreign policy..... MR. RUSSERT: How uphill will your battle be, and how many state ballots do you think you can get on? MR. NADER: There's a tremendous bias in state laws against third parties and Independent candidates bred by the two major parties, who passed these laws. They don't like competition. So it's like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope. And anybody who doubts it can look at a list of all these signature barriers and all the obstacles a number of states, not all of them, put before third-party candidates on our Web site, VoteNader.org...... MR. RUSSERT: Will part of your platform be the impeachment of George Bush? MR. NADER: Let me put it this way. When a president misleads, if not fabricates, going to war and sending our sons and daughters to war with no exit strategy, with a quagmire over there, that is very serious, Tim. If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, then misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse.....[The reason for going to war] was oil. And oil has ruined so much of our foreign policy and antagonized so many people in the Third World, when we should be converting to renewable energy and solar energy and energy efficiency, all of which creates jobs in this country....Here's what we do now. We need to get out of there as fast as possible because we are the magnet for increasing guerrilla warfare and increasing entry by al-Qaeda and others, just the opposite of what we were told was going to happen. So we need to get the U.N. in there with properly funded and trained peacekeeping troops from a whole variety of countries, number one. We need to provide well-supervised elections with perhaps suitable autonomies with the acquiescence, of course, of the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. And we need to continue humanitarian assistance to those people in Iraq.... MR. RUSSERT: And what--who will run--who will rule Iraq? It might become an Islamic fundamentalist extreme regime. MR. NADER: Iraqis will be ruled by Iraqis. It will be ruled under fair elections by Iraqis. They're very creative people. And we have no business being there. We have no business diverting hundreds of billions of dollars over there while our schools, clinics, public transit, libraries are crumbling for lack of repair. We need to cut--get rid of that tax cut for the wealthy, which is increasing deficits, and have a massive job-producing public works..... MR. RUSSERT: [G]ays should be allowed to be married if they so choose, according to you. MR. NADER: Of course. Love and commitment is not exactly in surplus in this country.

And, finally, returning to the idea of impeachment, which you know I support....

MR. RUSSERT: So there should be an impeachment hearing and trial? MR. NADER: I think Congressman John Conyers is going to file such a request....President Bush...is really a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being.

And not doing a very convincing job.

Impeach.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.