This will be my last Nader post for a while, because I don't want my site to become a hot bed for political discussion. I'd rather it be a cool bed for Star Wars discussion. :-)

But this pretty much sums up my argument nicely:

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I hate puppies

And I like to put helpless kittens in gunny sacks and throw them in the nearest river.

Also, I think adorable babies should all be gathered up and put in concentration camps.

Okay, not really. But I just wanted to put things in perspective before I got to the real subject: I supported Ralph Nader in 2000.

And let's get this out of the way: if you're hoping for a Stalinist-re-education-camp-self-denunciation sort of thing, you'll have to go to a different website. I still believe that Nader had (and has) an important critique of the American political system.

But 2004 is not 2000. If you will forgive me for stating the obvious, 9/11 changed the world we live in. I don't know what the Bush administration would have been like if not for the terrorist attacks, but I know what they've done as a result. 9/11 gave the administration's most radical elements the perfect excuse to pursue their wildest fantasies of empire.

And we can't afford four more years of this.

Look, I figure there are two main reasons to mount a third party insurgency campaign: as a vehicle to get a message across, and as a party-building excercise.

Well, let's take them in order.

As far as the message--after the debacle of the 2000 election, that message has been reduced to a bitter laugh line: so there's no difference between the two parties, huh? There's a lot more to what Nader has to say than that, but it doesn't matter--that's all most people hear. If the 2000 campaign was an attempt to bring a message to a wider audience, it ultimately did more harm than good. In the aftermath of the Florida debacle, there are probably fewer people willing to consider that message than there were before. Nader is now living in his own private Twilight Zone episode, and the harder he tries to make people listen, the faster he drives them away.

(Anyway, Kucinich has already been out there, as this season's standard bearer, fighting the good fight for universal health coverage and the repeal of NAFTA and so on, and...well, he hasn't exactly taken the country by storm. And I mean no disrespect to Kucinich in pointing out this unhappy reality, but there it is.)

And as for the second point, party building: he's not running as a Green party candidate. No party. No party building. End of story.

His detractors are going to dismiss this run as ego-driven, but I suspect it's more about stubborness, and, frankly, dedication. It takes a special kind of stubborness to fight the battles he's fought, these past forty years, and I think you have to learn pretty quickly how to tune out the naysayers, to ignore the people who say, you're crazy, there's no need for safety belts in automobiles, and once you've fought those battles and lived to see a world in which seat belts are simply a mundane fact of life, given no more thought than running water or electricity...well, you probably lose some perspective.

I think he's spent so many years tuning people out because he had to that he's forgotten how to listen when he needs to. And now he's on the verge of becoming the next Lyndon Larouche or Gus Hall.

In more ways than one. I could surely be wrong, lord knows, but I don't think Nader will be much of an issue, in terms of the actual vote. I know there's a poll that says he'd get 4% if the election were held tomorrow, but that's nonsense. He didn't even pull 3% in 2000, and that was before--everything.

But here's the thing: I think the damage he will do is in re-igniting the liberal/left Civil War of 2000. To expand on something I wrote a few days ago: Nader's critique is, essentially, that there is a cancer on the body politic--and he's right about that. The problem in the year 2004 is that the body politic is also suffering from multiple wounds and blunt force trauma, we're in the emergency room and it's a damn mess and there's blood everywhere and the doctors are working furiously but it's anybody's guess how things are gonna turn out. We are in triage, and we have to deal with the immediate problems, or the long-term ones won't matter anyway.

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