Ah, Nader

In case you haven't seen it, here's Ralph Nader holding forth on Obama's victory:



More than anything else, it just goes to show what a lazy idealogue Nader has become. Yes: any black politician who disagrees with Ralph Nader's politics is an "Uncle Tom". Right.

It's kind of weird that I voted for this guy back in 2000, when I was 18 years old. Back then, we had had 8 years of frustratingly centrist leadership from the Democrats and Bush was running as a center-right non-interventionist. Nader's thesis that Gore and Bush were essentially the same made sense to me, so I jumped ship (of course, being in California, my vote wasn't too meaningful anyway). By the time 2004 rolled around, that thesis had been completely shattered: 9/11 had happened and Bush had used the occasion to get us into a war in Iraq on false pretenses and secretly wiretap Americans without warrants. Moreover, he was able to muscle through an extraordinarily right-wing agenda. When election time came, it was obvious to me that electing Bush had been a blunder of the highest order, and that the task for everyone from the middle of the spectrum leftward was to kick him out. Nader, though, somehow didn't see this: he ran again, potentially splitting the Democratic vote, still making the now-ridiculous contention that Kerry and Bush were essentially the same. If he hadn't already alienated most of the left by handing Florida to Bush in 2000, this definitely put him over the line: he was now a genuine pariah.

I don't begrudge Nader for having the out-of-the-mainstream views that he does, or even for running for president in 2000. Within the suboptimal electoral system that we have, third-party runs are a legitimate way to exert force on a major party that tacks too far towards the center, and he could not have known how dramatically the political landscape would change a year later, when America came under attack. However, I do begrudge Nader for the way that he has, since 2004, divorced means from ends, effectively casting his movement even further into the wilderness than it already was by alienating just about everybody in the country who would have lent him a sympathetic ear.

Ralph Nader was a fine activist; but he was a terrible politician, and one who shall remain forever unburdened with power.

PS: I think Shep Smith is overdoing it in the video...a little melodramatic, no?

From Kennedy to Clinton

From Bill Clinton's speech to the convention, a truly Kennedy-esque inversion:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

What a wonderful, succinct way of drawing the contrast between the demented Republican view of the world--in which we are forever serving up bluster and brinkmanship out of some abstract fear of "emboldening the enemy"--and the coolly pragmatic and principled view offered by Barack Obama. What an immense difference in maturity, pragmatism, temperament, optimism, and basic human decency there is between Clinton's speech and Giuliani's sneering diatribe against "liberals", against civil liberties, against imagined Democratic "elites" who, he fantasizes, spend their days looking down on their fellow countrymen and devising politically correct ways of saying the word "terrorist". One man is reasonable, says reasonable things, and is grounded in the empirical world; the other is completely unserious, says unserious things, and seems to be living in some kind of grotesque cartoon where upholding the Constitution comes in a distant third to eavesdropping on the American population carte blanche and unilaterally bombing the shit out of some distant country to show someone, somewhere, who is boss.

I mean--really. This has got to be the lowest, most ideologically bankrupt, most shameful moment in the history of the Republican Party. There are no ideas, only a Down Syndrome baby passed awkwardly from Palin to Palin. There is no acknowledgment of reality, only the bizarre and Orwellian spectacle of a ruling party calling for a "change" in Washington as if it hadn't had a stranglehold on power for the previous eight years. Stern promises that suspected terrorists will be tortured are met with whoops and energetic chants of "USA! USA!" Declarations that evil will be defeated are swallowed whole by an eager audience that is either unaware of or unconcerned by the fact that such statements contain virtually no information, that they are vapid, trivial appeals not to reason but to the raw emotions of nationalistic fervor.

That Republican convention hall is a crystal ball filled with dark, dark visions of a possible future that I hope with all of my being never comes to pass. And over the last few days, listening to the Clintons, Kerry, Gore, Obama--the decent ones, the right ones, the calm ones, the adults--I have never been prouder to be a Democrat.

"The Obama Nation"

The latest from Jerome R. Corsi--who was last in the headlines when he smeared John Kerry with his 2004 screed Unfit for Command--is, apparently, complete and utter bullshit.

McCain's ad

The blogs are pretty critical about McCain's first general election ad, fretting that "McCain doesn't have a general election message strategy":



Personally I think the no-message concern is a little bit too insider and meta. Normal people (and even most political junkies) don't give a crap about what a candidate's "message" is, and one ad doesn't necessarily signify anything about the campaign in general. So I think the reactions are overblown.

That said, it is a bit curious for its lack of substance. I suppose it's a complement to McCain's so-called "biography tour", where he emphasizes his ultra-patriotic history of service to the country--which, I think, is fair enough.

However, I think he ought to be careful about how he presents his stint as a prisoner of war. It would be bad if he flaunted it and made too much of a political object out of it, like how John Kerry jumped the shark with his "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty" schtick. At the end of the day, "vote for me because I was tortured" is not an argument that makes any real sense.