June 22, 2007

No Nader this time, please

Via Lawyers Guns and Money comes a link to Jonathan Chait's 2002 review of Ralph Nader's book Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President, a chronicle of the 2000 Presidential campaign. Scott Lemieux quotes a couple of paragraphs which demolish Nader's assertion that he acted for the good of the country in 2000, and then he comes up with a pair of trenchant observations about Nader's latest claims:

. . . there's the claim that the possibility of Clinton running means that the Dems are just as bad because she's just responsible. Now, I won't be supporting Clinton in the primaries, and please criticize her awful vote on the war as heartily as you like. But as for apportioning responsibility, I think this is pretty straightforward:
  • If Clinton votes against the war, we would have had the Iraq war.
  • If Nader doesn't run in 2000, no war.

This is pretty straightforward--their relative responsibilities are not remotely comparable.

Amen. The fog of war is only marginally larger than the fog of Nader's ego. His capacity for self-delusion knows few boundaries. The trouble is, with the media's horserace mentality, he will again be given a forum to spout the same sort of nonsense about there not being a dime's bit of difference between the two parties that he did in 2000. Hopefully this time the electorate will have wised up.

Posted by Linkmeister at June 22, 2007 09:50 AM | TrackBack
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