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Readers respond to "Ralph Nader's political olive branch to Bush"

Thanks for posting your critique of Nader's Wall Street Journal article in which he extended that repugnant “olive branch” to the Bush and O'Neill forces. I naively voted for Nader. I thought he represented hope. I thought he stood for the disenfranchised (q.v. what Frantz Fanon referred to by “The Wretched of the Earth”). I will never capitulate as Nader has done. Such capitulation is ideologically retrograde and a modality of death.

Steve
31 March 2001


Folks, that was the best critique of the mysterious Mr. Nader that I have ever read. The only article that makes any sense. I did not know that he had tied himself totally to that Jew-hating Buchanan. That alone makes him poison. But it is his “nonalignment” that needs to be looked at in even more depth. The last paragraph was the best, however: he makes no class-oriented critique in conjunction with his environmental protectionism. Without that element, no protection of the environment can evolve. The Big Money boys will still remain hungry, even after every last tree or pristine inch of ground has been mined, cut, drilled. Capitalism promotes maximized profits only, nothing else is even on the table. Nader's class-unconsciousness explains the bluntness of his critique and the emotional cheerleading he does on the stump. Where is his idea of change? You guys have clarified yet another unexplored corner of our political funhouse.

Yours,
SC
30 March 2001


“...[O]ne is obliged to assume that Nader's professed hope in Bush's ability to oppose the influence of “corporate fat cats” is merely a journalistic device aimed at currying favor with the new administration. That would be consistent with the generally groveling tone of his commentary. The alternative, that Nader really believes the new president to be something other than a tool of corporate interests, would brand the former Green candidate and long-time lobbyist a political idiot."

I'm not sure when it happened. Maybe it was when he joined the right-wing extremists' call to overturn the 1996 presidential election over sex. Maybe some time before that.

Why didn't we notice when somewhere along the line Ralph Nader became an apologist, nay an ADVOCATE, for the right-wing corporate power structure? We all know Nader lied over and over during the 2000 campaign saying there was no important difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. I know many expected Nader to own up to this, and tell the truth now that he can see what is happening because he helped Bush seize the White House. We can ALL see the Bush occupation is unleashing raw, right-wing extremism. It's plain to everyone. Corporate power, bigotry, misogyny and theocracy, on the march as never before, and trampling everything in sight. Even those of us made cynical and disillusioned by Nader's lies, broken promises, and close coordination with the RNC [Republican National Committee] and the Bush team, expected something better. We expected Nader to at least question the right-wingers on their election theft and reactionary policies, even if Nader's ego prevented him from admitting nearly everything he said during the 2000 campaign was wrong.

Instead Nader traded his anti-Gore put-downs for pro-George W. Bush pompoms as he cheerleads the onslaught against EVERYTHING progressives stand for. Bush's people already violated our right to vote and enlisted the Fascist Five Supreme Justices to pervert the Constitution. Just weeks into his illegal occupation, Bush is avidly rolling back consumer rights, choice and family planning, labor rights and protections for workers and children. I would think any self-described Green candidate would at least question Bush's flip-flop on Kyoto and inviting exploiters to despoil ALL our national lands. Nader is not challenging any of this. In his servile posture, eagerly supine to the “corporatists” and theocrats and fascists, Nader supports it all, just as he helped make it happen. Now we know why Nader lied claiming there's no important difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Now we see there's no important difference between Ralph Nader and George W. Bush.

MH
2 April 2001


See Also:
Ralph Nader's political olive branch to Bush
[30 March 2001]

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