Village Voice: "Ralph Nader: Suicide Bomber"

[Rowdyboy]

"...Later I was introduced to Nader's closest advisor, his handsome, piercingly handsome 30 year old nephew, Tarek Milleron...When I suggested that Nader could gain substantial influence in a Democratic administration by focusing his campaign on the 40 safe states and encouraging his supporters elsewhere to vote for Gore, Milleron leaned coolly toward me with extra steel in his voice and body. He did not disagree. He simply said, we are not going to do that.

"Why not?" I said.

With just a flicker of a smile, he answered, "Because WE WANT TO PUNISH THE DEMOCRATS, WE WANT TO HURT THEM, WOUND THEM."

There was a long silence and the conversation was over.


and then later, "On this first, strange day after the election, Nader may have been the haoppiest man in America".

Read the article

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/levine.php

[robbedvoter]

1. yeay! He won!

[keithyboy]

2. Some people will surely burn in hell.

eom

[Michael Costello]

3. As a Green once said...

...as soon as Nader gives up on swing states, he drops any threat to the current (DLC "New Democrat") leadership of the Democratic party, and as soon as he does that, he, and all of the issues and people he stands for become unimportant.

People are so focused on Bush, they act as if it is automatic that the Democratic leadership is a party run and for the working class of the US. This after leadership like Clinton, Lieberman and Kerry (All members of the DLC) - the "end of welfare as we know it", NAFTA (which Kerry voted for), invading Yugoslavia and so forth. We also got to watch the AFL-CIO membership shrink under Clinton's term.

More importantly - many blue collar Americans vote for the Republicans. Why? Because the Democratic party is run for and by upper middle class liberals. Working people don't have a political party of their own like they do in Europe.

[robbedvoter]

5. yeay! another winner!

[JHBowden]

23. Kerry is the most liberal Democratic nominee ever.

Teaming up with Bush against Kerry, like Mr. Nader, is asinine. Nader might as well be campaigning for the Republicans. If one is familiar with Kerry's record on everything from capital punishment to energy to progressive taxation, going Green is extra-strength dumb.

By sending a message that the left isn't reliable, it pushes the political spectrum to the right, since that's where the Democrats must move to remain competitive. Do you really feel Nader spoiling in 2000 has moved the country that far to the liberal end of the spectrum? If anything, the opposite has happened, with the GOP consolidating power.

[Skittles]

33. and Nader apologists make things better - how?

nt

[Poiuyt]

4. What other agenda could Nader have?

He HAS to know that his running again would hurt the Democrats. There could be no other reason for Nader to run than to damage Kerry and the Dems.

[Davis_X_Machina]

6. Nach Hitler, Uns.

Worked a treat for the German left in 1929-1933.

[debsianben]

11. The History Cuts Both Ways

The history of how the Nazis took over in Germany is actually also a classic argument AGAINST lesser-evil voting. I refer you to the classic Hal Draper article, "Whose Going to Be the Lesser Evil in 1968?"

(Full text at http://www.isreview.org/issues/34/draper.shtml)

Anyway, here's the relevant extract:

"The day after Reagan’s election as governor of California, a liberal pro-Brown acquaintance met me with haggard face and fevered brow, muttering 'Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler? Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler?' Did he mean Reagan was Hitler? 'Well,' he said darkly, 'look how Hitler got started . . .' A light struck me about what was going on in his head. 'Look,' I said, 'you’ve heard of Hitler, so tell me this: how did Hitler become chancellor of Germany?'

"My pro-Brown enthusiast was taken aback: 'Why, he won some election or other–wasn’t it–with terror and a Reichstag fire and something like that.'–'That was after he had already become chancellor. How did he become chancellor of Germany?'

"Don’t go away to look it up. In the 1932 presidential election the Nazis ran Hitler, and the main bourgeois parties ran Von Hindenburg, the Junker general who represented the right wing of the Weimar republic but not fascism. The Social-Democrats, leading a mass workers’ movement, had no doubt about what was practical, realist, hard-headed politics and what was 'utopian fantasy': so they supported Hindenburg as the obvious Lesser Evil. They rejected with scorn the revolutionary proposal to run their own independent candidate against both reactionary alternatives–a line, incidentally that could also break off the rank-and-file followers of the Communist Party, which was then pursuing the criminal policy of 'After Hitler we come' and 'Social-fascists are the main enemy.'

"So the Lesser Evil, Hindenburg, won; and Hitler was defeated. Whereupon President Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, and the Nazis started taking over.

"The classic case was that the people voted for the Lesser Evil and got both."

[w4rma]

7. Yup. That sound about right.

For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of “heightening the contradictions”. It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.

Nader often makes this “the worse, the better” point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that the Reagan-era interior secretary James Watt was useful because he was a “provocateur” for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, California, last week: “After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anaesthetiser, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilise us.'”

Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. “When {the Democrats} lose, they say it's because they are not appealing to the Republican voters,” Nader told an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, a few months ago, according to a story in the Nation. “We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes.”

That might make it sound like Nader's goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked “about leading the Greens into a 'death struggle' with the Democratic party to determine which will be the majority party”. Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Representative Henry Waxman of California. “I hate to use military analogies,” Nader said, “but this is war on the two parties.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,393674,00.html

Last Thursday morning CNN showed Nader voters ecstatic and unapologetic about their part in the election mess. “I'm a part of history,” burbled one woman.

Along with that woman CNN showed another Naderite who shrugged off the prospect of a Bush presidency with the following: “I believe things have to get worse before they get better.”

That seems to me to adequately sum up the belief of Ellen Willis who, in a Salon piece supporting Nader last week, wrote: “More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home.”
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/15/nader/

When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.”
“If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.” - Nader
http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/200008/200008camp_nader1.html

The only prominent Democrat who Nader seems to believe offers the party any chance for redemption is Russ Feingold, the maverick senator from Wisconsin who cast a lonely vote against the Bush Administration's antiterrorism legislation. Feingold is a rare Democrat who consistently says things like, “Ralph Nader is talking about issues Democrats should be talking about.” But the mutual admiration goes only so far. Nader rejects the idea of backing a Feingold run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. “I'll say a lot of good things about him, but we're not trying to build the same party,” he says.

Nader admits he experiences “lots” of frustration with the Greens. He warns that the party is not running enough candidates to achieve critical mass at election time, and he says it must do so--even where that means challenging relatively liberal Democrats.

Does Nader worry, even just a little bit, that another candidacy might divide progressives and produce another Bush presidency? “Look, I'd rather be engaged in the nonpartisan work of building a civil society. For me, there has been a gradual commitment to getting involved in the electoral process, and I still cling to this civic, nonpartisan vision of how to do things,” Nader says. “But if you do an acute analysis of why things don't change in this country, you come back to what has happened to the Democratic Party. When I look at how the Democrats have responded to Enron so far, it seems to me that we all have a responsibility to try to jolt them into an understanding of what is at stake. If Democrats respond effectively, there will not be much point to me or anyone else challenging them. But if they do not, something has to give. People realize that. People know what the Enron scandal means. This is a test. Are Democrats capable of addressing massive corporate crimes effectively? If Democrats cannot, if they are in such a routinized rut that they are incapable of responding, then how could anyone make a case that they should be given deference at the ballot box?”
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020225&s=nichols

Regarding Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Nader said that he is willing to sacrifice them because “that's the price they're going to have to bear for letting their party go astray.”
In an interview with In the Times, 10-30-2000

In a recent Time magazine interview, when asked if he felt any regret about the 2000 election, Nader responded, “No, because it could have been worse. You could have had a Republican Congress with Gore and Lieberman.” -- Time magazine, 8-05-02

“Let's see what really happens. Ashcroft is going to be a prisoner of bureaucracy.” -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001

“I'm just amazed that people think I should be concerned about this stuff. It's absolutely amazing. Not a minute's sleep do I lose, about something like this - because I feel sorry for them. It's just so foolish, the way they have been behaving. Why should I worry?” -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001
http://www.damnedbigdifference.org/quotes

[w4rma]

8. Also, contrast his statements with the 2 pre-Nazi Germany liberal parties:

In 1930 the parliamentary coalition that governed Germany fell apart, and new elections were held. The biggest winner in these elections was Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party. From twelve seats in parliament they increased their seats to 107, becoming Germany's second largest political party. The largest party was still the Social Democrats, and this party won 143 seats and 24.5 percent of the vote. Communist Party candidates won 13.1 percent of the vote (roughly 50 times better than the U.S. Communist Party did in the 1932 elections), and together the Social Democrats and the Communists were large enough to claim the right to make a government. But Communists and the Social Democrats remained hostile toward one another. The Comintern at this time was opposed to Communists working with reformers, and the Communists believed that a collapse of parliamentary government would hasten the revolutionary crisis that would propel them to power.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch16.htm

[sallyseven]

9. Nader shyould hang it up and

stop making a fool of himself. He couldn't in a million years follow through on what he claims he wants to do. He is just a blow hard and wants to be in the limelight all the time. He should grow up.

[LoZoccolo]

20. Not only is it similiar to that period in Germany...

...but I've seen people right here advocate letting this country collapse! Unfuckingbelievable. Hey, sounds like what we're trying to do in Iraq - how's that going by the way? To paraphrase the Magistrate, you are unlikely to survive a revolution!

Anyone who wants to pursue this strategy is basically a slacker activist - try taking your case to the people and getting their actual understanding and consent and maybe you wouldn't have to let all these people fucking die.

[checks-n-balances]

21. The Bushites & Naderites sound like two sides of a psycho coin

Besides, if this is "war," who the hell appointed Nader as the General? Who the f*** does he think he is?

I used to think ol' Ralph was just slipping, but this proves he's just as cynical and diabolical and corrupt as Bush - maybe more so, since he has more brains.

It's bad enough already having the self-appointed neocons f***ing up the world. So Nader would like to usher in his own illogical brand of destruction. What the hell more did he want Feingold & Wellstone to do to get more power, literally kill their republican opposition? He wouldn't have done any better had he been in their places.

How sick and totally insane - sounds to me like a real sociopath, since he has no real feeling for human beings. Just purist principles.

[Rowdyboy]

24. What good is your purity

if neo-Nazis are in conrol.

[Rowdyboy]

30. WTF is "conrol"?

[robbedvoter]

32. Bingo! And I didn't hear much from Nader when the war was proposed

I heard from Clark, I heard from Gore and later from some Dems. But st Ralph? Was trying to straighten up the basketbal league,

[debsianben]

10. Appallingly Racist Title

Do I really have to explain why calling an Arab American politician a "suicide bomber" is racist, especially in the current climate in this country?

[demgrrrll]

12. The author of the article in The Voice titled his piece Suicide Bomber

I would write to him and let him know how you feel there is probably an e mail somewhere on line where you can let him know.

[Rowdyboy]

13. Sorry, I was only quoting the Village Voice headline

and we all know how right-wing and anti-Arab the Village Voice is.

What was I thinking of? :eyes:

[Davis_X_Machina]

14. The only iron-clad defense against libel....

...is the truth of the assertion.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Rowdyboy]

22. First, I never called the Voice "left wing"...

But if you seriously want to imply that its right wing because they print a few articles that aren't lockstep with Naderite values, then you're blind to the truth. If anyone has any doubts, just check it out:

http://www.villagevoice.com/

I'll trust DUers to make up their own minds as to whether the Voice remains a liberal paper.

Then you show your true colors


" *****LEVINE*****(<-look, Jewish last name) "

Damn, I wish I believed you were being sarcastic.

[debsianben]

25. Whoah!

Just because the Village Voice is a liberal publication and this was published there, the author is incapable of being affected by or internalizing the racist attitudes towards Arabs rampant in this society right now?

[Rowdyboy]

29. No...Thats not what I said...The Voice prints all sorts

of viewpoints, many of which I disagree with. However, to imply that the Voice is not a reliable source of honest, "fair and balanced" information is unfair and untrue.

[debsianben]

34. "Fair and Balanced?"

C'mon, that's not a pretension that the left should touch with a ten foot pole. No fucking thing as "fair and balanced" news coverage, and the only people who claim to be such are out-and-out liars like Fox News. Every one has a point of view, and it inevitably colors your perception of the world...especially in an opinion piece like this. There's a practically infinite amount of information out there,and there's no way to avoid making judgements about what's important and what's not, what's trustworthy and what's not, and no way to completely extricate those judgements from your values. Nothing wrong with it, but in the case of the "Village Voice" talking about some one who establishment Democrats typically hate (Nader), there's no point to pretending that they have a "fair and balanced" view of the guy that's not colored by their hatred of him. Plus, the fact is that racism against Arabs really is rampant and almost unchecked in the climate of the "war on terror" and there's no point to pretending that all liberals are somehow by definition immune from the virus or above using hateful stereotypes to demean some one they disagree with.

[LoZoccolo]

15. You said it, not us.

I would think that a suicide bomber is someone who destroys himself to get at someone else.

[Mel]

16. you are correct

and it doesn't matter if I support Nader or not that title was plain wrong.

I ask people here what if a right-wing wacko wrote something about Helen Thomas and labeled it that way? It's wrong and DU'ers, I think, would be mad as hell about it!

[Rowdyboy]

17. In what way could Helen Thomas conceivably, under any possible

far out scenario, be referred to as a "suicide bomber"? She has never done anything in her illustrious career that could give her that title.

Nader RICHLY earned it in 2000 and he's earning it again today.

Also, your implication that the author of this article may be equated to a nutcase whacko is offensive. Dr Harry Levine is a respected professor of Sociology at Queens College in Flushing.

[Mel]

31. not to freepers though

to the freeper this guy is a lefty pinko they despise professors and it is one of the places the Right is out to capture/control.
I don't agree with the Dr.'s title his story was good and he didn't need to go there. I do see how it's offensive. From watching the right wing work it's there and they will use it to justify how the mean ole' liberals are racist. Get offended if you want but it's how the tiny wheels in their heads turn.

Also, don't you think I know Helen Thomas hasn't done anything like that but you also know the right wacko's hate her and she's been shunned by the WH. The right wingers just love that Helen was 'put in her place' you think they haven't made racist remarks about her Arabic background you can bet they have. Even Fleischer said 'she ought to quit journalism altogether and became a liberal advocate for the Arab cause.':wtf:

[union_maid]

19. You're right. It was too kind.

He's more like the people who train and send the suicide bombers out on their missions. Keep in mind, even with everything that's happpened, he's still running again. He doesn't care how many more people die if he helps Bush stay in office and according to him he's doing it for idealogical reasons. I'm not seeing a huge difference there.

[bagnana]

26. exactly! he doesn't care

He doesn't care what Bush and Co do to this country or how many people they kill or how many trillions of debt they create or how many pristine wildernesses they sully. He wants revenge.

[knight_of_the_star]

27. I don't think it is racist

I think it is VERY accurate. He knew he couldn't win, he was running to sink Al Gore.

[knight_of_the_star]

28. Green Party doesn't want him anymore

That and I doubt he will have as many supporters this time around, the country is too polarized to pay attention to "Saint" Ralph.

[Solidarity]

35. Debate Anyone?

Any chance we could have a serious discussion and debate here on Nader's candidacy without the slanders, smears, name-calling and outrageous false claims? I'd like to see more fairness here and not the kind of personal mud-slinging attacks on Nader of the kind we usually see leveled against progressives by right-wing Republicans.

If John Kerry is nominated and like Albert Gore cannot convince 7 million registered Democrats and 3 million Nader voters to support him is that Nader's and/or the Green Partys fault?

Gore could not even win the vote in his homestate last time! Suppose that was also Nader's fault.

We may well see a repetition of the 2000 election if John Kerry continues his drift to the right (the so-called center) and refuses to challenge the Bush government on the war, Patriot Act, NAFTA and other major campaign issues. I don't think he will campaign against Bush on those and other matters if he continues to take the vote of liberals and progressives for granted.

Both Nader and Kucinich have made it clear that a major goal of their campaigns is to push John Kerry and the Democratic party to the left. They think that progessives in the Democratic Party are being marginalized. Are they making any progess in that effort and are they right? So far it doesn't seem like it.