The most I remember of Mr. Nader was a clip I saw from some previous election where Nader filmed himself having a mock debate with puppets of [Republican nominee] and [Democratic nominee] because he was sore that they didn't invite him to the Presidential debates like a legitimate candidate. Immature, ridiculous, silly, all of the above. Solidified my relief that the man was a third-party candidate and ran absolutely no chance of ever walking into a room with "Hail to the Chief" played on anything more majestic than kazoos.
That being said, the recent profanity and insults that have been hurled at Mr. Nader by administrators and users of this site are shameful and embarrassing.
Update: To be clear, I'm not condemning the use of swears on the site (I fucking love swearing). I merely think that we as Democrats and liberals should be more considerate when applying those swears to the character of a fellow human being.
I made the apparent mistake of registering my shock at this vitriol in the comments on the front-page diary on the topic. The people who responded to me and others who shared my feelings on the subject were similarly childish. And this is, I believe, the main harm in that diary:
By posting it, Kos has legitimized that sort of rhetoric in this community.
It's now okay to call someone you don't like a poopyhead. If you don't want to vote for them, they're stupid and fucking retarded and should DIAF or whatever. And HO my God, did you see the JEANS he was wearing? Totally not even GUESS?. I feel like in the space of 24 hours the tone of conversation has turned from compassionate and welcoming to that of a gloating second-grade bully who just got the nerd in trouble with the playground supervisor. Didn't we grow out of that?
:: ::
So here's our beef with Nader, apparently:
- His mildly-successful third-party campaign in 2000 may have turned some potential Democratic voters into Green Party voters and cut sufficiently into Al Gore's totals that he lost key battleground states.
- He didn't endorse Carter over Reagan in 1980.
To the first, I must say I understand the hard feelings. It's been a rough eight years for all of us, and it's very easy to blame that win on stupid doodyhead Nader and his panty-waisted voters. They're all dumb and totally responsible for the economic decline and global warming and abortion and stuff. But is it really Nader's fault?
Nader ran again in 2004 and 2008, but no one's blaming him for a lost 2004 election and I wouldn't have even known he was running if I wasn't volunteering at a GOTV table next to two Vote Nader people on Election Day. Why didn't we pay attention to him this year? What was different between now and 2000? Answer: us. We got our ground game organized, we had a unified message, and we got people informed and voting. Granted in 2000 I was 15 and thus not a target of GOTV efforts, but I remember hearing almost nothing about Gore (save that he had "invented the Internet" and later that he invented pants) and approximately the same amount of information on Nader as I got this year. Just in comparison to what I heard about Gore, it seemed like a lot more.
Remember - Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and quite possibly Florida (we'll never know for sure). All of that despite Nader's candidacy, too.
...And to the second, seriously, you guys hold grudges about elections that happened 30 years ago? I wasn't even BORN then.