In two sentences you (a) compare Ralph Nader to Hitler and (b) state that he has not made a significant difference in American life. Do you know anything?

To put it mildly, Ralph Nader has done more for average Americans than the four candidates for president combined. A lot more. That may not make you want to vote for him, but please think, just a little bit.

But his symbolic work for justice through presidential campaigns has become a symbol of something ugly to myself and many other progressive Americans.

If Nader seriously wanted to be president, he should have built a grassroots campaign and been willing to lead the Green Party. We could respect him as progressives if this was what he had done as a presidential contender.

Instead, without even being able to consolidate the support of a party that was created for him by his supporters...he is there mainly like a burr in our sides. Yes, he reminds us that we are compromising with our choice of candidates....but through promoting more cynicism/idealism in the political system as it is, he is from a practical point of view taking us further away from accomplishing the very things he stands for.

was destroyed in 2000. He prostituted (defined as a use of something in an invalid or wrong manner) his former success to push the Green Party. As such, his efforts led directly to the Iraq War.

Nader is to blame for Iraq.

Nader siphoned away the votes for the winning margin in FL, NH and IA. Without him, we would be finishing up the second term of Al Gore.

Stop this CRAP about how good he is and what he accomplished. He is an evil stupid person, and anyone who supports him is evil as well. Evil is used here in a deliberate way.

2000 3.0%

2004 0.3%

2008 0.03%

You heard it here first!

We don't really need the Greentards, Forest Sprites and Bongwater over the hill hippies. Send the teepee dwellers and Burning Man assholes over to the GOP.

Virtually every letter from a Nader defender tries to obfuscate by confusing the issues.

There are several separate issues here.

1) Nader should not be prevented from running, if he is legally entitled to run. Of course this is true. No-one has suggested otherwise.

2) However, it is authoritarian claptrap to blather that he should not be "criticized" for running. Of course I will criticize him for running, if I wish to. It is a free country, and I damn well have the right to criticize Ralph Nader as much as I want. I will criticize him both for the platform he runs on, and for his very decision to run.

3) An important third issue, although related to the second, which is the true subject of the article, is how Nader's runs impact on the two major parties, whether he is aware of this impact, and whether the Republicans are funding him. Note that even if he is receiving perfectly legal help and funding from the Republicans, this is news, and worthy of discussion.

I was absolutely stunned, in 2000, that people pretended to believe that a George W. Bush presidency would be "equivalent" to an Al Gore presidency. However, I believe that 2.7% of the population was ignorant enough to believe that at the time. The people who voted for Nader once.

The people who are defending Nader here today are a different breed. They are people who want it both ways - people who want to affect a "radical" pose, while secretly favoring Republican policies. Right wingers who lack the honesty or self-confidence to overtly admit that you favor a right wing government.

I asked Nader supporter whether voting for Nader advanced a progressive agenda. His illogical reply was "Did voting for Bill Clinton?". Well, Bill Clinton was not running in 2000 or 2004, but the answer is "yes" relative to the effects on a progressive agenda of re-electing George H. W. Bush or electing Bob Dole, which is the only relevant comparison.

You verbal Nader supporters are not quite the 0.3%, but rather, the 0.03% that Nader is going to get this time.

It's your turn now. Launch an irrelevant rant about how evil Obama and Bill Clinton are, and hurl some really nasty insults at me.

That's funny. You sure about that?

I am expecting a "blow up" any day now from the obsolete rust bucket McSame.

why don't the dems just buy Nader off? Offer him a plum job policy job in the new administration, in return for supporting the dem in November.

Offer him enough, something that will give him national exposure, and he might think seriously about it.

Surely both Obama and Clinton are masters of this kind of manipulation. The DNC should be thinking about it.

Time to take off the gloves, come up with the cash, and give the guy something that'll make him go away.

Let's not forget that Nader's involvement in the 2000 Presidential race also makes him responsible for Britney Spears' recent mental collapse.

Hurricane Katrina? The tsunami? Heath Leger? Those were all Nader's fault, too.

A lot of people don't realize this, but when Fonzie decided to jump over that shark: that was Nader's idea.

Let me begin by saying that I strongly support voting for the most progressive candidate who has a chance of winning. In local elections, that may well be a Green Party candidate or independent. In fact Bernie Sanders is a great example of an independent who did things the right way.

Having said that, the US has, essentially, a variation of the district-based electoral system, as do Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, NZ, and a fair number of other countries. An individual politician must win the plurality of the vote in a geographically defined district to be elected to office.

In countries which have a variation of the "proportional" system, such as Italy and Israel, a political party may automatically receive some number of seats in a national assembly, if it receives some overall proportion of the national vote, without having to win a single district.

Yet Italy is not "more democratic" than Australia, because when there are many small parties in an assembly, they must form coalitions to pass legislation. The "compromise" comes after the election. In the end, in a democracy, some number of people must agree with you before you can pass legislation. Although Canada and so on have regionally based "third" and "fourth" parties that are viable in certain parts of the country, as a rule, district-based electoral systems lead to fewer, larger viable parties.

No sincere third party wants to run a candidate if doing so would actually "spoil" the vote on their side of the political spectrum and result in the election of an ideological foe.

For at least the past thirty years, all actors on the ideological right have united behind the Republican party. There is, in essence, no "fourth" party on the right, so except in a few locales, running a "third" party candidate on the "left" is a method of electing right wing Republicans, even where they do not represent the views of the voters.

Progressives have succeeded as independents, or much more, as very progressive Democrats from "liberal" parts of the country (Pelosi and Feinstein notwithstanding this is true).

No sincere progressive wants to split the "liberal" vote with a "third party", when there is no corresponding "fourth party" on the right.