The mystery that is Ralph Nader. A sphinx,wrapped in a mystery inside a Chinese puzzle, to misquote Winston Churchill, who said something like it about Russia. I've come to the conclusion that Ralph was dropped on his head as a baby. Only brain damage can explain his decision to run for President. Or else he's just a masochist who enjoys ritual humiliation.

I'm sorry, but the obfuscation and "playing dumb" on the part of Nader apologists is making me impatient.

Of course Nader is not directly responsible for Iraq, or any other specific Bush policy. No-one has suggested this. Stop twisting others' words and erecting deeply dishonest straw men. No-one said that Nader could foresee Iraq or had a role in it.

What Nader DID do was claim that George W. Bush was no worse than Al Gore, when that was obviously not true, and in an election where the media was already functioning as a full-bore propaganda arm of the Bush campaign, run a campaign the clipped votes away from Gore from the rear as Bush attacked from the front.

Someone said that this doesn't matter because "More Democrats switched to Bush than to Nader". Does not compute. What matters is how Nader voters would have acted if Nader had not run. The fact that "Hispanic Democrats deserted Gore for Bush", while deeply ironic given the current focuses of the Republican party, is not only irrelevant, it is more than irrelevant. It is a reason that Nader should have avoided taking other, different votes from Gore, if spoilage was not his goal.

Nader ran a spoiler campaign that predictably led to the gain of power by a candidate was clearly, grossly, obviously a disaster for the presidency to progressive observers. It should have been obvious to him that doing anything that facilitated a power gain by Bush might have very serious negative consequences, much more so than what would probably happen if Gore were elected.

Of course, a lot of other people made mistakes too. Of course Nader's mistake wouldn't have mattered if he was the only one to make such a mistake. But first of all, that doesn't change Nader's responsibility for his own mistakes. And second of all, "swing" voters who voted for Bush had not cultivated a public image of themselves as super-progressives. For them to vote against a progressive agenda turned out to be a mistake that has hurt many of them, physically and financially, but it was not necessarily as outrageously inconsistent with their own stated values as Nader's runs seem to have been with his.

Wouldn't Nader running force the Democratic candidate more to the left than otherwise. Couldn't that be the whole purpose? Maybe he attacks them more because they have the policies he's trying to influence. I would say Republican cheating and malfeasance is a much bigger problem. If I could give the Democratic Party one piece of advice, get out the vote, just like those horrible Republicans do.

Are we still blaming Nader for the debacle in Iraq? The last time I looked, both the House and Senate were led by Democratic Party majorities, and still, U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq, Iraqi civilians die by the carload every other day and Harry (Mr. AT&T) Ried votes in favor of extending warrantless wiretap laws, while urging his fellow Democrats to do the same. The Democratic Party sucks up to Dubya even more than the Republican Party does. The list goes on and on and on.

Of course the parties aren't the same, silly: one's name begins with an "R," the other's with a "D."

A final note: in 2000, more Florida Democrats voted for George Bush than for Ralph Nader. Is that Nader's fault, too?

Have zero credibility.

This is for all of the Obama lovers out there gnashing their teeth at Ralphie -

Obama has NEVER voted against any war appropriation put up by the Republicans, over $300 billion of appropriations.

He voted FOR reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005. Apparently Obama, the ex-civil right laywer, has no problem trashing everybody's civil liberties.

He voted FOR confirmation of Condaleeza Rice as Secretary of State, even though she surely was one of the original architects of the Iraqi war. He didn't even have guts enough to vote no? Would that really have been a career-killer for him?

In 2006, he went to Connecticut to actively campaign for Joe scumbag Lieberman, who was running, note, against a Democrat. What excuse could he possibly have for this?

He has made no firm commitments to actually stopping the war. He's hedged his statements so that when he becomes President, he can continue a war that will never end until we just pick up and leave either because we choose to or because we have no more bodies or money to spend on it.

Until I get something definite from Obama about ending the war on Iraq and U.S. citizens, I consider a vote for him to be "wasted."

I mean every infantile attack on Nader like Conason's makes reference to Ralph Nader's alleged ego. Can any one bashing Nader provide a speech, interview, published work, etc. which demonstrates in Nader this supposedly self-evident trait?

Nader would clearly be running regardless of McCain's favors in the past. Joe Conason isn't as astute as he thinks he is.

Omooex, SALON's anti-Nader agenda is old news. I remember that they headlined their report on Howard Dean's 2004 debate with Nader "Dean hits Nader where it hurts." That's the kind of tendentious headline I expect from TIME magazine! In the 2000 campaign, they'd actually published a few pro-Nader opinions, a mistake they're determined not to make again.

And sad to say, this bias has affected SALON's much-vaunted reporting standards. Consider the reporting of the decision to remove Nader's name from the Ohio ballot. Because I also read COUNTERPUNCH, I learned that this decision resulted from a technicality: his signatures were genuine and the total was well over the minimum, but too many were collected by out-of-state canvassers. (Clever law, huh?) The SALON correspondent, on the other hand, lazily reported that the removal happened because of "forged signatures."