Unsafe At Any Spin

So Pumpkinhead hands his show over to Nader this morning to indulge the latter's increasingly malignant narcissism, and predictably folks run to the backyard to dig up their Ralph bone and gnaw on it for the week, which is about how long this will be remotely a news item.

I've rehashed this ad nauseam, but what the hell: Ralph's quest to theoretically heighten the contradictions had some validity in '96 and 2000, but no longer. All the cranky-old-man schtick that gets flung at McCain goes as well for Nader, who is 1½ years older than Straight Talk, but that's really the least of it. Nader did a decent job of maintaining reasonable gadfly viability in the nineties, but now seems to just pop out of his hole every four years to fuck with the process, and as his .38% showing in '04 proves, he can't even do that anymore.

It's just disappointing that Nader feels the need to be part of the circus he spent so many years decrying, because that's really all he's doing here. But in the political sense, if anything it's a boon -- he will probably galvanize the Democratic apparatchiks more forcefully in general, and perhaps they'll bank some of their Nader rage for, you know, Straight Talk McCain. And if the Republicans want to waste money funneling cash to front groups for Nader, let them.

No one's going to vote for Ralph this year, so again, people might want to get off their crosses and be aware that this time around, if Hillary or Obama cannot sufficiently draw serious distinctions between themselves and McCain (and there are plenty of genuine distinctions, don't get me wrong, but there are also plenty of retards who are unable to get that, which explains why so many more registered Democrats voted for Bush than for Nader in 2000), there won't be any protest vote to whine about for the next decade. People just won't bother.

That's the biggest untapped pool out there anyway -- the non-voters who refrain not because they're too stupid or lazy, but because they are frustrated with choosing between someone bought by the telecom lobby, and someone bought by the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies.

Maybe if the pelf were taken out of it, and the lobbyists and horse-race announcers were forced to find real work instead of contriving and milking a permanent campaign season, more people would feel like their government actually works for them, instead of around them. I think if there were a referendum for Russert and Tweety and the rest of the assorted weasels and loobyists to spend the rest of their lives asking us if we want fries with that, it would pass roughly 99-1%.