<HTML>Justin writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">It is a way of making the point that except in situations more extreme than ours, no self-respecting socialist of any sort has any excuse for voting for a right wing bourgeois politician, much less advocating that others do. --jks</BLOCKQUOTE> Well leaving aside the rather tendentious transformation of Al Gore from a centrist Democrat into a right wing bourgeois politician [I know, since he is a Democrat he is bourgeois, and since he is bourgeois he must be right wing], I guess that the main point you want to make, like good old Doug, is that I am not a self-respecting socialist because I believe -- and advocate -- that a Gore victory holds the best hope for the advance of the mass left in the US. Would it help you any of I pointed out that I have no investment in being considered a "self-respecting socialist" here? Indeed, if I were to describe my politics in those general terms, it would be as a "radical democrat" who comes out of a democratic socialist tradition, but sees a need to radically revise many of its central precepts. What I can't get help but chuckle at, though, is the irony of how attacks on this politics by Doug and now Justin above, charged with self-righteous condemnation of betrayals and betrayers of socialism, still manage to lead with denunciations of it and me as self-righteous. I guess one of the reasons for the affection for Zizek is that Lacanian psychoanalysis doesn't bother with the study of projection. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>