On Sunday, June 9, 2002, at 04:24 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
>> http://www.ncpa.org/oped/bartlett/sep2000a.html
>
> ...and in case you didn't follow that link, the conlusion (the
> reference to Nader's Freeman article is his 40-year-old essay
> denouncing public housing, which sadly is no longer there):
> <snip>
>> This is neither liberal nor conservative, but authoritarian. As one of
>> Nader's former colleagues, David Sanford, wrote about him in 1976, "He
>> is, I believe, an authoritarian, a man on a white horse, and I for one
>> hope that he will never ride into the White House." That is a
>> sentiment I second.
>>
>> Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy
>> Analysis, September 20, 2000.
>>
>> For Nader's Freeman article http://www.fee.org/iol/nader.html
i recall when this article came out and how my gore-supporting friends used it to beat me over the head.
thing is, yes, nader has that "man on a white horse" thing going, fair enough. moreover, we all know that nader is no socialist. but it's just like bartlett and the ncpa to denounce everything they don't like as "authoritarian"--their post-cold war, post-jeanne-kirkpatrick word for evil things that they used to call communist. where bartlett doesn't come clean is that he sees anything anti-corporate as *by definition* authoritarian/communist. and the example bartlett uses,regarding change through the courts, is either naive or an outright twisting of reality.
in any event, his rhetorical strategy here is as transparent as it is disingenuous. it's like reading a declawed david horowitz piece.
j