you have projected your defensive, hostile, biased, shallow attitude toward the "narrow third party wing" onto me because third party folks probably do piss all over you for obvious reasons. you wear a target without realizing it. i'm not a third party member, by the way. just a guy who's sick and tired of professional Democrat apologists, propagandists and hustlers. the USA is at a serious crossroads, kids are dying in iraq and afghanistan and the best Democrats can do is, in your own words, run the "lesser evil" for president.
i'm interested to see you're vindictively punishing decent people like peter camejo because third party types who call your bluff and stick pins into your blatantly arrogant positions upset you deeply. i wonder if that's why camejo makes it so plain when he says, over and over, "democrats are in denial." ever heard him say that? i'll bet you have but it didn't sink in, right?
i'm interested you'll "slam" with chuck0, who you dodged earlier by saying you're voting for kerry because he's the "lesser evil." then a couple of days later i'm looking at another of your laundry lists of kerry's highlights, which chuck0 neatly takes apart. i'm glad chuck0 has more patience than i do with you because you need someone to make you believe arguing matters, i guess. i was delighted when chuck0 got involved because i was getting sick and tired of writing commentary on your "stuff." if i understand chuck0 correctly, he's tried to get the point across to you that all this party and election talk really doesn't interest him because it interferes with the anarchist agenda. (i hope i've got that right, chuck0.) maybe you didn't understand that, nathan.
you haven't been reading my postings to you, so openly stating i'm "off" your "list" is simply a defacto admission of what you've been doing anyway. and no surprise. taking me off your list, you believe, might save you a lot of embarrassment in the future. no hard feelings on my part, nathan; i didn't want to be on your list.
i'm going to make a point about nader and the Dems that needs making. whether or not you're interested, nathan newman, i don't care.
simply for the purposes of discussion, let's state that nader cost gore the 2000 election. (i don't believe this; i believe that if gore, the democratic party and lawyers like nathan newman had the intestinal fortitude to fight for a full recount of florida votes when it mattered, gore would have won clearly. but i digress.) how many votes did nader take from gore across the country. 1000? 2000? 10,000? however many, wouldn't the logical, reasonable, sensible thing for the democratic party to do over the last three years be to figure out how to get that constituency back into the party?
wouldn't the intelligent thing for the democrats to do be to reach out to that constituency rather than demonize nader and alienate as many of his supporters as possible? i've literally heard democrats say, "i hate nader. and i hate the green party." not just write it, say it. they hate nader as much or more than they hate shrub. not every one of those nader voters are "people who piss on other people's activism" as nathan newman self-pityingly characterizes them.
the democrats haven't tried to reintegrate the sincere left/liberal constituency into their neoDixiecrat, neoLiberal party. instead they spend all kinds of effort and energy trying to get nader not to run in 2004 when they could have made effort over three years to get the left/liberal constituents who voted for him back into the party. this absolutely delights the republicans, who busily counter the democrats badgering, browbeating and hassling nader with their own efforts to get ralph on the ballot, as in oregon now. talk about playing right into republican hands.
how many of the nader voters would it take to assure a kerry victory in key states? it wouldn't take retaining all the people who voted for nader in 2000. maybe just a 100 votes in key states? or 1000? 2000? it wouldn't take much. but the democrats didn't do it. and aren't doing it now. in fact, the dems are doing just the opposite: taking voters for granted and/or alienating them. smart guys and gals these dems.
the democrats put the entire nation at risk to a far right, fanatic regime once again because they didn't want to be bothered with left/liberals. enough said?
R
----- Original Message ----- From: "Nathan Newman" <nathanne at nathannewman.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 7:26 AM Subject: Re: Nader Goes Buchananite (Re: [lbo-talk] Vote Nader/Camejo 2004!
----- Original Message -----
From: "R" <rhisiart at charter.net>
>with you helping to set up the web site and your partner the statewide
>administrative director, who can believe your side was CRUSHED? with all
>your alleged political experience, committed ratiocination and constant
>search for someone/something to blame, nathan, you and your party keep
>making the same mistakes.
Okay-- you are off my list of useful people to talk to. I always wonder why people who talk this way expect to even try to convince someone else of anything.
Contrariwise, Chuck O and I will slam each other's political views against the wall, but we never piss on each other personally.
But I see a disproportionate amount of this kind of personal, as opposed to political, attack coming from the narrow third party wing. I used to work closely with a lot of third party folks, including people I respect like Peter Camejo for example, but folks like R. are why I've just given up on the whole thing. The whole third party faction just attracts so many truly nasty people who piss on other peoples activism that I decided whatever the theoretical merits of third party strategy, as a practical matter in the US, it was useless because of the people it had attracted under its umbrella.
Nathan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Nathan Newman" <nathanne at nathannewman.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 12:07 PM Subject: Re: Nader Goes Buchananite (Re: [lbo-talk] Vote Nader/Camejo 2004!
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
Nathan Newman wrote:
>-Expanded health care? What the fuck happened to universal health care?
>
>It got defeated.
-C'mon, Nathan. Defend Kerry all you like, but show some fidelity to -the facts. Clinton's health care proposal was a doomed disaster. -So instead, Clinton proposes some impossibly complicated scheme with -heavy private sector involvement and almost no political support. -That got defeated, not a real universal health insurance program.
I was in California in 1994 the same year Clinton's plan was defeated in Congress. Activists put single-payer health care on the California ballot (I helped set up a web site for them and my partner of the time was a statewide administrative director). It was CRUSHED at the polls, I think it got something like 35% of the vote.
Clinton's plan was a mess too, but you had the Clintonistas and the single payer absolutists refusing to deal. Frankly, the liberal Republican proposals on the table at the time, which could have been passed easily, look really good in retrospect. But no one was willing to settle for half a loaf, and fight another day for more.
What I care about is moving the ball down the field. I don't care how far it will move today; I care if we are moving it in the right direction and strengthening the mass movements that can move it farther tomorrow.
The equation of immediacy of victory with radicalism in some quarters drives me nuts. To demand everything and get nothing is not radical, it's a betrayal of those with immediate needs. Radicalism is getting as much as you can today, then planning the next battle.
Clinton screwed up in 1994, but so did the Left. They left a whole range of partial health care plans on the table that could have been passed, and instead held out for everything, rather than collaborate on a compromise. It was a suicidal, stupid mistake. I blame Clinton, but I also blame many single-payer advocates as well. They made sure that the votes were so divided among different proposals that no majority could emerge for any compromise plan.
Nathan Newman
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk