Nader's nadir (bad pun alert)

Bill Clinton's post-Presidential public actions may have some use after all. When asked January 3rd by NBC's Dave Gregory for a response to allegations that the United States has been "stingy and slow to respond" to the Christmas Day tsunami disaster, Clinton unequivocably dismissed such talk:

"No. I don't think its fair...But I don't even think we should waste time talking about that. America's got a good record and the President is doing a good job."

I'm not a huge fan of Clinton, but this was a pretty classy gesture. Clinton may have found his post-presidential niche here: telling liberals to knock it off when their judgement goes seriously awry. The Democrats should have him ready the next time Al Gore dusts off his Nazi "digital brownshirt" references for the MoveOn.org crowd and Howard Dean even gets the least bit excited at a rally.

Ralph Nader doesn't seem to get it, being one the aforementioned liberals (along with their friends at the New York Times) who are using the tsunami catastrophe as a pretext for scoring cheap political shots at the expense of the Bush Administration. Nader, for those of you who don't know, was last seen debating crude puppet likenesses of George W. Bush and John Kerry in a last-ditch effort to raise money for his campaign. He received 340,000 votes for his troubles.

Nader's tirade, available at CommonDreams.org, goes from tacky to comical in this this passage:

The first populated areas were flooded within an hour, yet for hours there were no alarms sounded either by radio, television, internet, or any other telecommunications technologies for the soon-to-be inundated areas. Australian embassies were warned by their country but diplomatic protocols and other bureaucratic reasons stalled the news inside those stately edifices.

Keep in mind who is writing these words. Ralph Nader, the arch-socialist, the man who believes there is no problem that a host of government programs can't solve, all of a sudden has a problem with bureaucrats! Well, that's priceless. Maybe he should read his book Crashing The Party and get to know the real Ralph Nader. It's actually a well-written book, but the passages that stick with me do so for the wrong reasons. Passages like this one, in which Ralph's faith in government largesse shines through:

If the Democratic Party's alive, then why doesn't it insist that the budget surplus be spent on health care for the 44 million Americans without it? And child care for the millions who lack it? And good schools for all kids? Why doesn't the party say it's plain absurd to spend $300 million on the military when the Cold War is over?

That last sentence undermines my point a little bit, but Ralph compensates by understimating the value of having a well-funded military ready to go just in case something unanticipated and 9/11-y pops up. You know, something that individuals or the private sector by themselves cannot manage.

(Self-disclosure parenthetical aside: I voted for Ralph in 1996 and 2000. And no, I didn't consider myself a conservative back then, although Ralph actually does have an odd conservative streak to him that manifests itself in complaints about the vulgarity of popular entertainment and the overcommercialization of childhood. We were a match made in heaven: I thought Democrats were spineless and too eager to flock to the center to get swing voters, and so did Ralph. I bought into the usual "progressive" tropes: feminism, socialism, "a woman's right to choose", all that jazz. But 9/11 happened, and Ralph, along with most liberals, decided to stop crossing off days on the calendar and instead root himself firmly to 9/10. So I left him there, along with the other liberals who seemed more obsessed with opposing other people's plans than coming up with plans of their own, and set sail for Conservative Island, with all its George F. Will-esque, Ann Coultery, Andrew Sullivanistic, and Mark Steyn-tastic charms. I still like reading him, though, if only for the Dem-bashing that, in part, attracted me to his candidacies in the first place. And I think he really pulled one over on the Democrats by goading them into taking their eyes off the road long enough to crash and burn in not one, but two consecutive Presidential elections. So he's not all bad, but he's still very much off his rocker.)

Of course, you don't actually have be a Green think that the appropriate response to a huge natural disaster that's responsible for 100,000+ deaths is to bash President Bush. You could simply be one of my Democratic (or Dem-voting) relatives. But the only thing that attitude is going is accomplish is to give Republicans a big head start on sorting out the finer points of the Guiliani/McCain/Hagel/Frist presidency.

My kin might still be in trouble, though, as they apparently can't bring themselves to call themselves "liberals", even though the party they are formally or informally affiliated with subscribes to a platform that is animated by liberal ideology. It reminds me of my Green Party-voting days when I eschewed the liberal label in favor of calling myself a "progressive." Which, I think, was a mistake. Nobody buys "progressive rock" records or The Progressive magazine, so what made us think that people would flock to "progressive politics"? We should have called ourselves the real liberals and taken that label back. I have no idea how prevalent this sheepishness about the liberal label is amongst Democrats and Dem-voters, but if it has the foothold nationwide that it does with my relatives, the Dems are royally screwed. The United States is not tepid enough to be a nation of "moderates". Especially when you consider this defintion of "moderate" from Dictionary.com:

Of medium or average quantity or extent.
Of limited or average quality; mediocre.

Yeah, THAT really sums up America.

Nader does have a leg up on my relatives in one respect. He understands that there is a political war of sorts going on and one must choose sides. If my relatives understand this, they're not letting on: I spent about ten minutes trying to explain to one of them that she and other Kerry supporters together constituted a "side" (i.e. a team, an ad hoc coalition.) I never quite figured out where she was coming from in her denials: does she believe that Kerry drew supporters equally from all parts of the political spectrum and therefore his supporters cannot be ideologically grouped together in any meaningful way? Or does she consider her views on various political issues to be grounded in common sense, which in an ideal world, ought not be considered political? Maybe she thinks that mixing a little Arlen Specter in with her otherwise overwhelmingly Democratic Presidential and Senate votes actually puts her above mere partisanship? Beats the hell out of me, but I just thought it would be interesting to note.

To me, it seems self-evident that there are sides in politics: otherwise, why would election officials even bother to break down vote totals by candidate? Why not just tally up the total turnout and be done with it? If sides don't exist, why register with a political party, or even have them in the first place? And so on, and so forth, down this nihilistic path, the rough equivalent of John Lennon's "Imagine". ("Imagine there's no heaven...imagine there's no countries...imagine there's no possessions...")

Speaking of John Lennon, the one great thing about January is that it marks the beginning of ten straight months without his awful "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" on the radio. Dippy lyrics, an off-key children's choir, and shrill-sounding background vocals by Yoko Ono make this not only the worst Christmas song ever, but the worst song in the history of mankind, just edging out Dan Hill's ode to self-emasculation, "Sometimes When We Touch". (There are other worthy candidates, like Dr. Hook's "Sharing The Night Together" and England Dan & John Ford Coley's "I'd Really Like To See You Tonight", lending credence to my theory that the entire male population went on a decade-long sabbatical from their genitals in the 1970s.)

Anyway, I bring the song up because of its opening line: "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?", which is a pertinent question in the wake of the tsunami. Economist Daniel Drezner's answer is a qualified no, National Review diarist David Frum's is an emphatic no, while The New Republic's Andrew Sullivan is more preoccupied with the details of recently deceased polemicist Susan Sontag's sex life. (Way to keep things in perspective, Andrew.)

And that will do it for political posts, at least for a good long while, as I try not to become one of those dreadful partisans like Joe Conason who doesn't seem to have any sort of life outside politics. Say what you will about George Will and Mark Steyn, but at least they've hopped off the political treadmill at times and authored books on baseball and Broadway, respectively. And then there's the National Post's Colby Cosh (hockey), National Review's Jay Nordlinger (classical music), and Hugh Hewitt (blogs). Stay tuned for a trip down temp-job memory lane, circa 2003 and 2004, and somewhat saltier language.

-Dave O'Connell