Ralph Nader - "Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump's Tyranny"

[Cirsium]

118. It is Nader, then

It is his opinions you don't like, as I said. The fluky nature of the 200o election just offers a convenient pretext or bashing Nader, and, as we see with another poster, and as I predicted, bashing progressives as well.

Nader never said "both sides are the same."

"We scoured hundreds of news reports from 2000 looking for an instance of Nader saying Gore and Bush were the same, or that it didn't matter which was elected, or any equivalent phrase."

The "Nader says both sides are the same" is a creation of those who want to bash progressives or who look for a lazy excuse for failure. The "blame the voters" mentality, so common here, is what hurts the Democratic party, not Nader or Stein.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/jun/30/ralph-nader/nader-almost-said-gore-bush-but-not-quite/

I think it is likely that those who voted for Nader would have registered a protest vote for some candidate whether or not Nader was on the ballot, or perhaps not have voted at all. I they didn't vote for Gore, they are not Gore voters. Pretty simple.

Here are some things that Nader did say:

"It doesn't matter who is in the White House, Gore or Bush, for the vast majority of government departments and agencies."

"I have indicated that there are 'few major differences' between the two parties, not that there is 'no difference between Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush."

"The only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door."

"It's a Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum vote. Both parties are selling our government to big business paymasters. That's a pretty serious similarity."

"Because it's the permanent corporate government that's running the show here ... you can see they're morphing more and more on more and more issues into one corporate party."

Do you not think if someone said those things here, or anything even close, that they would get the same reaction as the mention of Nader does? Of course they would, and from the same members, as well.

Ergo, it is the opinions he expressed that people object to, not Nader's campaign and the 2000 election.