2000 New Hampshire. Bush 48.07 Gore 46.80 RALPH NADER 3.90.=Bush 4 electoral votes.

[hfojvt]

23. Where is the evidence that over 60% of them would have punted?

That seems like a much bigger leap of faith - to assume that all of those voters would have either not voted or voted for some other third party. Perot got 48,000 votes in 1996, but it's hard to tell if he would get votes from the left or from the right. In 2004, in spite of the vote total being some 75,000 higher than in 2000, only 5,900 people voted for third parties in New Hampshire. Much less than 60% of Nader's 22,000 total in 2000. In 2008, the vote total grew by another 30,000 but the total for third parties left and right was only 9,810 less than 45% of Nader's total, well less than 60%.

I don't understand this seeming need to grasp for any straw, any excuse to avoid blaming an obvious culprit - Ralph Motherfucking Nader.

And the Supreme Court had nothing to do with New Hampshire. The Supreme Court had nothing to do with Iowa or Oregon or New Mexico or Wisconsin. Gore won all those states by a hair and Nader did every thing he could to also put those states into the Bush column.

Gore won Iowa by 4,144 votes or .31% where Nader took 29,374
Gore won Wisconsin by 5,708 votes or .22% where Nader took 94,070
Gore won Minnesota by 58,607 votes or 2.4% where Nader took 126,696
Gore won New Mexico by 366 votes or .06% where Nader took 21,251
Gore won Oregon by 6,765 votes or .44% where Nader took 77,357

Back in 2000, as much as I liked Gore, and I did, nothing was more important to me than keeping Bush out of the White House. As I said in my LTTE in October 2000 in Northern Iowa (counties which, btw, were responsible for about 70% of Gore's margin of victory in Iowa (hfojvt takes a bow here (to thunderous applause)) "Quite frankly, the prospect of a Bush Presidency scares me."

When Ralph Nader was asked, what if your candidacy helps elect George W. Bush, that arrogant moronic pusbag was quoted as saying "I don't care." Trillions in tax cuts to the rich, almost 10,000 dead American soldiers, many times that severely wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and so on and so on, and that egotistical imbecile said "I don't care." How the hell does he wash the blood off his hands? Why the hell hasn't he spent every second of the last 12 years apologizing to the world?

Maybe that is where all the excuse making comes from. Like the kid who drives the car through the garage door, he and his voters do not want to face the consequences of their actions, and the easiest way to avoid that is to avoid taking the blame. Quick, blame your little brother, blame your older sister, blame the video game or the TV show. It's not my fault. It can't be.