Nader blabbering on MSNBC. Still not apologizing for Bush.

[iverglas]

44. like I said

oh---so they would have voted for Bush?
No fucking chance.

Why not just line them up and hold a gun to their heads and tell them whom to vote for?

Maybe they would not have voted. Maybe they would have voted for Gore and felt an odd kinship with people "voting" in an old Soviet bloc country.

In Canada, we refer to the Liberal Party as the Natural Governing Party - in its mind. Anyone who stands in its way en route to its rightful place in the sun - especially, you see, my party, the NDP - is a traitor and unCanadian.

You can read this noise in the archives of the Canada forum at DU2. The shills and hacks for the Liberal Party telling the socialists/social democrats that we're responsible for Stephen Harper being in the PMO. We stole their votes. And then, horrors, we used those votes to bring down their corrupt government, and we kept getting people to vote for us even then. How very dare we.

Well here's the news: votes do not belong to anybody but the people who cast them.

My sincere suggestion is that a party that wants people's votes do something to earn them.

I am not in 100% disagreement with you. We have a Green Party here too, an odd animal that has long fallen on the right-hand side of the political spectrum but recently made some effort to tip its hat vaguely in the direction of the left. People who fancy themselves clever enviro types sometimes vote for them. They really are stupidly voting against an actual slightly-left party, and potentially splitting that voting block to very ill effect. And the candidate they're voting for has all too often actually been a Conservative Party operative.

But I don't see the situation in the US as the same. The Democratic Party is not an actual slightly-left party. As I said, I would myself undoubtedly vote Democrat for lack of any other option to achieve my goal, ensuring a Republican defeat, just because I do see enough of a difference to prefer pretty-far-right to even-farther-right.

All I can say is what I said: if a party wants people to vote for it, give them a reason. And any party that can't do that has itself to blame. (With the caveat of a level playing field such as we have to a much larger extent in Canada thanks to very stringent election spending rules -- but it's not as if the Democratic Party actually operates on a shoestring.)

And blame the people who vote Republican for any losses you suffer to Republicans, if you really want to blame somebody else.


edited to add, and doesn't this really speak volumes?

US Presidential Election 2008


The US Presidential Election 2012
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

You have to go there to see the current chart, and try to measure the distance between Obama and the Republican crew without a microscope ...

"This is a US election that defies logic and brings the nation closer towards a one-party state, masquerading as a two-party state."

Huh. Kind of what I was saying. And if you think that approach is going to attract third-party voters ...