Practicalmadness

I respect my contemporaries' right to vote with their hearts, minds or whatever other organs they choose to this November, and throw their support behind whichever candidate they feel is right for our nation¹.

Hopefully, however, with the help of tonight's Daily Show, a few of them will realize the truth: a vote for Ralph Nader is like having drunken sex with a close friend: feels pretty good thinking about it, and pretty good doing it, but the pain and humiliation that follows just might drive you to suicide. Or should, if you weren't a self-important asshole who can't understand why you just can't fuck around with, uh, politics. This is a post about politics, and not at all about any fantasies I may be having about any friends or co-workers or neighbors or, uh, um...hey, look, it's Elvis! M-Mitchell! Yeah, Elvis Mitchell!.

I went over this a bunch of times in 2000 (before Florida gave me something more earth-shattering to talk about) and I'll go over it again: voting for Nader is dumb. He has a lot of great ideas, but does he have a plan for working within the system to turn them into policy? Oh, right -- he has the moral high ground, and the system is corrupt, and we don't need your steeeenking system anyway.

And as Pres. Bush has so capably demonstrated, the President doesn't need the Congress of an effective staff of advisers and policy-makers to change the way America works -- he just needs a national tragedy and a really big marketing budget. So who's to say that Nader can't do the same with a ragtag band of idealistic yahoos with no government experience, no marketing budget and a platform that's really nice if you still believe that America even has a working class.

If Lisa Rein or someone puts up an online archive of the Nader segment I'll put up a link.

¹ And, of course, for the Iraqi nation.