Nearly eight years after leaving the scene of the crime without even the hint of a mea culpa and Ralphy-boy - I'm sorry, Mr. Nader - takes now to the high seas, per today's New York Times, to get pummelled by a few former fellow-travellers re R.N.'s hubris letting G.W. Bush win and, in the process, fuel the current Iraq war. Such delightful reportage has not been available since the collective closing statements from the Gang of Four's trial during Mr. Deng Xiaoping's 2nd resurrection, but I needlessly digress ... The hypothesis is rock solid and there is no delight - across most of the current political sprectrum, sadly enough - in proving such in detail. However for the best current exegesis of why Mr. Nader should be blamed for the Iraqi debacle, see an article written by Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College last September addressing the then nascent prospect of Mr. Nader going it alone again in 2008 should Senator Clinton have won the Democratic nomination. Prof. Dreier speaks eloquently about Mr. Nader's former triumphs in light of winding-up the primary historical pawn for an outcome that surely displeases even this stubborn-minded participant.
Of course there are other historical 'What If' games which, at least, have a board tinged with some grey, but it's clear that a circa 2000 Nader voter would have gone to Gore and his spread was more than enough to be the difference several critical ways. This is not an 'If Joe Kennedy Jr. doesn't go down on his last WWII Bomber assignment run, do we ever see Camelot?' scenario.What the article today mentions as almost an aside in the larger piece about a think-tank leitmotif nautical cruise one can take with like-thinking liberals under the sponsorship of The Nation magazine [Who didn't condemn Stalin until when was that?], is that there are still a whole bunch of hacked-off ex-McGovernites prowling the Lido Deck in their bamboo fibre socked birkenstocks for sight of 'Mr. Not Safe At Any Speed' just so they can pull rip-tide on a small avalanche of bileous stones for R.N. not dropping-out in 2000. The focus, in fact, of this effort from the holy paper's 'Travel' section is on the myriad amenities, diversions & edible offerings the well-heeled (fellow) traveller can enjoy on this progessive trek. More importantly to this entry, however, is the detail that Mr. Nader, an invited speaker, can't even elude one of his interrogators by hitting the head as a gent follows Ralph inside with rhetoric, I'm sure, akimbo.
Whether intended or not, I'm thinking now of taking the cruise just based on the verbal fireworks chronicled incidentally. Rather than bear-up to the failure to create a viable 3rd party in American politics, Mr. Nader, during one of the Q&A break-out sessions, is jocularly quoted as apologizing for his lack of omnipotence in doing such (just the kind of jalapeno manna that the pre-Yuppy Volvo set, I'm sure, wanted to hear). In fairness it should be noted that the Mr. Jeeves of this particular Brahmin caste, Christopher Hitchens (facializing at left), allegedly had already took the gold for verbal PC + pleasing the crowd on a previous cruise. It is reported that Hitchens came to a morning seminar only to break the ice by, first, depositing an opened bottle of Scotch on the seminar table, and, then, bramble-off into an off-color joke concerning Princess Di. The distaff faction of the group bolted like civil rights protestors at the '68 convention and formed their own roundtable in response. So much leftist political fun around food has not been had since the City College cafeteria of the 1930's, I'm sure, and has to be a value at twice the price.
So if you'd like to take a pot-shot at one of your left wing demi-Gods alongside some tasty Lin Biao spring rolls, you might want to investigate booking passage for the next sailing of this cultural & culinary neo-Potemkin. My only recommendation for improvement is that the ship appears sufficiently robust in size to accomodate a corollary Human Events or National Review gathering. I think it might be the bees knees if both groups - possibly quarantined stem & stern, respectively - conducted their own affairs for most of the day, but gathered for joint dinners and intramural shuffleboard tourneys off the poop deck. Just be careful of those quasi-jousting poles used for the on-deck game as some, I'm sure, might get sharpened to a finer point than a prize San Quentin shank after the right-wingers take credit for winning the cold war despite Joan Baez, Phil Donahue, Vladimir Posner & most of the Ivy League graduating classes of 1965 thru 1975.
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