As I announced in JFW a long time ago, I have decided that I am going to work through my anger towards Nader with love rather than hate or, worse, snarkiness. And, when, you love someone, as I do Ralph, you feel an obligation to protect them. The Salon article that I linked to earlier has the above picture as its featured graphic--pink elephants floating around Nader's head suggesting he's cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs-crazy. The title of the article refers to Nader's "pipe dream," like he's living in some kind of monomaniacal narcissistic fantasy world or something.
What the article is about is Ralph Nader's claim that he will attract at least as many voters among people who would otherwise vote for Bush as people who would otherwise vote for Nader. The first paragraph of the article quotes him as repeatedly saying "I think I'm going to take more votes away from Republicans than from Democrats."
What raises my protective love hackles about this are the arguments suggesting that Nader is being delusional when he says things like this. Nader is smarter than this. And if he really believed he was going to draw more support* from Republicans than Democrats, he would, for example, try to do more to arrange events in venues that might draw more Republican-leaning audience members. He's not being delusional; he's just lying. There's a difference. Perhaps this is the biases-of-resolute-love talking, but we should give Nader credit for being intendedly disingenuous rather than suggesting that he's being a fool playing into the hands the right. He may have a monomaniacal narcissistic mental world, but it's not a monomaniacal narcissistic fantasy world.
* I mean support in terms of votes, not necessarily support in terms of money and petition signatures, which some Republicans have been quite eager to provide.
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