Waiting for Nader

Whenever Ralph Nader comes on the tube, which isn't often enough, it's must-see TV. He's in a class by himself. I don't know of any politician, civic leader or social firebrand who can match him for his unique combination of level-headed insight, deep intelligence, real accomplishment and passionate straight talk.

For instance, in a must-see interview that aired this morning on Democracy Now!, here's what he said about whether the lame duck President With His Head Up His Ass still matters:

Yeah, he matters because he's a national security menace. He's a destroyer of our Constitution, a violator of our statutes, a revoker of our regulations. He's a war monger. He's a war criminal -- clinically a war criminal -- and he's still in charge. And as I said some time ago, he's a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being, although I sometimes wonder about the word "human." I don't think it's possible to see a more obsessively compulsive person with so much contempt for the traditions of our country ...

That's just a snippet of Nader's wide-ranging discussion of health care, corporate government, campaign financing, the current crop of presidential candidates and the general political realities of the BananaRepublic. (You can also read the transcript.)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

I voted for him in 1996 but didn't in 2000, because I wanted Al Gore to win. Nor did I vote for Nader in 2004, because I thought it would mean one less vote to unseat the illegitimate BananaRepublican regime. As I noted then,

If the American people want to elect the nasty little shit now in the White House, they should remember they will be indicting themselves as co-conspirators in his administration's criminal misadventures. They will no longer have the excuse that he was an appointed president, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, and not an elected one.

Even so, I still believed Nader had every right to run in 2004. And now I wish he'd run again, because now I'd vote for him again. His assessment of the political realities following the 2006 Congressional elections has so far proved true, unfortunately, right down to the last detail:

[T]o the extent the Democrats gained the majority in the House, it was on the backs of some very rightwing Democrats who won the election against rightwing Republican incumbents. And so, there was no mandate for any progressive agenda. ...

[One] thing that is good, though, is that there's some very good veteran chairmen who are coming in: George Miller, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and, of course, John Conyers. But to counter that, both John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi have taken the impeachment issue right off the table, before the election, and that means there's going to be no Bush accountability for his war crimes and his inflation of unlawful presidential authority.

... The Democrats will throw a lot of subpoenas at the White House. The White House will, of course, drag it on and on and on. And the public will get fed up with it. The White House has great reserves in dragging it on and on and on. Because Bush can't rely on Republicans as a majority of the Congress, he's going to inflate his presidential power even more extremely and unlawfully, in the opinion of many legal scholars -- to do through the inherent power of the presidency, as Dick Cheney and Bush have talked about, what he can't do through the Congress, which he no longer controls.

That's why the drive to impeach is long past due.

July 9, 2007 11:16 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on July 9, 2007 11:16 AM.

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