Ah, Yorick, I Knew Him Horatio. What a Bastard

Fox anchor: Guess who's here? The Independent Party candidate Ralph Nader. This is his second run for the presidency since he played spoiler in the close 2000 contest. This year he was on the ballot in 45 states plus D.C. This year, he was polling about 1 percent.

Ralph, you spoke to Fox News Radio's Houston affiliate today, and said this,

“To put it very simply, he is our first African American president; or he will be. And we wish him well. But his choice, basically, is whether he's going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.”

It's been a long time since I respected Ralph Nader. Shortly after his second run for the presidency, my support for him died. My respect did shortly thereafter.

I helped get his name on the ballot in NC in the 90s, but stopped after '96, when it became obvious to me that Nader was only in this for the gratification of his own ego. I came to that conclusion after watching him disappear from politics after each election, only to appear four years later to run again. It seemed to me that if he were serious about creating a viable third party, he'd spend the intervening years building the party from the ground up—running candidates for school board and local elections, state posts and legislature seats—using the efficiency of his grassroots network. But he didn't. He just kept appearing like a vampire in a B movie that simply won't die. So I gave up on him.

Then, in 2000, he jumped on Al Gore for some stocks that Gore held at the time. Gore said these were part of a mutual fund and not something that he actively traded or consciously knew about. Nader implied that he supported evil businesses, but when asked to reveal which companies made up his own mutual fund portfolios, Nader balked. He also balked at returning money from Republican donors who wanted him to continue in the race against Kerry in '04. That he could justify taking it and that he wouldn't participate in the transparency in investment that he demanded of others crushed what remaining respect for him that I had.

So it's hard to say what this latest incident does for me. Using “Uncle Tom” to describe President-Elect Obama is fairly insensitive to say the least. Saying he's going to hold Obama to a higher standard than he would another candidate is politically clueless. So I don't know what I can tell you about him, I mean, other than that he's dead to me.