The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Janice Dawley:

Erik Olson:
That's the Greens. That's Nader voters. At best, they are too stupid to see the huge differences between Gore and Bush, at worst, they don't care -- they just know that Gore should lose.

Well, Gore lost. And, they *revel* in the fact.

These are not allies.

Erik, haven't you realized that not all Nader voters are identical? That they don't all have the same reasoning for voting for him? You are setting up a straw man here.

I'll restate again what several other people have pointed out: a Nader vote in most states did nothing to affect the outcome of the election. Many Nader voters knew that, but did it a) on principle or b) to get him the magic 5% of the popular vote that would have secured more funding for the next election.

These people did NOT put Bush in office. And calling them "evil" is just as much a false equation as saying Gore is "the same" as Bush.

Greetings to all. This is my first post, though I've been lurking on both Patrick and Teresa's blogs for quite a while. You all are some smart, articulate, people.

What prompted me to write finally is a sincere puzzlement over the motivation to blame Nader for the Shrub disaster. I have observed this in a number of places since the 2000 election, and I just don't understand where the impulse comes from.

To me, the obvious reaction to what happened is to blame Bush and his cronies. They are the ones who threw the election. In my opinion, Bush DID NOT win, even in the electoral college, because the Florida votes should have gone to Gore. The extent of dirty tricks and out-and-out illegal tactics is mind-boggling and a severe breach of democratic principles. To me, this is where the lion's share of blame belongs.

Yet the tone of many Nader bashers is that all the rest of what went wrong in the election is meaningless: he and the people who voted for him are responsible. In some of the comments above, there is also a minor theme of "Gore is responsible". Both of these viewpoints seem to me to be missing the big honking picture in front of them: the criminals currently in the White House are responsible!

Is this just too obvious for most people to mention? Am I such an obvious kind of person that I can't see the point of dumping bile on anyone but the hulking bullies currently bedeviling our country?

What's going on here?

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