Counterpunch from Alan Maass

No one can say that the documentary An Unreasonable Man sugarcoats the case against its subject. The film opens with Ralph Nader mumbling through a brief statement at a sparsely attended press conference during his 2004 presidential campaign. Then comes several minutes of vitriolic denunciations of Nader by three of the most unpleasant, puffed-up and dishonest fixtures of the liberal firmament--Democratic "strategist" James Carville, author Todd Gitlin and Nation columnist Eric Alterman. If you aren't familiar with their complaints on the subject, they are easily summarized: Ralph Nader, because he ran for president in 2000 as a third-party candidate against Al Gore and George Bush, is responsible everything bad that's happened during the Bush presidency. Every. Thing.
"Thank you Ralph for the Iraq war, thank you Ralph for the tax cuts, thank you Ralph for the destruction of the environment, thank you Ralph for the destruction of the Constitution," Alterman spits out. "I just think the man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He's done enough damage to this one; let him damage someone else's now."
"Wicked," "megalomaniac," "politically idiotic," "deluded" and "psychologically troubled" are a few of the terms of abuse Alterman and friends lob at Nader.
If only they managed a tenth of this kind of venom when talking about Republicans. But instead, their sanctimonious and humorless diatribes are directed at the man responsible for seatbelts and airbags in cars, anti-pollution laws, any number of workplace safety regulations--and the most significant left-wing electoral challenge to the two-party political system in a half-century.
Fortunately, An Unreasonable Man spends the next two hours following Nader's history, and what emerges plainly from the film's interviews with supporters and detractors alike is that Nader's transformation--from a reformer working firmly within the Washington system to a renegade confronting the two parties from the outside--is wholly in keeping with the commitment to democratic principles that motivated him his whole political life.
The Democrats' claim that Nader was a "spoiler" who caused Gore's defeat in 2000 is wrong for any number of reasons--not least, the fact that Gore won both the popular vote and the election in Florida that would have given him a win in the Electoral College, but the Democrats were too timid to fight the Republicans' theft of the White House.
But Nader's real crime for Democrats is that his campaign represented a popular challenge to the two-party corporate-dominated system--and the deeply engrained politics of "lesser evilism" that convinces liberals and progressives, time and time again, to support a Democrat who inevitably betrays them without a second thought.

posted by Ugly Brit @ 7:00 PM