Saw Ralph Nader on TV for the first time in my life. Feel shocked that this weird goofball is the reason the horror of Bush was inflicted on the world. Feel even more shocked by the possibility that some people are trying to carry out a repeat of that fiasco.
10 responses to “Status Update: Ralph Nader”
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In his heyday, Nader was the candidate of choice for many academics and “intellectuals.” A loner weirdo whose sole accomplishment was to face down General Motors, but who had never even been elected as middle school class treasurer, was considered to be sufficiently competent and experienced to lead the most powerful nation on earth.
The Germans have a word for the high-I.Q. fools who think they know what’s best for the real world, but have never set a foot in it: Fachidioten.
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‘Faced down general motors’ and ‘have never set a foot in the real world’ don’t make sense together in an argument.
Only a blithering idiot would characterize Nader as some sort of ivory-tower academic with no grounding in the real world. He has lots of faults, but congratulations on being so spectacularly wrong about the one thing he was right about. Takes some effort.
Have you cut off the seatbelts of your car (assuming you can still drive) to register your ideological opposition to Nader’s activism against GM?
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Ah, Stringer Boy, stumbling over misunderstood English yet again? Come on, let’s try basic English comprehension one more time…
I give Nader full credit for seat-belt safety and various automotive improvements. He made definite real-world improvements in that very limited area, and Nader would have gotten my vote — for G.M.’s chief safety officer! What I don’t acknowledge is that he ever had the elective or other managerial experience to run a nation as large and as world-striding as the U.S.A.
My contempt is aimed not at Nader, but at the “never set a foot in the real world” ivory tower Ph.D. academics who supported him because they were naive enough to believe that his very narrow expertise with automotive safety somehow translated into an ability to be America’s President and Commander-in-Chief.
Very few third Presidential candidates of any political persuasion have the broad experience needed to manage the vast scope of requirements for a U.S. commander-in-chief, and that isn’t really their fault. That misjudgment belongs to the idiots who vote for them.
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Well, I don’t know why WordPress ate my reply, but here it is again. If it ends up double-posted, too damn bad.
You really should make a better effort at English reading comprehension before you start flying off the handle, Stringer Boy. (It is your second or third language, right?) Let me walk you through it.
I never said, or even implied, that Nader was “some sort of ivory-tower academic with no grounding in the real world.” You’re combining unrelated statements from two different paragraphs. That was my accurate description of the Ph.D. Fachidioten who voted for him.
There was indeed “one thing [Nader] was right about”: The need for seat belts and improved safety on American automobiles. That very limited talent would have certainly earned my vote, if he’d run for General Motors’ Chief Safety Officer.
Except that he wasn’t running for safety officer. He somehow thought that this singular knowledge of automotive safety give him the experience and competence to be the president of the United States and commander of its military forces, despite the fact that he’d never been elected to anything of consequence, and had no political experience at all in the the give-and-take of American democratic bartering at all.
You can’t blame Nader for feeling grandiose with all the fawning high-I.Q. Fachidioten at his feet. Were you old enough, or misguided enough, to be one of them?
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English is MY third language. So what? Every year I teach dozens of monolingual native speakers how to write a simple sentence in English. Boo hoo, native speakers. Let’s all die of admiration.
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“English is MY third language. So what?”
So you can at least read two separate paragraphs in English and understand that they address two different subjects, lady!
If I write, “Mary was a beautiful child raised by her grandmother” in one paragraph, and then “Her grandmother was an ugly old hag” in the second paragraph, you’ve got enough reading comprehension not to condense the two separate ideas, and then accuse me of saying something like, “Mary was a beautiful child and an ugly old hag!”
(Which is exactly what Stringer Boy did in his reply at 00:46 above.)
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You’ve spent an awful lot of time angrily clarifying what you meant in your initial post. It isn’t clear in your initial post that the “high I.Q. fools” in the second paragraph does not include “Nader” in the first paragraph. Regardless of the actual point you were trying to make, this is very poor writing.
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My redundant second explanatory post was added only because because a typo in my e-mail address delayed, potentially fatally, the first first explanatory post. In any case, neither of those added posts should have been necessary to a discerning reader to clarify my meaning.
My first, short post clearly distinguished between Nader and his “many [academic] and [intellectual] supporters, who were obviously the “high-I.Q. fools” referenced in the second paragraph.
Only someone ideologically opposed to my viewpoint would go out of his/her way to deliberately misread what I wrote.
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Well, Nader and Trump at least have one thing in common — they’ve always been equally qualified to be President.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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