Just when you thought election coverage couldn’t get any weirder, perennial oddball Ralph Nader throws in his two cents. This year he may be a little less odd because like a lot of people, Nader says he doesn’t support Clinton or Trump.
Asked by the Washington Post’s PowerPost blog whether he will play a role in the presidential transition Nader stated that he might try to influence Clinton appointments if she wins, but of Trump he said, “I don’t think you can influence any Trump transition unless you are a Martian or can provide him with casinos.”
Nader was also asked for his predictions for the country under a Trump presidency.
The fastest impeachment and conviction in congressional history, because he’s totally lacking in self-control. He’s up at night going after a beauty queen on Twitter. What’s he going to do if a dictatorial regime provokes him? He cannot control his impulses. In his public persona, he is a seriously unstable person who is vigorously ignorant. He’s proud of it. He’s ignorant of the facts, ignorant of what it takes to be in that office. . . . [He] lives in an unreality of fabrications, wild exaggerations, false statements and prevarications. They’re the four horsemen of Donald Trump.
G.K. Chesterton said that reformers are often right about what is wrong but may be wrong about what is right. This describes Nader to some degree. He does make some good points. Nader’s criticism of the state of elections rings true even if you don’t agree with all of his priorities:
We have commercialized, corporatized elections, and the press have gone along with it. Citizen groups, who have actually built justice in America for 200 years — they are the people who have changed things, changed laws, changed conditions on the ground — they’re never asked to participate as observers or commentators. As a result, the civil society is blocked from injecting new issues into the debate, issues that are ignored like the crisis in pensions, corporate crime, empire, the bloated military budget. These issues are never discussed by the two parties . . . Instead, we have a circus carnival for an electoral process, with all the reporters diddling each other all the time and a chief circus barker on top of it all.
His words about the media are also food for thought.
I’m doing Anderson Cooper tomorrow. I don’t know how that happened. It’s always four minutes in which the interviewer takes a minute. The whole thing is absurd in terms of a rational society. It’s a mockery. We’ve never had more communications systems and less opportunity to use them for substantive purposes. These elections have become a profit center for CNN and others.
“We’ve never had more communications systems and less opportunity to use them for substantive purposes.” That’s pretty profound.
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