A little respect for Ralph

Listening to all the Democratic poobahs’ take-downs of Ralph Nader, I keep waiting for someone to recognize that he’s done more to produce ‘change’ over the last 50-odd years than a whole passel of overpaid senators wrapped together with baling cord.

Instead, we get distortions of Nader’s arguments. In fact, Ralph doesn’t say the two parties are the same or that Bush and Gore were indistinguishable. He argues that they’ve jointly and complicitly led the country down a disastrous path toward war, hypertrophic growth combined with gross inequality and injustice, and systematic dismantling of the regulatory apparatus that’s led us into one catastrophe after another, the subprime mortgage debacle being only the latest.

Is he wrong?

I don’t dispute that Ralph’s plan to run for president again is deranged and counterproductive. But Nader’s now 73. A less dedicated guy would have tossed it decades ago and gone fishing. But Nader slogged on, patiently fighting the steady march backward on dozens of fronts in excruciating detail while his self-righteous Democratic critics buckled again and again.

You’d think the political classes would cool their jets long enough to treat Nader with some indulgent respect. A tad of humility on their part might even pull his miniscule base of voters towards the more viable opposition.