Nader needs to go away

By BJ

I am far too tired trying to recover from staying up far too late last night and then getting up early for work to get too angry, but what the hell was Ralph Nader thinking?

It's a pretty sad end to a career and man that was once worthy of respect

Comments

[Peter G.]

This was the subject of quite a long thread over at Crooks&Liars. I was quite surprised at how many otherwise clear thinking people thought Nader's racial epithet unobjectionable.

[Bivings]

The folks who are whining about this are ignoring the whole point, which is the likely corporate hold upon Obama's presidency. Forget not that 21st century America is a neo-Fascist state (accusations of "socialism" notwithstanding). Obama was the choice of the owners of the USA.

Nader made a calculated infraction of political correctness in order to drive home the point.

Shepard Smith was defending the corporate interests by framing Nader's words as racism. Internet commenters took the bait. The importance of what he said shouldn't be overlooked due to the manner in which he said it.

[BJ Bjornson]

Yes, Bivings, we’ll all just have to get used to calling Obama the house n*****r of the corporations I guess, eh?

Nader was certainly looking for shock value, but you can’t use that kind of language in today’s America and still be expected to be taken seriously. Certainly not by me.

[David Nichols]

I'm afraid I agree with Bivings here. Nader's choice of words was unfortunate, but "Uncle Tom" is primarily offensive in this context because the person using the term was white. (If Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party candidate, had warned Obama not to be an "Uncle Tom" to the corporations, her remarks would have passed without comment. The same would not have been true, I suspect, if she'd called him a "house n****r.") And his underlying message is important: Obama's professed concern for the middle class shouldn't blind him and the Democrats to the needs of the working class and the poor.

I also think it's amusing that in assuming a posture of outrage over Nader's "racism," we're emulating FOX News. (Then again, it's rather pathetic that FOX is the only news outlet Nader could find that was willing to talk to him - and then only to make fun of him.)

[BJ Bjornson]

David, if you think for a moment that someone who was black could have gotten away with calling Obama an “Uncle Tom” without outrage directed at them, you are sorely mistaken. Near as I can tell, it is amongst blacks that the term gained its epithet status. The first time I came across it was reading a biography of Muhammad Ali who used the term to describe other prominent blacks as sell-outs, (or house n*****rs), during his more militant days in the Nation of Islam. It is a loaded term to use regardless of skin colour