Actually, we wouldn’t mind if somebody winged him a little. Just enough to keep him in rehab and off the ballot until November.

Do I sound angry? Do I sound bitter? I’m not surprised, because I say all this as a man who used to have a great deal of respect for Mr. Nadir. I say it as someone who believes in almost everything he advocates, and who is almost as tired of politics as usual as he and his diehard supporters are. I continued to respect him right up to the month of November, 2000, as we watched that farce play out in Florida and it began to be clear that he, and he alone, was responsible for foisting the shitkicker from Texas on a gullible public (the majority of whom did not vote for Bush, don’t forget).

I write all this knowing that some of my good friends voted for Nadir in 2000. Some may even have worked for his election. I forgive them. How could they have known? He looked … well, not charismatic, but he looked honest, and he said the right things, and Al Gore was a schlub. Why not vote for him? (None of my Nadir-voting friends live in Florida. That I don’t think I could forgive.) Maybe they even voted for him again in ’04 … and though I can’t see why, after the Great Theft of 2000, what the hell. He wasn’t a factor, and John Kerry made Al Gore look like John Kennedy, charisma-wise. But if any of you are planning to vote for him this time … you have your head so far up your ass you can probably see Dick Cheney in there. Sorry, but that’s a fact.

Nadir denies he threw the election to Monkey Boy. A few people I’ve talked to also doubt that that’s the case. I don’t understand them. I really, really don’t. The math is so very simple. Here’s the official numbers from Florida, 2000, plus or minus a dangling chad or two, and with no way of knowing how the thumb of the Florida Secretary of State, Mrs. Douchebag of Florida, Katherine Harris, on the scales of justice might have figured in the tally:

 A difference of 537 votes. Think about that one for a minute, and enjoy another late-night joke about the joke who walks like a man, Ralph Nadir.

Is it just me, or is it rocket science to figure out that 2,912,253 plus 97,488 equals 3,009,741? Which beats out Monkey Boy, because not even Antonin Scalia could maintain that 3 is less than 2.9, which throws Florida’s 25 electoral votes into the Gore column, which gives him 291 with 270 needed to win … (are any of you having any trouble following this? Because I can come to your house and provide some private tutoring) …

… and then Monkey Boy and his whole hideous clan have to retire to Crawford to kick some shit, and Dick Cheney becomes a footnote to history … didn’t he used to be in the Eisenhower administration, or something? … and Rummy doesn’t have a chance to get 4000 of our boys and girls killed by his criminal incompetence, and Karl Rove looks for another empty suit he can stuff with shit and hold up before the American people as a candidate … and Condi Rice is playing the piano in some sleazy bar in Pittsburgh … ah, my friends, in some alternate universe, all this happened, is happening, and I know it’s not a perfect alternate universe, but it’s a better one than this …

25% of 97,488 is 24,372 votes for Monkey Boy, + 2,912,790 = 2,937,162 idiots

38% of 97,488 is 37,048 votes for Gore, + 2,912,253 = 2,949,301

Not that I believe those polls for a second; still, I let the man have his say, didn’t I? And didn’t I just prove that, by his own figures, Nadir admits that Gore would have won Florida by 12,139 votes if Nadir hadn’t been running?

And the supreme irony here? That partial list of the things Nadir stands for up above: “wants national health care, curbs on lobbyists, reform of corporate law, is against tax breaks for the wealthy and for big business” … that’s me!!! I believe in all that! And I was glad he was in the race … until it became clear that this was going to be a close one, and even clearer that he could not withdraw! It was psychologically, even physically, impossible for him, like kissing his own ass. His ego was too massive for that. I wasn’t even asking him to compromise—though his total inability to compromise, even a tiny bit, is the least attractive thing about him; uncompromising people, left or right, are despots in the making, no matter how good their original intentions. He didn’t have to endorse Gore, he didn’t have to ask his supporters to vote for anyone; they’d know what to do.

There is one part of Nadir’s message that is so beguiling, that rings so true to so many of us, including me, until you stop and think about it, and it is this: “There’s really no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties these days. A vote for either one of them is a vote for the same old shit. Only a vote for Nadir is a vote for fundamental change in the system.” And how many times have I heard that? How many times have I uttered it myself, from the depths of cynical despair?

And it just ain’t true, my friends. It is true that the Democratic party has not covered itself in glory these last decades. It is true that the party seems to have lost its way. I haven’t been enthused about anybody in politics at all in many, many years. But I know the difference between dumb and dumber, between discomfort and agony. Here’s the choice I’d like you to make, Ralph, if you think there’s no difference. I’m going to tie you down and either A) cut off both your arms with a chainsaw, or B) smash your thumb with a hammer. Neither sounds like a lot of fun, does it? But I think I know what you’ll decide. The Republican party is the chainsaw, and the Democratic party is the hammer. Get used to it, you’re not ever going to get everything you want, no matter what your mommy told you. Sometimes you just have to take the best of two bad options.

I’d say I don’t know how he can sleep at night, knowing what he’s done, but it’s not true. I know how he handles it. Ralph Nadir is a supremely self-righteous man—very much like Monkey Boy in that respect—and the self-righteous always sleep the sleep of the innocent. I hold him personally responsible for all that has gone wrong with my beloved country in the 21st, Monkey Boy Century. He did not, of course, start the war in Iraq, nor has he personally gutted the Constitution and made the United States of America into the most hated nation on the planet … but he helped. You know where the final responsibility lies, and I won’t go through the names on rolls of dishonor, from Monkey Boy (also known as Dick Cheney’s sock puppet), to a Secretary of Defense who went to war with “the army we have,” no matter how many generals told him it wasn’t enough, to a Secretary of State who makes a bad joke of the whole idea of statesmanship, to a Labor Secretary who hates the working man and woman and an Interior Secretary who hates the environment. You know who they are, and if you don’t, there are people out there who have been making note of crimes and taking down names for the day of reckoning, whether it be in five years or ten.

Ralph Nadir didn’t do these crimes. But he gave us the people who did.

A headline in the Los Angeles Times this morning said that McCain was ahead of Obama by 44% to 42%, and ahead of Clinton by 46% to 40%. It’s still a long way to November, but those numbers worry me. Ralph Nadir gave us George W. Bush and his fellow war criminals. Don’t let him give us John McCain and a 100-year war.