Things That Celebrities & Pop Stars Do That They Think Are Really Clever/Funny But Just Make Them Look Like Twunts

this really is quite distressing.

Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon endorsing Ralph Nader for President. And Tim Robbins defending his support for Nader just last month (long after the Naderite mantra "Gore=Bush" had been obviously exposed as the lie that it was).

Michael Moore (another Naderite) writing a column making fun of the elderly and Black voters in Palm Beach County, Florida confused by the butterfly ballots.

Charlie Sheen camping out in a park in my Portland neighborhood to convince people to vote Gore. As if the warm ecstatic glow of celebrity would be enough to change peoples' political inclinations.

A Democrat accusing a celebrity of pol mongering for the Greens is tantamount to pots and kettles and blackness and that whole bit.

that ted danson thing sounds quite hilarious. probably loads of jumpy LA idiots who can't see a guy marrying a black woman might have cause to mock racism.

Ah, the vaunted Naderite "purer-than-thou" schtick raises its head. Of course celebrities campaign for candidates -- no problem with that. Shit, the Greenies' candidate was a celebrity himself (albeit a nasty, washed-up one with all the charm and charisma of used Kleenex and who hasn't been relevant in politics since Elvis was still alive) who basically strong-armed his way into the Green Party to start with.

What is amusing (or sad) were all the celebrities like Sarandon, Robbins, Ani DiFranco and Eddie Vedder (let's not forget Eddie Vedder -- Jesus, having that sack-of-shit pimping for Ralphie probably cost the Greenies votes) with the "Bush=Gore" Big Lie could afford to live out the Bush years while looking down their noses at anyone who supported Gore. I wasn't aware that limousine liberalism became a virtuous political stance simply because those espousing it were Naderites.

Nor does that excuse Michael Moore's column making fun of the elderly and Black voters in Palm Beach County, which sentiments would not have been out of place coming from a Republican (except Moore was a Naderite, which supposedly made it OK). We could also throw in Chomsky's "what's the big deal? flip a coin!" bit of flippant nastiness, but I don't want to go there.

I would have voted Nader and vote M/L or green at home. It was not a waste because you are voting with your ideals rather then selling out.

I apologize for this thread mutation into a "Gore v. Nader" thread. I'll speak my piece on this, then be silent and let the thread return to its original purpose.

I believed 100%, and still believe 100%, that Al Gore was by far the most qualified person running for President and was better qualified than even Bill Clinton was in 1992. I thought, and still do think, that he would have been a very good President and that what he would have accomplished, though not 100% of what I agree with, would have been far more progressive than anything Bush is doing and far more progressive than the Naderites would have folks believe. So I wasn't "selling out" by voting for Gore and I find that accusation more than a little insulting (though I know Anthony didn't mean to be so).

As for the "voting for your ideals" thing -- it is a liability when by doing so you risk empowering someone who is 100% against your ideals (such as Chimp Boy). Like it or not, the United States is a two-party state, with the election laws reinforce the dominance of the two major political parties as does the Congressional scheme. The only real role third parties can play is to be spoilers -- whether it's the Greens being spoilers to the Democrats, or the Libertarians or the Reform Party being spoilers to the Republicans. Such a strategy gains the third parties nothing, and earns them little but the contempt of those within the major parties (esp. those who agree with their positions but get burned by third parties). Although many Naderites I've known were insufferably self-righteous and insulting to those who didn't agree 100% with their positions or dared to criticize Ralph Nader in any way, which certainly didn't help (and Nader himself was the role model for such behavior).

Third, the Green Party is incredibly ignorant about politics. Not only about the foregoing, but also because they seemed to think that by simply running candidates they could all of a sudden build a political movement. That's putting the cart before the horse -- the movement should be built first, from the grassroots up, and should affirm its gains and its positions via the voting booth. The Greens got it exactly backwards, thinking that elections=politics (a common American misbelief, in all honesty) when the truth is that elections are just a tactic and not the end-all-and-be- all of political action.

Finally, Nader was a deeply flawed candidate and hardly the paragon of progressive politics that he wanted people to think he was. He had an unofficial "agreement" to not attack Pat Buchanan, the other 2000 spoiler and arguably the most odious American political figure (other than Jesse Helms or Newt Gingrich). He was a union-buster (he busted a nascent union at one of his sister organizations in the 1980s) and is known in the public-interest to be notoriously cheap, dictatorial and capricious. His original position on gay issues and women's issues were that they were "gonadal politics" and that he wasn't interested. He and his followers essentially strong-armed their way into the Green Party, he never bothered to register as a Green (under American law, if he had gained the 5% of the national vote necessary to get federal election funding the monies would have gone to him and not the Green Party). He lied constantly about Gore's positions, and his campaign was built on the Big Lie that "Gore=Bush." He railed against lobbyists and influence- peddling in D.C. and corporations exempting themselves from taxes, all the while being one of the biggest lobbyists in D.C. during the Sixties and Seventies and himself running an organization that itself pays no taxes. Essentially, Nader is nothing but an opportunist, an egomaniac, a liar and a hypocrite, which means that he's precisely no different than any other politician.

Sorry for the long-winded rant, but I'm still pissed about this past November.

You are right on a couple of things. I am a canadian and so that is realvent. Nader on queer issues is just wrong . The two party system and the grassrights growing is really correct . I am sorry , i did not even consider it.

That said can you send me more information on the Buchanan agreement and the Union Busting

BTW Thread Mutating is expected on ILE

Tadeusz: irrespective of whether Clinton was a good president or not, he is an outstanding campaigner. Any thts on why Gore — who in the event turned out to be a very poor campaigner, especially against so apparently obviously dud an opponent — kept him bottled up?

From a distance admittedly — and UKTV and newspaper commentary on US politics is mostly irredeemably rubbish — Gore looked to have run a terrible campaign, which left him far more vulnerable than he actually ever should have been to i. Nader, and ii. votes-stealing.

Well, Mark, Gore did win the popular vote. Granted, because of the Electoral College that wasn't good enough. And by no means am I suggesting that Gore ran a perfect, or even a very good campaign. But if you just added up the votes Gore did well enough by that measure.

My own opinions about why Gore didn't win more votes centers on the very slanted coverage in the American media. The Bush campaign played the press like a fiddle, flinging every accusation in the book at Gore, with little-or-no-fact checking as to whether the accusations were true. Gore is partly to blame because he didn't counter all of those accusations as effectively as Clinton did when he was being accused of various things. But even when Gore did, such refutations were either buried and/or the Bush campaign was allowed to keep repeating those lies. The "inventor of the Internet" misquote (which was a Gore quote taken out of context -- Gore didn't say that he "invented the Internet," he said that as a Senator he had supported the congressional funding that made the explosion of the Internet possible, and Vincent Cerf [the real "inventor" of the Internet] essentially corroborated Gore's true quotation) was a prime example of this.

Secondly, the way the media spun the debates. Granted, I'm pretty partisan and maybe my views are to be treated cautiously. But I did watch all three of the debates. In precisely none of them did Bush do a particularly good job -- in the third debate, he was downright awful. And Bush flat out lied at least three times-- when he claimed credit for Texas' Health Care Bill of Rights (truth: it passed over his gubernatorial veto); when he claimed that Gore made up the story about overcrowded Florida schools (it turned out that Gore was telling the truth), and the "fuzzy math" re taxes and Social Security (it turned out that Bush's math was fuzzy, not Gore's). Even when caught red-handed, though, the American media did not report that Bush had lied. If anything, the media concentrated on piffle -- making fun of Gore's choice in suits and ties, his demeanor, or whether he was "sighing" too much (as if anyone with a modicum of intelligence wouldn't sigh in exasperation from debating with someone as stupid as Chimp Boy). Then, Bush and his media sycophants made it seem that as long as Chimpy didn't essentially do or say something outrageous or breathtakingly stupid that he effectively "won."

As for why Gore didn't rely on Clinton so much while campaigning -- I think that was mainly Gore's (ultimately bad) decision, that he wanted to be seen as "his own man," not as someone hiding under Clinton's wing. I guess he thought he'd get better media coverage that way -- since the media was pretty much anti-Clinton from Day One -- and I think that's at least partly why he picked Joseph Lieberman to be his Vice Presidential candidate (because Lieberman had publicly scolded Clinton for lying about getting his dick sucked by Monica Lewinsky). I think it was wrong of Gore to have done so because of Clinton's high approval numbers. But that's just my two cents' worth.

And having Nader around didn't help things, either. Since the margin between Gore and Bush in Florida was so small, had even a small percentage of those who ultimately voted for Nader had voted for Gore instead then Gore would have won Florida handily. Even if one reckons that a certain percentage of Nader voters wouldn't have voted for Gore under any circumstances whatsoever (my own reckoning is that that would be 1/2 of the ultimate Nader vote). Also, even if the Florida results had stayed the same, had Nader not run Gore would have run New Hampshire, whose 3 electoral votes would have been enough for Gore to win both the popular and Electoral College votes. Then the whole Florida mess would have been irrelevant as far as who won the Presidency (though still significant in terms of questions of election fraud, whether Blacks and Hispanics had been illegally dissuaded from voting, etc., of course).

More importantly, Nader broke one of his original campaign promises -- he originally promised not to campaign in states where the race between Gore and Bush was going to be tight, then decided to do precisely that two weeks before the election. Accordingly, Gore had to spend time in places such as California, Oregon, and New York, which should have been shoo-ins for him but for Nader, and less time in true swing states (such as Florida). That alone might explain some of my hostility towards Mr. Nader.

Here is the link to the story about the tacit agreement between Nader and Buchanan to not attack each other's Presidential campaigns. The most salient portion:

> That Nader is tailoring his campaign to reach potential Buchanan voters was underscored by comments made by an official from Nader's camp in the presence of this reporter. The official predicted that Buchanan would be the “first to break the truce” between the two third-party candidates.

When this reporter asked the official about this truce, he replied that while there was no written pact, Nader and Buchanan had worked together since the anti-NAFTA campaign in the early 1990s, and that there was a “mutual agreement” not to criticize one another.

The union-busting charges (as well as other things criticizing Nader) are here. And this is an e-mail post from the guy Nader fired allegedly in retaliation for organizing a union drive at Multinational Monitor (a Nader publication from the 1980s). Note than Doug Henwood, the publisher of Left Business Observer who ultimately did endorse Nader (although mostly as a "fuck you" gesture than anything else), thought that the allegations were credible.

TWUNT! Has no one even commented on the brilliance of that word.

TWUNT.

I think I'll say it over and over again.

TWUNT TWUNT TWUNT TWUNT....

Tadeusz, you "apologize" for turning this into a "Gore vs. Nader" thread, then dominate the thing with your ramblings. Someone sounds bitter, angry...? I've no doubt you're one of the new Persecution Complex Dems who've sprung up, convinced Bush contributed to Nader's campaign. I'd review your own behavior on this thread before accusing moi of any perceived "self-righteousness".

Why not just start a Gore thread and get it over with? I'm sure you'll be the star.

Eddie Fuckface Vedder. A big sob-wringing pro-choice piece he wrote for (I think) 'Spin', the gist of which was that "If my GF wasn't allowed to get an abortion, I would have to stay home raising a kid rather than travelling the world enlightening you with my fantastic music, boo fucking hoo". Twat. Enough to make somebody join Operation Rescue.

i'd have to agree with you on that, dave.

I do not think anything could convince me to join operation rescue.

It's not like 'Pet Rescue' then?

It makes money from dominos. They used Act-Up techniaues to prevnt woman from termanating fteuses.

Too bad they got to Eddie Vedder's mom in time

It's not too late

Eddie Vedder was also a very vocal supporter of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, which says everything anyone needs to know about that business.

Then there's some other Ralphie-related business to take care of ...

> I've no doubt you're one of the new Persecution Complex Dems who've sprung up, convinced Bush contributed to Nader's campaign.

"New Persecution Complex Dems"? Jesus, did you get that one straight from Monkeyboy or Dick Cheney themselves? Just confirms another hunch of mine ... that many Nader voters are really future Republicans. Looks like yer well on yer way to becoming a full- fledged Repugnant, chzza -- the distance between Che t-shirts and Brooks Brothers suits ain't as far as it seems, both being uniforms and all. Since you're in Oregon, you might also want to look at some of those who contributed heavily to Nader's campaign, in yer own backyard -- the California GOP buying TV ads with Nader bashing Gore, or in Washington State with GOP moles infiltrating the Green Party just last month. As well as bullshit that spouts out of Ralph's mouth. Then maybe you'll think twice before babbling about "new persecution complex Dems" and voting for egomaniac vanity candidates with no chance of winning much of anything.

I was looking for a Chris de Burgh thread but this one leapt out at me as the most appropriate.........

Chris de Burgh has told Markus Babbel he can heal his paralysed legs.

The Liverpool star has Guillan-Barré syndrome.

De Burgh visited Babbel in hospital in Germany to give him relief with "positive energy".

Babbel was apparently surprised when de Burgh opened his bag and brought out a large crystal lamp.

"This will create a better atmosphere in the room and support your well-being," de Burgh told him.

"I discovered 25 years ago that I have a very high energy potential and sometimes I can heal people with my hands."

He then closed his eyes and stroked Babbel's paralysed legs, and the player said he could actually feel some warmth in his limbs.

De Burgh explained why a miraculous recovery failed to happen.

"This needs a longer, more intense treatment," he told Babbel.