Monday, February 25, 2008

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Thanksralphery is especially geared up for it being so early in the running of the race, so you can be pretty sure that Democratic partisans are already deep into the Fear, as Hunter S. might've put it. The fellows at Lawyers, Guns, and Money have already posted 16,247 times on how Ralph Nader was responsible for the Democrats' losses in 2000 and 2004, as well as for the Holocaust, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby, Godfather III, the Great Leap Forward, the cancellation of Sportsnight, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Scott Lemieux confesses, "I'm more sad than angry about what Nader will do to his reputation with another pointless Republican-funded campaign at this late date." Oh, his reputation. He could bottle and sell those tears.

The comments are a priceless, if dour, rolling example of the persistent confusion between correlation and causality. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, I suppose.

Posted by IOZ at 10:27 AM | email »
Labels: , , ,

14 comments:

Montag said...

it is too stupid to put together in a single argument, but it's seemingly possible to hold both of these beliefs:

--Gore won.

--Because of Nader, Gore lost.

etc.

11:27 AM
Anonymous said...

I'm glad that we finally know who it was that got Sportsnight cancelled.

11:31 AM
la Rana said...

I believe in endorsing whoever wins the majority support of the rank and file, no matter who that person may be, as long as it is the result of democratic deliberation within the coalition.

Hillary Clinton wants to win so badly that she will destroy the progressive coalition!

Nader is going to ruin the election of a democrat!

Listen you fuckers. Either you believe in democracy, or you don't. I for one do not, but if you are going to disagree with me and "believe" in this particular outcome producing system, then shut the fuck up when the system doesn't produce the outcomes you would have otherwise chosen.

12:47 PM
Anonymous said...

it's funny that nader still gets all this blame hurled at him, but "stayed home and masturbated", which received the support of about 60 million registered voters in 2000, never gets brought up.

12:52 PM
LA Confidential Pantload said...

anonymous,

That's because we would have to admit that "stayed home and masturbated" actually won the election.

1:41 PM
Homsar said...

Interesting op-ed in the Boston Globe yesterday by Andrew Bacevich. One graf struck me:

"The United States once adhered to principles that were both sound and eminently straightforward. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called Vietnam syndrome exercised a restraining influence. Americans saw military power as something to be husbanded. The preference was to use force as a last resort, employed to defend vital interests. Overt aggression qualified as categorically wrong."

Mind you, this guy is a professor of history and international relations, and oft-quoted in Donkle circles since he lost his son in Iraq.

Comment?

3:14 PM
El Serracho! said...

golly, i bet they feel the same way about ross perot "losing" the election for george the first.

except, of course, that they don't.

3:35 PM
Anonymous said...

it's funny that nader still gets all this blame hurled at him, but "stayed home and masturbated", which received the support of about 60 million registered voters in 2000, never gets brought up.

That's because no good liberal would dare denigrate the AMURIKAN PEOPLE! on the whole. They're so terrified of appearing to be the "liberal elitists" they get constantly accused of being by the right, they won't call a fat, useless retarded lump with 60 million appendages by its true name.

4:35 PM
Scats said...

re: Bacevich -

seems right to me. Covert was certainly the preferred mode of aggression in the late 70's & 80's. Now we prefer our aggression more overt.

course, even in the 70's/80's we didn't always get our preferences.

6:13 PM
ran said...

"The preference was to use force as a last resort, employed to defend vital interests."

wonder what "vital interests" led us into meddling in Lebanon in the early 80s murdering lots of civilians with airstrikes and shelling from offshore and getting hundreds of marines killed in a spectacular suicide attack subsequently?

and this is just one quick example that comes to mind.

8:29 PM
Joseph Dietrich said...

Dear Democrats,

Please nominate a character people would rather vote for than Ralph Nader. In principal this seems like a good idea, but perhaps you have overlooked it.

Thanks.

p.s. Stop being upset when the game slants to your disadvantage. You look like a bunch of whiners.

5:30 AM
AlanSmithee said...

Eh. That's nothin. Go check out the batshit-insane clusterfuck going on at DKo$ Now that's entertainment!

7:29 AM
CK said...

"When did you stop beating your wife?"
"At tennis she still whups my butt, but I beat her at pool regularly."

9:36 AM
LA Confidential Pantload said...

I'm often slow on the uptake, so I didn't catch on to what Thanksralphery was really about right away. I kept wondering "how could otherwise intelligent people disregard all evidence - even to the point of responding to and rejecting it immediately - by blaming Gore's loss solely on Ralph Nader?" Not only that, but blaming him personally and specifically - not the Green Party, not the voters.

Then I had my Col.Kurtz-diamond-bullet moment and realized that demonizing Nader had the same relationship to Thanksralphery that the security of Baghdad has to The Surge: it's the strident theme that is heard immediately over the more subtle (and more important) counterpoint.

With The Surge, that counterpoint is the US presidential election; with Thanksralphery, it's keeping left-leaning Democrats within the party corral. Thanksralphery is a cautionary tale that could readily be reformatted by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson.

In such a telling, the wise Democratic Party parents warn their children never to leave the Big Tent to climb the fence of the nearby orchard and pick the exotic fruits of universal-health-care and guaranteed-annual-income. They are told that such fruits will come to them automatically if they just keep adding extensions on to the Big Tent.

One day a mysterious stranger in a Corvair of Many Colors arrives, and tells the children that he will drive them to the fruit trees and that their parents have not been truthful with them.

Tired of waiting for fruit that never arrives (and tired of building what appear to be useless extensions on the Big Tent), the children succumb to temptation and follow the stranger.

They drive down to the orchard, but, alas! Even standing on each others' shoulders, there are not enough of them to climb the fence.

Even worse, while they are gone, the terrible ogre Wingnut steals into the Big Tent and takes a dump right in the dining room! Oh noes!

Mama and Papa come home and chase the stranger away. "You must never, never again listen to such a bad man," they tell the children. "We know you didn't mean to cause any trouble."

Then they sit down to tea, and they have scones and NAFTA and cake and don't-ask-don't-tell and lovely biscuits and Iraq sanctions.

And everybody lives happily ever after.

Ultimately Ralph Nader himself is irrelevant to Thanksralphery; he's just a useful cipher so that the tale-tellers don't have to call out actual voters by name (might get them riled enough to question things, don't y'know).

And, of course, like all morally-improving fairy tales, it's fiction.

12:14 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)