St. Ralph Leaves Messages!

For some Friday comedy gold, the man who gave us Iraq and Alito has a voicemail arguing in the course of one of his favorite non-sequiturs that the word “spoiler” is a “politically bigoted” term.  To briefly re-state the obvious, 1)while all candidates are trying to get votes from another candidate, some might actually win and hence vote-gaining is advancing their stated political goals and others can’t win so their vote-getting is counterproductive to their stated political goals, a real thing the term “spoiler” usefully describes, and 2)needless to say, nobody has ever questioned Ralph Nader’s “right” to run; they have questioned the wisdom of his decisions to run, terrain Nader would prefer not to fight on for obvious reasons.

On a related note, from Rolling Stone‘s recent profile of the Koch Brothers:

With Republicans and Democrats united in regulating the oil business, Charles had begun throwing his wealth behind the upstart Libertarian Party, seeking to transform it into a viable third party. Over the years, he would spend millions propping up a league of affiliated think tanks and front groups – a network of Libertarians that became known as the “Kochtopus.”

Charles even convinced David to stand as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980 – a clever maneuver that allowed David to lavish unlimited money on his own ticket. The Koch-funded 1980 platform was nakedly in the brothers’ self-interest – slashing federal regulatory agencies, offering a 50 percent tax break to top earners, ending the “cruel and unfair” estate tax and abolishing a $16 billion “windfall profits” tax on the oil industry. The words of Libertarian presidential candidate Ed Clark’s convention speech in Los Angeles ring across the decades: “We’re sick of taxes,” he declared. “We’re ready to have a very big tea party.” In a very real sense, the modern Republican Party was on the ballot that year – and it was running against Ronald Reagan.

[…]

By this time, the Kochs had soured on the Libertarian Party, concluding that control of a small party would never give them the muscle they sought in the nation’s capital. Now they would spend millions in efforts to influence – and ultimately take over – the GOP. The work began close to home; the Kochs had become dedicated patrons of Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who ran interference for Koch Industries in Washington. On the Senate floor in March 1990, Dole gloatingly cautioned against a “rush to judgment” against Koch, citing “very real concerns about some of the evidence on which the special committee was basing its findings.” A grand jury investigated the claims but disbanded in 1992, without issuing indictments.

Were the Koch brothers more effective trying to find a Libertarian Party that mirrored their beliefs perfectly, or pushing the Republican Party closer to their views? I…do not think this is a difficult question to answer. If only more conservatives thought like a small but decisive number of liberals thought in 2000…