Nader steps out against Oh Bummer

One of the refreshing earmarks of our age -- perhaps the most refreshing -- is how some categories and factions of people are becoming less distinct. Ralph Nader sure doesn't march to anybody else's drummer. His latest headline:


http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=163304
Obama the ’executioner’
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/ralph-nader-book-103908.html


When he was new during my teen years, all one knew was he wanted to help consumers and oldsters defend themselves from trouble specifically involving those contingents. Since then his political orientation has enjoyably evaded pegging. I'd thought of him as in essence conservative and enjoyed hearing him as guest on Chuck Harder's much lamented For The People radio show -- but others spat at these impressions, even my fiscal- and labor-conservative father.


Whatever respect I had for Nader wasn't helped by his appearance in the One Percent documentary that fascinates me. Made by a young New Yorker trying to pierce the filthy-rich matrix in which he's spent his entire life, the only solutions it envisions are leftish (surprise surprise). But here's Nader in a perfectly sensible mode, daring to do as a leftish independent what almost nobody of any orientation is willing to -- condemn Obama outright as a usurping tyrant:


Nader writes in “Unstoppable” that Obama “has extended the Bush doctrine by declaring his unilateral right, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, to destroy anybody, anywhere in the world, including American citizens, suspected to be engaged in alleged terrorist activities, all this vaguely and loosely defined as anti-U.S. security.”


But wait -- get this! I've been insisting to people that Obama is merely another Bush, as Bush was just another Clinton.... and Ralph just comes out with it, fingering Slick Willy as the real impetus of it all:


He continues, “Inspired by the military actions of the Clinton administration, the Obama and Bush teams made a seamless transition into a militarized foreign policy, extending even further the illegal reach of wars of choice, invasions, incursions, and drone attacks, carried out irrespective of national sovereignties.”
The consumer crusader’s new book also makes the case for a bipartisan effort to “dismantle the corporate state.”


"Dismantle the corporate state" -- that sounds remarkably close to the "inflammatory anti-government rhetoric" that Washington takes as extreme fighting words these days, even if it is a simple updating of the "alter or abolish" clause of the Declaration of Independence!


Let's hope he keeps it up and doesn't apologize. And that none of his supporters in any camp abandon him for his stark honesty about today's reigning demigod.


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