Is Ralph Nader on the Bush campaign's payroll?

By Bev Conover

June 15, 2000 | In a presidential election year in which the courts are the grand prize, along comes presidential wannabe Ralph Nader, the self-proclaimed champion of the people who hasn't a chance of being elected, to play spoiler.

But the spoiler role Nader is playing isn't against the Republicans and George W. Bush who find the Constitution an annoyance, and democracy too messy for their and big businesses' tastes, but the Democrats and Al Gore.

The outwardly monkish and disheveled Nader, who for some unfathomable reason has become the darling of the Green Party, has been taking in millions of people – not to mention millions of dollars -- ever since he proclaimed himself the champion of the consumer by declaring the Corvair "unsafe at any speed" and carefully constructing an image as the "good guy," as opposed to all those nasty Washington insiders and big business bullies.

Today, Mr. Pure sits atop a financial empire which not only rivals the biggest corporations in their reach and influence, but he runs as an iron-fisted autocrat. This is not to say that the peons who labor in his many nonprofit organizations have not done some good. But their leader is not what he seems to be.

hile some criticize Nader, himself a lawyer, for being in league with the trial lawyers' lobby, his hypocrisy in amassing a personal fortune in stocks, CDs and treasury notes while publicly giving the impression he has taken some vow of poverty is more troubling.

And now he seems hell bent on attempting to stop the Democrats from holding on to the White House and regaining control of Congress. What is issuing from Nader's mouth is that the Democrats haven't been true enough to the cause – especially Al Gore.

While some of us won't argue that many Democrats have become like the centrist Republicans of yesterday, is that any reason to help the extremist Republicans of today hang on to Congress and let the Bush family again get its hands on the White House, so together they can pack the federal courts, including the Supreme, with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas clones?

If this is get even time in Nader's mind, someone should remind him that he and his PIRGs will go down in flames with the rest of us.

Ralph, this is the wrong time for your games. If you succeed in gaining victories for the GOP and George W., history will not be kind to you. Give it up, man. All you are succeeding in doing is dividing us at a time when we must be unified in order to save our freedoms. Have you gone over the edge or are you on the Bush campaign's payroll?