Al Sharpton isn’t by any stretch of the imagination an exemplar of the median of Democratic party policy, goals, or philosophy. You do appreciate that most of Al’s funding comes from folks on the right don’t you?

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0405,barrett,50745,1.html

I am running out of time so I will clsoe with this one, not abot Democrats exacetly. Guy’s like Al Sharpton encouraged burning down inner city businesses and kills business onwers and employees. After the businesses were detroyed Al was complaineding that there were no inncer city jobs.

The Right pulled away from the median of the American public (as clearly indicated by the divergence between the voting statistics shown by VoteView and the statistics shown by the Michigan surveys). This imbalance between where the public mindset actually is and the right desires for what to do with power has driven the right to increasingly desperate and increasingly offensive means.

Nader? Nader has no support to speak of on the ground. His only support comes from cynical labor and funds provided by the right. A good person could only accept that kind of cynical behavior if he really believes that the other side has lost their moral compass. God help us.

And, here’s a counter point to Ben’s assertion that “The Right” is being dirty with their attempts to remove illegitimate voters from the rolls, etc. The Democratic party is doing everything they can to keep Nader out of the election. Is that not forcefully removing people from the body politic?

My point here is not that either party plays fair. I don’t believe that. I think they both play dirty, for power seeks to perpetuate itself at almost all costs.

Perhaps I’ve mischaracterized this blog entry as attempting to needle the Republicans, but I don’t find any basis for either party to claim the moral high ground in the political process. The process is dirty, and both sides play it that way.

- unless you opose, I’ll translate the whole post to Spanish and post it to my blog, annotated as I think more about it.
- the similarities with lotteries. Each one of us looses very little, but there is someone who wins the big lot. In the lottery is the organizer (*not* the winner); here it is the dominant elite.
- the memetic character of the whole thing (included the “no difference” meme). It is a particularly effective meme since it is propagated (typically) by successful people, the ones most interested in keepìng status quo, and we humans do have a trend to imitate successful people.

Seriously, though, I believe your comment is more to the heart of the matter. Power seeks to maintain power, and abuse is found on all sides. So, my point was simply that you cannot call one party on the carpet about such abuses without realizing that your own party is equally guilty of abuses (perhaps the same ones in different times and/or places). It’s a question of humanity, not ideology.