A couple dozen protesters, wielding signs, stand outside the building. The only sign that made an impression upon my memory said “Ralph Nader… George Bush’s ONLY Chance”. Some of the Nader-detractors had on their pins “John Kerry 2004”. They were mixing it up with some Nader supporters waiting to come into the building, heated arguments about the nature of the two-party system and the Tweedle Dees and the Tweedle Dums.

Looking inside the windows, I saw the set-up: on the edges, the political activists were sitting down, waiting for signatures to gather to them. Evidentally, the head-counters were in full force as well, waiting for a thousand people — a thousand person gathering being one of the measures that could get Nader on the ballot.

Never happened. 700 people came.

To wit, Nader left undaunted. “The ball game, it had to be the ball game.” — referring to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game.

Remarks that would show the same disconnect from reality that the idea that he might attract a huge Republican vote does…

If true. According to someone posting at the local Anarchist/Left internet hangout, it was a joke.

… Though I’m getting contradictory information here. …

“Our support is heavily working class,” Nader’s Oregon chairman, Greg Kafoury, told the AP, “and for those people this is the biggest night of the year.”

Whichever… I’m left pondering the fate of a man who easily filled up buildings at the drop of a hat in this fare city as short as a year ago… if not here, where? If not then, when?

I put the question asked at the Democratic Debate and had a thread at Clyde Lewis’s forum. For your, um…, edification, the responses:

………………

sh101: More to the point: is Bush on America’s side?

………….

zenarchy: If God is on all sides, who’s gonna win? If God grants the wishes of his followers, will we all die?

We’re DOOMED! ACK! ACK!

……………….

DOUGLAS: Other than some old testament stuff.
god has washed his hands of war.
also old testament stuff.
He is on no side.
God will not condone MURDER!
I mean war…
We just Kill each other for fun and profit.

……………

george: As Captain Picard has said elsewhere that he was taking a break in the holo….So let’s all head up to the Holo-Deck and see what’s happening, O there’s David Icke, f… him, he just a hologram, lets talk with him anyway, hey mate, how’s your digital self treating you?…just fine mate, don’t need any Viagra in this mode….great, David, be seeing ya, we’re off to find some hot Lizard chicks to marry, we had to annul those Klingons, too macho…understand mate, good hunting.

O there is Jesus, yo, bro, whose side you on?… Mary our Mothers sides, back, front, top, bottom, every bit of it, with Me daddy Joseph and all our family, just waiting for you all to forgive one another so we-all can get into what I have in MIND…..wow, awesome….see ya my MAN…wow, did you see HIM shape/shift, just awesome

…………….

mariposa: I think when one looks at God like a Parent figure, I fugure he figures He’ll just let us duke it out for awhile, and when He gets real sick of this family feuding, He’ll just come on in and start kickin’ the sh*t of of everybody, figuratively speaking, that is.

………

(relatively embarrassing user name): OK George…..What ever you are on stop taking it. I feel stoned just for reading what you said, and I have not done drugs of that sort since 1987.

….

(another relatively embarrassing user name): Is God on our side? Well, the 3rd Commandment says “You shall not take the name of your Lord in vain” In other words, saying that “God is on our side” is breaking the 3rd of the Ten Commandments. Just a little FYI for all of you religious types out there…

……………….

My mother is dismayed when Pat Buchannan wins the New Hampshire primary. “What is wrong with the Republican party?’

I have no idea what her thoughts were in 1988 when Pat Robertson won the Washington Caucuses.

Flash forward a few weeks. Bob Dole either firmly reasserts himself from the Steve Forbes — Pat Buchannan (Lamar Alexandar is a distant memory), and my mother is satisfied.

Flash forward to November. Jack Kemp has waved his influence on the campaign, or maybe Bob Dole is just getting a little desparate. Bob Dole has offered a 15% tax cut.

Clinton is out of the question. (I know I wouldn’t vote for him.)

I say (probably best described during my teen years as a political nihilist), “You could vote for Perot.” (I do know what she thinks about Perot.)

“Egomaniac.”

“You could vote for Nader. He once crashed a Pinto!” (My high school Auto teacher did a rant on Nader, though I don’t know what pushed him to rant about Nader.)

“I may just well do so.”

If I had to guess I say she voted for Dole. But it doesn’t really matter anyway, because she voted after the national media announced that Clinton had won the thing…

The man is basically trolling around to do some anti-war in general anti-Bush proseltyzing.

“You know what Bush’s campaign slogan should be?” he asks one soon-to-be bus rider.
“No, what?”
“Bush and War for 2004.”

The bus rider smiles in agreement or in apathetic social congeniality, and gets onto the bus he’d been waiting for. So, the anti-Bush proseltyzer walks over to me.

“You hear what Bush said the other day? We’re Now Martching to Peace! Can you believe that?”
I shrug. “You hear the whole story of why he said that, didn’t you?” I ask.
“No,” he shakes his head.
“Well, what he said was that the economy went down — in this case meaning primarily the stock market — because ‘We were marching to war but now… now we’re marching to peace so, the stock market is rebounding.”

The man senses I’m a kindred soul of sorts, so he launches into what is, evidentally, the next phase of his efforts.
“You ever hear the station on my cap?”
I look at his cap. KBOO — the left-wing Pacifica-type radio station in Portland. “Sure, Sure.”
“My favourite show is on Friday mornings… Marlene (I forget the last name)’s show… at 10:00 there’s this guy, I forget his name…”
“Uh huh”
“He sounds crazy, and talks about stuff like the Bush Family’s connections to the Nazis and… I went to the website and, although he sounds crazy, the footnotes are all there.”
I sort of roll my eyes. I’ve heard the show. My favourite bit of “information” from the show was the fascist-underground connection between the well-connected anti-tax Movement Conservative activist Grover Norquist with the left-wing (and indeed, Communist) anti-war organizer Ramsey Clarke by way of a speaker that Clarke invited to speak at an anti-war demonstration that was in good standing with Grover Norquist’s organization. Scratch my head in wonder at this left-right fascist alliance!
“There’s this extreme right-winger from Texas who did this video about how Bush knew about 9/11.”
I smile and nod.
At this point, a young man — probably mid to late 20s, turns around and says “What was up with Bush’s activities at the time of the plane crashes?”
“Well, he was reading to school kids. When he got the word from the secret service, he just kept reading.”
“Yeah. I wonder what he was reading. Must have been some sort of Skull and Bones book or something.”
I say, “I think it was The Hungry Little Caterpillar.”

The bus comes around, and I get on it, leaving the other two to discuss their political matters.

Listened in to a conversation on the bus, between the bus-driver and a bus-driver. It seems to reflect a bit of what is going on politically in the country.

“Now they’re going after Bush’s military service. Sheesh.”
“Right.”
(I tuned out for various reasons, but it appears that she was going over the various ideas of what the released records mean.)
“I dunno. Every election cycle I’ve seen we don’t really get the issues, we end up focusing on personalities. Every time.”
“Sure. …
I saw Bush on Meet the Press. It looks to me that he doesn’t really care about any issue but the war. The only time he has any passion is when he’s talking about war. Nothing comes out when he talks about everything else. He seems unable to really focus on anything else.”
“It’s a problem.”

……………………….

Perhaps we can christian this problem “the Bush Effect.”

His assertion “I’m a war-time president” seems to have gone over like a lead balloon.

A Special House of Representatives Kentucky election is coming up… Originally, the Republicans framed it as a showing of Bush’s strength — they’ve backed off of that since the Democrat looks like he’s going to win.

And meanwhile, things are getting restless, or so say the Bush partisans:
The suspicion is that his 2004 campaign organization, a fund-raising juggernaut, is otherwise inadequate.