The Third Party Spoiler Argument

Every four years, progressives are urged to line up behind a Democratic candidate that may share some (but not all) of their ideals, because the Republican alternative is far worse. Naturally, these progressives are also urged not to vote for a progressive third party candidate that may align with most of their policy priorities, based on the "boogieman argument" that Ralph Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Al Gore (who wound up beating Bush by half a million votes, but lost the electoral count). I bothered to look at the state vote totals for the 2000 election again recently. Out of every state where Bush won the popular vote, there are only three where Gore would have won if he got some (and, in two cases, most) of Nader's votes: Iowa (2 electoral votes), New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) and most importantly Florida (25 electoral votes), where a few hundred Nader votes would have theoretically pushed Gore over the top for a nationwide electoral vote lead.

There are a few problems with this theory: (1) The Republicans are accused of widespread voter fraud in Florida in 2000, so it presumes the votes would ever be fairly counted in Gore's favor (2) It assumes that people who voted for Nader would ever vote for Gore, rather than stay home (or write in Nader or some third party's name). Considering all the accusations that flew around about voter irregularities, point number one is quite serious (plenty of Dems still argue that not only did the Supreme Court rob Gore, but there were loads of sheisty ballot fraud going on throughout Florida). Point two is just as significant: Gore got 49% of the vote in Florida and it's entirely possible that the votes he got are all that he could get (he was never considered the most charismatic candidate). Out of a population of 15 million total, roughly six million people voted in 2000. Assuming that some votes were lost to fraud, faulty machines, prior felony records leading to disenfranchisement, or lack of interest in politics generally, it's just as likely that the Nader voters might either stay at home or register a write-in protest vote as vote for Gore.

Did anyone ever bother to actually dig up an exit poll of 2000 election Nader voters in Florida to ask? Probably not. The New York Times ran a story that for some peculiar reason cited an exit poll of California Nader voters that said roughly half of them would have voted for Gore had Nader not been on the ballot (Gore won California handily). The writer in that same article acknowledges the veracity of a New Hampshire exit poll of Nader voters (cited therein by Nader) that indicated roughly half of them would have thrown their support behind Bush had Nader not been on the ballot. Surely someone did an exit poll on the 97,000 Nader voters in Florida, but The Times seemingly didn't bother to unearth it. Perhaps it's easier to just keep the Nader spoiler meme going than try to actually drum up empirical data.

side note 1: No one that I have been able to uncover has asked how many votes Buchanan siphoned from Bush on the right (and how he still beat Gore in the states where he did, despite the presence on Buchanan campaigning to the right of him).

side note 2: A blog entry that does not cite traditional sources claims that half of the registered Democratic voters in Florida did not vote at all, which would seem to indicate that Gore's real problem was his GOTV effort.

side note 3: Not enough Democratic pundits have criticized the Gore campaign decision to only seek recounts in certain counties instead of statewide. The crux of the US Supreme Court victory for Bush was that this selective re-counting violated his 14th Amendment rights, whereas seeking a statewide recount would not have been vulnerable to such an argument.

New York Times Still Refuses To Question Illegal Action

The New York Times continues its running failure to contextualize illegal U.S. military aggression in foreign countries as a violation of international law, in this case referring to a bombing campaign inside Pakistan's borders as a breach of sovereignty. Of course performing covert bombing raids inside a foreign country is a breach of sovereignty, but absent UN Security Council resolutions authorizing such acts, they are also flagrantly illegal under the UN Charter, to which we are a signatory*.

Neglecting to place U.S. military acts within an international law context are only the beginnings of the failure of the Times to report on matters involving U.S. intervention, there is a routine failure to attempt to objectively measure claims regarding anti-American sentiment. In the same article, the Times reports (without attributing a named source) on the presence of an "increasingly powerful anti-American segment of the Pakistani population". The Times also more crucially fails to attempt to substantiate this claim with any objective means of measuring the size of this "segment" or to measure whether its size was actually, in fact, "increasing", say, with polling data, as they would when making any similar claim about sentiments of the U.S. population on any given issue.

It is somewhat of a tradition to report a rise in anti-American sentiment whenever U.S. military or paramilitary (C.I.A., etc) forces engage in actions that kill civilians, but the continuous failure to back such claims with actual statistical evidence or any real evidence at all is a stunning failure in journalism. Can world politics be reported on accurately when U.S. journalists report on the unsubstantiated hunches of unnamed officials about what any given set of untold millions of people in foreign nations may be thinking?

There are numerous polling companies engaging regularly in measuring the attitudes of populations in a variety of countries, including Pakistan. It's a shame that reporters don't dig deeper to find objective data to back their reporting on these sensitive issues.



* Students of history may recall Nixon's illegal "secret bombing campaign" in Cambodia. Although civilian casualties and U.S. military casualties in the Afghanistan/Pakistan military aggression are distinctly lower than the Vietnam/Cambodia military incursion by U.S. forces, several observers are beginning to make parallels.

New York Times Blindly Reports Illegal Military Activity

For some time now, I have been horrified by the corporate media's tendency to report on covert military or intelligence missions that flagrantly violate international law without ever putting the actions in (il)legal context. Case in point: the New York Times today reported that for the past four years the U.S. military has been illegally invading countries that have not committed a single act against America and killing people therein.

If Syria were to send troops into Israel to kill West Bank settlers it accused of slaughtering Palestinians, this would be an act of war.

If Mexico regularly sent drug enforcement agents to assassinate drug importers they accused of narcoterrorism in San Diego, this would be an international scandal.

So, why does the Times think it's appropriate to report on a story of the U.S. military assassinating people in sovereign countries as if it were an action movie without placing the actions in (im)moral and (il)legal context? Not to mention the fact that the wisdom of this type of "intelligence"-driven covert activity is not questioned in light of horrific "intelligence" failures on September 11, 2001 and in the ramp-up to the Iraq war, during which time we were assured that Iraq had all types of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons (yet close inspection revealed that Iraq possessed none of the above)? And these are the same intelligence agencies we should rely upon when sending U.S. covert military forces to kill people who may or may not be terrorists, in sovereign countries, and in violation of international law?

To confuse the uneducated reader, the Times includes a lengthy description of how these illegal acts are "authorized" by high-ranking U.S. military and civilian leaders, none of whom have the authority to unilaterally circumvent international law. It would be the equivalent of me arguing in court that I should not be convicted of murder because I talked to a few high priced lawyers about it and we all agreed it would be okay for me to start killing people. The idea is ridiculous on its face.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Thus, even when the Times makes a brief mention of sovereign nation Syria complaining about the incursions, the "protest" is not put in context of an allegation that international law was flagrantly broken by these covert acts, none of which were (or ever would be) approved by the U.N. Security Council, the body that has been given the authority to authorize military actions against (read: killing people within) sovereign states (however one may question the moral authority underlying the authority of the five permanent members of the Security Council to make such decisions). "Protest" is the descriptive word used, as if this were a boycott launched by picket sign-toting hippies, not an explosive allegation of the wanton disregard of the rule of law by the United States military.

Of course, a quick read through "A People's History of the United States" and "Into The Buzzsaw" would reveal the corporate media's complicity in all manner of illegal activities by the U.S. military in the name of imperialism (or under the general mistaken belief that the U.S. military is somehow exempt from the U.N. charter and other tenets of international law), but it never ceases to amaze me, an an impartial, historically aware observer.