Nope Big Mick, you are the one playing games. Look at the title to the thread. It isn't about Nader and his union busting tactics. It is about your boys bullying anyone on the block who disagrees with them.

Look, it is as simple as this. The Democratic party abandoned it's working class, union base thirty years ago. Of those working class voters who still vote (and the majority haven't in decades, and fewer and fewer of them vote in each election), they now bizarrely vote against their own self-interests economically, just to punish you middle class liberal bastards. It is their rightward swing that handed the Republicans the opportunity these last thirty years, to shove the politics of hate down the world's throats. I blame middle class liberals like you, Big Mick, for that. Not the poor working stiffs you and your ilk abandoned by the side of the road to your prosperity at our expense.

It is all about the one thing no good Democrat will mention nowadays: the class wars. Working class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a very uncomfortable fact for middle class union organizers like you, and one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner because of your need to obfuscate you and your ilk's failing the people who counted on you to see their interests were the nation's interests.

But now that privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization are hitting the middle class, you expect the working class voter to come to your aid, and bail you out this election year. You do it by insulting their political choices of voting Republican and conservative, every chance you get.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray to support conservative Republicans? Though working class voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for that working class backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last three decades, liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and conservatism won them over.

Why?

The Democratic party. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, college educated white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. Rather than educate and organize, they whipped out their checkbooks, recruited the rich away from the other party with promises to feed caviar to the them, instead of buttering the bread of the workers the rich depend upon to feed their wealth.

And then you demonized the working class for being ignorant on social issues. The most cynical and manipulative example of how that was done was school busing to enforce desegregation in Boston. Your party pitted the working class Irish against the working class African American, and made them fight over the scraps on national television. Then you kicked the Irish in the teeth for being "racist", and walked away.

Thomas Frank is the editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the book "One Market Under God". He describes what the Democratic party is doing today like this:

"The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?"

You demonize the "class warfare" and you demonize the rabble rousers like me and other true progressives--phonily and disingenuously chastising of me for swearing for instance--and appearing to be Mr. Royal Nice Progressive Union Man and Irish Bard. But you are a phony, like all your middle class Democrat friends. You look upon the working class voter with arrogant contempt, while you and your liberal buddies sit around congratulating yourselves on your personal virtue rather than do the dirty work of movement coalition building the conservative right is willing to do to win the hearts and minds of Middle America.

The Republican right wing in power is the price being paid in America today for your liberal virutuousness.

That Republican right wing has all the things the Democratic left once used to hold onto power for the majority of the 20th century: the integrity of living their lives in accordance with their values. It isn't their values that are admirable. Their values are detestable. But the fact that they are willing to walk their talk is what makes all the difference.

The Republican right now has the foundations channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. They have the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers, those working class voters that used to be hard core Democrats, going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the conservative backlash against the liberals who abandoned them and the America they built with their blood, sweat, and tears.

That Republican right wing movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. You and your ilk don't. You ignore them, and focus on the glitterati of corporate America instead. From the liberals, the Republican grassroots hear nothing but contempt, but from the reactionary conservatives, they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with tailor make wedge issues. And why shouldn't those Reagan Democrat working class voters get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them by the so-called liberal Democratic Party enough in reality.

So here is where I think America is headed with John Kerry and the Democratic party in control of the White House. Maybe instead of being a laughingstock, the working class Reagan Democrat who now supports the Republicans, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened with those "Bubbas" the liberals love to point and wag their fingers at, is that they are pointing the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party. Whether the moderate Republicans will still call themselves "Republicans" then or have switched to being Democrats won't really matter: both groups will be what the media whores now call "fiscal conservatives," which is to say "friends of business," and the issues that motivated our parents' Democratic party will be permanently off the table.

This is where I think America is headed with John Kerry and the Democratic Leadership Council and the New Democrats at the helm: a single party Republican plutocracy.