Why Nader?

I suppose I had some tingle of hope while Howard Dean was the leading man in the DNC, but now that Kerry is the man in charge, I'm definitely going with Nader. Besides, I live in Georgia--it's going Republican. Even the Democrats are Republicans here. But here's why Nader is the only responsible vote any more:

• Education. Nader is the only one of the three televised candidates (I'm not sure about the Greens) who will come out and say that high-stakes testing is a bad idea. Bush is all about No Child Left Behind; Kerry thinks that the only thing wrong with it is lack of funds.
• Electoral Reform. Nader supports Instant Run-Off voting, a system in which voting one's conscience isn't "giving votes" to a bad candidate, whether that candidate be Clinton in '92 or Duh-bya in '00. The system would insure at least that a majority of people wouldn't be horrified with any given president on election day. What a president does after that is a different story...
• Taxes. Not content to see feudalism reborn, Nader actually has the guts to propose taxing the giant pools of wealth that collect around certain families. That means reducing the taxes on money worked for and increasing taxes on money that just comes to certain blessed souls. More tax revenue leads to smaller deficit. Smaller deficit means less money spent on interest payments and more to fund schools. All of this should be simple, but if it's not, take a gander at Perfectly Legal. It's a book on taxes that is readable and infuriating just because you'll know things then that you wish you didn't know.
• War. This one is important to me: Nader is the only anti-war candidate. Ask him if he would have invaded Iraq, knowing what we know. He wouldn't have. Ask him what our course of action should be. He'll tell you he would withdraw the troops, not pretending that things would be rosy once the American military left but not pretending that things are so great right now. And he'd order the corporations, Paul Bremer's real legacy, out of the country. Perhaps some of those insurgent fighters wouldn't have so much energy for insurgency if they were driving the trucks all over the place. As it stands, Bremer has made Iraq a job market for unemployed Americans. Get the unions back in America, get the unemployed Americans out of Iraq, and you'll see Iraqis and Americans with jobs and CEO's with medium yachts instead of jumbo ones. And that doesn't sound bad.

So there are probably the biggest four reasons that I'm going no-party this election. So it goes.

In the dream recollection department, I've got some pretty vivid memories this morning. I was at some kind of youth ministers' convention (I'm not a youth minister), and the people talking up on stage were throwing some hardcore evangelical cliches around. One, talking about his wife, referred to her as "my quiet rock." Another used the word "just" as an adverb for every other verb in his public prayer. In the meantime, spastic youth ministers were playing "terrorist," planting fake bombs and trying to bribe the security guards with Monopoly money and generally making everyone miserable. And every youth minister thought every other youth minister's fake terrorist threat hilarious. Just as a little background, many of my friends from college are now youth ministers, and I can't be around more than two of them at a time for more than a couple days at a time; they just find themselves too amusing, often at the expense of people who, IMNSHO, are more responsible and contribute more to humanity and often to the Church. I don't have anything against any given youth minister; it's when they get together that I begin grating my teeth.