Nader Is Weighing Another Run

Re “Nader Sending Up an ’04 Trial Balloon,” Dec. 3: Little has been heard from Ralph Nader since the 2000 election about the environment, corporate greed or the other causes he espoused while helping to give the election to the current president. Now that the train wreck that used to pass for the American government is three years old, he creeps out of hiding to throw up trial balloons about running for president again.

In 2000 he declared the Democrats to be just the same as the Republicans. The recent past must surely have convinced him that a Democratic victory would not have given us a war in Iraq and on the economy, the environment, our allies, civil liberties, freedom of choice, everything Nader supposedly holds dear. If he cares at all about anything besides his enormous ego, he should work to elect anyone but President Bush in 2004.

Diane Calkins

Encinitas

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Your article’s shorthand version of events gives short shrift to history by leaving out or shading facts, such as Al Gore’s inability to win his own state, and conflating the constituencies of the two parties in question.

The Green Party and the Democratic Party are two separate entities, as are their voters. Assumptions about the importance, responsibility, obligations and results of parties’ and voters’ actions have no place in a news article. Such speculations belong on the editorial pages, where, I assure you, they can be properly demolished by rebuttal.

David Patten

Taunton, Mass.

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So Nader is exploring the possibility of a 2004 run? That is the last thing we need. If it wasn’t for that idiot siphoning off votes from Gore, the election of 2000 would have not been so close, and Bush and his brother wouldn’t have been able to steal it.

Unless Nader is really a Republican ... nah, Bush couldn’t come up with something that intelligent.

Mike Kirwan

Venice