Yeetle Box - Nader is to Politics as ...

Consumer champion Ralph Nader announced Sunday a fresh tilt at the White House, eight years after earning the acid hatred of Democrats for dividing the anti-Republican camp in a razor-thin vote after Al Gore could not defeat George W. Bush all by himsewf.

Denying that he was running as a "spoiler" who could hand the presidency to Republican John McCain, Nader accused both the main parties of shutting out the US public and handing the nation over to corporate interests. "I've been trying to get this point across most of my adult life. But will anyone listen? No. So, now I've decided to run again and again and again - until the entire country can say in unison 'Corporate interests bad. Ralph Nader good.' It's just got to be done, and it's got to be done by me alone."

He continued, "Dissent is the mother of assent, and is cousin to dissidence, which is father to disonance. They're all related. And in that linguistic context I have decided to run for president," Nader, who turns 174 on Wednesday, said on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday.

Amid the Democratic infighting, Nader declared: "If the Democrats can't landslide the election this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down. You see, I'm not trying to win the presidency. I'm just running for the presidency."

But Nader, who rose to prominence by campaigning for auto safety in the 1960s - approximatley 40 years ago -said he still had a message to offer for those "locked out" by the perennial Republican-Democratic duel.
Whether it was the war in Iraq, the Palestinian issue, environmental threats or the power of Wall Street, "you have to ask yourself as a citizen, should we elaborate the issues the two are not talking about? I say 'No!'"

Obama, who is bidding to knock Clinton out of the race on March 4 - if not in the face on March 5 - said anybody had the right to run for president if they qualified. "And I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference," he told reporters Saturday.

Borrowing a page from Bill Clinton's campaign book, McCain meanwhile has enjoyed a bounce in support from hardline conservatives after The New York Times last week insinuated an improper relationship between the maverick Republican front-runner and a female lobbyist eight years ago.

McCain received another boost Sunday with reports that he was a gay Puerto Rican who had entered the country illegally to fight in the Vietnam War.

Huckabee, still in the Republican race despite no one even knowing and despite those who do know not knowing what he means when he speaks, said Nader's entry would hurt the Democrats. "So naturally Republicans would welcome his entry into the race and hope that maybe a few more will join in." he told CNN. "A few more Naders and we could see a Huckabee landslide. Am I right?"

As a reminder...

Standing as a Green party candidate in 2000, Nader took more than 97,000 votes in Florida, outraging Democrats who said he had siphoned off enough support from former vice president Al Gore to hand victory to George W. Bush. But he won just 0.3 percent of the national vote as an independent in 2004, when he appeared on the presidential ballot in only 34 states. Imagine what he could have done if he had been on the ballot for 39 states - or even 40.