Matt Welch sticks it to Nader in an article for Reason Magazine.
Eighteen hours earlier, I had watched the Nader 2000 crew engage in a far more flagrant manipulation of the truth,
more egregious than anything else I witnessed during my two months covering the campaign for the lefty news site
WorkingForChange.com. Even before the first preliminary exit poll data crossed the wires, young staffers, on the
orders of campaign headquarters, were frantically devising multiple formulas to "prove" that Nader didn’t cost Gore
the election, no matter what the results might say later. "That’s shocking," I told one of the harried idealists charged
with carrying out the deception. The faces around the computer, for what it’s worth, did not register any surprise.
We’ve come to expect this kind of professional dishonesty from the two major political parties, which is one of the
reasons many of us find them repellent. But coming from a "purity" candidate who wants to lecture us on "how to tell
the truth," it suggests a certain self-delusion. It’s one thing to display the schizophrenia inherent in trying to cobble
together a coalition of disaffected lifelong Democrats and party-hating anti-globalization activists. It’s quite another to
"speak truth to power" by fudging it.
