On This Day in History: December 12
Ralph Nader fucks everything up
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It was over a month since the election and we still didn’t know who the fucking president would be, because hanging chads or some shit, and Ralph fucking Nader, that dick. Then the Supreme Court called it for another dick: Dick Cheney. We know he was the one who ended up running things. Into the fucking ground.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 12, 2000--
The 2000 U.S. presidential election was as close as you could get, with Al Gore winning the popular vote by 0.5%, but anyone who was around for 2016 knows that doesn’t matter for shit what with the “Black people only count as three-fifths of a person” Electoral College being the final arbiter of who got to decide if they blew up Iraq or would do anything about the planet being on fire. Anyway, it was down to a single state: MethGatorLand. Why is Florida the crazy shit state? Not sure, but in 2000, the meth gators were running loose.
Okay, so, fucking Florida. It was close. George W. Bush got 2,912,790 votes, and Gore got 2,912,253: a difference of a mere 537 votes. The Florida Supreme Court called for a recount, but on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ended that recount in a vote of 5-4 along partisan lines, giving the presidency to dumbass Dubya with 271 Electoral College votes to Gore’s 266. Fuck. Not that the recount would have given Gore the election anyway. But we would have seen a President Gore if that arrogant assbucket Ralph Nader had stayed the fuck home. He doesn’t get nearly enough hate for the loss. Let’s rectify that.
Ralph led the Green Party on an everyone-gets-a-pony platform. In Florida he got 97,488 votes. He knew in advance that he was a potential spoiler but ran anyway. I’ve read articles from people who suck at math saying, “Not all those who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore!” They quote polls reporting only 60% of Nader voters would have gone to Gore if Nader wasn’t on the ballot; having 40% go for Bush seems unlikely but I’ll allow it. More important is that those articles didn’t run the fucking numbers. Sixty percent of 97,488 = 58,593. Add that to Gore’s total and it = 2,970,746. Then give Bush the other 40% and he ends up with 2,951,785, losing to Gore by almost 14,000 votes. Hell, assume half of the Nader voters stayed home and Gore still handily wins Florida. Shit, even if only a mere 25% of Nader voters showed up and did the 60/40 split, it still goes to Gore by over 4,000 votes. Yet Nader refuses to admit he cost Gore the election.
In short, fuck Ralph Nader.
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First of all, speaking as a Floridian, I have to point out that it's not all meth and gators down here. There are a fuck-ton of old assholes too. They call it "God's Waiting Room" for a reason. But yeah... there's a shitload of meth and gators. I've only lived here for 9 years, but I can tell you some crazy-ass stories about "Florida Man."
But yes... fuck Ralph Nader. Let's not all forget about the time Bill Maher and Michael Moore literally got down on their knees and BEGGED him not to run... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI1Y_rRPy40
I lived in FL in 2000. That whole cluster fuck was like watching a really bad fake reality show. The hanging chad debacle was bad enough (lots of members of God's Waiting Room just couldn't figure out how to literally punch out their choice in the voting booth and the time spent on microscopically examining those ballots was almost entertaining), but the injustice that the supposedly Supreme Justices handed down was almost criminal. Yup, fuck Ralph Nader.