Nader's plan to bring Democrats left

The Florida presidential election debacle has been so underreported by the media that I feel an uncontrollable urge to talk about it. Don't worry, I won't bore you too much.\nJudicial Watch, a conservative legal group, has reviewed 70 percent of the undercounted ballots where no vote was recorded by machines. It found these votes would not have helped Vice President Al Gore. In fact, they would have extended President George W. Bush's lead.\nAt the same time, the Palm Beach Post conducted its own ballot-by-ballot review of discarded votes. It found that Gore would have picked up about 6,600 votes and won the presidency.\nI know, it's as confusing as a butterfly ballot. So, to clear things up a little, I went down to Florida during spring break and personally counted every scrap of paper I could get my hands on. What I found was very disturbing: The winner of the 2000 Presidential Election was actually Ralph Nader.\nNo, Nader did not win the vote count. He won the campaign, which was to make Gore lose. You see, the environmental movement was getting a bit lazy with a Democrat in office for so long, and Nader wanted to stir things up by getting a Republican elected who is in the pocket of the oil, gas, coal, gold mining, electric and logging industries. With someone like this destroying environmental laws, all of the lazy tree-huggers would be so miffed they would leave the Democratic Party in droves and join the Greens. \nFaced with the loss of so many of its supporters, the Democratic Party would have to lurch more to the left and incorporate the Green platform to bring them back. You know the old saying -- to make a new platform, you have to break a few elections. And being the mad genius that he is, Nader's evil plan has worked perfectly.\nAlthough a study by the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 found that the pre-Clinton standard for arsenic in the water supply endangered the public health, Bush rescinded Clinton's regulations and set the standard back to its 1942 level. After all, what's to worry? The Academy only stated that with the 1942 standard, a male has a 1 in 1,000 risk of developing bladder cancer from drinking water that contains the maximum allowable level of arsenic. It also can cause skin and lung cancer, skin lesions, anemia, nerve damage and circulatory problems. \nBut, hey, we wouldn't want to interfere with the gold mining industry, one of the biggest arsenic polluters. Rich people need to look nice and shiny, and they drink bottled water anyway.\nThen, we have Bush's first broken campaign promise, which, shockingly enough, concerns the environment. He told Congress he would not impose mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide at electrical power plants like he said he was going to do during his campaign. He also has officially abandoned the Kyoto accord, a treaty signed by the United States in 1997 that fights global warming. \nI'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that the coal industry, which stands to lose the most from carbon dioxide regulation, was one of Bush's biggest boosters during the campaign. Three mining companies also donated $202,500 to the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund according to Opensecrets.org, a Web site that keeps track of the donations politicians have to report.\nOf course, this is just the start. Environmental groups expect Bush to attack the regulation of toxic mercury emissions from power plants next. Only pregnant women and children are at great risk of mercury poisoning. So if you're neither, don't be alarmed.\nAlso under attack, according to The Natural Resources Defense Council, are protections for wild forests, appliance efficiency improvements, air quality in national parks, protections for wetlands, limits on ocean discharges, restrictions on snowmobiles in national parks, endangered species protections and reducing factory farm pollution. \nThe Greens are on the warpath. We can even see it in Bloomington. We have a dolphin in a tree and an upcoming "week of protest" in honor of a tree-spiker. \nIf this keeps up, we're going to have to wear oxygen masks, boil water and wade through tear-gassed hippies chained to street posts on our way to work or class -- exactly what Nader had in mind.