On July 1, the U.S. Congress approved a $1.3 billion Colombia "aid package" which will send money to Colombia's notoriously corrupt military to pursue the government's civil war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Even mainstream media pundits and right-wing congresspeople (including our own Slade Gorton) have compared this aid package with the U.S.'s disastrous involvement in Vietnam. In this election year it's important to point out that it was a Democratic president who got us mired in Vietnam, while a Democrat today is mouthing bullshit about the war on drugs as a cover for the real war against the peasants of Colombia. Meanwhile, Gore's party platform pursues a punitive domestic policy against poor people here at home, with a call to end welfare (a rational person has yet to explain to me what's so fucking bad about welfare!) and a move to consign even more tax dollars to prisons, cops, and expensive military boondoggles like the Star Wars missile defense shield. When so-called progressive magazines like In These Times endorse Gore for president, I want to scream. Truly, we live in a fascist country. Our two political parties represent the ultra-right and the devious right. If the Colombia aid bill, the salvage logging rider, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the continuing genocide in Iraq, the expensive missile defense fiasco, and the current farcical debate over a Medicare drug benefit (don't hold your breath) aren't enough to make you vote for Nader, then you might as well raise your arm in a Nazi salute.--Maria Tomchick

I don't buy the two arguments used by Gore fans, who assume a vote for Nader is a vote for George Bush, Jr. to win the presidency. Their mantra runs something like this: 1) Gore is better than George Bush, Jr., and 2) there will be some Supreme Court judges retiring soon. As to the first argument, Gore is worse than the shrub for two reasons. First of all, he's a Democrat, which means he escapes strong criticism from the very activists and left media who would be strenuously fighting the same proposals if they came out of the shrubbery. Secondly, because Gore is part of the prevaricating right, any Supreme Court judges he appoints are going be godawful, compromising assholes who can pass muster with a conservative Senate. Gore supporters should be spending their time and energy working to get rid of Slade Gorton and his ilk and forget about the presidential race.--M.T.

Among the Gore supporters is the Sierra Club. In an editorial in In These Times Guy Saperstein, a trustee of the Sierra Club, outlines why Gore should be thought of as "An Environmental President." Among his assertions is that Gore supports clean air (because he supports the EPA's improved clean air regulations) and that Gore negotiated the Kyoto Accords on global warming. It seems my memory is a bit better than Saperstein's. The U.S. delegation to Kyoto did everything it could to sabotage the Kyoto Accords, helped to draw up a watered-down version, and the Clinton/Gore administration has since done absolutely nothing to get the treaty ratified in the Senate. In fact, at each subsequent international global warming summit, the U.S. delegation has undercut moves to require industrialized nations to comply with the treaty standards. As for clean air, the Clinton/Gore Administration has undercut international attempts to impose limits on persistent organic pollutants (i.e., dioxin). According to the EPA dioxin is responsible for cancer in 1 in 100 people exposed to it (which is nearly all of the U.S. population).

Saperstein unashamedly asserts that "Clinton and Gore have changed the direction of the National Forest Service away from commercial exploitation and toward wildlands protection." Obviously, Saperstein has been spending too much time in the office and not enough time in our disappearing national forests, suffering from a unique Clinton/Gore virus known as the salvage logging rider. And Saperstein has the gall to attribute to Al Gore the hard work of activists who have fought to keep the Arctic National Wildlife refuge free from oil drilling and the folks who have fought against pollution from factory farms. To fill out his editorial, Saperstein lamely falls back on the retiring Supreme Court justice argument, then asks stupidly: "What are Nader's environmental accomplishments?" Well, for one thing, he's not Al Gore.--M.T.