McKinney Lashes Out At Nader

Still no word on where the 5,000 bodies are

By Charles Douglas

WASHINGTON -- From a campaign which struggled to maintain relevance in the face of declining preference for the Green Party, the Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente ticket decided to pin its hopes on attacking another independent candidate for president.

McKinney's campaign issued a press release this week which, while treating Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois with a mild rebuke, characterized independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, one of the leading advocates for consumer protection, civil rights and environmental quality in the last fifty years, as irrelevant after having left the Green Party in the lead-up to the 2004 election -- when he made his first independent run against failed attorney David Cobb.

"A vote for the McKinney-Clemente ticket is an investment that will continue to pay off as the Green Party grows and challenges bipartisan corporate-money politics in the years to come, "said Sanda Everette, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States. "A vote for an independent like Ralph Nader is a valid protest vote, but does nothing to establish a permanent political alternative. The Nader campaign will be over after Election Day, while the Green Party is a permanent political fixture with the hope of achieving major party status in the coming years."

For his part, Cobb, who was terminated from his spot as a weekly columnist in the daily Times-Standard earlier this year, wrote in the Oct. 28 edition of The Arcata Eye newsweekly that a vote for Obama, McCain or Nader was a wasted one. Cobb, who Humboldt County voters in 2004 put in fourth place in his own Green Party primary, presided over the collapse of Green Party support four years ago when his nomination for the Green Party ballot line for president -- marred by a convention many charge was rigged against the will of Green voters -- led to a 95% decline in voter support for the Green Party in the general election. Cobb, like McKinney, moved to California from an Old South state the year before before deciding to run for President, although at least McKinney had some political experience as a member of the House of Representatives from Georgia.

Nader and his running mate, former San Francisco supervisor Matt Gonzalez -- who left the Green Party earlier this year to join Nader's campaign -- have specifically refrained from attacking other third party candidates, preferring to critique the areas of agreement between Obama's Democrat ticket and his Republican opponents, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Although the campaigns of Nader and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr both poll above 1% nationally while McKinney has yet to register any measurable support on any national poll, McKinney's Vice President pick, Clemente, has also taken the opportunity to dismiss the agendas of the other independent campaigns.

"I feel that a lot of the issues coming from some of the other third parties are more reformist issues, and I feel we don’t need reform anymore," Clemente said in a debate with Gonzalez on the Oct. 3 edition of Democracy Now! "We need to really look at a lot of these systems in this country and talk about fully dismantling them."

Gonzalez refrained from attacking Clemente in return, instead calling on all candidates who are on enough state ballots to be capable of winning the Electoral College to be included in future debates, such as they one they had been excluded from the day before between Palin and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. This would have included the Green Party ticket, as well as the nominees from the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party and the Nader/Gonzalez independent slate.

Later that month, Gonzalez participated in a debate with Libertarian Party challenger Darrell Castle and Constitution Party nominee Wayne Allen Root in Las Vegas to which Clemente was invited, but failed to appear. Nader participated two debates, one against Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin in Washington, D.C. and the other against both Baldwin and Barr in Cleveland.

McKinney declined to attend either third party presidential debate, instead taking the time to post an Internet video clip denouncing Nader for encouraging the formation of presidential debates independent from the Commission on Presidential Debates Corporation, which is controlled by the Democrat and Republican parties and excludes third party candidates as a matter of structural policy.

McKinney lashed out again at Nader in a second video clip filmed by her campaign during the Cleveland debate on Oct. 30, where McKinney claimed it was more important to protest an execution set to take place later that day in Huntsville, Texas.

Meanwhile, questions linger regarding some of the other erratic behavior of the McKinney/Clemente ticket. At the Critical Resistance Conference in Oakland on Sept. 28, McKinney referred to an unsubstantiated allegation that 5,000 residents of the New Orleans area had been executed by federal military and paramilitary forces in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which most studies conclude resulted in the deaths of nearly 2,000 people, primarily from drowning, disease and starvation.

According to McKinney, 5,000 bodies were "processed" by the Defense Department, all of whom allegedly had bullet-holes in their heads then somehow the information was covered up and the bodies dumped in the swamp.

As of press time, there is still no word as to the swamp in which these bodies are situation, and no evidence has been found in any Defense Department database to substantiate the allegations. McKinney's other varied allegations regarding an inside job by the federal government to stage the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have also yet to be substantiated.