The smartest man in politics isn't a politician

In Ralph Nader's early years, he studied law, traveled the globe and worked in Washington.  

Nader, now aged 84, is incredibly smart, knows so much about so many things, is able to distill the underlying causes and arguments and zero in on the essence of any policy issue, foreign or domestic, and has devoted his entire adult life to consumer protection and the public good, foregoing all the trappings of his fame and success to concentrate on making the world a better place for everyone and every living thing.  

Jeremy Scahill (a smart young idealistic and tireless investigative journalist) recently interviewed Nader on Scahill's excellent podcast Intercepted, where they talked about the CIA, James Comey, Trump, the presidency in general, John Bolton, Generals Mattis & Kelly, Syria, the Mueller investigation, the FBI, and - driverless cars, ending on this note:

JS:  The line from a lot of Democrats is that people like Jill Stein and people who were aggressively reporting on Hillary Clinton and the Podesta emails and the DNC hacks - this is a charge daily thrown at you, at me, at Glenn Greenwald and others - what is your response when people say, 'Look what you gave us with Donald Trump,' and 'Hillary Clinton would have never put us in the peril and danger that we find ourselves in with Donald Trump.  Look, John Bolton is now the National Security Adviser.'

RN:  And the Democratic Party could not landslide the worst Republican Party in history since 1854?  The most ignorant, the most corporate indentured, the most warlike, the most corporate welfare supportive, the most bailout prone Republican Party; anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment?  Why don't they look in the mirror?  The Democratic Party is the most main scapegoater in American politics.  It's never their fault.  It's never Hillary's fault.  It's always a Green Party fault.  It's always an independent candidate fault.  They've lost two presidential elections since 2000 even though they won the popular vote because the electoral college took it away from them.  

There's a major national citizen effort to have an interstate compact to neutralize the electoral college.  The Democratic Party is not supportive of that.  ...  They've lost twice to the Republicans, and that meant George W Bush, and that meant Donald J Trump.  So this scapegoating is nothing more than a sickness of the Democratic Party that cannot unleash new energy.  It keeps putting losers in place like Nancy Pelosi.  It keeps putting the Democratic National Committee apparatus against any kind of insurgent effort like Bernie Sanders.  It's a sick, decrepit party that cannot defend the United States of America against the worst Republican Party in history.

JS: Does anybody ever have to ask you what you really think, Ralph?

RN:  Well, what I really think is we ought to make an accusation, Jeremy, that the Democratic and Republican parties do not really believe in democracy.  If they did, they wouldn't attack the press when the press is uttering inconvenient truths.  They wouldn't attack competitive candidates.  A democracy cannot be a democracy if wealth is concentrated in a few hands, and democracy cannot be a democracy if it is not a competitive democracy in a multi-candidate election situation.  And the two parties have an autocratic duopoly opposed to those democratic principles.

The full transcript and the audio file is at this link.