Dear Mr. Parry,

Given your evident inability to address any of the substantive criticisms of your positions I made in our recent exchange of views, it is, I suppose, understandable that you have chosen to stop responding.

What does come as a surprise is the rather extraordinary combination of factual inaccuracy, intellectual vacuity, and simple dishonesty on display in your most recent piece on Consortium News addressing what you take to be "the left" response to the Obama administration in the wake of the heavy Democratic losses in Tuesdays midterm elections.

As a instance of the this, please consider the following:

"Indeed, House Democrats, who took the hardest votes for progressive legislation such as a 'public option' for health care . . . took the brunt of the Republican assault."

Interpreted charitably, this sentence is simply incoherent. How could Democrats vote for a "public option" when the PO had been withdrawn from the final bill? This simply makes no sense.

Or, interpreted uncharitably, the passage indicates that you are blissfully unaware of the reality, namely that the absurd public option, in a classic bait and switch operation had been removed indeed, had been negotiated away by the White House long before the charade of public debate actually began. So rather than voting for progressive legislation, the "hard vote" was not for health care reform in any meaningful sense, but for what was ultimately yet another bailout, that of the insurance companies in the form of a subsidized market for some 30 million new rate payers which will materialize when the legislation takes effect in 2014.

Such factual inaccuracy was not unexpected given your previous postings, where several fabrications involving the status of third parties were conspicuous. I challenged you on these; now, rather than making any attempt to respond, you choose to double down:

"(T)hrough the 1990s . . .(r)ather than engaging in the hard work of building outlets for explaining the nation’s problems to the American people and offering practical solutions, the Left opted for fanciful notions about third parties somehow changing the national political dynamic."

In fact, as, you must know, there were no serious efforts to build a third party alternative in the 1990s. Nader's campaign in 1996 was entirely symbolic and effectively undeclared. There was the Perot campaign, something you have yet to mention in the thousands of words you have devoted to this topic, which was, of course, on the right, not the left. (As was the Anderson campaign from 1980, which you also falsely, indeed absurdly, previously characterized as an attempt at left third party activism.)

As a final instance of factual inaccuracy, you directly quote "progressives" who "in 2000 . . . rallied to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader under the deceptive slogan “not a dime’s worth of difference” between Al Gore and George W. Bush."

While there may be a few instances where progressives flippantly made use of this slogan (more so in 2004 not 2000), the position of the left was much more nuanced, namely that the differences between the candidates, were not sufficient to justify unconditional support of the Democratic ticket. This was particularly (indeed, uncontroversially) the case in the great majority of states where polls indicated that the outcome was not in doubt. This remains my position, and that of numerous other supporters of Nader. That you continue to propagate this straw man characterization even after its having been repeatedly shown to be bankrupt, can now only be attributed to bad faith.

Furthermore, on the subject of bad faith, there is a good reason why virtually no one one the left would embrace this slogan. That is because, as you well know, it is in no way associated with Nader's campaigns, but with the campaign of George Wallace in 1968. Your attempt to tar left third party organizers with the brush of Wallace's racist nativism is truly contemptible and cements the impression which I noted earlier that you are in no way part of the left. Indeed, you are an enemy of it.

On this basis, I previously called for my contributions to Consortium News to be returned. I also urged others to boycott what you illegitimately claim to be a left media outlet.

My suspicion is that while your initial postings might have been seen as superficially reasonable, if ultimately ill founded, this most recent posting will make what might have been seen as a somewhat over the top response on my part to be altogether appropriate among many progressives of good conscience.