Dictionary.com defines a nadir as “the lowest point.” Trigonometrically speaking, it has the charm of being a place that you can only go to once.

Not so with Nader. He’s back.

Like an unhinged and jealous mistress from a bad sex thriller (”If I can’t have you, NO ONE CAN!”), Ralph has returned to boil a couple more of our bunnies. It’s logically indisputable that he siphoned off enough liberal votes back in ‘00 to prevent a clear Gore victory and unleash the Bush administration upon the Earth.

Ralph doesn’t see it that way, but his psychology isn’t too hard to parse: If you awoke one morning, stepped out your door, and promptly stepped on your family’s treasured puppy, you’d have two choices. You could retreat inside and never venture out again, branding yourself “the puppy squasher,” someone who couldn’t be trusted not to destroy all that is beautiful in the world with your monstrous feet. Or you could get right back out there again, figuring that accidents happen, nobody could’ve predicted the future, there were all kinds of other factors involved, and etc. The latter is the common rationale for survival; it explains how people who run over other people with their cars can still be out on the roads, how teachers who preside over cacophonous and failing classes can return each September carrying last year’s lesson plan, how surgeons who inadvertently slice major arteries can pick up their scalpels the next day, and how Red Sox owner John Henry can still be out there trying to assemble a winner. Some things are too horrifying to take responsibility for.

So if Ralph Nader wasn’t going to gaze back upon the last four years of depredations wrought upon our foreign policy, our fiscal present and future, our skies and waters, and his treasured average American consumer - if he wasn’t going to take that in and promptly grab a hairshirt and a whip and parade himself through every town square in the nation uttering piteous and abject cries of remorse - then, psychologically speaking, the man has no choice but to get right back out there and squash that puppy.

[By the way, if any professors from any universities’ Advanced Psych departments would like to employ my “Puppy Squashing Model” in their curriculums, please give me a call. I have some colorful (but tasteful) charts and graphs that may be of use.]

Even I wouldn’t wish the hairshirt scenario on Nader, especially since the only hairshirts you can purchase nowadays are sold at Walmart and made in China. And all the Hairshirt Support Lines connect you directly to Bombay. That’d be too much for him to endure.

But all that said, and with all the rage that’s going to be directed towards him, it’s not really a cause for too much concern. These are not the carefree, peaceful days of the autumn of 2000, when independent-minded citizens thought that they could cast their votes to make a statement rather than elect a candidate. The “we need to break the two party system” issue has slipped a bit behind some pragmatic concerns we didn’t have back then (the “we need to earn back the world’s trust” issue, the “Jesus, look at that gigantic deficit” issue, and the “It’d be nice if people stopped trying to fly planes into our buildings” issue, to name a few). Today’s voter knows that we need to get a steady hand back on the tiller, whether it be a Kerry or an Edwards (or, for that matter, a Gore or a McCain or a Dole) - anyone, really, who would stop ramming our ship onto the rocks and calling it an unavoidable, cyclical change.

At least, let’s hope so. At this point, I suspect that there are a lot of Republicans in Congress who’d be much happier working with a Kerry administration, though none yet have found the cojones to say so. I’ve spoken to enough lifelong GOP boosters lately to know that unless Bush causes it to rain loaves, fishes, candy canes and Lexuses upon the land, he’s in serious trouble come November. And 2000’s Naderites aren’t likely to flock back to him in any significant numbers, not when everything the candidate himself believes in would be utterly destroyed by another four years of Bush. I mean, what are his possible slogans? Maybe “Ralph Nader - Because This Time Bush Really Doesn’t Have a Chance.” Or “Vote Nader - Your Children Will Understand Someday.” Or maybe just “Fuck The Real World, I’m Voting Nader.”

Not that I’m letting Ralph totally off the hook. Given the math and the state of the things he’s worked so hard for all his life, he really shouldn’t run. I’m not saying he shouldn’t ever step outside again, but maybe he should reconsider the whole jogging-in-dark-glasses-and-cleats thing. Just for the sake of the puppies.