Why vote for John Kerry?  What difference will it make?

By Alexsi Currier

In one sense the honest answer to that question is that it will probably not make a lot of difference. If you can envision the United States of America as a mighty ocean going liner, it is obvious that we are already underway, on a set course, with a full head of steam. There is a lot of momentum behind us. Even after the election we will still be plowing through the carnage of the Iraq quagmire, the spiraling deficit, the stagnant economy, and the dwindling affordability of adequate health care. So in this one sense the election won’t make all that much difference. Yet in another sense this election will make all the difference in the world, because it will decide who is at the helm, who controls the rudder, and who sets and steers the course.

This contest for command of our Ship of State is not just a choice between two helmsmen. It is not just a choice of Bush or Kerry. It is a contest between two crews, two different views, and two radically differing ideologies. In illustrative simplification it is at its root a struggle between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, wealth and the commonwealth. It is the choice between government of the people, by the rich, and for the rich, or government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is a battle between the rights of wealth and the Bill of Rights, between money as the entitlement to rule and rule through the entitlement of the constitution.

John Kerry is a rich man, but he is more than that, and that is the difference that makes all the difference. He is an American who believes in the commonwealth of our country. He volunteered to fight as a common man with the common men of this country. When he returned he had the backbone to call the powerful of his land to recognize the hell, horror, and hopelessness that the Vietnam War had become. 

Now he volunteers again to fight for his country. He fights to restore the American ideal of proportionate taxation.  No longer shall the rich be given millions in tax cuts, so that they can turn around and loan the money back again to the government at interest to cover the deficit caused by the loss of the taxes that they used to pay. No longer shall the little guy be taxed to pay the interest on the national debt created by giving tax cuts to the rich.

Again today he fights to wrest the helm of the Ship of State to steer us back into the family of nations, by working with the United Nations, joining in the treaties on the environment, and respecting the Geneva Conventions. He offers himself to represent the wishes of all Americans to see that our service men and women are justly paid and benefited for their sacrifices. He volunteers to contest the entrenched medical and pharmaceutical powers to assure healthcare for all our citizens.

So does a vote for Kerry make any difference? Yes! It does! It makes a tremendous, dramatic, difference because it turns the wheel of our great Ship of State toward an international war on terror and the causes of that evil; poverty, disease, injustice, and exploitation. It veers us away from concentrating the wealth among the few and takes a tack back toward sharing the wealth among all Americans. Simply said: It sets a course toward restoring to us a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.   

posted by John 4:37 AM

Vote GWB or You're SOL

In 1896, many factory owners told their workers that if William Jennings Bryan were elected president, the factory gates would be closed to them on the morning after the election. As a result, many factory workers voted in direct opposition to their own economic interests for William McKinley, who was elected. We're a whole lot more advanced now, though, right? Wrong. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

posted by jabartlett 1:44 AM

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Saving Lt. Bush


Whether or not the latest embarassing memos about George Walker Bush's chequered career as a National Guard aviator are real or faked is at least as interesting a question as how so many Swift Boat vets have suddenly been able to recover memories from a single day 30 years ago in such thorough and consistent detail when you can't get two eyewitnesses to a mugging yesterday to agree to whether the mugger was white or black. But that misses the point. The more interesting question is why Bush--with a little help from his friends--has systematically (and possibly illegally) removed from scrutiny virtually all records of the first 40 years of his life.

It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that there are gaps in our president's official records (or records that have been destroyed completely) that must contain information that would be embarassing if it were known. Otherwise, why would he and his political handlers have gone to such extraordinary lengths over the years to make sure that the information doesn't surface?

The "cleansing" of the most incriminating documents from Junior Bush's wild years clearly began before, or soon after, he was elected governor of Texas in November 1994 and realized there might be a national campaign in his future. On March 31, 1995, for example, both George and Laura Bush were assigned new driver's license numbers which meant that their old files were destroyed and along with them any records of arrests or traffic violations. We don't need to get into Laura's driving problems again but Bush has admitted to being convicted of drunk driving in a 1976 incident near his family's home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

In 1996, while governor of Texas, Bush made a big production of showing up for jury duty to demonstrate that he was not "too important" or "too busy" but then called his legal counsel Alberto R. Gonzales (the same Alberto R. Gonzales) to get him excused when it appeared that he would be picked for a DUI case which might have required him to testify under oath as to his own driving misadventures.

There is also the curious stint of community service that our hero performed in December 1972 for Project P.U.L.L., an inner city Houston program for troubled youths, that is so completely out of character with his behavior at the time that a reasonable person might infer that it was mandated by legal authorities. Alas, no records seem to exist to document this brief fling with community activism. Alert readers will note, however that it was only three months earlier, in August 1972, that Bush was suspended from flying for failing to show up for a required medical exam (which, for the first time, included mandatory drug testing) and shortly before he disappeared into the wild blue yonder of Alabama never to be seen at a National Guard drill again.

As for the National Guard coverup, we know that Bill Burkett, a Lt. Colonel who was the State Plans Officer of the Texas National Guard at the time, claims that a team of Bush operatives headed by Dan Barlett (the same Dan Barlett) visited the Air National Guard archives at Camp Mabry in 1997 to go through and "scrub" Bush's records to make sure the "facts" were consistent with the fairy tale biography called "A Charge to Keep" that Karen Hughes (yes, the same Karen Hughes) was writing for him. The Bushies, of course, have denied the allegations and gone to extraordinary lengths to portray Burkett as a disgrunted nut case. (Burkett's name has resurfaced again in connection with the CBS documents.)

Since Bush took office, the White House has ordered the Pentagon not to discuss his records with reporters and records released under the Freedom of Information Act had been released slowly and reluctantly. The CBS memos could well be fakes, but based on what we already know about the herculean efforts by Bush and his longtime gang of co-conspirators to cover up his wild and crazy past, their contents are more than plausible. The White House has not disputed them, possibly because they know that whether the memos are real or not, the information in them is true and they can't risk being caught definitively in a lie.

posted by Jerry Bowles 5:26 PM

Wanted: A Debate Coach for Kerry

Since the Kerry camp thought there was only an upside to talking about his record in Vietnam, let’s hope they have learned something and that now they are planning for the debates knowing there will be a downside to a side-by-side comparison with Bush. We know BushCo will lower expectations, but Kerry should not take the bait. Hopefully someone on the Kerry team is cataloguing the successful strategies of past debates, because RoveCo already has. If Kerry hasn’t, here are some reminders.

First and foremost, Kerry will be asked about flip-flops and Bush will use the expression to further tar him. Kerry should remember the first rule about debates: it doesn’t matter what the question is; give your answer. Kerry should make no attempt to explain a change in his positions. Rather he should say “Thank you for that question. Here is where I want to lead this country on that issue…” Kerry needs to go on the offensive and say that Bush as president wants it both ways, that he says one thing and does another on education, health care, medicare, environment and the war on terrorism. Objective: get under Bush’s skin. Then throughout the debate when Bush tries to have it both ways, as he will, Kerry needs to invoke Ronald Reagan and say, “There he goes again.”

Kerry needs to bring up Halliburton sole source contracts, because the questioners will not ask about it. He needs to ask Bush to renounce Cheney’s scare tactic about a vote for Kerry being a vote for weakening the fight on terrorism. When Bush equivocates, Kerry needs to come at him again.

Kerry needs to ask about Afghanistan with a line like, “So how’s it going in Afghanistan? What’s your [Bush] plan for dealing with a resurgent Taliban? When does the DEA expect to see the heroin from Afghanistan hit the streets of New York City?” And on any question related to security Kerry needs to say “While America has not seen another attack since 9/11, the global village that we are a part of has seen a dramatic rise in attacks, even though the State Department lied [yes, use that word] about the increase in its official report, a disturbing pattern used by many departments in George Bush’s administration.” Kerry needs to remind the audience that America not only has duty to protect itself, but an obligation to do its part in the world community. “Safety,” he needs to say, “is not a question of borders or boundaries.”

Kerry needs to preference a number of questions with this lost bit of biography, “When I was a prosecutor…”

Bush will be asked to address his pledge in 2000 that he was a “unifier, not a divider.” Kerry needs to quickly acknowledge that the only time he met his pledge was a few brief months after 9/11. Since then he has been an obsessive divider and the only unity he has to show for more than three years in office is a solidification of the Newt Gingrich/Tom Delay/Pat Robinson agenda for America. Kerry needs to ask the “Are you better off today than you were four years ago” question. And he needs to ask it more than once.

Since debates are about personality as much as content, Kerry needs to match Bush on self-deprecating humor. He needs to chuckle and show a human side.

Above all, as Paul Krugman suggests this morning, he needs to answer as specifically as he can the question of what he would do to get us out of Iraq and then turn the question back to the president by saying "Mr. Bush is the one who got us into this mess with no exit strategy, what's his plan for getting us out?"

In fact, I nominate Krugman to be the lead debate coach. He has the arguments and the facts down cold. Today’s column, Taking On The Myth, lays out the strategy Kerry needs to follow for the next 49 days.

posted by Josh 9:33 AM

Democracy takes a Royal detour in Saudi Arabia

Talk about shell games... Rice-a-roni spent yesterday and some of today lying through her teeth about prospects for "democracy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. What she didn't tell us is that the Saudi royals have postponed the first local elections to be held in over forty years... for the second time. The Saudi government gave no reason for the postponement. If Kerry wants to boost his approval rating on "national security" he ought to lay into Bu$h and Cheney for their "double standard on democracy" in the oil rich Gulf.

posted by Groom 6:56 AM

All Aboard the Magic Bus

The secret of a good magic trick is misdirection. The magician gets the audience focused on some small, unimportant detail while the real “trick” is happening somewhere else. No political party in history has employed this venerable sleight-of-hand technique more successfully than the Bush administration. It is one thing to hide a rabbit in a hat; it is quite another to make the biggest military and foreign policy disaster since Viet Nam disappear entirely. And that’s precisely what BushCo has done with Iraq. Now you see it, now you don’t.

More than 100 people died and several hundred were wounded yesterday in a series of car bombings, mortar attacks and gunfights between insurgents and U.S. troops and it hardly made a ripple on public awareness except in the Arab world. (Seeing an Arab journalist killed by American gunfire on live television is not the kind of thing that is easily forgotten.) Since the bogus “handover” of power at the end of June, big media and much of the public have simply lost interest in Iraq or, worse, have played along with the myth that it now an “internal” problem.

The administration’s handover misdirection was clearly transparent but it worked because most Americans sincerely want to believe in their government; a majority still think the war in Iraq is somehow related to 9/11 or the war on terror. They refuse to believe that an American president—any American president—would send American soldiers to die without a reason beyond the madness of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the confused loyalties of a small group of Likudniks in the Pentagon.

The entire Iraq misadventure has been the ultimate act of misdirection. Judged by any of the many reasons the administration gave for the invasion, the war and its aftermath have been a colossel disaster. There were no weapons of mass destruction and no operational al-Qaeda links. The claims of mass graves were greatly exaggerated. Abu Ghraib is a prison where people were tortured but we can’t even claim that moral high ground any more. And let’s be realistic: it’s not too soon to know that there is nothing resembling an American-style democracy in Iraq’s future.

That so many Americans still trust the Bush administration to do the right thing after all the lies and deceptions that led up the war, the utter incompetence of the occupation, and the lack of a clear way out is a testament to the power of what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” They see the wires, the cards tumbling out of the sleave, the rabbit in the box under the hat, the pretty lady lying in two bloody pieces on the floor because she’s been sawed in half for real, and yet they are still willing to believe that there is a noble purpose in this stunningly bad performance. Afterall, 9/11 changed everything; maybe this is how magic is supposed to look these days.

For those of us who lived through the Viet Nam years and recognize the unmistakeable smell of hubris and paranoia that led to the last spectacular American defeat, the fact that many Americans are still willing to cut the administration so much slack is as frustrating as it is inexplicable. Unfortunately, only time and more American deaths can shake that sincere, but misguided, faith. (And, frankly, it would help a lot if our guy looked like a more appealing alternative.)

A couple of years from now—when George W. Bush is still president and the increasingly bloody guerilla war in Iraq is still raging, claiming dozens of lives daily, with no end in sight—the tide of public opinion will swing and most Americans will see through the administration’s cheap tricks. By then, we won't be able to make Mandrake the Mangler disappear until 2008.

posted by Jerry Bowles 1:05 AM

Monday, September 13, 2004

posted by Evelyn 6:11 PM

Department of flotsam and jetsam

Watching Kitty Kelly and Sharon Bu$h this morning on the Today Show you had to wonder who took the most lithium before going on camera. Perhaps the most ugly component of this Chaucerian housewives tale was Matt Lauer, in full inquisitorial mode, doubling as Nazi "peoples court" judge Volksrichter Freissler. With their own case of Camelotitis, the Bu$h family ought to get the same "equal time" as the Kennedys. That could mean Chapaquiddick x William Kennedy Smith + Golf Club Skakel to the nth power. If the publishers of this book really wanted it to influence voters, they should have come out in April, not September. Stay tuned. Herr Lauer will be back im vollen putz, tomorrow. Maybe we'll learn that el presidente's favorite Hummel figurine was the one called "little tooter."

posted by Groom 4:21 PM

Life Was a Cabaret

The lyricist Fred Ebb died Saturday. Along with the composer John Kander, he created many of the great musicals of our jaded generation: Cabaret, Woman of the Year, Zorba, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and of course, Chicago.

I had been hearing about him a lot lately from a friend of mine, the playwright Tom Thompson, with whom Ebb had been collaborating for the last several months on a minstral version of the Scottsboro Boys trials.

I was fortunate to have been among the first audiences in 1996 to see the revival of Chicago; fortunate because it starred Ann Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth and James Naughton, and fortunate because the Kander and Ebb music was the perfect accompaniment to the second term of the Clinton Administration. The lyrics of Fred Ebb were my dark litany in celebrating a fiend-filled Monicagate, with Lucianne Goldberg as Big Mama. Hilary, of course, would have been Velma Kelly. And how about the media chorus of “sob sisters” like Diane Sawyer and the credulous rest? In the finale, a paen to the ultimate triumph of slick over good and evil, you could imagine Clinton himself in top hat and tails.

Ebb no doubt would agree that this would be a good time for John Kerry to re-acquaint himself with the words of the immortal Billy Flynn:

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
Razzle Dazzle 'em
Back since the days of old Methuselah
Everyone loves the big bambooz-a-ler

Give 'em the old three ring circus
Stun and stagger 'em
When you're in trouble, go into your dance

Though you are stiffer than a girder
They let you get away with murder
Razzle dazzle 'em
And you've got a romance

Mr. Ebb, on your way up to that Great White Way in the sky, could you send down some stardust to a guy who’s down on his luck?

posted by Evelyn 11:09 AM

Have You Seen This Man?

Memo to Mary Beth: It's the likeability, stupid.

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:41 AM

Two possession game

We’re early in the 4th quarter and Kerry is down 21 to 13. He needs a touchdown and a field goal to eke out a win. That means a resounding “victory” in the debate(s) and the emergence of a “wildcard” event or issue that activates Murphy’s Law and forces the Bush campaign “off message.” Since there are no current indications that this scenario will materialize tracking polls are likely to remain close enough for ABB (anybody buy Bu$h) supporters to keep the faith. But Kerry’s low approval ratings on whether he would make a good “war president” are at best problematic, at worst irreversible, and incontrovertible. Commentators know when a game is lost yet they have the skillsets to "keep it interesting" during the final quarter. Perhaps Bob Woodward said it best yesterday on Meet the Press… “who is John Kerry and who would he be as Commander in Chief (CINC).” When one looks at how the “insurgency” is ramping up toward a “Tet-style” offensive in Iraq on the eve of the US presidential vote the answer to Woodward's question is one that Americans may never know.

posted by Groom 2:41 AM

Presciently, H.L. Mencken Advises The 2004 Bush Campaign

from his vantage point, on the pages of The Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 25, 1926:

. . . No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and when they die they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long tested and solidly agreeable lies.

posted by Michael 1:14 AM

This Young Man Reassures Me, Where The Old Man He's Become Does Not

"It takes a special courage to speak out against a cause for which you were once prepared to die."

-- Jeffrey Smith, a West Point-trained C.I.A. man and Kerry contemporary, on John Kerry's 1971 Congressional testimony

posted by Michael 12:10 AM

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Kerry's Had Courage. Does He Still?

Frank Rich's Sunday column makes the point that the Vietnam War would still be front and center of this election even without the Swift Boat or National Guard controversies simply because of the resemblances between Vietnam and Iraq. In the jingoistic run-up to war, the jimmied rationales for war, and the resulting quagmires and the quagmire's cover-up, the similarities far outweigh the differences. One reason that the American public came to see the true nature of the Vietnam War was because a decorated Navy Lieutenant had the courage and love of country to appear before congress and help reveal that war's darker conduct.

Rich writes (about a new documentary about Kerry's, and other's, service in Vietnam):

"What stares you in the face is the anguish and grief of men who put their lives in the line of fire for a government that undertook a pointless war, mismanaged it, kept it going out of hubris and then abandoned it. These veterans do not lightheartedly toss away the symbols of their sacrifice in Vietnam; they struggle with tears and violently conflicted emotions as they do so. They are battered men often wearing the ragtag remnants of their uniforms. Their eyes are haunted. They are willing to engage in self-annihilation, eradicating the record of their own heroism in battle, if that's what it takes to prevent their brothers from continuing to die in a doomed mission."

I recognize the disadvantages the Kerry faces in this election campaign: 43 has the power of incumbancy, greater financial assets, and the dumb luck that only blesses bullies and puppets. The radical right has the media either duped, cowed, or, as is probably the case, backpocketed; having learned that lying about, well, everything, carries no punitive backlash, Bushco continues to rewrite history and camoflage its true intentions with the media's complicity. And Bushco has 911 and his war on terror and nobody's going to take it from him, dammit, it's his, his, his (Ted Olson, no doubt, has investigated getting 911 copyrighted exclusively to the GOP). How does Kerry defeat a president who has botched the crucial war of our time in order to fight a war of bloodlust - which he's botched - and yet whose election seems practically inevitable because he will shamelessly, breathtakingly shamelessly, lie and pander, with the media's craven assistance, to the American public's natural patriotism?

He remembers the man who came home from Vietnam and determinedly tried to change that war's course. He recognizes that he cannot win by presenting nothing but the credentials of "I'm Not Bush." He understands that this election is about more than this election cycle. Win or lose, this is a battle, not the entire war. Now is the time not only to make sure that Bush's record on all issues, not just the war, are exposed and repeated with as much integrity and passion as possible. Where is the talk about the Supreme Court? Where is the talk about the environment? For Jeebus' sake, where is the talk about the deficit? The agenda of the radical right is so extreme they have gone to extraordinarly lengths to hide it. If they don't think they can win an election offering their agenda in the open, why should we? Talk about it.

And then he does something brave: right after clearly, precisely detailing Bushco's motives and methods he clearly, precisely details his own motives and methods. Yes, I voted against one version of the $87B funding bill for Iraq but not until the prior bill, which I voted for, had been scuttled because George W Bush threatened to veto it unless provisions which would benefit him politically and his friends financially were added. But we're in Iraq now: here's my plan. Yes, I'm against privitizing Social Security because it will enrich the rich and risk and possibly destroy the savings of the poor. Here's my plan. Continue down the roster of issues. Raise some hell with a obsolete concept: disdain the banal, embrace the intelligent. In a campaign being run on catering to the lowest common denominator the GOP will win every time. If we are to lose this election - and I'm not saying we're going to lose - please make sure that the distinction between left and right is not made by the right alone.

Kerry's history proves he was capable of acts of physical, intellectual, and emotional bravery. Whether or not he's capable still has yet to be seen.

posted by Blackdogred 7:14 PM

He said he said... Powell called Neocons "fucking crazies"

It's true. And it's right on. The BBC's James Naughtie does the dish on the Moral Compass in his new book. The comment, made during the run-up to the "war of lies" says the Guardian, was made by the US Secretary of State to his British counterpart, Jack "I never saw a jacked WMD report I didn't like" Straw. Way too divisive for the Kerry campaign to pick up on, I suppose.

posted by Groom 5:50 AM

Time To Re-Don

those alcoa fedoras:

Blast, mushroom cloud reported in N. Korea

Sept. 11, 2004  |  SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A large explosion occurred in the northern part of North Korea, sending a huge mushroom cloud into the air on an important anniversary of the communist regime, a South Korean news agency reported Sunday.

As soon as I get my absentee ballot, I'm taking a decisive act to defend my country -- and it won't take me seven minutes to decide what to do. That way, on Election Day, I'll be free to help others get to the polls.

We've got to get rid of these incompetent clowns. They're going to get us all killed.

posted by Michael 2:48 AM