Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Juxtaposition
I watched some of the first day of the Republican Convention yesterday and was struck by the speeches guaranteeing that we will, if we re-elect George Bush, win the war on terror. Whatever that means.
Here are two frontpage stories from the NY Times on-line at this moment that appear next to each other:
Twin Bus Bombings in Israel Kill
at Least 15 and Wound Dozens
After Citing Doubt Bush Declares
'We Will Win' Terror War
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's speech in particular struck me as an endorsement to fight terror the way Israel does. He kept saying that we needed to be on the offensive rather than the defensive which is why it was so great that George Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq.
If anything Giuliani's hysterical rant confirmed for me that the Israeli approach has been a failure. Thirty two years after the horror at Munich Israeli citizens are still getting blown up on their way to work. This is the blueprint we should follow?
Isn't it time for a different approach?
I watched some of the first day of the Republican Convention yesterday and was struck by the speeches guaranteeing that we will, if we re-elect George Bush, win the war on terror. Whatever that means.
Here are two frontpage stories from the NY Times on-line at this moment that appear next to each other:
Twin Bus Bombings in Israel Kill
at Least 15 and Wound Dozens
After Citing Doubt Bush Declares
'We Will Win' Terror War
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's speech in particular struck me as an endorsement to fight terror the way Israel does. He kept saying that we needed to be on the offensive rather than the defensive which is why it was so great that George Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq.
If anything Giuliani's hysterical rant confirmed for me that the Israeli approach has been a failure. Thirty two years after the horror at Munich Israeli citizens are still getting blown up on their way to work. This is the blueprint we should follow?
Isn't it time for a different approach?
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Nixon Targets Kerry
A few posts back I pasted Kerry's 1971 speech before Congress. I posted remarks indicating my opinion that there is a special rage that results from whistle blowers like Kerry, especially from someone like Nixon.
Check out these Nixon tape transcripts discussing discrediting Kerry. Nixon even meets with John O'Neil, a leading member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. So this guy has been trying to ruin John Kerry for over 30 years now! The great part of the tapes is when they all admit that Kerry was impressive and made some good points. It must have driven Nixon crazy that this kid was from Massachussets and spoke like Kennedy.
A few posts back I pasted Kerry's 1971 speech before Congress. I posted remarks indicating my opinion that there is a special rage that results from whistle blowers like Kerry, especially from someone like Nixon.
Check out these Nixon tape transcripts discussing discrediting Kerry. Nixon even meets with John O'Neil, a leading member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. So this guy has been trying to ruin John Kerry for over 30 years now! The great part of the tapes is when they all admit that Kerry was impressive and made some good points. It must have driven Nixon crazy that this kid was from Massachussets and spoke like Kennedy.
Monday, August 23, 2004
What's Cookin On the Threat Board. Nothin???
I hope that it is just my paranoia getting the better of me but this little gem from an article about North Korea in the NY Times this morning gave me a start:
North Korean nervousness is expected to reach a higher pitch in late October, when warships of the United States Navy, the Japanese Coast Guard and other allied nations are to conduct joint exercises in the Sea of Japan. The maneuvers will be held under the banner of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program designed to interdict seaborne illicit cargoes from an unnamed country. Previous training has taken place in locales distant from North Korea, such as the Coral Sea, off the coast of Australia.
"They really believe that Bush and Koizumi are in a plot for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea," Mr. Quinones recalled of his early August conversations in Pyongyang. "The hardliners will use P.S.I. The military will say, `I told you so.' "
Hmm, a preemptive attack on North Korea that could escalate into a nuclear shooting war.
Sounds like a good reason to cancel elections. Nooclur combat toe to toe with the commies.
Lets see, we have a megalomaniacal dictator raised from birth to lead his nation, armed with nuclear weapons whose country has been identified as part of the axis of evil. Do you think he might have an itchy trigger finger?
On our side we have a moronic president, also raised from birth with the certainty that his family is bred to govern, who has announced a new military policy of attacking enemies before they attack us. Both leaders feel in their bones that power may be slipping from their hands.
Who will shoot first?
What time is it on the doomsday clock?
Where in the hell is Major Kong?
I hope that it is just my paranoia getting the better of me but this little gem from an article about North Korea in the NY Times this morning gave me a start:
North Korean nervousness is expected to reach a higher pitch in late October, when warships of the United States Navy, the Japanese Coast Guard and other allied nations are to conduct joint exercises in the Sea of Japan. The maneuvers will be held under the banner of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program designed to interdict seaborne illicit cargoes from an unnamed country. Previous training has taken place in locales distant from North Korea, such as the Coral Sea, off the coast of Australia.
"They really believe that Bush and Koizumi are in a plot for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea," Mr. Quinones recalled of his early August conversations in Pyongyang. "The hardliners will use P.S.I. The military will say, `I told you so.' "
Hmm, a preemptive attack on North Korea that could escalate into a nuclear shooting war.
Sounds like a good reason to cancel elections. Nooclur combat toe to toe with the commies.
Lets see, we have a megalomaniacal dictator raised from birth to lead his nation, armed with nuclear weapons whose country has been identified as part of the axis of evil. Do you think he might have an itchy trigger finger?
On our side we have a moronic president, also raised from birth with the certainty that his family is bred to govern, who has announced a new military policy of attacking enemies before they attack us. Both leaders feel in their bones that power may be slipping from their hands.
Who will shoot first?
What time is it on the doomsday clock?
Where in the hell is Major Kong?
Saturday, August 21, 2004
The Young John Kerry
Thanks to Atrios for posting this speech in its entirety today.
John Kerry, April 1971
Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington and Senator Pell.
I would like to say for the record, and also for the men sitting behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of a group of 1,000, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table, they would be here and have the same kind of testimony. I would simply like to speak in general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification [only] yesterday that you would hear me, and, I am afraid, because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but, also, we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard-put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free-fire zones--shooting anything that moves--and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using, were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and, after losing one platoon, or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of "Vietnamizing" the Vietnamese.
Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly: He told me how, as a boy on an Indian reservation, he had watched television, and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
Great speech.
Keep in mind that this is the very speech that created a 30 year animosity against Kerry by some very powerful people. Kerry's eloquence did help end the war, along with other brave insiders like Daniel Ellsberg. A special kind of hatred is created when an insider blows the whistle. It is important to destroy the reputation of such a person if his arguments cannot be defeated. Read the White House tapes relating to Ellsberg. Nixon understood this. That is why Ellsberg's psychiatrist office was burglared. Nixon and Kissinger discussed the importance of deterring further whistle blowing by destroying, by any means necessary, the reputation of the whistle blower. Keepers of the status quo never forgive disloyalty, it's so un-Cross-n-Bones like! We see examples of this everyday: Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil.
A whistle blower makes a moral decision to stand up for humankind over the vested interests of his own institution and is quite aware of the risk he takes. That is called virtuousness, courage, and integrity.
Now if I could only square this picture of the brave young Kerry with the guy who voted for a second Gulf of Tonkin resolution to allow Bush to conduct a disastrous war in Iraq I would feel a lot better right now.
The shame is that despite Kerry's fervent wish it looks like 30 years later we have not "turned". We are still a nation that is capable of blowing little brown people to bits in order to "save them".
Kerry will get my vote, and I believe he is destined to be our next president. Will he have the courage to be the next "president to lose a war"?
God, I hope so.
Thanks to Atrios for posting this speech in its entirety today.
John Kerry, April 1971
Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington and Senator Pell.
I would like to say for the record, and also for the men sitting behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of a group of 1,000, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table, they would be here and have the same kind of testimony. I would simply like to speak in general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification [only] yesterday that you would hear me, and, I am afraid, because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but, also, we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard-put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free-fire zones--shooting anything that moves--and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using, were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and, after losing one platoon, or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of "Vietnamizing" the Vietnamese.
Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly: He told me how, as a boy on an Indian reservation, he had watched television, and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
Great speech.
Keep in mind that this is the very speech that created a 30 year animosity against Kerry by some very powerful people. Kerry's eloquence did help end the war, along with other brave insiders like Daniel Ellsberg. A special kind of hatred is created when an insider blows the whistle. It is important to destroy the reputation of such a person if his arguments cannot be defeated. Read the White House tapes relating to Ellsberg. Nixon understood this. That is why Ellsberg's psychiatrist office was burglared. Nixon and Kissinger discussed the importance of deterring further whistle blowing by destroying, by any means necessary, the reputation of the whistle blower. Keepers of the status quo never forgive disloyalty, it's so un-Cross-n-Bones like! We see examples of this everyday: Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil.
A whistle blower makes a moral decision to stand up for humankind over the vested interests of his own institution and is quite aware of the risk he takes. That is called virtuousness, courage, and integrity.
Now if I could only square this picture of the brave young Kerry with the guy who voted for a second Gulf of Tonkin resolution to allow Bush to conduct a disastrous war in Iraq I would feel a lot better right now.
The shame is that despite Kerry's fervent wish it looks like 30 years later we have not "turned". We are still a nation that is capable of blowing little brown people to bits in order to "save them".
Kerry will get my vote, and I believe he is destined to be our next president. Will he have the courage to be the next "president to lose a war"?
God, I hope so.
Friday, August 20, 2004
Kerry Rally
This is where I spent my birthday on Friday the 13th along with 50,000 other Oregonians. We scored a spot under the tree to Kerry's right, out of the range of this picture, so we didn't get burnt to a crisp like most of the crowd.
The interesting thing was that Bush was making an 2 appearance in Portland at the same time. Only he would not tell the newspapers or broadcast media where he was going to show up for an "ask the president session" in this swing state. At the 11th hour a memo from the Secret Service to the media detailing where to be and when, was leaked and appeared on the internet. I thought about trying to go to the high school in suburban Beaverton where Bush was hiding (I mean facing the public), the problem was in order to gain entry you had to volunteer to staff a Republican phone bank for 3 or 4 hours in order to maybe get permission to ask the president a question. I decided to add my body to the 50,000 in downtown Portland on the riverfront, many of whom burned up a vacation day to attend the event. I missed an 8 year old asking Bush how he could help him get reelected president. Isn't that precious? That 8 year old better have made 3 hours of phone calls or I am going to be pissed!
It took two hours for the crowd to file in to the fenced off waterfront and then another hour before any speakers took to the stage. Leonardo DiCaprio was surprisingly eloquent, Bon Jovi mercifully only played two painfully bad songs. The right wing media attack dogs tried to say that Portland was so flaky and wierd that we all really took the day off to ogle these two celebrities. These idiots don't know Portlanders very well. In 2000 ten thousand people paid $7 each in Portland to hear Ralph Nader rail against both parties. We don't need so-called celebrities to get us fired up. Kerry was good but not great which is what we have come to expect and accept. If Kerry came again next week he would get the same crowd back. People are that desperate to unseat Bush.
Could there be a more marked contrast between the public support these 2 candidates enjoy here? Of course the Secret Service began referring to Portland as Little Beirut during the first Bush administration so that may give you an idea of how unpopular W is here. Despite this I do not believe that there is a city in the US that would have 50,000 supporters of Bush take a day off of work to cheer him.
I have great hope that he will be soundly defeated in November.
This is where I spent my birthday on Friday the 13th along with 50,000 other Oregonians. We scored a spot under the tree to Kerry's right, out of the range of this picture, so we didn't get burnt to a crisp like most of the crowd.
The interesting thing was that Bush was making an 2 appearance in Portland at the same time. Only he would not tell the newspapers or broadcast media where he was going to show up for an "ask the president session" in this swing state. At the 11th hour a memo from the Secret Service to the media detailing where to be and when, was leaked and appeared on the internet. I thought about trying to go to the high school in suburban Beaverton where Bush was hiding (I mean facing the public), the problem was in order to gain entry you had to volunteer to staff a Republican phone bank for 3 or 4 hours in order to maybe get permission to ask the president a question. I decided to add my body to the 50,000 in downtown Portland on the riverfront, many of whom burned up a vacation day to attend the event. I missed an 8 year old asking Bush how he could help him get reelected president. Isn't that precious? That 8 year old better have made 3 hours of phone calls or I am going to be pissed!
It took two hours for the crowd to file in to the fenced off waterfront and then another hour before any speakers took to the stage. Leonardo DiCaprio was surprisingly eloquent, Bon Jovi mercifully only played two painfully bad songs. The right wing media attack dogs tried to say that Portland was so flaky and wierd that we all really took the day off to ogle these two celebrities. These idiots don't know Portlanders very well. In 2000 ten thousand people paid $7 each in Portland to hear Ralph Nader rail against both parties. We don't need so-called celebrities to get us fired up. Kerry was good but not great which is what we have come to expect and accept. If Kerry came again next week he would get the same crowd back. People are that desperate to unseat Bush.
Could there be a more marked contrast between the public support these 2 candidates enjoy here? Of course the Secret Service began referring to Portland as Little Beirut during the first Bush administration so that may give you an idea of how unpopular W is here. Despite this I do not believe that there is a city in the US that would have 50,000 supporters of Bush take a day off of work to cheer him.
I have great hope that he will be soundly defeated in November.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Comments
If you have any comments let me know. I am curious if anyone is actually reading these rants.
Thanks.
If you have any comments let me know. I am curious if anyone is actually reading these rants.
Thanks.
OIL
How concerned are you about oil supplies? Ford and GM, among others, have recently been granted permission to begin offering car loans in China. Can the world produce the oil needed to fuel an explosion (no pun intended) of demand for new gas guzzling vehicle for the Chinese market? Earlier this year domestic steel prices went through the roof due in large part to the booming Chinese economy. China used to produce a lot of low cost steel for export, not anymore. China needs every bit of steel it can produce for domestic consumption. In 2003 China consumed 40% of the world's concrete, largely on massive road building projects.
All of this is great for China and I in no way want to imply that the rise in per capita earnings of the Chinese, now surpassing $1000 US per annum, is a bad thing. The problem is there is a finite supply of oil. We are not making any more of it, no more dinosaurs to melt down. The world is consuming 81 million barrels of oil per day, OPEC produces 1/3 of the world's oil and is pumping about 30 million per day. Oil producing countries have been using new technologies such as slant drilling to pump more oil and faster and yet still cannot keep up with demand. Royal Dutch/Shell has admitted to lying about proven oil reserves under its control. It seems that 22% of the oil that they have reported as "proven reserves" may only be "probable reserves". Yet people think it is outrageous that the price of gas is going up. Do the math.
So let's see; China has build the roads and unleashed the automakers to start financing car sales to a population of 1.26 billion people (we have .28 billion) do you think maybe oil prices may continue to rise?
Kerry is talking about the problem. He is now calling for a massive effort to find alternatives to fossil fuels. Bush doesn't seem concerned. He thinks you should buy an SUV and take it for a spin through a salmon spawning stream.
Yeeha!
How concerned are you about oil supplies? Ford and GM, among others, have recently been granted permission to begin offering car loans in China. Can the world produce the oil needed to fuel an explosion (no pun intended) of demand for new gas guzzling vehicle for the Chinese market? Earlier this year domestic steel prices went through the roof due in large part to the booming Chinese economy. China used to produce a lot of low cost steel for export, not anymore. China needs every bit of steel it can produce for domestic consumption. In 2003 China consumed 40% of the world's concrete, largely on massive road building projects.
All of this is great for China and I in no way want to imply that the rise in per capita earnings of the Chinese, now surpassing $1000 US per annum, is a bad thing. The problem is there is a finite supply of oil. We are not making any more of it, no more dinosaurs to melt down. The world is consuming 81 million barrels of oil per day, OPEC produces 1/3 of the world's oil and is pumping about 30 million per day. Oil producing countries have been using new technologies such as slant drilling to pump more oil and faster and yet still cannot keep up with demand. Royal Dutch/Shell has admitted to lying about proven oil reserves under its control. It seems that 22% of the oil that they have reported as "proven reserves" may only be "probable reserves". Yet people think it is outrageous that the price of gas is going up. Do the math.
So let's see; China has build the roads and unleashed the automakers to start financing car sales to a population of 1.26 billion people (we have .28 billion) do you think maybe oil prices may continue to rise?
Kerry is talking about the problem. He is now calling for a massive effort to find alternatives to fossil fuels. Bush doesn't seem concerned. He thinks you should buy an SUV and take it for a spin through a salmon spawning stream.
Yeeha!
