It's Got to be Kerry
I saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" Saturday night. It's not a movie you can be indifferent to. My own feeling, walking out of the theater, was that Bush must be defeated, at all costs. I've had that feeling for about two years now, but this movie aroused my passion to a level it hadn't been before. The movie also left me exceedingly angry, though, with the Democratic Party. All of its failings, its shortcomings of the last couple of years have to be examined if you want to understand how Bush managed to accomplish (if that term fits what has been done) the last couple of years. Without a quiescent Democratic Party, without the opposition party trying its damnedest to not be offensive, we wouldn't be where we are today. And John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President, has distinguished himself during this time by going along with the program. Very early in the film you see black Democratic house members raising objections to the certification of the 2000 election results. It was already clear by that time that in addition to the vote counting irregularities in Florida there was a lot of hinky stuff going on with black voters being tossed from the voting rolls. When the time came that the black members of the House objected to this, when they tried to shine a light on these misdeeds, they needed one senator, only one, any one, to join in their protest. None did. Most specifically, John Kerry failed to.
In the days after 9/11, the Bush Justice Department quickly cobbled together a bill that would relax (or eliminate) restrictions on Police investigatory tactics. None of the items on the wish list were specifically tied to fighting terrorism and the absence of the freedoms the items on this list would give to police agencies had in no way contributed to the success of the 9/11 terrorists. These were just things that Ashcroft and his ilk had wanted for years and they saw in 9/11 an opportunity to get what they wanted. When the USA Patriot Act, as this police state abomination came to be known, came to a vote in the Senate, only one man (God bless you Russ Feingold) voted against it. John Kerry voted for it.
When, a year later, the vote to authorize George Bush to use virtually unlimited force against Iraq came up, John Kerry once again was on board.
When just a couple of months ago the Senate voted on the approval of John Negroponte to be the Ambassador to Iraq, the vote was 95-3 for his confirmation. John Kerry was one of the two no-shows. John Negroponte established his reputation as a diplomat in Central American in the eighties, carrying Reagan's water in his dealings with the tin-pot Saddams of the time who the Reagan and Bush administrations seemed to have a special affinity for cozying up to. John Kerry had no special objection to a man linked to multiple regimes with atrocious human rights records on their hands becoming our man in Baghdad.
When, over the last couple of years, somebody needed to step forward and take the lead in fighting back against George Bush's agenda, John Kerry, at every opportunity, failed to do so. He has enabled George Bush to do every awful thing he had done. And yet...
And yet, he is our only hope. I don't know what kind of President he will be. Based on his service in Vietnam his physical courage in unassailable. But he has failed, with the exception of his earliest years in the Senate, to display the moral courage this country so desperately needs to raise us out of the mire the Bush administration has us slogging through. We can only hope and pray that he will grow into the job, because we have to vote for him. We have to remove George W. Bush from the Presidency. So hold your nose and vote for Kerry. Just once. Sadly, somehow, he's the best electable option we've got. What a system, eh?
|
