Listen. Lest there be any doubt. I support John F. Kerry for President of the United States.
There. I've said it.
He still irritates me, but that seems like a personal problem. I still feel like he's a bit of an invertebrate, but with all the stem cell research he'll sponsor, they might find ways to regenerate his spine. The Presidency itself is sometimes good for that though. I wish I saw more difference between his and the president's stated positions on a range of matters, but I think a lot of what he's saying is driven by perceptions of a voting "market" that may look very different after November 2.
But, hey, Hunter S. Thompson endorses him. "I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next President of the United States." said the good Doctor. He means it. The meat hammer's not out of the question. He also says, " Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear..." I commend to you his full rant.
. . .
Then there's the exquisitely named Al Qaqaa - or Deep Qaqaa, as I prefer to call it. Sure and we live in the Golden Age of Irony, but this is too perfect. We invade Iraq to keep terrible weapons out of the hands of terrorists. In the course of our removing Saddam, we also remove his security forces which were keeping 380 tons of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives out the hands of terrorists. Guess who has them now. And George Bush is still proposing that he will be more competent at keeping us safe. And millions of us go on believing him.
Or, as Maureen Dowd put it with customary succinctness, "The officials charged with protecting us set off so many false alarms that they ignored all the real ones."
Look. We simply cannot allow America to look as simultaneously laughable and terrifying as it will if we keep these lunatics in power. If you have a scrap of Patriotism. you can't permit that. But, given that 49 percent of the population is hallucinating like a 300 pound Samoan attorney on bad acid, what can we do about it in the next few days? Time is very short.
I have several suggestions.
1. Make a Party Out of Voting
I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again. Democracy doesn't have to be dreary. Your franchise is a gift not an obligation. Exercise it with with gladness. And company.
Friends don't let friends vote alone. . . . .
. . .
6. Quit Hating One Another
While I confess there's been some pretty intemperate rhetoric in this screed as well as my other outbursts during this terrible era, I have been making a sincere effort to hate the sin and not the sinner. These fellow humans in the Administration are caught in the bloody jaws of Leviathan. They have been made servile to what Ken Kesey called The Combine, the terrible machine that is eating the world with its blind and organized hunger.
Remember they are not operating on the same reality principles that you are (unless you, like many patient right-wing BarlowFriendz, happen to be one of them.) You think that abortion is Very Bad. If you've participated in one, it haunts you forever. But you don't think it's murder. They do. That's really how it feels to them. To many of them killing a blind, insensate human larva is no different than pitch-forking peachy-cheeked infants in their prams. What wouldn't you do to stop a routine practice of that. (Why this same sense of horror doesn't extend to collateral dismemberment of infant Arabs, I don't know. It's a mystery.)
. . .
No matter who emerges from the looming Constitutional crisis with the gold ring, we are going to have to start getting along better or we'll be like Hutus and Tutsis in a couple of years. And I'm not being hyperbolic. America teeters on the edge of Red/Blue exchanges of ordnance. And once that starts, the horror will make Rwanda look like a good start.
In the meantime, personal attacks and the general vitriol from the left and the right are turning off the few bland souls in the middle, upon whom this election depends. (Unless, as now seems more likely, it all depends on Justice Rehnquist's thyroid tumor.)
This is not to say that we shouldn't be angry. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. But I am angrier at the deeds then their perpetrators. I believe that many Bush Administration policies cross the line into criminal. Some of them certainly violate international law, which is very clear on the prohibition of preemptive war, for example. But I am not ready to say they are the work of criminals. (Well, alright, Doug Feith seems pretty criminal to me.)
In any case, I think that attacking them personally, however personally delicious, is both counter-productive and wrong.
A man in Tennessee claims he came up with the idea for Disney's FastPass system, whereby one gets a ticket to come back to a ride later without queueing, and sent it as a suggestion to Disney. Disney wrote him a letter back telling him it was a dumb idea, and then -- he alleges -- they implemented and patented it. Now he's suing. 