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Thursday, Sept. 02, 2004who in the hell is Karl Rove and where does he get off?
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�Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead�
-Lucille Ball
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
REGISTER TO VOTE
"The time is always right to do what is right"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The "seven social sins": Knowledge without character,
Science without humanity,
Wealth without work,
Commerce without morality,
Politics without principles,
Pleasure without conscience,
Worship without self-sacrifice."
--Gandhi
"We have not inherited the world from our forfathers -
We have borrowed it from our children."
--Kashmiri, proverb
~~~
Rove: Kerry Tarnished Vietnam Veterans
By RON FOURNIER
NEW YORK (AP) - White House strategist Karl Rove said Wednesday that Sen. John Kerry had tarnished the records of fellow Vietnam veterans with his anti-war protests, prompting a blistering response from the Democrat's campaign.
�Who in the hell is Karl Rove, talking about John Kerry's war record?� asked retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak. Another Kerry backer called on President Bush's top political adviser to resign.
Rove created a campaign stir when he told The Associated Press that he didn't appreciate Kerry's congressional testimony 33 years ago condemning the actions of some U.S. soldiers upon Kerry's return from the Vietnam War.
�It was a period of intense feeling on both sides for and against the war, but I think that was painting with far too broad a brush to tarnish the records and service of people who were defending our country and fighting communism and doing what they thought was right,� Rove said during the 30-minute session with AP reporters and editors.
Testifying in 1971 to Congress on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry detailed atrocities he said were committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam, including rapes, beheadings and random killings of civilians. Kerry said at the time he was referring to incidents witnessed by other veterans, and has since said he regrets some of the language he used.
Rove, who said he had an uncle who served in the war, said voters should decide whether the testimony was relevant to the campaign.
�I do know that John Kerry has said, �Judge me by my record' and spent a lot of time talking about his service in Vietnam, which we ought to honor,� Rove said. �There are not going to be ads and such by the Bush campaign about this, but it's something that the American people have a right to take into consideration.�
McPeak said voters should also consider the fact that Rove received a student deferment when he graduated from high school in 1969. Democrats also note Vice President Dick Cheney's five Vietnam-era deferments.
Kerry aides, ordered by their boss to respond to virtually every attack on his military record, hastily arranged a conference call with two prominent veterans, former Sens. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., and Max Cleland, D-Ga., who accused Rove of coordinating with a GOP-leaning group of veterans that has been attacking Kerry's combat record and later anti-war activities.
Cleland noted that two Bush campaign aides resigned when their ties to the group were revealed. He said Rove should, too.
In the AP interview, Rove strongly denied that he is linked to the group. �Those guys ought to stop drinking from the swamp. The fevers are getting to them,� he said.
Rove also said Kerry �served with valor� in Vietnam.
A Bush campaign spokesman, Steve Schmidt, noted that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Vietnam prisoner of war, has defended Kerry's war record while saying his 1971 testimony was a legitimate issue.
Pointing to Kerry's anti-war testimony is one of many ways the White House hopes to undercut his credibility as a potential commander in chief. The Democrat made his combat record the centerpiece of his nominating convention in Boston, to the virtual exclusion of his economic agenda or a detailed plan to end the war in Iraq - two issues troubling Bush's candidacy.
The same group attacking Kerry's war record, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is airing a commercial critical of Kerry's 1971 testimony. . .
09/01/04 16:41
� Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
~~~
"It is the responsibility of...every evangelical Christian, every pro-life Catholic, every traditional Jew...to get serious about re-electing President Bush."
- Jerry Falwell
The New York Times
July 16, 2004
FaithfulAmerica.org is an interfaith group with members from many traditions, but we wanted to tell you about a great campaign being run by our Christian friends at Sojourners.
Sojourners is responding to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others on the Christian Right who claim that God has taken a side in this election and that Christians should vote only for George W. Bush.
The campaign asks how the love of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, and his good news to the poor, have been co-opted by the political agenda of the Religious Right.
If you feel like your faith has been hijacked, click below to sign the Sojourners petition and tell America that the Religious Right does not speak for you.
Sojourners' "God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat" petition ran Monday, August 30th, as a full-page ad in The New York Times. It was also placed in the hometown papers of Falwell and Robertson. More than 45,000 people have signed the petition so far. You can donate and help continue to place the ad in newspapers across America - including your own. . .
www.takebackourfaith.org/faithful
Blessings,
The FaithfulAmerica.org Team
~~~
And finally�Frequently Unasked Questions (courtesy of Christopher Dickey with Newsweek):
How do we know when the war on terror is over? Why have our early victories become so much less than the sum of their parts? And why isn�t Kerry pressing for answers?
. . . For three years now, just when we think one danger�s past, we�re told another one is looming somewhere out there, bearing down on us, building strength, about to wreck our present and our future. As if terrorism were some force of nature that you might survive by preparing, and can only avert by praying.
President George W. Bush was thinking that way, it seems, when he told NBC�s Matt Lauer on the morning news yesterday, �I don�t think you can win� the war on terror. And even when the president tried to come back to, um, clarify those remarks today, he suggested some pretty serious change in the globe�s geopolitical climate would be required to get the job done. �In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table. But make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win,'' Bush said with his trademark grin. �We will win by staying on the offensive, we will win by spreading liberty.''
Okay, Mr. President. But�when? If we don�t sit down at a peace table, how do we know the war�s over, much less who came out the winner? What would victory mean? Who or what makes that determination? The government? Our gut? As it happens, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been asking those sorts of questions for more than a year, to his credit. And to our chagrin, he has yet to produce a convincing answer. Is that because the plan is to stay permanently on the offensive? Always at war? Always �winning� without ever having �won�? To compound the problem, this administration�s doctrine of preventive war leaves wide open the question of when the next one will begin. To pre-empt a real threat? To obliterate an imagined one?
These are the questions you might think Democratic challenger John Kerry would be asking. But no. His spokesman responded to the Bush stumble with a nice zinger: �This president has gone from mission accomplished to mission miscalculated to mission impossible.� But as usual neither Kerry nor his people give us a picture of what Kerry would do differently, and they�re certainly not committing themselves to a decisive vision of victory. . .
Yet the nature of victory needn�t be so mysterious. Terrorism is not a force of nature, nor an act of God. Terrorism is just a technique for waging war. If you fight against the people who use that technique, they can be defeated, and you�ll know the job is done because they�re dead, or in jail, or isolated and aging, or even at some kind of peace table. As a veteran field officer for the C.I.A. told me the other day: �Terrorists cannot change the nature of American society, only we Americans can do that�in the name of fighting terror.�
Most professionals at the C.I.A., the State Department and the Pentagon who�ve devoted their lives to working in the Middle East have a fundamental rule for dealing with its very complicated problems: define them realistically and address them individually. Don�t try to tie everything together with a nice bow (or even a Gordian knot) and pretend they can be solved with a single idea like �liberty.� As much as possible, unravel the problems, or, in diplo-speak, disaggregate them.
If the Bush administration had followed that rule, we wouldn�t be up to our eyeballs in Iraq, we would be much safer, and the president would richly deserve a second term for his administration�s performance in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. . .
18 months ago the goal should have been to calm the international scene and build cooperation. The cancer of Al Qaeda had largely been cut out. The challenge was to keep it from metastasizing. This was the moment for the war of ideas to begin in earnest and international cooperation to be at its height. This was the time when terrorist recruiters could have been isolated and their lies exposed.
Instead, our impulsive, almost petulant invasion of Iraq did just what so many of our friends and allies warned it would do. It created a whole new hot-bed of fanaticism, and an inspiration to terrorist recruiters everywhere.
By pretending the War on Terror is one all-embracing fight, Bush has created a war he has no idea how to win. At the same time, he�s succeeded in pulling together many separate enemies. No, terrorism is not a force of nature. But we have done a lot to create the perfect storm.
� 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
~~~
Word of the Day for Thursday September 2, 2004
plenipotentiary plen-uh-puh-TEN-shee-air-ee; -shuh-ree,
adjective: Containing or conferring full power; invested with full power; as, "plenipotentiary license; plenipotentiary ministers."
noun: A person invested with full power to transact any business; especially, an ambassador or diplomatic agent with full power to negotiate a treaty or to transact other business.
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