The sheer chutzpah of this sort of thing never seizes to amaze me:
John Kerry Delivers Kenyon College Commencement Address
My wife, Teresa, is honored by the degree you grant her, today. But she’s also here to honor you because when you grow up in a dictatorship as she did, when you don’t get a chance to vote until you’re thirty-one , when you see your father voting for the first time in his seventies, you know what a privilege it is to cast a ballot.
Through that long night, we in Massachusetts watched you in Gambier. We were honored. We were inspired. We were determined not to concede until our team had checked every possibility. If you could stay up all night to vote, we could certainly stay up that next day to make sure your vote would count. In the end, we couldn’t close the gap. We would have given anything to have fulfilled your hopes.
Oh yes, that vaunted team, the team that helped you run a lackluster campaign. That team that you promised us in fundraising email after fundraising email would “protect the vote” … you mean THAT team made sure votes were counted?
Of course, that “hard work” lasted barely twenty four hours until you were up on a stage conceding the result of an election that ANYBODY could see had some serious irregularities. Remember THIS little gem in that pathetic excuse for “leadership”?
In America, it is vital that every vote count and that every vote be counted. But the outcome should be decided by voters, not a protracted legal process. I would not give up this fight if there was a chance that we would prevail, but it is now clear that even when all the provisional ballots are counted, which they will be, there won’t be enough outstanding votes for us to be able to win Ohio. And therefore, we cannot win this election.
Oh yes, Senator, you sure appreciated those people who stood in the rain and pulled the lever, pushed the button, filled in the optically-scanned bar for you. Yessirree, I know how much you cared, as you shut the lid on an election while the corpse of our democracy was chopped up and its pieces scattered all over Ohio and other places. You showed us all that it’s only worth fighting if you’re sure you can win. If not, hey, what they hell, it’s the final score that matters, right? A short two months later Senator, were you not in the Middle East on a photo op when Senator Barbara Boxer joined several Democrats from the House in a challenge to the votes from the Electoral College? Oh, yes Senator, we can remember how much you cared:
Sen. John Kerry, who lost the election to Bush and is currently overseas, said in a letter sent to supporters Wednesday he would not take part in a formal protest of the Ohio Electors because, despite widespread reports of voting irregularities, his legal team had “found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.”
Oh, your anguish was palpable Senator, as you disappeared and sent us more emails and letters, drilling for more contributions, even as people’s champions like Representative Conyers were actually raising the alarm about yet another Republican subversion of the ballot box:
“We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election,” said a report issued Wednesday by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
Even so, the effort seems certain to leave Bush’s victory intact because both Republican-run chambers would have to uphold the challenge for Ohio’s votes to be invalidated.
Underscoring that the outcome was not in doubt, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who conceded to Bush the day after the Nov. 2 election, said he would not join the challenge. Instead, he was in the Middle East, thanking U.S. troops for their service.
In a statement, Kerry said there are “very troubling questions” about the Ohio voting and said he will present a plan later to improve voting procedures.
Oh yes, another plan, and no doubt more fundraising to help pay for you to travel around the country and reassure us once again that you and Teresa cared deeply about your fellow citizens being treated the same way peons are treated in a banana republic. Where is that plan, Senator? I mean a real one … will it be drawn up and fought for by the same crack squad you promised would “protect the vote” in 2004?
Which way is the wind blowing Senator, as your carefully coifed hair blows in commencement breezes. Which way will tomorrow’s coin flip fall, will it be “heads, I fight” or “tails, I run and hide” as it has been for decades now? Oh yes, you care, the way you cared about voting to send American troops to die in a criminal war before you cared enough to vote against it?
Oh yes, Senator, thank you for standing up in front of that class of young people who will be paying for the mistakes of the last six years for the rest of their lives and telling them how much you appreciated them. Thank you for all that you and the other Vichy Dems in Washington have done to make it safe for capital to move freely about the globe, for how you and the other Democrats all decided to let the Iran/Contra criminals off the hook … a sad and terrible betrayal especially from you, a young Senator who’d done such couragous work on the BCCI scandal. After all, you’d made your bones … why keep stirring the pot?
So please, Senator, tell us again how you care. Maybe you can send it in an email, maybe with a little button on it. You know, one of those little buttons that says “Press Here to Contribute Now”.
