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”.
We were honored. We were inspired.
I really have to just laugh: And then they did jack shit.
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.
I wish he would simply fade away. Or go endlessly windsurfing. Whatever works and shuts him up. He can keep the 15 million, which is what matters to him.
I’m so sick of them, and I read this today and … well, you can see the result. Just retire if you don’t want to do your job.
Actually, I think Two-Face is more honest than John Kerry.
I mean, he admits to being a liar and a theif.
Your anger at the Democratic party of the last 10 or so years is palpable and understandable by many here, although a diary like this would get you banned from Kicking Ass and many other blogs.
I want to hear from you what is the deeper implication you are really implying about the mainstream Dem party of the last 10 years. In other words, why was Kerry allowed, along with many other Dems in power now, to act in such an ineffective manner? Is it incompetence or a giant charade to cover other reasons?
Conspiracy theories will get you banned at other blogs too ;o)
What if there really was a conspiracy for once, but nobody dared to talk about it because if you did, you would be painted as a conspiracy theorist and banned from blogs. I say if the shoe fits, go with it!
most conspiracies aren’t evil cabals sitting around and hatching plans. They’re people with shared backgrounds and interests making decisions based upon mutual understandings of shared goals. No need to spell it out explicitely … they all know where they’re headed.
against their vested interest??
Can/could John Kerry, the richest most corporate connected person in the senate through his wife, ever really support in truth progressive values in economics?? How did he get to be the symbol of the party which is supposedly at least more socially leaning in this country???
There might have been a time when he was so inclined, but my original question comes to bear now! I don’t know if his nomination was the result of a conspiracy, but as you say, he knows what Repubs stand for and what they stand for benefits his world more than mine!
I think the mainstream Democratic Party has come to accept many of the policies of the Republican Party: those policies that benefit large corporations and the investor class, in favor of militarism and a too cozy relationship with the state of Israel above and beyond the actual interests of the United States.
I think, having severed nearly all ties to their base, they have no source of passion or energy to invest in campaigns against an opposition that DOES tap into their base. They are left only able to run overly careful, appeasing campaigns. They have nothing really to fight for other than maintaining their position in the status quo.
Do I think the two parties sat around and set up some Bond-villain-like master plan?
No.
What I think is they go to the same clubs and restaurants. Their children go to the same schools. They hit up the exact same people for campaign contributions and advice. They are tapped into the same insiders who own that town now. They’ve gamed the electoral system to preserve the seats of incumbents. They’re alumni of the same elite universities and law schools, and belong to the same fraternal organizations. Their spouses sit on the same charity boards. They accept speaking engagements from the same small circle of companies, foundations and non-profits. Their older children, siblings and spouses are lobbyists with the same lobbying firms. They all use media consultants and pollsters who use interchangable methods.
They’ve made a deal with the devil b/c most of them are lawyers who believe in “free” trade, in the drug war (many of them are former prosecutors), in the idea that Wall Street is the primary way to measure the health of the economy.
They have more in common with the people looting this country than they do the rest of us. Why be suprised when so many of them fail to fight FOR us? For the same reason that many of us can’t wrap our heads around a neighbor who gets carted away for murder or molesting children (“he was such a nice guy, we chatted at church just last week!”), the DC Dems really can’t go after the Republicans because they’re too CLOSE to them, yet can’t respond when the Republicans fan their base by not being so nice in return.
If you start out in something called the “center”, and fall for Clinton’s stupid idea that the Republicans should be given a pass on Iran/Contra so that the Dems could “work with them” is to render the party completely unable to fight for anything, having already given up the game.
That’s where I think the DC Dems are.
oh, and the growing practice of banning “leftists” who don’t get with the program is only another indication of how close the centrist cum liberals at supposedly progressive blogs like Daily Kos, Next Hurrah and Kicking Ass are to the Republicans. The party needs to have this fight, as what it’s doing now plainly isn’t working. That the ward heelers and budding media consultants at those places seek to kill the conversation show only that they have no idea how politics for change really works.
Notice, despite how much they’ve gotten, that the activist right is threatening to withhold the vote b/c they’re finally getting the idea that they’re not going to get the big changes they were promised. Ask Bob Dole what happens when they follow through with those kinds of threats. They get it, why don’t we?
Actually, my problem with Kerry is very simple.
He said he’d fight for a fair vote. He did a lot of fundraising to support that fight. He touted the measures he’d put in place to help ensure that the vote was fair.
Then, 24 hours after an obviously corrupt election, over the objections of his running mate, he throws in the towel and takes a massive wad of cash to fund his next set of primary campaigns.
How is this remotely ethical?
oh, that was the last straw, wasn’t it?
Well, that was a long time ago. And pretty much everything else that I can remember before that could be argued as simple ineptitude or an honest mistake. His post-election handling was very obviously unethical and dishonest, and casts many of his pre-election activities in a completely different light.