Kerry
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Quick round up
- Blogs to Riches – a good article on the major blog players. I’m not mentioned for some reason.
- Signs That the United States is About to Bomb Iran – it’s more of what the signs would be more than an indicator of occurrence.
- Bikers roll to military funerals to oppose anti-gay protests
They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.
Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs — explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.
A good article on some fairly spontaneous action against Phelps and his loathsome cadre. Supposedly their intention is to provoke either the police or the military into assault to they can sue.
- In the footnotes of this post, Jane Galt puts it very well with
My favorite moment in the debates came at the “town hall” style one, where Kerry told a pro-life questioner that while he personally agreed with her that abortion was murder, he couldn’t legislate his morality. Pro-choice readers should substitute the words “lynching” for “abortion” and see if this position would overcome their reluctance to vote for a Dixiecrat
That was what turned me off of Kerry too. At that time I was somewhat open to voting for him. Since the course in Iraq is set, I think the president and congress fighting all the time and getting nothing done would be a wonderful thing. Then he said that.
I would imagine his actual position on abortion is more in the middle, most likely mirroring my own strong disapproval, but that statement lost me forever. My original thought on that debate was a bit different. He prefaced that comment with a statement of his Catholicism. My thought was “that’s like saying you’re a vegetarian that eats veal”. But Jane’s remark was much better.
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Very well put
Jesse Walker, in a recent article in Reason
But if you haven’t forgotten it completely, I’d like you to think back to that last week before the ballot, when many Democrats honestly believed that the polls were undercounting the “youth vote” and that this invisible demographic was going to put them over the top. Pretend, just as an exercise, that this fantasy really happened, and that a bunch of cell-phone-wielding kids elected John Kerry last November. Imagine that for the last six months, the Republicans have been searching their souls and spinning their wheels, trying to find out how they can get those fledgling voters for themselves.
One faction would claim that the best way to appeal to the young would be to muzzle every prominent Republican with a track record of appealing to the old. Another group would argue that the GOP needs to change itself more deeplythat it has to adopt youthful concerns as its own, just as soon as it figures out what those youthful concerns might be.
Yet another would insist the Republicans are already young and hip, and that the trick is to frame their message so the kids will understand this. They’d propose ads announcing that Karl Rove sends text messages, that Dick Cheney knows some real live lesbians, and that W. may be versed in the use of powders, wink wink; that running huge deficits is risky, just like snowboarding, and that Bush’s favorite judges are totally extreme.
He also raises the Mother Jones quote of “worse than conservatives’ pretense of moral superiority is liberals’ pretense of superiority to morals.”
He omits the media creating, and the Dems going along with, this whole artificial demographic of “Evangelical” and “People of Faith” when the perfectly good term “very religious” would do, but on the whole, a very good summation, of this whole crass endeavor.