Bringin’ ’em On: Dean, Franken, Kerry, Bush, and Hill
So, I’m going to recommend an article published on Salon.com, because not only did it cause me to laugh out loud, but because it also scored a place for John Kerry in my fortunes file:
The swagger of a president saying ‘Bring ’em on’ will never bring peace. Pride is no substitute for protecting our young men and women in uniform. Half the names on the Vietnam Memorial are there because of pride — because of a president who refused to admit he was wrong.
John Kerry
I heard George’s “bring ’em on” on the radio and it made me cringe, and hope that they were somehow targetting that for American consumption and that such dumb sentiment wouldn’t make its way into the Arab press, and into the minds of radicals looking for some hair-brained reason to “bring it on.”
Anyway, the laugh-out-loud funny comes from Al Franken. You can read the article at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/09/03/franken_dean/.
In other groovy news, a recruiter is presenting me today for a local university job that I think I’m a good fit for. With any luck, September will make up for August, karmically.
At any rate, I was thinking this morning that for D. Howard, Howard Dean is an obvious choice.
Well, since I’m babbling, I’ll mention that I saw a really chilling story in the Tribune today. A former minister is scheduled to be executed in Florida for murdering two abortion doctors. Excellent quote found on Yahoo, from Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood: “It’s sad that people like Paul Hill would murder in the name of life.”
I’m no fan of the death penalty, but a clergyman who is unrepentant about murdering people is the sort of monster that makes the death penalty sort of make sense. He says he’d kill again, because God is on his side. There is no question that he is a menace to society.
But perhaps life in prison would give him plenty of time to think about things. I would think a pious, pro-life Christian like Jeb Bush, who is supposedly going to let the man be executed, would want to allow the man time to repent for his sins before he dies so he could get to Heaven. Oh well.
Then the part of me that is just plain angry at Paul Hill would rather he rot in solitary until his God calls him off of this world. A long life of solitude is more deserved than the free press for martyrdom. But then, maybe that’s what Jeb is thinking.
And the whole idea of Christians in America murdering so that they can become martyrs seems to dovetail with all the Muslim fanatics seeking to be martyred in the Middle East. What with our Energy Consumption, and the vast military and financial involvement in the region that that brings us, most visibly with Israel and Iraq these days, it is like we our cultures deserve each other.
