A big THANK YOU to John Kerry !

After so much critique in my last post, I want to write something positive today, and yeah, it has to do with John Kerry, how could it be otherwise? ;-)

Yesterday the Democratic US Congress passed a vote on a troop funding bill that will let GW Bush continue the war in Iraq without setting a deadline for troop withdrawal. Emotions ran high in the blogosphere and certainly in the American population that opposes the war 3 to 1. People are frustrated and disappointed and in this atmosphere John Kerry posted a diary on Daily Kos to inform people that he votes "no" on the bill and to tell people not to give up.
(Isn't that so typical for John Kerry?! Think about his words in 1971: "This is not the struggle of one day..." - You can read them in full and listen to them by scrolling down to the bottom of my blog.)

From Kerry's diary (please read the whole thing, it's great!) :

I’m not going to call on you to do anything specific today; you’ve done so much already. I’m not going to ask for patience, because the truth is big policy changes like this are only achieved by impatient people – in huge numbers. I’m just telling you that I’ll continue to work every single day (every damn day as my old friend Ron says) to apply pressure to change this broken policy. There will be new avenues of attack, new paths to take. But, for right now, it’s up to folks like me to do our part to keep the battle going, so all of you can work to keep the pressure going. Together, we can win this, as long as we keep the battle joined. Keep punching.


And later John Kerry answered some comments and that was as beautiful as his original post:

Cynicism (19+ / 0-)
I think this Administration is counting on us to get cynical, disillusioned, and just quit on the whole enterprise. That’s how they win. These are really good reasons to be fed up -- fed up with Washington games, turned off by a political process that moves too slowly while good people die. But none of those are reasons to pack it in, they’re reasons to become more activist, to redouble our efforts. I understand your feelings, as well. This is a bitter struggle, I’ve been there before and this feels like déjà vu remembering Vietnam and a President who wouldn’t budge back then too. But one thing I’ll tell you is, I don’t come here to do anyone else’s bidding or speak out of anything other than my own conviction. I actually think it’s a strength and not a weakness of our Senate leadership and our caucus that no one in the leadership even knew I'd post a diary here; that's not the way we operate, that’s the way the other side operates. They’re the ones who demand Stepford-like message “discipline” – hence the reality of Roadblock Republicans who know this policy is a bust but cling to it with a stubbornness that reflects their leadership. I've been here before calling for action, I'll come here to celebrate when we win, and I thought I owed it to you to come here now when the bill didn't go the way I wanted. If I came here to call for support for the bill, you might have a point, but I didn't.

Although I will tell you something else, a completely personal aside that you can take as you will, Harry Reid and I haven’t always walked lockstep in the tactics of how to change the Iraq debate, but the depth of his feeling that this Iraq policy is tragically wrong is something as sincere and genuine as it comes. Look at Harry Reid’s face, he wears the anguish of this war for everyone to see, and he cares as deeply as anyone about forcing a change of course. He has more quiet determination than anyone about seeing this through.
by John Kerry on Thu May 24, 2007 at 02:18:20 PM PDT



And this "Never forget" in answer to someone who is frustrated over more dying soldiers:

Thank you (7+ / 0-)
The only reason that people get so upset, is that troops and innocents are dying in the time it takes to get things done. That fact just never goes away. It's always in the back of our heads, always. If you are like me and know people who lost their lives in Iraq, and I have no doubt you do sir, then you know that the pain never goes away - and the delays in ending the war just create more dead bodies and more people with a hole in their heart, where their friends' life used to be.Cheers, keep fighting!
by cycloptichorn on Thu May 24, 2007 at 09:19:38 AM PDT

Never forget (14+ / 0-)
Never out of my thoughts, and never will be. It hurts like hell to go to some of the funerals I’ve been to, more and more as this war goes on. Those faces at Walter Reed never leave your thoughts either. You bet this is personal. I've seen what happens in war; I know what it's like, I’ve seen my friends wear it for the rest of their lives, and I have friends I loved who never got to grow old the way I did.. It's exactly for that reason that I fight for this.
by John Kerry on Thu May 24, 2007 at 02:12:06 PM PDT

-----------------------------

We discussed this all as well in the DU JK group and here are some reactions from my fellow Kerrycrats over there (sorry guys, but I just had to post this here!) :

beachmom in regard to these comments from Kerry:
...they're so poignant. I can't believe this man almost made it to the WH. The Oval Office would have been GRACED with him. John Kerry is the exception in my lifetime -- the only person I voted for president that had so much integrity, decency, grit, and, yes, grace.

fedupinBushcountry:
He is speaking from his heart and gut - this country is missing out on so much. IMO there is no politician that can ever top him.



I wholeheartedly agree with both of them. We later had a "Thank you, John Kerry" thread and I wrote the following:

Thank you, John Kerry, for keeping the image of the "other America" alive!

I can't tell you how often in the past 5 years I came close to give up on the USA. That I still like your country, that I still have hope for your country and its people, that's all thanks to you! I took an interest in politics a long time ago here in Europe and have seen a lot over the years. And sometimes, rarely but sometimes, there were politicians I really liked, but I never thought that I could admire a politician as much as I admire you. I never believed in role-models and now I'm too old to start with this stuff. *g* But if I'm asked today if there is some person in the world I can look up to, I won't hesitate a second to name you.

I hope that other people in the world have the same view on you and your country as you meet and met with a lot of foreign government officials who seem to trust you more than they trust the Bush regime. I can't help but think that over the years you have helped creating a kind of parallel US foreign policy, and I'm glad to see you involved with the "American Security Project". I'm sure that whatever will happen in the next years and whoever will become the next US president, you will continue to work relentlessly to restore the America we all knew and liked before Bush came to power, and I can't thank you enough for that.

Finally, in the afternoon, John Kerry came to the Senate floor and (as in response to my earlier blog post) he said the following:

I think in the last week or two, I've been to 3 funerals, Mr. President. One funeral, the son of a man who has opposed the war, a military man, a West Pointer himself, a man who gave us his career. But he's opposed to this war. And he dared to use the word to me in a conversation on the very day his son was being buried about how it was important for us to redouble our efforts here in the Senate, to bring this to a close. How it was important for us not to allow these young men and women to have their lives wasted; a word that if any politician used, we'd be pilloried for. The father of a man who was being buried used that word on the very day his son was being buried.



globalvillage has the full videos of JK's speech up on YouTube :
(check her channel, she has much more amazing videos!)

Thanks again, John Kerry, for being this man of integrity and honor you have always been. Keep fighting, Senator!

Reflections on America: The Wars

Today I will start a series of critical reflections on the USA and the first part will be about America's wars.

I just read a Daily Kos diary about the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq and yesterday on CNN I heard a very strange Republican presidential candidate say some interesting things. Ron Paul (whose name - honestly! - I had never heard before and who seems to be hated by most Republicans) thinks that the Iraq war was wrong, is a disaster and the USA should pull out. Asked by the CNN journalist what the USA should do in a scenario where North Korea attacks South Korea or China attacks Taiwan, he insisted that this shouldn't necessarily be a US problem. He thinks that Korea would be reunited like Vietnam, weren't it for the US presence in the south, and that the USA didn't intervene in the Russian-Chechen war, so why should they intervene in a Chinese-Taiwanese conflict. With one sentence: The USA isn't a world police.

Of course, after the two World Wars that's exactly the role the USA found themselves in and especially Europe during the Cold War was comfortable with that. The unofficial title of the US president as "leader of the free world" speaks for itself. (How ironic now to give this title to Bush of all people. But that's another story.) The USA became a superpower but with this status came arrogance.

Then came these proxy-wars against Communism and things became less clear. In this Washington Post article mentioned in the diary I earlier talked about, the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq are stunning. How can a country make the same mistakes over and over again? Do they never learn from History?

A while ago my great blogger friend beachmom had a fantastic diary on Daily Kos that really showed where the problem lies. As the superpower USA can't loose a war militarily, it must be lost morally at home. It's all the fault of the American people who didn't believe in the Vietnam war anymore and who don't believe in the Iraq war now. That's the famous "Dolchstosslegende" ("Stabbed in the Back") used by Hindenburg to explain Germany's defeat in World War I. Well, the result was Germany's Word War II. The Germans learned it the hard way that this was bullshit. But they learned it. What's about the USA? How many Koreas, Vietnams, Somalias, Afghanistans and Iraqs do they need to learn it?

America is no world police and shouldn't try to be. And especially not in the imperialistic and fascist way, George W. Bush starts his preemptive wars. And another question occurs: Why don't Democratic politicians use this frank talk that Ron Paul used? Well, I know it's not popular. When Harry Reid said that the Iraq war is lost he was immediately attacked, when Barack Obama and John McCain talked about "soldiers' lives wasted", they had to apologize. They can't tell the truth because they would be called un-american or unpatriotic. What an idiocy! That's part of these "stabbed in the back" excuses.

I'm always amazed to hear John Kerry's answers when he is asked if it means that he doesn't support the troops when he calls for a withdrawal from Iraq. Okay, these questions asked by so-called journalists who are nothing else than propaganda tools for the Bush regime are more than stupid. When Kerry answers that he supports the troops by seeking a diplomatic solution for Iraq and the region, I'm sure he means what he says. Or at least, he meant it in '04 and until a while ago. But does he still mean it? Maybe he is the eternal optimist and really does. But aren't we at a point now where nobody can deny anymore that this war is just lost and no measures - diplomatic, military or whatsoever - can avoid the down-slide into total chaos of Iraq and probably (God help us!) the surrounding countries. Why can't they just state the facts: The USA lost a war... again. Will it be the last one? Will they ever learn their lesson?

Book talk with the Kerrys in Cambridge, MA

I had the honor and the pleasure to be in Cambridge, MA last Saturday, April 21st, when John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry presented their book This Moment on Earth and answered questions from the public. I won't write much about this amazing afternoon in the neighborhood of Harvard University because Kerstin over at the John Kerry Blog already did it so eloquently:

A MOMENT IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

However, here are a few pictures that I took during the event and a little music video made with some of my pictures:

Bush's image on German TV

Well, everyone knows that Europeans don't like George W. Bush. That's nothing new. But I think it's funny to see how he is ridiculed on German TV. These are pictures from RTL, a private German TV station (from their late night news program "Nachtjournal" - and no, it's not comedy, it's a serious news program).

Sorry for the bad quality, but I took the snapshots directly from my TV screen.

Congratulations to Al Gore!

He won an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and he really deserves it! He says that it's not a political issue but a moral issue and he is right. What this man has done to open the eyes of Americans and other people in the world to the climate crisis is unbelievable. Even George W. Bush can't deny Global Warming anymore. People here in Europe never understood that so many Americans stuck their heads in the sand and didn't want to see this problem. I remember discussions about this subject on French and German TV years ago.

And even if the politicians take some time to address these issues, people can start energy saving at home. As John Kerry said recently (BTW, he and his wife are writing a book about environmental issues as well):

In the last year Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" has brought the science of climate change to millions of Americans in a dramatic and persuasive way. It's terrific what he's done. Here's the bottom line: within the next decade, if we don't deal with global warming, our children and grandchildren will have to deal with global catastrophe. We need big changes to fix a big problem. We can't "middle" our way there.

As individuals, the change can be as simple as replacing traditional light bulbs with efficient fluorescents. In our communities we should require that new buildings include lights that turn off when people leave the room. We should follow the lead of Tokyo and their energy efficient escalators that shut off when they aren't being used. There are literally thousands of things to be done, too few of which we are being asked to do. Each of us can do something.

http://blog.johnkerry.com/2007/01/combating_global_warming.html


A personal experience I made in the USA: I spent several months with an American family in 2004/05, a liberal Californian family who voted for John Kerry and had no false religious or political reasons to deny Climate Change, and they didn't. But did that mean they stopped wasting energy? When they went out, they left all the lights in the house switched on, also the TV (not even on stand-by!), had always all the doors open, used the washing-machine several times a day just for some clothes, let the water running from the water-tap while doing something else in the kitchen, drove several times the day to the grocery or some other store because they didn't make a shopping-list, had a subscription to 20 or more magazines which arrived weekly, piled on the living room table and were seldom read. I tried to tell them that they wasted energy (and money!) but it's hard to get rid of these bad old habits, that's for sure.

For a lot of people here in Europe energy saving has become a natural thing to do. At least in my family (and that was already the case when I lived with my parents) we have these energy efficient light bulbs since I was a teenager. I can't even remember when exactly my dad brought them home for the first time. We always switch the lights off when we leave a room; that's an automatic reflex. We close the doors when we leave or enter a room to keep the heat in the room. We switch the heaters off when we don't use a room or leave for the day. We switch our electronic devices (TV, DVD player etc.) off when we don't use them - not leave them on stand-by. We use the washing machine, dryer, dish-washer etc. only for a full load and not several times a day. We use recycled paper for the printer, for letters and envelops etc. We bring our own bags when we go shopping because in many German and French supermarkets you don't get plastic bags anymore. We have several trash-bins to separate trash because it's recycled. These are just the small things you can do in your own household and it will save you not only energy but a lot of money as well. Just check your water and electricity bill and you will see it.

There is more to do, of course. And we have only 13 years left to change our behavior and save the world as we know if for our kids. Isn't that a really sad thing to realize. Only 13 years!

My friend Global Village from the John Kerry group at Democratic Underground made a wonderful video clip about Climate Change. You should watch it!





Links to
- An Inconvenient Truth
- John Kerry & Teresa Heinz Kerry: This Moment on Earth
- GlobalVillage's YouTube channel