Here’s the transcript of a great piece from All Things Considered the other day on the Bush Administration’s obsession with secrecy :

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page expressed their suspicions about why the loss of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq, missing since last December, should come to light barely a week before the election. One might also express suspicion about why the missing explosives should be have been kept secret. The Administration obviously has reason to keep bad news under wraps in this tense pre-election period.

Some bad news they can’t do anything about, like higher fuel prices and lower stock prices. But it can hold its own secrets close to its chest, until that is, someone inside is motivated to blow the whistle.

Last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in an internal memo that the Administration has no way of knowing whether it’s winning the war on terror and he predicted a “long, hard slog” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Administration’s gloomy assessment became known only after someone leaked it to USA Today.

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, former top commander in Iraq, wrote in a memo last winter that the supply situation was so poor that it threatened his forces’ ability to fight. Sanchez was replaced last summer. The memo leaked to the Washington Post last week.

The Administration, which has been scoffing at Senator Kerry’s talk of a long war costing $200 billion, is considering after the election asking for $70 billion more for Afghanistan and Iraq. That would raise the total to $225 billion. Somebody leaked that to the Washington Post.

Election or not, the Administration seems unable to keep the lid on all its secrets. One can only wonder what things the public should know that it doesn’t know yet.

Like I’ve said in the past, if the Bushies want people to give them the benefit of the doubt, they should stop acting in a way that makes people assume the worst.

I personally think the bin Laden tape doesn’t help either guy very much politically, but count me among those who are offended by this :

Bin Laden popping up like a malignant jack-in-the-box four days before the balloting may bolster John Kerry’s argument that Bush should have finished wiping out Al Qaeda before turning his attention to Iraq.

But it also refocused the nation on terrorism, which polls show helps Bush. And it reminds voters of their horror on Sept. 11 and Bush’s well-received response, as well as obliterating the recent flood of bad news for Bush.

“We want people to think ‘terrorism’ for the last four days,” said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. “And anything that raises the issue in people’s minds is good for us.”

A senior GOP strategist added, “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.”

He called it “a little gift,” saying it helps the President but doesn’t guarantee his reelection.

How fucking cynical do you have to be if you’re calling a threat from a terrorist madman a “gift”? I’ve tried to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt when people say they’ll do anything to win, but giving each other high-fives over bin Laden’s tape makes that conclusion harder and harder to avoid.

Since it’s in the news, now would be a good time for the everyone to consider the following question : What do you think about a president who has spent much more time, money, resources, and troops trying to catch this guy…

…than this guy?



Save your answer for Nov. 2nd.

I wonder how many times the Democrats can get this ad on the air in the swing states this weekend?

Just a reminder of why this mass-murdering fundamentalist psychopath is still on the loose :

Bush’s original comment came while U.S. forces in Afghanistan were searching for the Al Qaeda leader, who had eluded joint American-Afghan military operations designed to find him.

“We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is,” Bush said during the 2002 news conference. “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.

“I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country,” Bush continued. “I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became ? we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his Al Qaeda killers anymore.”

Pay special attention to that last part. It explains everything we need to know about how Bush judges success in the wars on terror and in Iraq.

He was concerned about bin Laden because “he had taken over a country”. Once the Taliban was overthrown, Bush was satisfied that bin Laden was declawed and no longer a threat. The same held true with Saddam. Once he had been driven from his Baghdad palaces into a spider-hole, Bush felt that the mission had been accomplished. In Bush’s view, this new threat isn’t about the man or those who support his ideals, it’s about the governmental structure from which he gains support. Once the bureacracy has been defeated, the threat isn’t there.

This all goes back to the argument Kevin Drum has been making a lot lately :

There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer’s Washington Post article about the Bush record in the war on terror today, but running through it all is a thread that I’ve mentioned before: George Bush’s outmoded focus on state sponsors of terror (the “axis of evil”) vs. John Kerry’s focus on al-Qaeda and other non-state terrorist groups as the real problem of the 21st century.

Again: it’s not that they aren’t both important. But we’re not fighting World War II and we’re not fighting the Cold War. Radical Islamic terrorism is a fundamentally different problem than either of these previous enemies, and it’s not, at its core, state-centric. This is the key blind spot that prevents Bush from effectively prosecuting the war, and it’s the key piece of understanding that suggests Kerry could do better.

Damn right.

Here’s a first hand account of one of Bush’s loyalty oaths (via Josh Marshall) :

“I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they’ve replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

As the old joke goes, I’m sure it sounds better in its original German. Somebody out there has to have a video of this…

This video, on the other hand, is scary as hell :

Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast a videotape apparently featuring Osama Bin Laden, in which he threatens new attacks on the US.
In his opening remarks, the al-Qaeda leader accused President George W Bush of deceiving Americans in the years since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

He compared the Bush administration to what he termed corrupt Arab regimes.

The development comes as US voters prepare to go to the polls on Tuesday in the presidential election.

Bin Laden said he first thought of attacking the US after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

He said the attacks on the US would have been less severe if President Bush had been more alert.

But he added that the security of the American people depended neither on Mr Bush nor on his challenger, John Kerry, but on US policy.

Jeez, there sure are a lot of religious people declining to endorse anybody this year, huh?

Seriously though, this is a pretty clear example of Bush’s failed leadership in the war on terror. He let Bin Laden slip away, diverted attention to Iraq, and has done nothing to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world. For this reason, Bin Laden’s standing among Arab extremists and moderates has grown considerably in the three years since 9/11. If Bush didn’t have such a boner for a war with Iraq, this asshole would be dead right now instead of threatening us from afar like he’s Cobra Commander or something.

UPDATE : More quotes from the tape are emerging :

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

“It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone,” he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

“It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God,” he said.

In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out “within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed.”

It looks like Giuliani wasn’t the only person thanking god that Bush was President on 9/11.

Well, this cover story in this month’s National Geographic (and the article’s first page) sums it up pretty nicely (via Waxy):

Here’s the opening paragraphs of the article :

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life’s work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It’s a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth’s living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it’s “just” a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is “just” a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally?taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth’s orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It’s such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution “nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system.” The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created “the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning,” in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don’t change, he insisted, dismissing “Darwin’s nonsensical theory.”

Unfortunately, all the “facts” and “evidence” about evolution are match for the persuasive power of Jack Chick :

It’s astounding to think that there are still people who think Eve was made out of one of Adam’s ribs or that Noah built a big boat and put two of every animal in it. I try to be sensitive to people’s faith here, but this is as absurd as believing in the three little pigs or something. Of course, nobody’s trying to force science classes to replace their curriculum Aesop’s fables.

Since all the cool kids are doing it, here are my final predictions for this Tuesday :

For eagle-eyed readers, you’ll notice that my prediction is slightly different than from three weeks ago. I don’t think the chatter about winning Tennessee really panned out, but the chances of winning Arizona have picked up since the debates. Also, I’ll spare you predictions for the popular vote because (a) I was pulling those numbers out of my ass anyways and (b) if the electoral process doesn’t give a shit about the popular vote, why should I?

The reasons I gave for my predictions three weeks ago are even stronger now.

The almighty incumbent rule will bite Bush in the ass. Especially when he’s below 50% in states that he has to win.

Clinton’s back! Maybe I’m being too optimistic here, but I really think his presence on the campaign trail could be enough to swing a leaner or two (Missouri and Arkansas in particular).

The polls showed Bush with a substantial lead this time four years ago and Gore ended up getting half a million more votes. Keep that in mind when you see today’s polls form the same companies that show a tie.

The polling methodology is still suspect. The main pollsters are weighing their polls under the assumption that minority turnout will be low and that Republicans will outnumber Democrats at the polls. This logic defies the exit poll numbers from 2000, clear demographic shifts, and the conventional wisdom that Democrats are more motivated than Republicans this year.

Bush’s presidency has hurt the swing states. The jerked around Pennsylvania and Ohio with his steel tariff flip-flops, he made Nevada into a nuclear dumping ground, and his commitment to union busting won’t win him many friends in worker-friendly Great Lakes region. Not to mention the state-specific unemployment numbers haven’t had much good news for Bush lately.

Kerry’s got the big MO. He’s won the news cycle every day this week. The Sunday shows will be a mix of predictions and debate on issues that hurt Bush. With four days to go, Bush probably won’t have time to turn things around.

Weapons, weapons, weapons. When confronted with evidence that they let explosives fall into the hands of terrorists, the Bushies did what they’ve been doing for the last four years; they lied and tried to change the subject. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work this time. A story that should have been defeated on Wednesday lived on to fight another day. People will still be talking about this on Tuesday morning.

So that’s how I think it’s gonna go down. While I’m still aware that anything can happen between now and Tuesday evening, time is running out for any surprises. The GOP is still trying to work the refs, so we shouldn’t keep our eyes off the ball. Pay close attention to any potential voter fraud or intimidation, contact the media to make sure the election storyline isn’t being written exclusively by right-wingers, and do what you can to help get out the vote through donations or volunteer work. We can rest when the polls close…for a little while anyways.

They just showed the Bush photoshop ad on CNN and I noticed one other thing about the ad that’s worth mentioning :

It’s complete bullshit.

Seriously. Here’s a transcript :

Script For “Whatever It Takes”

President Bush:
These four years have brought moments I could not foresee and will not forget.
I?ve learned first hand that ordering Americans into battle is the hardest decision, even when it is right.
I have returned the salute of wounded soldiers who say they were just doing their job.
I have held the children of the fallen who are told their dad or mom is a hero but would rather just have their mom or dad.
I?ve met with the parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag. And in those military families, I have seen the character of a great nation.
Because of your service and sacrifice, we are defeating the terrorists where they live and plan and you?re making America safer.
I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes.

This crybaby crap is from the same guy who criticized John Kerry for using the word “sensitive” and whose supporters use the word “French” as an insult. But apparently he deserves our vote because he elicits a basic level of compassion and kindness when he’s around people who have suffered. Is he trying to say that John Kerry wouldn’t return the salute of soldiers or hold kids whose parents have been sent away?

If George W. Bush was using this ad to run for finish-line hugger at the Special Olympics, then he’d totally have my vote. But when it comes to picking who’s gonna run the country, I need a little more than faux compassion.

By the way, don’t believe it when people describe this ad as his “final push”. At least one more ad has come out since then and it’s (surprise, surprise) an attack ad.

Considering the ongoing rumor that this tape was “leaked” by a certain campagin who’s been pushing for networks to air it, I gotta say that this October Surprise is pretty lame. Here’s a bit from CNN that’s already getting ignored by the press :

“We have been unable to verify the tape’s authenticity,” the official said.

Portions of the 75-minute tape were aired Thursday evening by ABC News, which said it obtained the tape from a source known to have Taliban and al Qaeda contacts in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
. . .
A U.S. official said there were “real questions about its authenticity.”

By that, the official said, he meant that it was not clear whether the tape was prepared by someone affiliated with al Qaeda and taking orders from its leaders, or whether it was a hoax.

With the presidential election just days away, officials are wary of a possible trick by an impostor.

“Without being able to authenticate it, it’s just some guy talking on a tape,” the U.S. intelligence official said.

Indeed. The voice sounds like an American guy trying to fake a Middle Eastern accent. Atrios has the best take on this whole thing here :

Frankly, as far as I’m concerned ABC should pre-empt their prime time broadcast and show the whole damn thing. Go ahead and remind people that Bush diverted attention to Iraq and let a bunch of terrorists thrive in Pakistan/Afghanistan border areas. But, the real story here isn’t the existence of a rather bizarre video, it’s the fact that someone in the Department of Homeland Security or other federal agency is leaking to Drudge to put pressure on ABC to get them to run it. Now, that’s truly scary. Anyway, am I the only one who remembers the good old days when broadcasting these types of videos were thought to be a threat to national security? When Condi and the gang warned that the people on the videos could be sending “secret codes” to terrorists around the world, and they leaned on the networks to not broadcast them. At the time I thought those were just attempts to throw their muscle around, to prove they could, but they claimed they were serious. But, now we have someone involved with our national security leaking this stuff to an online gossip in order to put pressure on a major broadcaster. That’s a story.

Unlike “our” big news this week, there isn’t any evidence to prove the authenticity of this video in one way or another. This is just a guy talking into a video camera.

Wow. Former weapons inspector David Kay just tore apart the Bush Administration’s missing weapons arguments on Aaron Brown’s show. He confimed that the explosives were there after the invasion, that the barrels contained the HMX and RDX, and he indicted the Administration for not providing enough troops to secure these sites. I’ll post a transcript when it shows up on the CNN site.

UPDATE : Here’s the full transcript :

BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I.

BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it’s a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

BROWN: David, as quickly as you can because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

KAY: Oh, absolutely not.

BROWN: Thank you.

KAY: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.

BROWN: OK. It’s just dangerous and it’s out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.

KAY: Well, look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It’s a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.

Y’know those missing explosives that were videotaped by embedded reporters? Well, the station has an update now that shows that they were locked under an IAEA seal (via Kos) :

A 5 Eyewitness News crew in Iraq may have been just a door away from materials that could be used to detonate nuclear weapons. The evidence is in videotape shot by Reporter Dean Staley and Photographer Joe Caffrey at or near the Al Qaqaa munitions facility.

The video shows a cable locking a door shut. That cable is connected by a copper colored seal.

A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency told 5 Eyewitness News that seal appears to be one used by their inspectors. “In Iraq they were used when there was a concern that this could have a, what we call, dual use purpose, that there could be a nuclear weapons application.”

Here’s a pic :

Weapons have fallen into the hands of terrorists due to the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Rather than admit it, they’ve got a different excuse every day.

They’ve spent the last three days insisting that the explosives were taken from al Qaqaa before troops arrived. Well, guess what? Wrong. (via Political Wire)

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled “explosives.” Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

“We can stick it in those and make some good bombs.” a soldier told our crew.
. . .
In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name “Al Qaqaa”, the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren’t secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

“We weren’t quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn’t appear that this was being secured in any way,” said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. “It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents”.

Here’s some stills from the video in question :

So, faced with the growing evidence that tons of explosives slipped into enemy hands under our noses, the Bush campaign sent Rudy Giuliani out to deliver the new talking points :

“The president was cautious the president was prudent the president did what a commander in chief should do. No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”

He’s the same scumbag he was on September 10th.

I hope the troops (and their families) are picking up on this. Apparently the Bush administration’s failures to use enough troops and make a high priority of securing high-power explosives, radioactive material, and dual-use technologies is your fault.

I’ve haven’t been very diligent when it comes to fundraising appeals, but if you’ve been putting off a contribution, this is your last chance. Here’s the fundraising appeal from John Edwards :

What kind of country do we want to wake up to on
November 3?

That’s the question each of us must ask ourselves as we enter the final 36 hours of the most important fundraising drive in Democratic party history.

It is hard to imagine America making a choice that could matter more than this one — not just because the contest is so close, but because the differences between the candidates are so stark. Make no mistake about it, four more years of George W. Bush in the White House would spell disaster on many of the issues that you and I care about the most.

That’s why, whatever issues you care about, you must have one overriding priority right now — helping win powerful, persuasive victories for John Kerry and other senate candidates five days from now.

Our final fundraising deadline of the campaign is tomorrow night:

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html

If you’re concerned about making America stronger and more respected in the world, we need you to step forward now. If you believe that turning a blind eye to the mistakes President Bush has made will only deepen our dilemma in Iraq, we need you to step forward now.

If you think that President Bush’s obsession with tax cuts for the wealthy is risking our economic future, we need you to step forward now. If you know we can do better creating jobs and solving America’s health care problems, we need you to step forward now.

If you want to protect the future of Social Security, we need you to step forward now. If you want to safeguard the balance and integrity of the Supreme Court, we need you to step forward now. If you realize that four more years of Bush’s environmental assaults will devastate America’s natural resources, we need you to step forward now.

Step forward now:

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html

Here’s the reality. Whatever issues you care about, whichever concerns are closest to your heart, the single most important step you can take right now is helping John Kerry and other senate candidates win on November 2. Let’s not wake up on November 3 realizing that you could have made all the difference in the world.

When you mention fundraising to most people, it’s usually with language like “give to the Kerry campaign”. Framed like that, campaign contributions seem like little more than a gift to a candidate or party who, in many cases, you support for pragmatic reasons only. Needless to say, that’s not the real truth here.

In an election as important as this one, your campaign contribution is a gift to yourself and your country. While John Kerry would be the most obvious recipient of these funds, 99% of us wouldn’t be supporting him if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve all made the informed decision that John Kerry is the best person to lead America in a more positive direction.

I’ll be the first to admit that my support for John Kerry’s campaign is for strictly selfish reasons. As much pain as the last four years have caused people at home and abroad, the most important reason why I support John Kerry is because I personally don’t want to live in a world run by a dumbass. That’s what motivates me to contribute to the election of John Kerry.

Yes, it’s frustrating to contribute to a privately-financed political process that’s sucking the blood out of our democracy, but in a critical time such as this, the question we should be asking ourselves is “Would we rather face four more years of the same failed leadership, or give in to a necessary evil to help change the course of our nation?” Before you answer that question to yourself, try to imagine how you wish you’d answer it after hearing the news of a Bush victory.

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html