Who would you rather Coming to Rescue You, George Bush or John Kerry?
by The Daily Brew
It is 1969. You are a 21 year old kid in the Navy, serving on a Swift boat in Vietnam. You might have joined the National Guard, but some Congressman's kid jumped ahead of you in line, grabbing the last spot available.
Right now you are on patrol in the Mekong Delta, and you have run
into an ambush. A mine goes off under your boat, throwing you in the
water and injuring your skipper. Weighed down by guns, grenades, and
ammunition, you sink to the bottom while five more boats pass
overhead. You shed your gear and surface. As the boats disappear down
the river, you are taking machine gun and small arms fire from both
banks of the river. You can't swim to either side without getting
shot, and even if you did, getting captured means getting killed. You
have one, and only one chance, to get out alive. You have to hope that
your skipper turns his boat around, heads back into the crossfire over
the mine infested water, reaches down with his bloody arm, and drags
you back up on the boat.
Now for the quiz.
Who would you rather have as your skipper, George Bush or John
Kerry?
Jim Rassmann is alive and well living on the Oregon coast because
when it happened to him, his skipper was John Kerry. I don't know
what George Bush would have done if he had been skipper that day, but
I do know that on September 11 when he was commander in chief and this
nation was under attack, he was nowhere to be found. He was busy
flying around the country, eventually landing his plane in Nebraska.
It was Rudy Giuliani, not George Bush who stepped in front of the
cameras in New York City and let America know that while we were down,
we weren't out, and no made for T.V. fictional account of history
changes that fact.
Now it is America that is in the middle of the river, taking fire
from all sides. Our foreign policy has been hijacked by
neoconservative ideologues who have isolated us from the world
community. They have embroiled us in a war we didn't need to fight,
forcing us to move resources away from the one we must. More
importantly, they have poisoned the well with the allies we need to
win. Our domestic policy has become the plaything of plutocrats who
want to gut social security to give more money to billionaires. If we
allow them to finish their agenda, America will resemble Haiti, with a
handful of families having permanent control of all the nation's
wealth, with no social safety net for the rest of us. We need a hero
to pull us out, and John Kerry is the only guy who can be that hero.
The next six months of this campaign may well decide the race.
Bush's plutocrats have given him $170 million. Karl Rove's plan is
to use that money to define both Kerry and Bush in the public mind.
Have no doubt, when Rove is done, he hopes that the public will
believe that it was Bush who took machine gun fire to save his fellow
sailor, and Kerry who disappeared from his National Guard unit to who
knows where. If we are going to stop that from happening, we are going
to have to give John Kerry some money. And we are going to have to do
it right now.
If you are like me, you believe that special interests wield way too much power in our government. I hate to point out the obvious, but there is a reason for that. The fact is, when it comes time to elect a president, the special interests pull out their checkbooks and people like you and I, for the most part, don't. So if you have spent the last six months saying "anybody but Bush", guess what? The mystery is over. It is no longer "anybody" who has a chance. The next president will either be John Kerry or it will be George Bush. And if Kerry is going to win, it is going to be because people like you and I put our money where our mouths are and write Kerry a check. You might not be able to afford a lot, but you can afford something. Don't let Rove define John Kerry. Let his own record as a decorated war hero, prosecuting attorney, and the environmental Senator who started the ball rolling on the Iran-Contra and BCCI investigations define him. Pull out your credit card and give Kerry some money. Do it today. Do it now.
by the Daily Brew www.thedailybrew.com
