Kerry Blasts Bush's Daytona 'Photo Op'

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) - A confident John Kerry launched a full-throttle attack on President Bush's economic policies, mostly ignoring his Democratic rivals on the eve of the Wisconsin primary. Howard Dean's campaign shed another top manager and John Edwards vowed to press on no matter how he fares Tuesday.

Kerry, who has a commanding lead in the race to oppose Bush this fall, chided the president for taking time out Sunday to attend the Daytona 500, saying the country was bleeding jobs while he posed for a ``photo opportunity.'' Bush had donned a racing jacket to officially open NASCAR's most prestigious event in front of some 180,000 fans.

``We don't need a president who just says, `Gentlemen start your engines','' Kerry said. ``We need a president who says, `America, let's start our economy and put people back to work.''

Kerry for the most part has chosen in recent days to aim his Campaign 2004 rhetoric directly at Bush as he has lapped his competitors, winning all but the South Carolina and Oklahoma delegate-selection contests.

His broadside against Bush came as the president argued anew against any rollback in the tax cuts that Congress has passed at his behest, and on a day in which Dean divulged the departure of national campaign chairman Steve Grossman.

For his part. Edwards declared ``there are differences'' with his Democratic rivals and said he was confident his campaign was gaining momentum. He said he would remain in the race well into the March and the Super Tuesday round of electoral faceoffs.

Kerry's latest criticism of Bush came during a town hall meeting at Northcentral Technical College, where he toured the school's machine tool lab and posed for pictures with students who engraved an 40-pound aluminum plaque with ``Wisconsin Backs Kerry in 2004.'' But he didn't go unscathed either.

Lasee Philips, who is learning about the electrical and mechanical trades at the school, rose during the forum and told Kerry his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement was ``throwing some red flags in my mind.''

After working 22 years as an injection molder in the same factory, Philips lost her job last year and blames the trade agreement.

Kerry responded that the United State initially gained jobs under NAFTA, but blamed subsequent losses on the failure to enforce side agreements on labor and environmental standards.

Philips was not convinced. ``NAFTA, in my mind, sent our country in a tailspin the day it passed in 1997,'' she said after the forum.

Edwards claimed the endorsement of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state's largest newspaper. Then he sharpened his differences with rivals.

``I was against NAFTA,'' he said. ``Governor Dean and Senator Kerry were for it. There are differences.''

Polls have shown Kerry with a wide lead heading into Tuesday, but Edwards vowed to press ahead. While he has sought throughout the primary season to avoid attacking his rivals, Edwards said he would make differences clear and insisted there's plenty of time for voters to see those differences.

``It's not too late because this primary process is going well into March,'' said Edwards. ``I want voters to know what the differences are between us.''

Kerry said the first step to repairing the economy is to repeal Bush's tax cuts for people who make more than $200,000.

Bush, appearing in Florida on a visit that the White House characterized as official business, told an audience at a window factory: ``You hear people in Washington saying, 'Oh let's not make the tax cuts permanent.' When you hear somebody say that, they're saying 'We're gonna tax you. We're gonna raise your taxes'.''

Bush didn't mention Kerry by name. But a spokesman for the president, Scott Stanzel, said, ``Senator Kerry's pledge to raise taxes on Americans is precisely the wrong thing to do.''

In the Dean campaign, the departure of Grossman was the second high-level change in less than three weeks; campaign manager Joe Trippi was ousted in the wake of Dean's losses to Kerry in Iowa and New Hampshire.

It was during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters that Dean acknowledged Grossman had left, and just before the former Vermont governor was to appear at a campaign event in La Crosse, Wis.

He indicated that the move came following statements attributed to Grossman in which the chairman suggested Dean would likely curtail his campaign if he lost the Wisconsin primary.

Dean said he was appreciative of Grossman's efforts and that he had no hard feelings.

Roy Neel, Dean's campaign manager, however, said he thought that Grossman was heading to Kerry's camp. ``He's made clear his on-the-record comments to the press he has another agenda at work now,'' Neel said.

Grossman said he had neither resigned nor been asked to resign. But he said he understood why Dean considered him no longer part of the campaign.

``I think it's fair to assume my public statements and actions as tantamount to a resignation,'' said Grossman. ``For the record, it didn't happen quite that way. I tried to make it clear I would do nothing prior to the end of the Wisconsin primary.''

Dear Senator Kerry:

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum, and I wish you would go away. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, and a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. You are the pro-choice poster child. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, and a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the very dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Would that a hawk would pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. You are a cootie-poo, candy-ass, blind, ugly son-of-a-bitch dumb bastard. I mean, I’ve met some dumb bastards in my life, but you outdo them all. What you’ve said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to you. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed in on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than the rest of our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

P.S.:

You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal,fascistic, bigoted,racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic,insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic ,fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic,spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb,evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative,paternalistic,fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic,diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive,dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim,unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive,mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive,socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.

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