Posted on 08/27/2004 8:40:40 AM PDT by presidio9
Edited on 08/27/2004 10:24:07 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Bush has the vote of my great-uncle, a retired Marine who is usually making wisecracks about how Republicans aren't for the "little guy." His favorite presidents were all Democrats.
No way he's voting for Kerry, he finally stated -- the vote was essentially Kerry's to lose. He hates Michael Moore, Bill Clinton, and the radical nature of the modern-day Democrat Party.
He now calls himself an independent who will vote for Bush. The party has left him, as it has so many like him. These are the silent types who aren't being polled but I would imagine are huge in number.
They uses to be called "Reagan Democrats"..there are many, of the same age and background as your great-uncle..they are almost physically unabable to vote for a Republican....changing slowly, but the trend's the friend..
Thanks for the memories! RIP Michael.
So far, quite a few.
"....Two days ago, I asked him how he felt about the SBV ads..Iw as trying to get a sense of how it was impacting Dems..what they really felt...His replyto me was priceless.."rememberr how you told me YOU felt in 2000 when the "story" about Bush's supposed DWI arrest broke a few days before the election?" well, he said, multiply it by 100..."
The big difference is that Bush got out in front, took responsibility, and let the chips fall where they may. And the SBVT didn't wait until a few days before the election in any sleazy attempt to prevent the candidate from responding. They gave him almost SEVEN MONTHS prior to the election (May 2004 news conference).
Kerry is gutless and smarmy, preferring to attack the fine vets at the SBVT rather than release his military records and standing by them.
YOu missed my point. guess I didn't explain myself..my bad..I was tryign to get a Dem to tell me what he believed the SBV ads were doing to the campaign..did he really feel they were hurting Kerr. I remember how I felt when the Bush/DUI story broke..I was crushed for 24 hours..I thougth it could cost us the lection..the Dems feel the same way now....
She's a believer! Great column! LOL!
Please Please PLEASE post this on DU.
The resulting flames will destroy their server. :-)
Great start!
I don't have time, but surely SOMEONE does.
Make an excel spreadsheet, with each tab covering
a different Medal John Kerry has been awarded, plus
one more for the Cambodia trip.
Within each tab, the columns would be calendar days,
and the rows, different Network news shows.
Within each cell, we could track the spin
told by the KKK (Kerry Kool-Aid Krew (TM)) on that network
. . . ON THAT DAY.
Just think, you could have an account of how their stories
& responses changed over time.
Any takers?
Yep, you wouldn't believe the number of folks who've written to ask me how I could possibly be so dumb as to believe anything John Kerry says! LOL!
Anyway, here's an elegiac tribute I wrote to Mike Kelly after he was killed in Iraq on April 3, 2003. His wife and mother both wrote to thank me.
April 10, 2003
I Believe: In Remembrance of Michael Kelly Karen Pittman
I am no one. I have nothing whatsoever to do with wars, with cataclysms, with apocalypse. I have never tread on desert soil, never traveled with the1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, never witnessed the massive American army rumbling. I have never watched an old man fall to his misshapen end. Yet the passing of Michael Kelly profoundly moves me.
In his last column posted from Iraq on April 3, 2003, the same day he was killed in a Humvee accident, the syndicated Washington Post columnist, editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, and veteran correspondent of two Gulf Wars contemplated the jarring anonymity of death. Having come upon the “twisted” carcass of an “old man,” an Iraqi irregular, he clashed head-on with the meaninglessness of life in the dead dustbowl that is the desert. The corpse, with “his blood-matted gray hair . . . was lying on his back,” near the rapidly charring hull of one of Saddam Hussein’s many makeshift tanks, a truck’s “burning skeleton.”
Clearly, smoke wasn’t the only thing getting in Michael Kelly’s eyes . . . and the chalky odor that I imagine must have calcified his nostrils would in the end turn out to be just the ordinary, dry, nihilistic stink of death—not only the obvious death of the sad, sacked straggler he noted, but his own top secret one, lying in wait to ambush him just around the bend. I find his preternatural lingering over that lone soldier’s blood-smeared remains poignantly prescient. Not long after filing this terminal report, Kelly literally took a wrong turn—and wound up similarly undone in a Baghdad canal.
His journalistic reputation he sealed when things were livelier, way back in 1998, in a more cynical yet complacent time—a time when the national psyche was obsessed with nothing more urgent than an incumbent president’s sex drive (which was “urgent”—and obsessive—in the extreme) and whether or not the wild stock-market acceleration of the nineties would ultimately shape up to be a prickly “bubble” blown in a collective pique of “irrational exuberance.” Indeed, this was an era when Money only was Holy—and when, according to the administration’s (anything-but-) divine materialistic scheme, a secular trinity emerged, whereby Alan Greenspan was the all-knowing God; Bill Clinton a secondary, unfairly-crucified, admittedly flawed Christ-figure; and Ken Starr the oft-blasphemed Paraclete of Conscience.
Into this swollen blasmosphere (blasphemous atmosphere) Michael Kelly injected his ironic wit and savage moral grace. With one tiny but hugely influential column called “I Believe,” Kelly showed us the absurdity of the Clintonian creed. This he achieved by cleverly taking the president at his (literal) word. He wrote, in a plain-spoken style (which, oddly enough, anticipated George W. Bush’s) drenching with sarcasm, “I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadn’t had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.”
In “I Believe,” Michael rehabilitated us with his simple but powerful gospel, impossible to refute. “I believe the president has lived up to his promise to preside over the most ethical administration in American history. . . . I believe that The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.”
Kelly’s writing hand was double-jointed; depending on the mood and the occasion, he could flex it in one of two opposing directions, by doing either the artful tango of poetry or the Funky Chicken of straight-talk. He could shuck-and-jive with the best of them. Despite his elastic intelligence, however, he never allowed the curve of his polemic to arch too far over our heads. Even when straining for lyrical effect, he deliberately kept his rhetoric within reach. The same man who tartly and ironically labeled Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky “cheap tramp[s]” also told us of the Spartan aesthetic of war. Listen to the loveliness of this line, one of his last: “The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees [one of which—again ironically—would transport Michael Kelly to his death] and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the American army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.” It has a clean, spare, existential beauty.
Michael Kelly understood the army would march on without him, much as the Iraqi army marched on without that ragtag old soldier. He understood, too, that for as long as human history is writ, wars and rumors of wars will rumble on, pushing past antediluvian warriors upended in the desert, past the primed young reporters paused to gawk at them, and past marvelous Humvees absurdly drowned. War knows an inhuman, piston-like propulsion all its own.
In an April 5 tribute to his cut-down colleague, The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle beautifully mourned the character of the man whose written voice made us shiver: “In a professional universe too often peopled by shark-minded careerists with too many credentials and too little humanity, he was in many ways a kind of throwback to his father's generation of Irish-Catholic blue-collar newspapering. He delighted in journalism not for any illusion of status, but for the joy of language, the adventure of experiences and the chance to prod people into thinking.”
Amen, Ken. Thank God for Michael Kelly. Because of him, and others like him, ours is a less disillusioned, narcissistic age. I, like Michael Kelly—like Ken Ringle, like the countless people proselytized by Kelly’s pure prose—believe.
I believe in the man in the trenches, in the reporter who scraps for the story. I believe in the truthful journalist who believes in the truth. I believe in the foot soldier who believes in his cause, who toils in truth's trenches, and who is willing to die for what he believes. I believe in Michael Kelly.
Though I am no one, I offer my small, faraway sorrow. I offer my gratitude. I offer my prayers for all who have fallen—for those whose shimmering bylines we have known, like Michael Kelly’s . . . and for those whose names will go untold, who have silently died, in a world made loud with grief.▪
Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and published poet whose work also appears on Wednesdays at www.amsiriano.com and www.amgoodnews.com, and weekly at www.therant.us. She has also written commentary for The Washington Dispatch and The Common Conservative. Several of her editorials have been recognized by Townhall and added to its archives. Her article "Goodbye, Natalie: Dixie Chick Eats Crow" won Opinion Editorial's Best of 2003 Award, and further earned the distinction of being the most popular (most widely-read) op-ed in the web site's history. Frequently ranking among the weekly Quill Pen Ten, her rants typically generate considerable attention and no small amount of controversy. Her style is as acerbic as it is witty. Occasionally resplendent, often raucous, always refreshing, her no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-is commentary not only informs -- it entertains. She's the Lay's Potato Chip of political punditry: You can't read just one!
tpittman7@comcast.net
FYI: Anyone interested will find my entire archive at OpEds.com: http://www.opinioneditorials.com/writer.php?id=kpittman.
Thanks, all!
Karen Pittman khp0129
...is a MORON?!
Karen,
Thanks for this and for a fantastic column. Keep up the great work!
P9
Lay off the man. Don't you know he SERVED IN VIETNAM?
"YOu missed my point. guess I didn't explain myself..my bad..I was tryign to get a Dem to tell me what he believed the SBV ads were doing to the campaign..did he really feel they were hurting Kerr. I remember how I felt when the Bush/DUI story broke..I was crushed for 24 hours..I thougth it could cost us the lection..the Dems feel the same way now...."
More my fault. I was responding to him through you!! ;-)
I believe the Redskins will take the Super Bowl this season.
But - I’m already practicing how to say “Just wait till next year!”.
A bit early, but a good idea. Thanks.
B) You never trust a brand new occifer with a compass and a map.
I believe John Kerry .... is the biggest waste of protoplasm
Well it's a bit premature of them, they have to repeat it 23000 more times for it to be true.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.