All this was seared in his memory, before it wasn't
by JohnHuang2
What a mess. With turmoil rampant, plans to stabilize the place lay in tatters. And the political upheaval only gets worse. The place is just ungovernable. Anybody will tell you that. The ruling authority, despite a promising start, is now seen by most as illegitimate. It's credibility has, almost overnight, utterly crumbled. As the crisis deepens, the political vacuum at the top is staggering! Amid the growing turbulence, the mood is grim and growing grimmer. With the opposition newly emboldened, calls for the government's immediate resignation and for special elections grow louder by the hour. Let the voters decide -- now, not next year, opponents clamor.
How long will the current standoff last? Will the government buckle under pressure? Will it be toppled? Or can Gov. McGreevey hang on? (You didn't think I was talking about Iraq, did you?) As the political tumult escalates, "High level New Jersey Democrats said Sunday that pressure is building among members of (McGreevey's) own party for him to step down before his announced Nov. 15 resignation date," the AP reports, quoting one unnamed Democrat consultant saying party leaders are worried "that it will get uglier and more damaging to the party. It's pressure for sooner rather than later." They're afraid this story has legs, really hairy legs, especially charges the governor wasn't just *doing* his mistress, er, misteress, but the taxpayers too -- to the tune of $110,000 in annual salary to a poet named Golan Cipel who was giving the governor a hand with anti-terror advice. (This is what Democrats mean by a more 'sensitive war on terror,' though there's nothing soft about this approach, Dems insist.) It turns out that McGreevey gave Cipel more than he could handle, given that Cipel was unqualified to service in such a sensitive position. (Cipel is a foreigner, meaning no security clearance for the hard assignment. This is what Democrats mean by reaching out to other nations.)
But Cipel claims that, rather than being on the sharp lookout for al-Qaeda making unwanted advances into skyscrapers, his time was taken up keeping an eye out for McGreevey making unwanted advances of a sexual nature. It wasn't terrorism, says Cipel, but he felt very terrorized, telling an Israeli newspaper Sunday that he felt so terrorized at the sight of McGreevey, "I got to a point where I was afraid to stay with him alone." (Who would expect something like this would rear its ugly head in the workplace?) Intimidated by the size of the governor's political clout, Cipel says he kept his mouth shut. The whole time. McGreevey found Cipel an apartment close to McGreevey's place, not to give Cipel a commanding view of al-Qaeda, but a commanding view of McGreevey. The governor says he needed Cipel on call, 24/7, just in case he got the urge for a briefing on the terrorist threat. (The couple first met in Israel in 2000.) For the record, Cipel denies being gay. In fact, he's pretty depressed about the whole affair. He has that memory which is seared -- seared -- in him.
(Having gay sex with subordinates is what McGreevey Democrats mean by 'standing up for the working man'.)
"At first," Cipel explains, "it didn't occur to me that he was homosexual." (Cipel probably thought that when McGreevey told him, 'I am gay', the governor meant he was happily married. When McGreevey pointed towards the bedroom, he probably just meant taking a nap, who knows.) Well, that big, fat misunderstanding led to another, then another, till finally Cipel couldn't take it anymore, says Cipel. He's set to file a lawsuit charging sexual harassment. The airing of dirty laundry has only begun. It could drag on forever.
Hence, the idea is to have a quickie election and be rid of this sticky mess. The hope is to stabilize New Jersey and firm up Kerry's position there, in view of some polls showing the contest tighter-than-expected. (One poll had Bush and Kerry in a dead heat.) McGreevey says he won't step down -- not before November, dealing a hard blow to party hopes. (You'll sooner democratize Iraq than New Jersey politics.) Complicating matters further, a weekend poll showed McGreevey getting a bigger bounce after admitting getting into Cipel's pants seeking terror advice than Kerry got after a convention week of 'Shove it', bunny-suits and papers getting into Sandy Berger's pants. The governor, even without Viagra, rose 2 percentage points -- about the size of the gay population.
McGreevey heatedly denies not having an affair with Cipel ('I DID have sexual relations with that man, Mr. Cipel!'). His spokesman, Micah Rasmussen, calls Cipel a liar, "a person trying to exploit his relationship with the governor." (McGreevey dishonored his office, humiliated his wife, humiliated his children, disgraced them and his parents before the whole nation. Clearly, McGreevey is the victim.) McGreevey aides say Cipel tried to blackmail the governor for millions of dollars, threatening to *out* him as a homosexual. (Democrats say this just goes to show why homosexuals belong in the military and CIA.)
McGreevey says he's resigning because he can't function effectively as governor any longer but he can't resign immediately because he needs to function ineffectively till Nov. 15. (Transitions high up at the governor's level require time -- this is not some lowly office like the presidency). So, McGreevey says he can't be effective in office because he's gay. Gays say this is why they're so proud of McGreevey.
On Nov. 15, under state election law, the Senate President takes over as acting governor to replace the governor no longer acting -- acting as heterosexual. His term expires in January 2006. But if McGreevey steps down now, a special election is called.
"The fact that I have chosen to leave office before the end of my term only heightens my responsibilities to the citizens of New Jersey," wrote McGreevey Tuesday in USA Today. These "responsibilities" include overseeing "an orderly transition of power." He needs time to teach a rookie the ropes -- paying kickbacks, bribes, looting ... you don't learn these things overnight, so get real. (Let's name a hurricane after McGreevey.)
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Speaking of natural disasters, has anyone seen Kerry lately? If this were January, I'd guess he'd be aboard a swift boat celebrating Christmas Eve in Cambodia with those wonderful Christians, the Khmer Rouge -- but it's August. Did you see that dirty trick Nixon played on Kerry back in '68? You'll notice that Kerry hardly mentions Vietnam, but in a Boston Herald piece in 1979, Kerry wrote this: "I remember spending Christmas eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas" -- a holiday in Christian lands like Cambodia and Vietnam. Continuing: "The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Nixon wasn't President yet, so evidently Tricky Dick misled Kerry into thinking he was (and misled Kerry into invading Cambodia.) In March of 1986, Kerry told a Senate hearing, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians (that Christmas Eve), and having the president of the United States" -- a Buddhist country -- "telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which has been seared -- seared -- in me."
But Adm. Roy Hoffman, Swift Boat commander of Kerry's unit at the time, and Steve Gardner, fellow Kerry crew-member, both deny going into Cambodia Christmas Eve. So Kerry now says that his memory, while seared, was seared imprecisely. That he did go into Cambodia on Christmas Eve, but it was in January or February. And that he forgot to mention this in his journal because he was at Sa Dec -- 50 miles from Cambodia -- when he invaded Cambodia on Christmas Eve. (Kerry can only be in two places at once.)
Gardner and Hoffman are part of the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose devastating TV ad, airing in key battleground states, is giving the Kerry folks conniption fits. The book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, co-authored by John O'Neill, who succeeded Kerry as Swift-Boat captain, lays it all out in meticulous detail. Through exhaustive documentation, it shreds Kerry's claims apart into tiny fragments and seriously calls into question his character and credibility. The book is the No. 1 best-seller in America. The Kerry people say the veterans cited in the book served far, far from Kerry (like a few feet away in the boat right next to Kerry's).
The book notes that "all the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command" contend that "Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone" where he said he went, when he said he went. The Kerry folks insist Kerry did invade Cambodia, crossing the Mekong River which separated Vietnam and Cambodia before Nixon moved the Mekong River many miles away from the border just to make Kerry look bad.
Kerry maintains that only someone with extensive, four-month combat experience, like him, has the skill to lead a nation to war (now we know why FDR bungled WWII). Having made his seared Vietnam service the center-piece of his campaign, Kerry is stunned why anyone would raise a ruckus just because he can't remember if it was Christmas or not, if it was Cambodia or not, if it was Nixon or not.
Last week, he spoke to a convention of minority journalists where, for the first time, he criticized Bush's immediate response to 9/11. He criticized it for not being immediate enough. (Three years after 9/11, Kerry just discovered he didn't agree with Bush's response to 9/11. I question the timing of this.) Kerry said he would not have spent 7 minutes reading to those elementary school children. Instead, he'd have moved quickly and decisively to spend 40 minutes hanging out with Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid realizing "nobody could think." It's an inspiring account of heroism Kerry shared with Larry King on July 8. All this was seared in his memory.
Anyway, that's...
My two cents
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