Don’t Reward Kerry’s Betrayal
So John Kerry’s giving the commencement speech at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. The college’s press release reads: “Thanks to record student voter participation, Kenyon College was among the last polling places in the nation to close on Election Day 2004.”
Talk about spin. The reality is that 1300 students registered to vote, and there were only 2 voting machines instead of the 13 required by an Ohio court decision, based on 1 per 100 voters. At worst there should have been 6 or 7 machines there, even if counties pleaded poverty. And on Election Day 2004, one machine broke down. Matthew Segal, a Kenyon College student, testified about the eleven-hour wait to vote and how the polls closed around four in the morning when he addressed Rep. John Conyers and the Minority members of the House Judiciary Committee, who held hearings in on December 13, 2004 in Columbus to determine what had gone wrong with the Ohio vote.
Meanwhile, a few miles away on Election Day 2004, at the pro-Bush right-wing Mt. Vernon Nazarene College, there were plenty of voting machines and no wait. Scores of people illegally registered to vote at the school’s business office, according to records at the Licking County Board of Elections. Emails flying around that not-for-profit institution endorsed Bush for President, a clear violation of IRS laws.
And what did Kerry do? Nothing. He was missing in action. He packed his bags and took his $7 million fund to “count every vote” and refused to fight. He proved in time of crisis to be both gutless and spineless, relying on advice to concede from a probate attorney, Daniel Hoffheimer, who worked for the Republican Taft family law firm in Cincinnati. Kerry, an elite member of Yale’s Skull and Bones society, was contemptuous of advice from civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson and the thousands of voices from the grassroots who had been ripped off, repressed and suppressed.
Kerry betrayed his vast legions of supporters, who worked their asses off for months to change the occupant of the White House, and he was indifferent to the plight and suffering of the tens of thousands of disenfranchised poor and minority voters who waited in the central city of Columbus between four and seven hours to vote. Kerry’s lack of nerve should not be rewarded with allowing him to speak at Kenyon.
The worst part is that Kerry has the nerve to keep sending us emails like we want him to run again. Like hell we do. He had his chance and he blew it. Thanks goodness for the Green and Libertarian candidates Cobb and Badnarik, who fought the stolen votes even when Kerry left town after November 2004.
When God gives you lemons, make lemonade.
We, on the “fringe”, never get to implement our ideal socialization except on the ground.
The ground is swelling.
We don’t want John Kerry to run again, and we don’t want Hilliary Clinton either.
Next time we want a real progessive like Russ Feingold. I applaud his comments yesterday on Specter’s moving the marriage amendment meeting to a smaller room on Capitol Hill to keep out us riffraff – ordinary Americans.