John Kerry is conservative choice for President
October 22, 2004
Democrats have unified as rarely seen before and thrown their full support behind John Kerry. They should. They have a very decent, thoughtful and personally conservative man for a candidate: reasonable, patient, experienced man in the tempest of a chaotic, complex and unpredictable world. In the face of an opponent who has perhaps done his best, but whose resoluteness is marred by clearly unexamined decision making, Kerry looks like a man who could help pull the country from its present malaise. The ''instinctual,'' ''from the gut,'' ''faith-based,'' ''always resolute'' policy leadership practiced by President Bush, we submit, has raised a serious wall of ill will against America around the globe, one that augurs badly for positive American leadership on the international stage. Stretching the national treasury while ensnaring the country's best men and women in a costly and unnecessary war, we face a bloody and unfocused struggle with no end in sight.
Beyond the flip-flop image that Karl Rove's command center painted on Kerry, intoning manipulated numbers from congressional votes, and the brutal and deceptive Swiftboat slander campaign by disgruntled Republican operatives from the Nixon era, the real John Kerry has impressed as a seasoned elected politician. He has communicated clearly his commitment to lead the American people from a position of studied and well-informed planning, under strategies that include a higher intellectual rigor. Kerry, the only actual war hero in the race, a decorated officer who faced deadly combat in his time and then came back to a courageous and risky role of war critic, in short, appears ready for a major role in international affairs.
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The intolerance we see full-grown and going full-tilt from the American right wing, we believe, is so out of line that it is harming American public life and is destructive to democratic practice. Even as we secure our homelands from terror tactics by specific political groups, and strive to quiet the specter of generations of hate in the rest of the world, American fundamentalism is proving more problem than solution. American close-mindedness can be as hateful as any other and potentially just as dangerous. (As American Indians can attest one need look no further than all the innocent victims of an unnecessary war.) This is detrimental to the much-needed clear-thinking American intelligence, both for the agencies charged with that task and for the public mind, which is seriously degraded these days by the sophisticated message manipulation that bombards it.
As a way of creating misleading headlines, operatives functioning as talk-show hosts for media moguls has taken over the political airwaves and it is a wind overwhelmingly blowing from the right. Cold and rapier-like, this movement has destroyed long-established notions of what is fair and proper, what is ethical (and used to be legally prescribed) - fair and balanced information on our television channels. The movement, which has caused some journalism media owners to sell their souls, instead completely saturates news programming with manipulated indoctrination of the highest order. These days, Sinclair Broadcasting Group competes with Fox News as the administration's favorite strategic partner and major news conglomerates quaver at the slightest pressure from the Republican government. The present media manipulation effort by right-wing ideologues with their purchasing power and political manipulation is the most severe ever launched at the American people.
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096409729&CFID=90733&CFTOKEN=75157762 
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