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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2200)	6/3/2003 10:32:51 PM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 10965

S[ean] P[enn], An Honest Man Great timing of that remark - Message 18999281 LPS5

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2200)	6/4/2003 12:00:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Kerry Wins Backing of Henry Cisneros story.news.yahoo.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2200)	6/4/2003 12:22:17 AM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 10965

"An Open Letter to Sean Penn" Posted by Doc Farmer Monday, June 02, 2003 Mr. Penn, I'm currently suffering through your 4,117-word diatribe as published on page A-11 of the New York Times. It took some doing to find it, since I don't subscribe to that particular rag, but you were vain enough to publish it on your website (http://www.seanpenn.com/kilroy.pdf). As a writer, I understand that kind of vanity very well. It is a vanity we share. And I hope it is the only one. I understand you blew $125 grand to print this. Which should tell you about the quality of your writing. Hell, they PAY Maureen Dowd at the Times. And you had to pay THEM? Think about it. I don't have the space here to rebut you point for point, Sean. My editor likes me to keep it under 1,000 words, don'tchaknow. So I'll make this short, but not necessarily sweet. What is your major malfunction? I know that as a member of the Hollywood crowd, you and your fellows are severely dendritically challenged. I know that you lean so far to the left that you're in constant danger of falling over, which might explain the level of synaptic degradation that you appear to suffer from. But even you understood that Saddam was an evil son-of-a-so-and-so. And yet you cozied up to the schmuck before a major war. You KNEW that he'd use your visit for propaganda purposes. That's why people referred to you as a traitor. And they were right. You're no better than Hanoi Jane. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy, you jerk. And don't give me that depleted uranium malarkey either, sparky. You reference numbers of cancer deaths that can't be proved. Why? Because their source was Baghdad Bob? Who took lying lessons from BOTH Clintons, it would seem. I noted that you couldn't resist taking some jabs at Dubya. You make reference to Enron, when it was really your buddy Slick Willie who was far cozier to them. You make oblique reference to Halliburton and others, raising the spectre of ''blood for oil.'' Want to find ''blood for oil'', Sean? Get Woody Allen to introduce you to his Froggy friends. You'll find lots of blood on their hands, and now-defunct oil contracts in their pockets. And then you diss Dubya's military record? I didn't serve in the military, but to the best of my knowledge, neither did you. Dubya did. Which means that he's a better man than BOTH of us. I'm sorry that your dad died. My dad is still alive. He served in Korea and Viet Nam, and did so with honour and distinction. I understand why he served, although I'll never truly understand the sacrifices he made. You still don't seem to understand the concept of honour, distinction, or service. You say you're not a Democrat, Republican, etc. I don't give a rat's rear end, quite frankly. It's quite clear what you are. A liar. A fool. A traitor. And not a very good actor, either. Your only claim to fame seems to be that you slept with Madonna. If you were dumb enough to do that, you're obviously not smart enough to claim greater political or moral awareness than the President of the United States or his many (far more moral and ethical than you) advisors. And would you care to put your college records forward, to show the universities you attended, the degrees you earned? Even your friend Slick Willie doesn't have the guts to do that. And I'd doubt that you could hold a candle, intellectually, to Dubya on his worst day. There are now 25 million people who are freed from tyranny and oppression, thanks to Dubya and the coalition of 50 countries he put together to end their suffering under Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party. U.S./Coalition forces served with merit, and did everything possible to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. You, on the other hand, supported a regime that maximized civilian oppression, suffering, torture, imprisonment, rape, and murder. And you're a better person than Dubya? Puh-LEEZE! Face it, Penn, the only thing you've got going for you is that you happen to have a talent for memorizing somebody else's words and spewing them out in front of a camera. You certainly don't have much in the way of a talent for the written word of your own, if your rambling harangue is any indication. You ask in your article that we ''celebrate'' all our soldiers. The best way you could do that, Sean, is to shut the hell up. They don't appreciate your support of leftist causes. They don't like your attitude regarding their Commander-in -Chief. They are against your collaboration with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime. Here's a bit of advice. The next time you get it into your mind to publish something, perhaps it will be shorter and clearer. Like an apology to the American People. And to the Iraqi people as well. Yours in disgust, Doc Farmer Doha, Qatar P.S. You should probably know that ''Kilroy'' didn't bring down the twin towers. ''Kilroy'' was an American Soldier. 9/11 was caused by Islamofacists, not Americans. Try to remember that. chronwatch.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2200)	6/4/2003 12:27:04 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Fabrications as Magic Potion ___________________________ by Pierre Tristam Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 by the Daytona Beach New Journal (Florida) Toward the end of "Rambo III," the last of the great war comedies, Rambo and his latest POW catch are surrounded by about half the Soviet army, somewhere in Afghanistan. All seems lost. But poet-warrior that he is, Sylvester Stallone's Homeric hero fires a two-worded obscenity at the oncoming Russians and starts shooting his howitzer of a gun even as a monsoon of bullets and artillery rains around his magnificent pectorals. It's a terrifically funny bit of war fiction that looked impossible to top -- until that front-page account in The Washington Post of April 3 about Pfc. Jessica Lynch: How she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers" after Iraqis ambushed her company, "firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition," how she "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her," how she was "fighting to the death," how "she did not want to be taken alive." And all that just in the first three paragraphs of the story. The Post has been gloating over The New York Times' scandal of fabricated and ghost-reported stories. But it has yet to print a correction about the reporting on Lynch's capture and the subsequently invented stabbing she suffered, the bedside slap, a-la-Patton, by an Iraqi officer, and the allusions to torture ("Special Operations forces found what looked like a 'prototype' Iraqi torture chamber in the hospital's basement"). First the BBC, then the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, among others, have corrected the Pentagon's Rambo account of Lynch's capture and rescue. At this point it's doubtful whether the 19-year-old West Virginian fired a single shot, because her injuries were the result of a pretty bad vehicle accident. No gunshot wounds, no stab wounds, no torture. To the contrary: The Iraqi hospital staff where she was kept seems to have accounted for much bravery and compassion, treating her fractures, donating blood for her and protecting her from roving thugs. She "sipped juice and ate biscuits," reports the Tribune. But that version of the story didn't fit the narrative the Pentagon wanted. If the fabrication of the Jessica Lynch story is a harmless lie, it is nevertheless emblematic of the Bush administration's sordid deceptions that led to the very lethal, very costly Iraq war and its equally pointless aftermath. For the media, Vietnam had its Five O'Clock Follies. But Iraq was (and still is) an around-the-clock sham. At least in Vietnam the press learned to call trickery by name. Regarding Iraq, and admirable exceptions aside, much of the press remains a stooge, stage-managed as surely as that $250,000 set built at Central Command Headquarters in Qatar, where the press corps gets its daily fix of fictions. The storytelling started quickly after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush White House, clueless until then, discovered that waging war was its only chance to stay relevant. Any war. Afghanistan wouldn't be enough. The White House went to work concocting an Iraqi threat that hadn't existed for more than a decade. It invented that al-Qaida connection with Saddam Hussein. It invented a nuclear threat from Baghdad, too, thanks to forged papers plucked from the Internet. It invented that "road map" to peace that went from Baghdad to Jerusalem by way of Oz. Once the war began, it turned out Iraqis were not dying to hug and kiss the Anglo-American invaders. They were merely dying. And the war's false finale was no less contrived than the Jessica Lynch story: The toppling of Saddam's statue on Paradise Square was a staged gig by a few dozen Iraqi extras in the shadow of American tanks. But the mother of all inventions -- the one about chemical and biological weapons -- continues to metastasize hilarious variations. If it isn't a rusty truck from the Sumerian era that could have been a bioweapons lab, it's the absolutely trustworthy testimony of an anonymous ex-Saddam official whose friend's supervisor's second cousin by marriage might have once seen a fishy yellow substance stored in suspicious barrels in an Ali Baba cave that may or may not have been part of the plot in Sheherazade's 12th night. For all this, we're at war in a land that never should have mattered more to us than its mirages and sand piles. Still, the venal inventions continue. Our top gun president depends on them. Bush out-fabricated all fabrication with his May 1 carrier-jacking of the USS Abraham Lincoln so he could pretend to fly a plane onto its deck, pretend to act like the soldier he never was, pretend to call Iraq a "mission accomplished" (at least 26 American soldiers have been killed since May 1), and pretend to have made the world safer for his juvenile aphorisms about good and evil. With such a make-believe president in charge, the movies have no chance. Jessica Lynch has no chance. And Democrats, of course, have no chance -- unless they want to make rank dishonesty their trademark, too. Even Rambo has more class than that. ______________________________________ Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be contacted at ptristam@att.net © 2003 News-Journal Corporation commondreams.org

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2200)	6/4/2003 12:27:40 AM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 10965

Joe Scarborough ‘The Real Deal’ on Sean Penn’s screed newsandopinion.com \| A Hollywood liberal pays big bucks to bash President Bush and the American flag in a full page New York Times ad. If you want to know why the ad smacks of hypocrisy, here's "The Real Deal." SEAN PENN took out a $120,000 ad in today's New York Times. His 40,000-word screed reads like a term paper fueled by a combination of pot, grade A acid, and Viagra. In the ad, the star calls the American flag a "vulgar billboard" for US corporate interests. He blasts the Bush administration as tools of oil conglomerations, and says we slaughtered thousands of innocent Iraqis for no reason at all. Interestingly enough, not one of his 40,000 words mentioned the Iraqi's newfound freedom of speech, or the Shiites' freedom to worship their god as they please, or about the torture chambers Saddam forgot to show him during his Baghdad tour last year. Movie stars like Sean Penn, Danny Glover, and Susan Sarandon still don't get it. The free ride given to left-wing superstars is over. If you bash America, attack our President, compare our troops to terrorists, or say you're ashamed to be an American, you will be held accountable for your words and actions. That's not McCarthyism. That's the price of stepping into the arena that we all pay. If movie stars want to play politics, that's great. Try to change the world. But remember, they don't call it hardball for nothing. You, me, nobody gets a free pass. And it's time for some of these spoiled brats to follow the advice of Harry Truman, and live by the Democratic president's motto, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen