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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (44949)	8/24/2004 7:40:17 PM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

I liked the last question: What would you tell a good-hearted citizen who is seriously considering casting their vote for Ralph Nader? The thrill of Naderism is in telling your Democratic pals that you're thinking about ralphing and seeing them get all flushed and earnest and wring their hands and roll their eyes and moan. Actually going into the voting booth and ralphing is no great pleasure, compared to the remorse you'll feel if Mr. Bush is elected and fresh horrors begin to unfold and the nadir is reached and the Bushies keep going down, down, down. I say, Stand tall for Ralph, wear his button, wave his flag, put on his cologne in the morning, be as ralphic as you like, but in that private sacred moment, make your X for the Man.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (44949)	8/24/2004 10:17:41 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Intellectual Capital: Michael McGough / Bush-bashing, British-style It isn't just on stage that the president and his circle are portrayed as dangerous extremists <font size=3> Monday, August 23, 2004 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette LONDON -- There is no curtain call at the conclusion of "Guantanamo," Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's play about post-Sept. 11 detainees at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba. For the accomplished actors in the play to take their bows would put the audience in mind of Prospero's parting words in "The Tempest": Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air. The whole point of "Guantanamo," a proudly political play, is that the story it tells is real, drawn from interviews with, and letters from, detainees -- most of them British -- and their relatives. Two of the principal figures in the play are among five Britons who were released from Guantanamo in February. Instead of a curtain call, the play ends with an exhortation for Britons to reclaim their principles and end the detention without trial not only of men held by the U.S. but also of captives at two locations in Britain. Lest the playgoer be in any doubt about the message of "Guantanamo," the playbill doubles as a manifesto. One essay by a journalist from The Guardian is titled: "How Britain Forgot Justice." The playbill features film-strip like images of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is impersonated in all his smarmy smugness in the play itself. (Neither the play nor the playbill brings the audience up to date on the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled that Guantanamo detainees can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts. The playbill does note that such a ruling might be forthcoming.) In Britain as at home, Rumsfeld is a popular target. He is also the inspiration for "Stuff Happen," a forthcoming production at the National Theatre written by David Hare and inspired by the tin-eared defense secretary's reaction to reports of looting in Baghdad: "Stuff happens ... and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and do bad things." As Rumsfeld might point out if confronted with these dramatic denunciations of U.S. policy, intellectuals -- in America as well as Britain -- never have liked the Bush administration or its policies. But contempt for both Bush and the war in Iraq is not confined to left-leaning playwrights and actors. It is widespread in Britain, even among upper- and lower-case conservatives. As in America, but more so, Bush is ridiculed here for his linguistic lapses, simplistic Christianity and general goofiness. Whatever critics of the war think about Prime Minister Tony Blair, they acknowledge that he made the case for war in Iraq with an eloquence Bush is incapable of -- and part of the rap against Blair is that in doing so he provided vital cover for what would otherwise have been a go-it-alone American invasion. But it isn't just Bush's style, offensive as it is to many Britons, that has made Michael Moore a familiar face in British bookshop windows. As in "Fahrenheit 9/11," Bush's supposed stupidity is thought (however illogically) to coincide with artful mendacity about the reason for the war in Iraq. And here it is possible to posit a difference between American and British Bush-bashing. The notion that Bush's harshest American critics are shocked, shocked by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction is ahistorical: Many of these critics never believed that WMDs were what impelled Bush to invade Iraq, and they said so from the start -- offering as alternative motives oil, Israel, even revenge for Saddam's plan to assassinate "my Dad." In Britain the political equation was different. Unlike Bush, Blair seemed sincere in emphasizing the threat posed by Saddam's supposed WMDs. For Americans, pro- and anti-Bush, weapons of mass destruction were one justification for war. For many Britons, it was the only justification. These days Blair insists that the failure to find WMDs does not invalidate the war. But WMDs loomed large in the British case for war -- and their apparent non-existence drives the disaffection here. That disaffection is also fed by the perennial fear that the United States is calling the geopolitical tune and the United Kingdom is obligingly dancing along. In the 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was derided as Ronald Reagan's "poodle." That canine characterization is kind compared to the way some of Blair's critics describe the current prime minister's supposedly sychophantic relationship with Bush. Blair has even been accused of preferring Bush to John Kerry, despite the fact that the Democratic Party and Blair's Labor Party are traditionally regarded as kindred causes. Last week, in a column in The Guardian, Labor Party executive committee member Mark Seddon recounted this question posed to him by an American unionist supporting Kerry: "Tony Blair! When ya gettin' rid of him?" Only a Briton might suspect that Blair's perceived closeness to Bush would hurt Kerry in the November election. But there might be a less fantastic connection between the American election and Blair's future. If Bush is an albatross around Blair's neck, a Kerry victory could remove it. post-gazette.com