Kerry's Undeclared War is a must read!

[MISSDem]

Kerry's Undeclared War
By MATT BAI

Published: October 10, 2004


s New York and Washington were under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, a film crew happened to come upon John Kerry leaving the Capitol. The brief moment of footage, included in a BBC documentary called ''Clear the Skies,'' tells us something, perhaps, about Kerry in a crisis. The camera captures Congressional aides and visitors, clearly distraught and holding onto one another, streaming down the back steps of the Capitol building in near panic, following the bellowed instructions of anxious police. Off to one side of the screen, there is Kerry, alone, his long legs carrying him calmly down the steps, his neck craning toward the sky, as if he were watching a gathering rainstorm. His face and demeanor appear unworried. Kerry could be a man lost in his thoughts who just happens to have wandered onto the set of a disaster film.

''I remember looking up at the sky as I walked down the steps,'' Kerry told me recently, when I asked him about the film clip. He said that he and other members of the Senate's Democratic leadership had just watched on television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and shortly after that they heard the sonic boom of an explosion and saw, through a large window, the black smoke rise from the Pentagon. ''We'd had some warning that there was some airplane in the sky. And I remember seeing a great big plane -- I think it was a 747 or something -- up there, but it wasn't moving in a way that, you know, I was particularly concerned. I remember feeling a rage, a huge anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war.'''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/magazine/10KERRY.html?pagewanted=1

[pacalo]

1. I've read this article before & it is quite good.

It's time to put an adult back into the WH -- and a more lucid, credible one at that.

[MISSDem]

2. To me, it just shows another instance where delayed

gratification is in out best interest. To do it Kerry's way may take longer but it will be lasting. Unfortunately, a lot of folks like to go in with guns blazing - to quote on woman, "I like the violence".

[Hello_Kitty]

3. Wow! I am more impressed by Sen. Kerry than ever before

And I'm that much more aggravated by the way Bushco and the media whores are spinning that one comment he made about making it more of a nuisance. I doubt the blowdried airheads on the news channels even read the article b/f they started flogging that talking point.

[Wind Dancer]

4. Words of peace and wisdom!

"''We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days,'' Kerry told me during a rare break from campaigning, in Seattle at the end of August. ''And that's all about your diplomacy.''

When I suggested that effecting such changes could take many years, Kerry shook his head vehemently and waved me off.

''Yeah, it is long-term, but it can be dramatically effective in the short term. It really can be. I promise you.'' He leaned his head back and slapped his thighs. ''A new presidency with the right moves, the right language, the right outreach, the right initiatives, can dramatically alter the world's perception of us very, very quickly.

''I know Mubarak well enough to know what I think I could achieve in the messaging and in the press in Egypt,'' Kerry went on. ''And, similarly, with Jordan and with King Abdullah, and what we can do in terms of transformation in the economics of the region by getting American businesspeople involved, getting some stability and really beginning to proactively move in those ways. We just haven't been doing any of this stuff. We've been stunningly disengaged, with the exception of Iraq."

more..................