NY Observer: After Blundering Bush Years, John Kerry for President

[kskiska]

(snip)

It’s hard to believe that only four years have passed since Mr. Bush left Texas and his callow past to assume the post of leader of the free world. So much has changed since the Supreme Court anointed Mr. Bush as President in late 2000. Little of that change has been for the better, and the America of Inauguration Day, 2001, now seems to belong to a vanished era.

(snip)

Before Sept. 11, this generation believed that the stupidities, absurdities, corruptions and venalities of modern American politics were the new business as usual. Before Sept. 11, the President of the United States, the indispensable man in American life, could still afford to be a kind of imperial Li’l Abner, brave, good-natured and oblivious. Bill Clinton persuaded us that Presidential intelligence was a plus but character didn’t matter because, hell, everybody was getting rich, and the greatest national frenzy was triggered by the illicit act of a President with the intellect of Woodrow Wilson and the impulses of Warren Harding.

So, to succeed Mr. Clinton, the nation sort of elected the ne’er-do-well son of a former President, a Connecticut preppie in Stetson boots, figuring that we could take our chances with him because, really, how much damage could he do? As a personality, he had an advantage on his stiff opponent, Al Gore. His ignorance of world events seemed inconsequential as long as the economy kept creating wealth and jobs. He was another example of what the age seemed to be creating, a personality with a slogan: "I’m a uniter, not a divider," with a wink toward those who knew he meant exactly the opposite.

(snip)

The Observer endorses Mr. Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards.

Mr. Kerry is nobody’s idea of an ideal campaigner, but his record and his rhetoric demonstrate that he understands, as Moynihan did, just how dangerous a place our planet can be. Indeed, it is so dangerous that only a fool would argue that our historic allies are our enemies, that civil liberties are expendable, and that public information is dangerous. Yet those have been exactly the arguments of the Bush Presidency. This nation is in no position to do what an anonymous Bush aide suggested: create our own reality. We are not that powerful; no nation is. A fool’s paradise can also be a fool’s purgatory.

Contrary to the Bush campaign’s desperate slanders, John Kerry does understand that the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. He knows—how could he not?—that a ruthless enemy wishes to bring death and destruction not only to America, but to all that is not fundamentally Islamic. Like all of us, he yearns to beat this clear and present danger into a sidelined beast. Achieving that goal will require more than arms. It will require the rest of the world.

more…
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage5.asp

[opihimoimoi]

1. I just hope Kerry pulls it off.

The Shrub has done far too much damage to us since taking office under dubious conditions