John Kerry: “No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan and a stand-still-and-lose strategy in Iraq.”
Like Al Gore before him, John Kerry waited too long to take the gloves off against the right-wing smear machine. If he had responded like this to the Swifties, he would be working from the Oval Office rather than the Senate today.
President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week’s midterm elections.
The last week of this campaign has seen the Republicans dredge the cesspool for attacks in a desperate attempt to bamboozle the American people into letting them keep their Congressional majorities. Is it any wonder that the administration, which has spent the last six years demonizing their political opponents and scaring Americans into voting for them, would redouble their efforts at this juncture?
It is pathetic that Mr. Bush and his friends cannot recognize that we are all Americans, regardless of our political affiliation or our views on his policies. And it is good reason to force them to deal with a Congressional majority representing the views of those Americans they have demonized for so long.
I certainly hope that on November 7th, the American voters tell them they have had enough.
Again, let’s be honest with ourselves. Racism is one of the key building blocks of Republican politics in the United States. Don’t look at me with a straight face and tell me you don’t realize that’s true. That doesn’t mean that all Republicans are racists. Far from it. It doesn’t mean that a lot of Republicans don’t wish the stain wasn’t part of their party’s recent political heritage. They do. But racism and race-baiting is the hold card Republicans take into every election. When times are good, guys like Mehlman ‘reach out’ to blacks and Latinos to try to take the edge off their opposition to the Republican officeholders. But when things get rough the card gets played. And pretty much every time.
For those who are not up to speed about what this is all about, in the Senate race between Harold Ford (Democrat, who is black) and Bob Corker (Republican, white) in Tennessee, the Republican National Committee put out a race-baiting television ad. The Corker campaign then put out a radio spot where items about Ford were backgrounded with “jungle drums.” In both cases, it is clear that the ads were appealing to racist stereotypes and the racist legacy of the South in order to try to save this Senate seat for the Republicans.
This isn’t news to me. I’ve written about the Republicans’ dirty little secret on many occasions. But that doesn’t make it any less despicable when they drop down to that level again.
Corker will probably win this campaign because of his racist message, although it is my hope that the good people of Tennessee will see the garbage that this is and reject it - and him. And that very well may allow the Republicans to hold onto the Senate. A fact which should make every member of the party of Lincoln ashamed of the role that they have given to racism in their party.
And don’t EVEN get me started about Rush Limbaugh making fun of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s Disease.
The fact is, the modern Republican party has repudiated all of its values in order to win elections. For their sake, as well as our own, we owe it to them to send them home from Washington so they can re-think that position.The protest wasn’t led by any union group. Rather, it was instigated by two department managers, Guillermo Vasquez and Rosie Larosa. The department managers were not affected directly by the changes, but they felt that the company had gone too far with certain new policies. Among them were moves to cut the hours of full-time employees from 40 hours a week to 32 hours, along with a corresponding cut in wages, and to compel workers to be available for shifts around the clock.
In addition, the shifts would be decided not by managers, but by a computer at company headquarters. Employees could find themselves working 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. one week and noon to 9 p.m. the next. “So workers cannot pick up their children after school everyday, and part-timers cannot keep another job because they can be called to work anytime,” says Vasquez.
The Times has an article today about evangelicals worrying that teenagers are turning away from evanglicalism:
Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.
If we are simply teaching our teenagers that the faith is a list of “don’ts,” as reflected in the quote above, then it is not surprising that we are losing them. The fact is this: the gospel has no power if it is merely a self-help tool to keep us from doing naughty things. While I don’t mean to trivialize the quest for obedience reflected in those “don’ts,” it simply isn’t something worthy living for.
Jesus gave us something worth living (and dying) for. The call of the cross is the call to radical love and radical communion with God and our fellow humanity. It is the call to be a transformer of the spiritual, political, and economic realms of the world. It is the call into relationship with one who truly accepts us as we are and by doing so helps us accept others as they are.
We do our kids no favor if we teach them a half-hearted “gospel” which merely helps them live a little better in our fallen world. Instead, we must insist on living out with them the true gospel which challenges the isolation of our society with a call to radical community. One which does not accept the concept that one third of humanity must live in extreme poverty. One that cries with the mothers around the world who have lost their children to a world gone mad with violence.
In short, we need to teach them to deny themselves, pick up their crosses, and follow Jesus. For it is the only way to life. And I suspect, it is the only thing that will convince them that Jesus is worth living for.
And the only way we can teach them is by doing it ourselves. Something which the American church has largely failed to do in our current era of abundance.
