I wasn't to sure where to post this:shrug:
http://www.rosannecash.com/monthly.htmlThe most epic bait-and-switch in American history was accomplished, and I offer my congratulations to Karl Rove, because manipulation of that level is truly an art form. While the conservative Christian population was whipped into hysteria by a masterful play on their fear and loathing—of gays, of women who want control of their own bodies, of the so-called ‘liberal elite’— and made to believe that John Kerry was out personally recruiting same-sex couples to walk down the aisle, the administration slipped right through on a platform of lies, duplicity, corporate interests, a breathtaking indifference to the basic tenets of the Constitution, environmental irresponsibility, a staggering deficit, an economy stretched to breaking by the military budget and the tax cuts for the wealthy, pitiful health care coverage, and an overall callous disregard for the middle class. They actually got 56 million people to vote against their own best interests, to insure more tax breaks for people and corporations who don’t need it, just to avoid the prospect of having to see two men tie the knot. (Oh yeah. Thanks for the tax break, Mr. President, but my son’s kindergarten teacher was the one who REALLY needed it).
The Republican party shamefully uses September 11th as an emotional grease to finesse every agenda, related or unrelated, that they want to promote, or to explain away every wrongdoing they want to excuse. I live in lower Manhattan. On September 11th, 2001, I was downtown, and the first plane to hit the towers flew right over my head as I sat in a parent-teacher meeting at my daughter’s school. I watched the towers burn from the street outside her school. I was one of the grateful moms from that school who helped feed the 200 extra policemen from around the country who generously volunteered and came to our local precinct, and camped there for several weeks. I lived with the acrid smell from ground zero wafting around my home and my children’s schools until nearly Christmas. My son, a toddler at the time, participated in a young children’s project run by Columbia University to gauge the degree of respiratory problems suffered by downtown pre-school children as a result of the smoke and particulates from the 9/11 attack. The results were discouraging, to say the least. I lived, and still live, with a constant background anxiety that we will be attacked again, as Dick Cheney and Tom Ridge assure us we will. Whenever a low-flying plane goes overhead, or I hear a military jet, my heart still stops. I tell you all this to explain why, as a New Yorker, I feel utterly betrayed by my President. He said, in the days following the attacks, that the number one priority was to catch Osama bin Laden. And just before the election, more than three years after 9/11, with over 400 billion dollars tied up in military operations in Iraq, and no end in sight to that war, bin Laden appears on television, not in Iraq, but looking like he just spent a couple of weeks at Club Med.
During the Republican convention a lot of visitors came to New York for the first time. In the New York Times, there were many interviews with delegates to get their impressions of the city, and I must say that most were complimentary. Generally, a mutually respectful attitude prevailed. But one gentleman, from Iowa, said something that just stunned me. He was complaining about the ‘liberal elite’ (that phrase again. Can we come up with something else to villify Democrats who drink white wine and enjoy a good discussion?) and New York in general, and said that ‘New Yorkers could learn a thing or two about patriotism from people in the heartland’. I couldn’t believe that someone could come to our city, which had been attacked by terrorists, and be so ignorant and disrespectful. Did he not see the firefighters and police officers who went into the burning buildings to sacrifice their lives? Did he not see the best in all of us in this city come to the surface under the most trying circumstances? Did he not see the American flag raised in the midst of the destruction? Is THIS what people in the heartland think of us, that we don’t know the ‘right’ way to be patriots?
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