Feeling dejected? Yearning for a leader? Watch Clark tonight.

Wes Clark
C-Span
8:50 EDT

:patriot:

C-Span 2. The website does not list it.

I think!

"Just when the world is being dragged into the death spiral of an unending cycle of violence by a vision-less, coldblooded collection of think-tank warriors goose-stepping their way into the new millennium with a stunning lack of respect for human rights, the environment, or international law, along comes a man with the proven credentials of intelligence, integrity, and courage singularly equipped by his spirit and experience to lead us out of this mess. Don't listen to what the lying liars say about him; listen to what he says. Wesley Clark is a prayer answered."


I guess my background and being a Rhodes Scholar had led to expectations that I’d go in a different direction. Do something responsible—be Secretary of State."

Which he might well have done had it not been for Vietnam. "Life was so different before Vietnam, and the assassinations of all the visionaries," Kristofferson says. "The scary thing about it was that everybody J. Edgar Hoover hated, it looks like, died. The experience had to change you. I was a totally different person before Vietnam than I was after. My nickname in college was Straight Arrow.

"Early on, when the anti-war movement first got going, I wasn’t part of it at all, because my friends were over in Vietnam. But now I respect what those people did--Joan Baez and the rest--because they were right. We didn’t belong there. And they weren’t protesting against the soldiers, they were protesting against the sons-of-bitches that sent them there."

When Kristofferson, who was serving a five-year Army hitch, did still believe our soldiers belonged there, he asked to be transferred from Germany to Vietnam. Instead, he was assigned to teach English literature at West Point. That’s when he resigned his commissions, traveled to Nashville to pursue a career as a songwriter, and began to listen to—and believe passionately in—what Baez and other protesters, including disillusioned Vietnam vets, were saying.
Years later, when he was on the road during the Gulf War, Kristofferson did some protesting of his own. "I may have been the only entertainer out there who was talking against it, and I was getting picketed for it. The whole country was waving flags and we’re bombing the people of Baghdad around the clock. And the suits like Kissinger are saying, ‘We can’t pull our troops now; we’d lose face.’"

They just flashed this up while I was watching some other speakers.