Alternate Entries

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

A while back, I wrote about my friend Marnie's quixotic quest to convince Barbara Boxer to stand up for holding Dubya accountable for the mess he's created. Today, in the wake of the bottom-feeding, Swift boat nonsense, I decided I needed to jump in as well, at least for the moment. So this is the letter I sent to Senator Boxer this morning:

Dear Senator Boxer:

My friend, Marnie Webb, has been writing you, more or less daily, encouraging you to take aggressive action to hold President Bush responsible for the morally reprehensible and legally uncertain (lying to Congress is still against the law, no?) manner in which he has "led" this country in its insane war against Iraq. Mostly I've seen this as a quixotic quest on my friend's part: just, but unlikely to bear fruit.

But I have to say, Karl Rove and company's recent foray into the familiar territory of character assassination by remote control has just, how to say it, put me over the edge. As Josh Marshall puts it a recent post to his blog:

The current debate about these two men's military service has put the spotlight on physical courage. But that really is a side issue in this campaign, if we're talking substance. The real issue isn't physical bravery but moral cowardice.

President Bush is an examplar of that quality in spades. And it cuts directly to his failures as president. Forget about thirty years ago, just think about the last three years.

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A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

As I've been saying here for the last couple days, the issue isn't that Bush ducked service in Vietnam. It's that he tries to smear other people's meritorious service without taking responsibility for what he's doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him. Again, that image of McCain calling him on his shameless antics and his look of fear, his look of feeling trapped.

So I guess what I'm saying here is that as your constituent, I am encouraging you to help George W. Bush with his moral cowardice problem, help him learn the thing that he should have learned in kindergarten: that you have to take responsibility for your actions. All your actions. And particularly those actions that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American citizens, and thousands of others, all of them based on a lie.

Following Marnie, I ask: raise your hand, make a speech, stand on your desk, hold up a sign, wave a flag, buy a doll, shed a tear, stomp your feet, sing a song, tap out Morse code, write a letter, have some hope, do a good deed, pet a dog, yell, put your left foot in, shake it all about, swear, kiss a baby, buy a T-shirt, make some candy and demand that the President sit in front of a joint session of Congress to answer a very basic question: what the fudge were you doing? And then hold him accountable.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Ellen Evans
Oakland, CA

posted by jeev | 10:54 AM |