My Minute with Randi

I just sent this email to Mr. York. I sent it also to Mr. Fertik and Democrats.com for review and consideration.

"E.L Doctorow, (NYU, "Ragtime") was villified and "booed" off the stage at Hofstra University at a 2004 Commencement exercise when he criticized G.W. Bush and his administration's policies. It has become increasingly clear to me that G.W. Bush may be triumphing in a void -'the void that exists in his mind, his heart and his soul'. He will not meet with Cindy. He has no answers. He never had. He never will. He operates in a mental, psychological and spiritual abyss. His obvious arrogance is thusly trumped up with the support of the neocon stalwarts who devise and contrive the policy that keeps his arrogance visible and his "in your face" tactics consistent. And so the cycle continues. Many people have bought into it, but the numbers of those who "see" and "feel" the Truth are ever-increasing.

This morning I received an email from a friend in the Caribbean who found this analysis from Doctorow. I found it to be, as usual, eloquent, direct and right on target. I forward it to you for your review and consideration.

As a postscript, let me say that, those who have the Truth on their side have the ability and strength to maintain calm and peace in their expose'. The vandalizing of crosses, the hatefilled firing of gunshots and people who extol nationalism over the Absolute Truths of universal laws of humankind are examples of how false truths expose themselves with time.
The Truth is One and no one's connivery (or arrogance) can escape it.

Please find the writings of E.L. Doctorow here below ....

peace,

Jacqueline Jill-Rito, teacher/advisor
Bethpage High School
Bethpage, NY 11714

"Subject: Fw: E.L.Doctorow on the War in Iraq

I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what
death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year
olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for
the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He
knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of
choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost
more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the
mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the
table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies
strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd,
smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He
doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during
the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a
moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the
ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles
an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being
because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal
responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who
wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers
or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a
terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the
inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... They come to his
desk as a political liability which is why the press is not
permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he
regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to
war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not
regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of
his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that
rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.

So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have
fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he
did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to
listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that
you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it
is the only option; you go not because you want to but because
you have to.

This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to
cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much.
This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for
only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use
that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war
will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader.
The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And
so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not
sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and
children.

He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the
families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five
million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty
percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for
the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working
people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at
time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how
many people in this country this President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is
relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their
tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is
polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and
that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to
save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of
their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is
actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional
class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God
and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are
doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I
remember the millions of people here and around the world who
marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously
aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national
borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war
anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over
the world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions
of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope
of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of
democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest
democratic republic in history was turning its back on the
future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance
the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the
kind
of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people,
now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no
other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president
the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our
malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the
kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our
responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The
trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic
trouble.

Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather
report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that
prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of
America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the
constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal
economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of
such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow"

I did notice that they dropped the "global struggle against extremism" phrase pretty quickly. Guess it didn't poll well with the wingnuts, because extremism IS their agenda.