speech bit

[kandrathe]

that one crazy Democrat

I loved Zell Miller's speech(transcript). As neither partial to elephants or donkeys I can relate to a politician that shoots from the hip and calls it like he sees it.

What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?  I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom
over tyranny.

Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric.  Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.

I think he's touching on the issues, actually. Here some excerpts from Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Remarks by Georgia Senator Zell Miller at Democrats for Bush Rollout;

But after listening to Senator Kerry over the last year or two – after hearing the agenda he’s laid out for our country – I cannot support him in his race for the presidency. There are too many issues about which John Kerry and I disagree. And there are too few similarities between John Kerry and the great Democratic leaders I’ve known.

Senator Kerry doesn’t make any secret of the fact that he wants to bring more money into Washington so that he can decide how to spend it.  In his first one hundred days in office, John Kerry’s massive health care plan would force him to raise taxes by as much as $900 billion. And the only way he’s going to get that kind of money is if he reaches into the wallet of every man and woman in America.

For decades, the Democratic Party maintained peace through strength. We worked with Republicans to ensure that freedom and democracy would not falter in the face of any threat.  These days it seems like some people in my party are motivated more by partisan politics than by national interest.  John Kerry has the wrong idea about how our country should respond to the threat of terrorism. He says the war on terror should be mainly a law enforcement action.  Now I know that an army of lawyers can be scary sometimes, but it does not compare to the Army of the United States – not to mention the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and all of our reservists and National Guardsmen who are fighting under the flag of the United States of America.

Remember it was President John F. Kennedy who told the world: ‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’   I think John Kerry made the right decision when he voted to authorize the war in Iraq. But then he went out on the campaign trail and started spending too much time with Howard Dean. And he came back to Washington and voted against the $87 billion the troops need for protective armor, combat pay, and better health care. That’s the worst kind of indecisiveness, and the wrong leadership at this critical moment in history.

I know it's the nature of the beast, but it's no kind of dialogue. Two large groups of televised sycophants, cheering like morons for speakers who are all saying essentially the same meaningless things that they always have, has left me with a rather hopeless feeling of disgust. I don't think that I'll bother any further with watching these phonies pander to the lowest common denominator.

These are pep rallies. That is their intent, to rally the repective parties to make the last big push to the finish line.