Bennet Kelley
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| Bennet Kelley is the former National Co-Chair of the Democratic National Committee’s young professional arm, the publisher of BushLies.net and a Santa Monica attorney. He can be reached at bennet@bennetkelley.com.)
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Articles by this Author
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SOAP BOX
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As the nation commemorates George Washington’s birthday amidst a cacophony of “President’s Day” retail promotions, we should be mindful of poet Carl Sandburg’s warning that “whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.” In this post 9/11 era of the “Patriot Act,” domestic wiretaps and dissent being labeled as “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic,” it is clear that we have “forgotten (our) hard beginnings.”
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SOAP BOX
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With baseball players reporting for spring training, this is the time of year in which fans of even the most hapless teams are hopeful that this might be their year. For Democrats, however, this air of hopefulness is limited to the baseball diamond since as they look ahead to the upcoming elections they are growing increasingly restive and fear that they will lose ground again as they have for every election since Sept. 11.
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SOAP BOX
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Like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” where Toto reveals that the “great and all powerful Oz” is a fraud, the Bush administration is similarly exposed by the pre-Katrina video of FEMA warning President Bush that a breach of New Orleans’ levees was “a very, very grave concern” — four days before he and Secretary Chertoff claimed nobody anticipated such an event.
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SOAP BOX
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Like the pennants that adorn Yankee Stadium, Republicans celebrate and promote their past victories and legends year after year. Focusing on the Reagan Legacy Project, the Republicans have achieved 74 dedications to the late president in 25 states and five countries, with Reagan National Airport in Washington being their crowning achievement. Democrats, however, ignore their legends — with the exception of John and Robert Kennedy — and, instead, are more like old-time Red Sox fans who basked in their glorious defeats.
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THE SOAP BOX
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A Missouri House Committee recently ignited debate over whether the United States was a “Christian nation” when it approved a resolution that the founding fathers “recognized a Christian God and used the principles afforded to us by him as the founding principles of our nation.”
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THE SOAP BOX
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The challenge for any Earth Day assessment of the Bush Administration’s policies is where do you begin? With a record that includes refusing to acknowledge evidence of global warming and weakening environmental laws — there is no shortage of material demonstrating this Administration’s poor stewardship of the nation’s environment.
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THE SOAP BOX
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Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo most likely will celebrate Cinco de Mayo by continuing to sound the alarm that the nation is awash in a wave of “of immigration ... far greater than anything we have ever experienced.” Tancredo, who may run for president in 2008, views immigration not only as “the most critical issue facing our nation today” but as a threat to western civilization itself.
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THE SOAP BOX
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An apt summary of President Bush’s justification for the NSA domestic spying program is that “(o)ur sovereignty may be dependent on our ability to eavesdrop on transmissions between our enemies on the outside and those on the inside with sympathies for them. I trust my ability to determine who to mark for examination and so will you.”
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THE SOAP BOX
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Politicians and pundits, start your engines. With California and 12 other states holding primaries over the next two weeks and another 26 states having primaries between July and September, the 2006 mid-term elections are about to heat up. This is a critical election, since Democrats may regain one or both houses of Congress, which would enable them to reverse or block the Bush agenda and investigate the administration’s handling of Iraq and other issues. While the winner of this election is a matter of speculation, one result is certain — it will be ignored.
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THE SOAP BOX
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Human rights have long been a core element of our foreign policy because, in the words of President Carter, “human rights (are) the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”
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THE SOAP BOX
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A flag is a very powerful symbol. It represents who we are and what we stand for. On Sept. 11, like many Americans, one of my first reactions was to hoist the flag as a way of saying to besieged New York and Washington and to the world that we are one as Americans. Five years later, however, the Republicans are using the flag as a tool of division with this week’s vote on a Constitutional amendment banning flag burning despite the fact that there have been only nine such events since Sept. 11.
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THE SOAP BOX
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A recent Los Angeles Times poll found voters favoring Democratic control of Congress by 54-34 percent, but still preferring Republicans on national security and terrorism by 39-30 percent. This is why Karl Rove believes that the key to victory for the Republicans in the mid-term elections is to make it a fight over national security. Given the Republican’s foreign policy record, however, the Democrats’ response should be — “bring it on.”
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THE SOAP BOX
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Ned Lamont’s dramatic primary victory over Joe Lieberman this week will cause much soul searching within the Democratic establishment. While the defeat of a three-term senator and vice-presidential nominee is certainly a shock, the result is actually a victory for the party for several key reasons.
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THE SOAP BOX
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The question has echoed in alternative media for months. As coverage of the spiraling violence in Iraq and the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina shines a spotlight on the Bush administration’s two biggest failures and Joe Scarborough has the nation buzzing over whether the president is “an idiot,” people increasingly are beginning to wonder whether George W. Bush is the worst president in history. While President Bush has some stiff competition, this is one race Bush can win without the intervention of the Supreme Court or an unscrupulous Secretary of State.
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THE SOAP BOX
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Sept. 10, 2001 was the 213th day of a presidency focused on tax cuts and Iraq. President Bush had yet to even speak of al- Qaida or Osama bin Laden and was “paying no attention” to terrorism, according to former aide Paul Bremmer. Sadly little has changed as we approach the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as this tragedy has not been used as a call to action to secure the nation from future attacks but rather as a political tool to implement the Bush administration’s Sept. 10 agenda.
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You need not know anything about the Geneva Convention or international law to understand the current debate over President Bush’s proposal to weaken protections for U.S. held detainees. The president’s current hard line position — that the fate of the CIA interrogation program is in jeopardy since current law is too vague — was not derived from any legal treatise but from Karl Rove’s campaign playbook and the proposal is more about defining the debate for the mid-term election than about clarifying the Geneva Convention.
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THE SOAP BOX
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The Republican strategy for the fall campaign was simple — use the anniversary of Sept. 11 and Congressional votes on national security issues to define the debate and put the Democrats on the defensive, then spend October hammering the Democrats en route to victory in November.
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THE SOAP BOX
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Throughout the fall campaign, the Bush administration has been stymied and forced to respond to the “Book of the Week” from the National Intelligence Estimate’s findings that the “Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse” to Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” exposing the administration’s arrogance, mendacity and incompetence in Iraq. This week should be no different, as the release of David Kuo’s “Tempting Faith” reveals that compassionate conservatism is nothing more than a hollow facade for a domestic policy solely focused on maintaining power.
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THE SOAP BOX
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To paraphrase Mark Antony’s eulogy of Julius Caesar, “I have come to bury the Republican Congress, not to praise it.”
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SOAP BOX
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“Electronic voting machines are placing our democracy at risk.” This dire warning on the eve of the election came not from MoveOn.org or Air America, but CNN anchor and lifelong Republican Lou Dobbs.
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THE SOAP BOX
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Standing before the 1964 Democratic Convention and waiting as delegates cheered for 22 minutes before he could speak a word, Bobby Kennedy clearly had a hold on the Democratic Party at a time when the party had a hold on the nation — controlling the White House and both houses of Congress and over half the voters.
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THE SOAP BOX
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In the 1994 comedy “Reality Bites,” a group of recent college graduates struggle with the clash between the world of their imagination and the world as it really is; with the lead character questioning, “why things just can’t go back to normal at the end of the half hour like on the ‘Brady Bunch?’” In the 2006 remake, however, the movie is transformed into a tragedy as the setting moves from Houston twenty-something’s to the Bush White House, where President Bush continues to wait for “Brandy Brunch” resolutions.
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THE SOAP BOX
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One of the powers of the presidency is to define the agenda both in Washington and, to a large extent, in the media with the result being that issues ignored by the White House often are ignored by the media as well. This year was no different, as the Iraq War dominated the news while important issues ignored by the Bush administration failed to get the attention they deserved.
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THE SOAP BOX
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A recent open letter to the American people lamented that “under the pretext of ‘the war on terror,’ civil liberties in the United States are being increasingly curtailed. Even the privacy of individuals is fast losing its meaning. Judicial due process and fundamental rights are trampled upon. Private phones are tapped [and] suspects are arbitrarily arrested”. The fact that this was written by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is galling given Iran’s poor human rights record, but what is especially appalling is the fact that it is not far from the truth.
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Just as winter gives way to spring, the mid-term election season gives way to pilgrimages to New Hampshire by presidential hopefuls. The seasonal change also brings renewed questions about the Granite State’s coveted role as the nation’s first presidential primary and jockeying among states for an early primary spot in order to avoid being a mere “afterthought” in the process as Gov. Schwarzenegger recently noted.
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