dear john

This is a letter sent to Kerry before Debate 3, didn't have any effect, but it was still worth saying.

11 October 2004

Senator John Kerry
Kerry-Edwards 2004
PO Box 34640
Washington DC 20043
Fax: (202) 7123-001

Dear President Elect Kerry:

Re: Un-Solicited Advice

On the eve of the final debate I would like to send my congratulations on your performance in the debates so far. Knowing full well that advice is worth what you pay for it, here is the free un-solicited advice of one of your supporters:
Should the topic of the War Without End on Terror come up, please do not use the phrase “hunt down and kill the terrorists”. I know that you are striving to take away Apparent-President Bush’s advantage on the homeland security front, but this comes across as somewhat desperate, verging on bug-eyed crazy. I think that “bring to justice” would work as well with the law-and-order folks and far better with those of us who are not keen on frontier justice. Furthermore you can explain that prisoners can lead to more arrests while corpses rarely provide much information. I have also been hoping that you would point out that Mr. Bush’s answer to the question on 9/12/2001 “Why do they hate us?”…”Because they hate our freedom” is not one that gives any insight or allows us to get at the root causes of terrorism, and without that we will truly be in a war without end.
In the vice-presidential debate President-in-Hiding Cheney said that the supreme court of Massachusetts had “ordered the legislature to change the constitution to allow for gay marriage”. I was shocked that an experienced trial attorney like Senator Edwards did not: a) point out that that was factually wrong and misleading, the supreme court ruled that it is un-constitutional to stop gay couples from marrying, a significantly different ruling, and b) use Cheney’s lead in to point out that BushCheney have been consistently hostile to the rule of law (some examples: holding prisoners indefinitely without charge in Guantanmo Bay, setting up military tribunals with rules that would not pass legal muster in even the most repressive countries on the planet, ignoring the Geneva Conventions, refusing to acknowledge the International War Crimes Court, using the Patriot Act to violate law-abiding citizens’ basic civil rights etc., etc. ad nauseam). I do not agree with you on the issue of gay marriage, I think it is an outrageous example of discrimination, but I think you should use the topic to point out the ways in which BushCheney are hostile to human and civil rights and the legal system that is supposed to provide checks and balances against the potential tyranny of the Executive and Legislative branches.

I could carry on for days, but promised myself to keep this to one sheet.

To Victory in November,




Nic