'God has a plan. Bush will hold back the evil'

[CHIMO]

Burton Kephart asks me for 10 minutes to see if he can save my soul. Opening his Bible to Matthew and Romans he tells me that I was born a sinner, God gave his only son for my sins and if I accepted Jesus into my heart I could be saved.
I ask him what will happen if I don't. "Eternal judgment," he says. "Hell."

Mr Kephart gave his first-born son, Jonathan, to the American army. In late March the 21-year-old went to Iraq to serve with the 230th Military Police Company. Ten days later he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad.

He was the first person in Venango county, where Oil City nestles on the banks of the Allegheny river, to die in combat since Vietnam. The way his platoon sergeant, Edwin Rossman, tells it, his was a heroic death as he continued to spray insurgents with gunfire even after he had been hit twice in the shoulder during an ambush. "I know at one point when I looked at him, watching as he poured fire into the enemy troops, I knew we had a chance to make it out of there," wrote Mr Rossman in a letter to the Kepharts.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1323316,00.html

[bluestateguy]

1. I read the whole article, and I have NO sympathy for those parents

They wanted this war, they want Bush and they sacrificed a son for this fraudulent, unnecessary slaughter in the Middle East. Then they have the gall to say that they want the war to continue, so that so many more parents can lose sons too.

Some may call them good, Godly, moral people. I call them bloodthirsty, stupid and just as zealoted as the fanatics of Al Qaeda.

They got what they deserved.

[CHIMO]

2. But How

Do we reconcile the deep divide?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's very good to have you back on Democracy Now! We interviewed you quite a while ago when you said this very thing. But can you talk about your reaction to the top U.S. weapons inspector's report?

IMAD KHADDURI: The reaction I had was: What good would it do now? A lot of blood has been shed in Iraq; thousands -- tens of thousands of people have died. And I am also appalled by the reaction. Still forty to fifty percent of the American people, who are going to vote in about four weeks, still believe that there was some untrue connections between that awful regime of Saddam and Al Qaeda. The whole thing is so distressing that these facts -- They should be in a war crime tribunal with Cheney in front and Bush and Rumsfeld behind him. But they're doing nothing. I mean, they are just now debating points and they are just raising the level of rhetoric. But the crime has been done. The occupation has been awful. And this is what distresses me more -- most about this report. It's just too late. And it shows me the sham of what is to be called democracy. I mean in yesterday there were news that were so blatantly obvious to anybody who was watching the news. Israel comes out and says that the Gaza plan is intended to indefinitely delay the establishment of a Palestinian state, for example. And then the Israeli government says: "Well, that -- that U.N. ambulance didn't have a s.a.m. rocket. In fact, we were mistaken. Sorry about that; but we've killed fifty people in Gaza, nonetheless." Then Dick Cheney's TV interview was just so full of lies, and the main media is isn't carrying it -- all that in one day. To me, the whole truth about Iraq is so horrible that it would even sink Kerry instantaneously. Because he is a 'me-too' candidate.

The best hope for the rest of the world, apparently, I have come to believe, is that Bush should win and sink the whole empire into complete isolation and hopefully into its perdition.

Now, you see, the problem is not that the problems or the causes are not known. We know them better every day. The problem is that those causing the world's miseries are powerfully and deeply entrenched in their positions of power, and that it would take massive, sustained violence, unfortunately, to dislodge them.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/07/1335230


The above is one paragraph, but I don't know how to highlight areas, so I have broken it apart. It scares me at the extent that things have become polarized. No one can sit and talk about anything anymore. It is becomming very scary.
I do not like it. And furthermore I am not sure what I have to do to protect myself and family.