"Reasons Jews should vote for Kerry in this election..." AN ARTICLE

elfwitch

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Mon Oct-25-04 09:18 PM
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"Reasons Jews should vote for Kerry in this election..." AN ARTICLE

Edited on Mon Oct-25-04 09:22 PM by elfwitch

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/154/story_15457_1.html
This was an article on a list I belong to that talks about Jewish issue and concerns. I felt that what the author stated was applicable to all, not just Jews. Some of my favorite excerpts...

But Jews don't need a whole lot of reasons to vote for John Kerry because the reasons to vote against George W. Bush are so numerous and compelling. To put it bluntly, the President's vision for the future is scary--for all of us, but especially for Jews--and his performance in office is a shande. (Yiddish for disgrace).

Our supposedly God-fearing President has much to confess in the category of fraudulent speech, not to mention his grave foreign policy mistakes for which more than a thousand Americans and thousands more Iraqis have paid with their lives. Yet Mr. Bush acknowledges no errors or regrets beyond a tepid "miscalculation" and a few "bad appointments." (Translation: whatever went wrong was someone else's fault).

The Ethics of the Fathers, the most widely-read tractate of the Mishnah, names the capacity to acknowledge the truth as one of the seven characteristics of a wise man. (Avot 5:9) Maimonides, the 12th century physician-philosopher, devotes ten chapters to teshuvah, repentance. But this President repents not and regrets nothing. His arrogance is imperial, his lies monumental, his hubris epic. Instead of the American dream, he�s given us Greek tragedy.

But as the truth has emerged and we've learned the full scope of Bush's deception, John Kerry has outlined a rational exit strategy with a timetable for withdrawal. Where Bush promises prideful rhetoric and open-ended military commitment, Kerry promises to extract us from what is fast becoming this generation's Vietnam quagmire. What's more, he has delivered his views with dignity and grace, without defamation or smears, or that smarmy expression of superiority we've come to recognize on the President's face.

AND THE BEST PART
In this time of existential crisis, I don't want my Commander-in-Chief to be a smirking frat boy who strutted around on an aircraft carrier and declared our mission accomplished when the killing had barely begun.

I don't want the man in the Oval Office to be a Charlie McCarthy puppet who needs Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to feed him his lines.

I don't want the person with his finger on the red button to be a hale fellow who prides himself on not reading the newspaper but pores over "My Pet Goat" while the Twin Towers burn.

I want the button to be controlled by John Kerry, whose fingers, when they touch the Vietnam Memorial Wall, brush the names of men with whom he served, men who went to war for this country while George Bush got a free pass into the National Guard and stayed home. I want the Commander-in-Chief to be a man who was under fire in the Mekong Delta every day for months and knows what it means to wonder what you�re fighting for and why the soldier next to you had to die because a president couldn�t admit he was wrong.

I want the leader of my country to value books and ideas as does John Kerry--and almost every Jew I know. I want him to surround himself with advisors unblinkered by extremist ideology or Evangelical aims, and to defend the wall between religion and state so people named Cohen and Abdul-Rahman don�t feel like aliens in a "Christian nation."

I want a President who supports reproductive choice and stem cell research because he values the life of fully-realized people over that of a fertilized egg.

And I want a President who respects civil rights, favors a ban on assault weapons, and cares more about the assisting the poor and protecting the defenseless--defined in Jewish law as debtors, widows, orphans, and "the stranger" (read immigrant)--than protecting $89 billion in tax cuts for one percent of the population, many of them Bush family friends.

But above all, I want a President who uses his pulpit to inform, inspire, and unite the American people, not to bully, divide, and delude us. I'm voting for John Kerry because I believe only the truth can keep our ship of state from floundering, and I don't want a liar for a captain.