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Speaking the Unspeakable
Karen has told us many times and in many ways to speak out, to do something -- anything -- to help make visible the reality that this administration has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. It's easy to read her words and say, "Yes, she's right. I'll do something...soon..."
Guess what? Time is running out.
That's the bad news. The good news -- if there can be good news about this subject -- is that people are starting to realize that time is short and are doing something about it...people like Ray McGovern.
On March 3rd, 2006, Mr. McGovern marched into Congress with 15 others wearing Guantanamo Bay orange jumpsuits and declared:
"As a matter of conscience, I am returning the Intelligence Commendation Award medallion given me during my 27-year career in the CIA. The issue is torture, which inhabits the same category as rape and slavery -- intrinsically evil. I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture."
Mr. McGovern is now on a nationwide campus tour sponsored by World Can't Wait, speaking out and sharing his conclusions from the hearings held in October, 2005 and in January, 2006 by the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity by the Bush Administration.
When you hear this gentle man speak in his calm, soft-spoken way of the culpability of the Bush administration in these horrors of wars of aggression, torture and indefinite detention and rendition, you know you are hearing the truth. And it scares the hell out of you. And then it makes you mad...mad as hell...again.
In addressing a crowd at our local college last night, Mr. McGovern talked about how appropriate our anger is, even though we may suffer from "Outrage Fatique." (He wondered whether the weekly outrages we seem to have are a part of Bush's plan to wear us down.) He said that Cindy Sheehan is a great model for our anger; her simple act of asking the president "For what noble cause did my son, Casey, die?" helped others channel their anger and join her side. He cited the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas' words about “the virtue of anger” when it looks to justice and reminded us of the “unreasoned patience” that the people of Germany showed during Hitler’s rise to power.
Mr. McGovern covered many aspects of events that led up to the Iraqi War and told us true, heartwrenching accounts from people who were witness to the torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. He listed six reasons why torture is beyond the pale, in increasing order of importance:
1. It really hurts the image of US in the world.
2. It's a recruitment tool for terrorist groups like Al Quaeda.
3. It endangers our own troops -- physically, spiritually, and emotionally.
4. It brutalizes the brutalizer.
5. It doesn't work because people will tell you anything if you torture them.
6. Torture is wrong, just as rape and slavery are wrong. Civilized nations of the world have all agreed on this and have made laws against torture because it's wrong.
Rather than me repeating his lecture, I urge you to read more of Mr. McGovern's words at other sites such as Anti-War, Alternet, Tom Paine, and Common Dreams. Mr. McGovern has also written several books, including his latest Neo-Conned! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq: The Illegality and the Injustice of the Second Gulf War.
More importantly, we now must turn our anger and attention to what's happening with Iran. The increasing sounds of the war drums banging for an attack on Iran demand that we do everything we can to prevent this administration from committing more atrocious crimes.
As Mr. McGovern said, "Iran is not Iraq." Iran is much more dangerous and has a larger military that can attack US troops over the border into Iraq. And the greatest danger is that it may end up in the use of nuclear weapons. Mr. McGovern speculates that the November elections and the need for Bush to be a "war president" may result in an attack on Iran as early as June.
What can we do? Mr. McGovern urged us to use imaginative ways to make people aware of what's going on, including:
- Get educated on the Iranian situation.
- Write/call your senators and demand that they sign Feingold's Censure Resolution.
- Show up in person at the offices of your Congress people while they're home on Easter break to let them know your position on Iraq and Iran.
- Write letters to the editors to any and all papers to build awareness and state your position.
- Talk with your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors to let them know what's happening and what they can do to help prevent it.
These times require us to get our bodies, our minds, and our hearts into helping stop this crisis. We must speak out for justice before it's too late.
Ray McGovern reminds us of Martin Luther King's haunting words about Vietnam, "There is such a time as too late."
Madame, this just reinforces the message of Fear Up... that we must speak out and we must let them know that it MUST stop.
I've cross-posted this at dailykos. Please recommend there if you find it worthy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/14/84529/4983
You're right, dwahzon...as usual... And "Fear Up" no longer applies to just the horrors of torture, but also to the imminent danger of another war...a war that will be potentially much more evil and destructive. We MUST demand of our country's leaders that they stop this administration from getting us into it.
McGovern and other speakers I've heard lately (Scott Ritter & Joseph Cirincione) who are connected to insiders all confirm that the WH & DoD are definitely preparing for war with Iran.
MLK note....
He was killed 1 year later to the day; April 4, 1968.
We still miss him.
S/b; MLK was killed one year to the day after his speech at the Riverside Church which is linked in the topic head.
So...does anyone know who the first person this administration tortured?
(That is, other than all of us who are tortured daily by their illegal/immoral policies...)
Something else from last night's speech that ought to make you very, very afraid...
McGovern talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis and how one person dared to speak out in a last minute conference with JFK, when the missiles were loaded and ready to go... This person (Soviet Specialist Llewellyn Thompson maybe?) brought to JFK's attention the two letters that Khrushchev had written, and convinced JFK that Khrushchev wanted to negotiate a peaceful solution that also saved face. We all know the results...
(See here if you want to know more... http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/briefing/index.html#Confontation )
Who, in this administration, would dare speak out against them and stand up for the world?
We know that answer too. That's why it's up to us.
Here's something I got in an email from Democrats.com...
Congressman DeFazio Tells Bush: Striking Iran Would Require Congressional Authorization
Congressman Peter DeFazio will send a letter to President Bush reminding him that he is constitutionally bound to seek congressional approval before making any preemptive military strikes against Iran. DeFazio is circulating the letter to other members of Congress seeking additional support. DeFazio will also introduce a resolution expressing the sense of the Congress that the President cannot initiate military action against Iran without congressional authorization. He is seeking additional support among other House members for the resolution as well.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/10101
Tell your congress member to support DeFazio. Now. November is coming...
Chuck- I posted a comment on the previous thread, and I'm not going to repost it here. You have to know that I respect your opinions a lot, but that I just disagree with you on this issue. Slamming Cynthia Tucker is not "standing by our own." She's an African American, she's a liberal, and she's a fine writer. It's just that she disagrees with the majority opinion on here about illegal aliens (and I don't want to call them immigrants anymore- that's an aspersion on legal immigrants), and she disagrees with some of us about John Kerry, evidently. But to slam her and say she must be a moderate because she doesn't like some things about Kerry isn't "standing by our own." Like I said, unless this is the Kerry for President blog. It may be, and if so, I've misplaced my writings. Because I don't know who I'm going to support for President in '08. Right now, Russ Feingold seems to be the most courageous man in politics- it may be him. And if it is, I'll openly say (in the primaries ONLY) that he's showed more courage than John Kerry on the issue of Bush's wrongdoings, and if that offends, then it will offend. But in the general election, I'll be for whoever our party nominates. (I don't REALLY think Lou Dobbs is running for president, BTW :-) If it's primary season already, please let me know. And if this is the Kerry for President blog, please let me know.
But I reserve the right to believe that Cynthia Tucker is definitely "one of our own." She's one of my own, anyway.
An appropriate quote from Mahatma Gandhi about taking action...
"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."
this is off topic but something that I read this morning that is truly stunning if true, and would establish how truly tone deaf Bush is.
"Rumor has it, that Tom “the Hammer†DeLay may be on the White House list of potential replacements for Josh Bolten, as head the Office of Management and Budget. Perhaps the Bush administration sees some benefit in Delay’s recent experience. After all with the budget woes under the Bush administration, a little swapping around of money might be helpful."
It's off-topic, I know... but they tell me that confession is good for the soul and so on and so forth and scooby-dooby-dooby...
So... barring significant changes in circumstances, which of course may well take place between now and then, et cetera and so forth...
I have decided that I am going to vote for an incumbent Republican Senator the next time he comes up for re-election.
glad I had a chance to get that off my chest,
Otter
Posted by: Otter at April 14, 2006 12:40 PM
April Fools day was a couple of weeks ago. Your late.
Something I found today out of LA Weekly:
Colors of Optimism: The immigrants-rights movement energizes a nation
By DANIEL HERNANDEZ
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 6:00 pm
A modern-day civil rights march in Los Angeles (Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov)
[snip]
By March 25, when more than half a million gathered in downtown Los Angeles for the largest peaceful demonstration since anyone around here could remember, there was little doubt a movement had begun that was unlike any in the nation's history. Then Monday happened. The demonstrations spread. And grew.
Black Muslim, Christian and civil-rights leaders were present at events in cities including Detroit and Seattle, and here in L.A. At La Placita, the Rev. Norman Copeland, presiding elder for the Los Angeles conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, made connections between the “walls" that separated blacks from their civil rights in a previous era and the “walls" separating immigrants from their rights today.
Black Americans have faced walls before, walls of segregation, walls of discrimination, walls of slavery, legal walls that would not allow my father to eat in a restaurant or sleep in a hotel, Copeland said. Walls are the breeding ground of fear and confusion.
Then, invoking a rallying cry everyone in Los Angeles can understand, he hollered: Fight on! Fight on! Fight on!
During the march through Chinatown, a neighborhood with its own nasty history of racial discrimination against the Chinese immigrants who came to build California late in the Industrial Revolution, NAACP president and CEO Bruce Gordon stood at the center-front flanked very symbolically by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Senator Gil Cedillo, rivals and old friends.
African-American leaders have attended many of the immigration-rights events since the beginning, but organizing leaders and media figures overshadowed their presence. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the columnist and political commentator, has drawn attention to the fact that the "old guard" of black organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League and the Congressional Black Caucus, have been slow to stake their position on the immigration-rights movement.
"Just getting a speaker to come to a rally is not enough," Hutchinson said. "There's still a feeling-out process on the part of the mainstream older civil-rights organizations. It's overwhelmed them in many ways."
That's part of it, of course, but so is the widely held and dangerously generalized notion that tensions exist in Los Angeles between blacks and Latinos. For this reason, organizers at the vigil and march downtown on Monday had a point person ready to tackle a topic that is laced with inadmissible, 'Crash'-prone stereotypes.
Shannon Lawrence, a 28-year-old political coordinator in South Los Angeles for Service Employees International Union Local 434B, said L.A. blacks are seriously discussing their place in the new movement, and tackling some of their own prejudices. At the end of the day, everybody is an immigrant to this country, but second of all, we all live in the same community, we all shop in the same stores, we all go to the same libraries, our kids go to the same schools, Lawrence said. There should be no reason why my neighbors should not be able to participate the same way I do.
The immigration-rights movement, he added, is "really calling people out on their own personal beliefs. I think it's forcing them to look in the mirror, and in looking in the mirror, people are realizing that we're more the same than we are different.
A hopeful message, but one that maybe hasn't resonated with African-Americans who are filling the infosphere with angry messages about the immigration marches. For Hutchinson, the response is a sign of deeper problems that leaders on both sides of the divide have failed to actively address. In an interview Tuesday, he said that African-Americans have a legitimate concern on the question of jobs, but that instead of first pointing fingers, community leaders must also tackle the social ills that afflict black America, such as failing schools and broken homes.
There still is a disconnect between what they're doing at the top and what many African-Americans feel at the bottom. "They do not see the illegal-immigrants-rights movement as their movement," Hutchinson said. It's not going by polls, it's not quantitative, it's just what people are saying. As a matter of fact, many are very hostile to it: How dare you make that comparison.
The responsibility is on the immigration advocates, Hutchinson said, to aggressively reach out to older civil-rights organizations, in the same way those very organizations created broader and ultimately stronger coalitions during the 1950s and 60s by reaching out beyond their African-American constituents.
But what is it about Los Angeles, where this black-brown divide seems to be on everyone's nervous radars? Whenever I am visiting relatives in the Bay Area or at home in San Diego, there doesn't seem to be that black-brown tension that apparently permeates everyday life in L.A.
Visiting over the weekend in the old barrios in San Diego where I grew up Sherman Heights, Barrio Logan, Shelltown, Chollas Heights, National City, City Heights, I was reminded that in the state's second-largest city, blacks and Latinos have, and continue to live in, relative harmony. Both groups there have rich, deeply rooted histories, and have shared the same neighborhoods for decades, meaning in San Diego brown kids grow up with black playmates and black teens are seen walking down the street with brown teens and it's not a head-turning anomaly.
Geographic distance and racial isolation in Los Angeles are partly to blame for the fomenting of tensions, Hutchinson said, but L.A. has something to learn from its less flashy, less wound-up neighbor to the south.
MORE: http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/colors-of-optimism/13133/
I'm not late, LT. I'm flat-slap serious.
gee who'd'a thunk it,
Otter
My husband and I are realizing we identify as much with gays, immigrants, minorities as much as we do anyone else, for many reasons. We have flown across the country on a red eye & now in Chelsea, we feel completely at home. All the services & culture we like are right here, beauty, stimulation, hopeful politics. From blue to blue, and then rainbow. Beautiful.
The world is not going to go back to the way it used to be. Pandora's box has been opened. We will not go back to a little white picket fence world which never existed. Just as some now promise to bring democracy to the middle east and other places in the world and think they can control the outcome, they now are finding that their control freak mechanisms right here at home & in other "developed" places have failed.
America and Europe are changing & it's unstoppable. Some see it as a bad thing. We think there is much positive about it. Also, I can see that the religious right and conservatives will never ever kill what we love about America. They can only control certain sectors & all they do with them is create festering corruption. They will rot from within & it won't be too soon.
The more I think about this Iranian situation and the more I read, I can easily see a situation where the US gets Israel to launch nukes against Iran... That way, the neo-cons can presumedly keep their hands clean...
Whoever ends up using nukes -- if it comes to that -- will most definitely be starting WWIII...
Linda,
We all tend to give more credence and slack to those who agree with us. Cynthia Tucker has known all along the nuances of the IWR, and not too subtle, either, that Kerry did not sign on to go to war, only to get the inspectors in. Many people wrote to her with quotes, dates, with the do not rush to war. She knows.
Written and said many times, but I repeat that a lot was still to be determined considering the unequivocal, hysterical intelligence. Wilson, Kerry and others, said they all put too much faith in Colin Powell, who knew better at the time-although he was out of the loop.
Proving and disproving to the country seemed important. A cautious approach that the media understood at the beginning, but decided to play anti/pro war word games through now.
Some here may think had Kerry been this or that about the war there would have been a landslide, but 55% approved of going to the war, without understanding anything about the reasons. Not so sure, and getting elected important.
They believe the attacks about him to this day.
Next time out we all need to be less personally self-serving, and bigger picture. My husband likes to say that Democrats like to eat their seed corn.
Hi DiAnne, see you're enjoying Chelsea and access to a computer. The single thing that offsets the inconveniences, is the acceptance of things and people different. There are many undercurrents and inequities, as everywhere, but less marked and a lovely rainbow to witness.
Marjorie- I'm sure Cynthia Tucker knows all the nuances of the IWR, I know all the nuances of the IWR- the only people in the country who don't know all the nuances of the IWR are almost everyone who is not a Democrat and a total political junkie like us. Oh, that's a lot of people, BTW.
What I'm planning to do about the whole thing, is to support whatever candidate runs for president in '08 (probably Feingold at this point) who lacks the political stigma of having voted in ANY WAY FOR ANY REASON AT ANY TIME for even the threat of going to war in Iraq. Because Colin Powell never convinced me that we needed to go there either. Not even with his speech to the UN, since I knew the information he was giving was coming, all along, from an administration that has never known the meaning of the truth. And, because I don't want to spend the next election cycle as I did the last, trying to explain nuances to a lot of non-political junkies who weren't going to get it anyway. I want our next candidate free of the political baggage of Iraq, and I think that's probably what was behind McKinney's comments. I know I'm at odds on this with most of the posters on here, and I suspect that at sometime over the next year or so, I'll stop posting on this website. I believe it will revert to the old Kerry for President blog again, probably nearly as soon as Kerry announces, and I'm just not into that idea anymore. I am NOT insulting Kerry by saying this- I just prefer someone else, that's all. And I think that's what Tucker was saying too. Sorry, but that's the way a lot of us feel.
Posted by: Linda Enterkin at April 14, 2006 05:59 PM
I hope you don't stop posting, Linda. And I hope this doesn't revert to a Kerry for President blog either. As you said, it's not as an insult to Kerry, but it does go against the original intent of this blog -- to integrate, educate & promote democracy.
I'm sure that the Kerry '08 site will have their own blog. This site will always (I suspect) have its share of Kerry supporters, but once primary season gets going, I expect we'll see quite a diversity of opinion.
Linda,
DCP will not revert to a Kerry site, whatever his intention. Hopefully DCP will become a popular site for all issues and choices for candidates. Teaching how to become active and organized.
Just think many are politicizing Iraq now, not really trying to solve it. Cynthia for one.
As much as I like Russ Feingold for many reasons, he's being canonized for not addressing how to get Bush to the UN and the inspectors in, as well as not needing the support of the Dem Party to run for president. Forgive and forget with Kerry depends on how strong a supporter to begin with.
I am not saying Feingold was insincere, at all, but there was a need to verify, and how would he have done it? Kerry as a Foreign Relations guy, like the others, saw the need to confront and solve. Wasn't easy for him, and all was not clear that October.
When Feingold announced in August to exit Iraq, he kept repeating that he's first, which isn't true, but still why keep putting it in the lexicon?
Just saying, far too much manipulation of opinion and loyalty on that IWR vote, or being first with a non-plan.
Linda, some of us are more than angry at the media for being so irresponsible last time, and Cynthia among them, as a Dean supporter. Never speaking of the new information she was given in piles.
She's entitled to like or not like, but the pro-war, anti-war, so simplistically used as a weapon last time is being used again, as deliberately and personally.
She, and others, are not entitled to their own set of facts.
Marjorie- We were flying over Iraq every day prior to the IWR, and Iraq had been under UN Sanctions for years. That part was obvious when Bush started all his sword beating about nukes in that country. Sorry, but not everyone believed it, or even felt it needed to be verified. Iraq had no system to deliver nukes even if they had them- their airforce couldn't even get a single plane off the ground when we attacked them. And at least two other countries were so obviously a larger threat to America than Iraq that even concern about the Iraqis was ridiculous- North Korea and Iran did then, and still do, pose a much larger threat to America than Iraq ever did. Those are probably the set of facts that she's using. And quite frankly, I remember exactly where I was the day of the IWR- kind of like when Kennedy was shot- and I've never been more ashamed of my party than that day. At that point in time, this country had no loyal opposition party. They'd let 911 and the super-patriotic ferver after it overwhelm them to the point that they were rolling over to Bush on every issue. But this whole argument began over an article when she corroborated what I'd been trying to say on here for a couple of days- that there is a deep resentment in the African American community towards illegal aliens in our country. I don't know if it was her statement about Kerry or her attitude towards illegals that really got more people upset. Whatever, there seems to be very little understanding on here for former Dean supporters- the animosity of the primaries in 2004 is not gone yet. And unless we can get along, both those of you who plan to support Kerry in the next primaries (assuming he runs) and those of us who do not plan to support him unless he gets the nomination, the rift in this party that started in '04 is never going to heal. I don't give a flying fig about the fact that you guys supported Kerry and he beat out my guy, Wes Clark, for the nomination in '04 or not. What I do care about is the chips on the shoulder that are still there towards people who supported other candidates. That's not called sore losing, BTW, it's sore winning, and there's just NO justification for that. And it is extremely natural, also, for those who supported other people to wonder if their guy could have won had he been nominated. I think Tucker believes that about whoever she supported in '04. We never will really know, will we? It's fairly fruitless to wonder, but it's still natural. But to question her liberal credentials because she made an off hand comment is not fair. Let's face it. Dennis Kucinich was far more liberal than Kerry, wasn't he? So we all pale in comparision to those who supported him, don't we? As liberals anyway. Tucker is a good democrat, and is entitled to her opinion. And if her opinion was that there was no need to verify the word of a known liar (no matter what his office), well I agree with her there too. Facts are facts, and no one is entitled to their own facts. But they are entitled to the way they interpret those facts. And I interpret them pretty much the way she does in this instance.
Linda, its like Rashomon, how much we're willing to blame those who saw selected facts and what they did about them. Why are we still back there, giving extra points, taking away, for what?
Dennis, as I remember, was all for getting the inspectors in, as there was so much in October needing to be determined, or at least Bush given that opportunity to prove, when he so publically said that verifying was all he wanted. Outright call him a liar in advance?
That was not a Kerry vote for war, however you wish to say it was from your viewpoint. After Leiberman publicly came on board with the resolution as it was, Kerry, and others, couldn't effectively stop Bush.
What wasn't known in October was a far cry from what was known in March about Bush's intentions.
If you want a new candidate, many will agree with you. I'd just like the campaign deconstruction left and right to stop, so we can go forward, and stop using the inaccuracies from before to justify.
Glad Cynthia speaks for you. What rankled us about Dean, and Cynthia, was has how they misused his same opinion and his same words as Kerry, to gain in the primary. Then, as now, it was a lot of heat and dishonesty.
I don't know all the discussion here about Cynthia. Apologies for coming in the middle. It's not who is more liberal, but that she is disingenuous.
Can't we get past who was more right? Join and end this war.
The Dean people have no leg stand on with regard to Iraq. If you supported Dean, you supported a candidate who changed his opinion with the wind, and tried to sell his preference for Biden-Lugar (a preference that Kerry also shared) as a meaningful difference.
Had Biden-Lugar passed in October 2002, Dubya could have still gone to war in March 2003. He just had to issue a certification that Saddam had not complied.
I always liked Dean personally; but I can't remember a campaign that was more based on smoke and mirrors as that one.
Good editorial about the Iranian situation in Saturday's NYTimes. It's very much in line with what Mr. McGovern was talking about when he mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis...redoubled diplomacy with face-saving efforts for the Iranian leaders...
Unfortunately, I'm not sure who in the current administration is capable of such diplomacy...And we know they have no interest in helping anyone else save face...
Recipe for a Perfect Crisis
Let us not kid ourselves. Iran's drive to develop nuclear weapons technology would pose an enormous challenge for Washington even if the Bush administration had not tied United States ground forces down in Iraq, squandered its diplomatic credibility over Baghdad's nonexistent nuclear program and pursued a reckless energy policy that has made America the world's most extravagant oil guzzler and helped maximize Iran's petroleum leverage.
But those disastrous decisions have left Washington with far fewer plausible and credible tools than it might have had for managing a crisis that very much needs to be managed. The prospect of Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons, even in ten years' time, rattles people and governments, not just in Israel, but across the Middle East and beyond.
Because Iran has natural uranium supplies and the technological know-how to convert uranium into bomb fuel, the only conceivable long-term solution is to somehow persuade Iranian leaders that they have more to lose from building nuclear weapons than from not building them.
The logical method would be concerted and coercive diplomacy. And that's where the costly policy mistakes of the past few years come in. Some of the countries Washington most needs to work with are still wary of the Bush administration's intentions, consistency and commitment to multilateralism. And the Iranians, with their increasingly strong hand in Iraq, do not seem to be feeling very coerced.
A flurry of reports about possible preparations for airstrikes seems to have alarmed American military and foreign policy specialists more than the Iranians — and rightly so.
With no realistic military solutions available, Washington needs to redouble its diplomatic efforts. That should include a willingness to talk directly with Iran about the nuclear issue and to take a fresh look at some of the proposals now floating around that might give Iranian leaders a face-saving way to substantially slow their enrichment efforts. Even if such an approach produces no satisfactory agreement, it will help strengthen the basis for joint diplomatic action through the Security Council.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/15/opinion/15sat2.html
Marjorie- why are we back there? Because a couple of threads ago, I posted an article that Tucker had written about illegal immigrants, which was on topic for the thread. Immediatly after that, there was chiming in about Tucker's opinions not mattering because she was not a liberal anyway. Which is just baloney. My point in the original post was to bolster what I've been trying to say on here for several days, that African Americans in the south resent the illegal immigrantion a lot, and that we need to watch out what our decisions are on that issue. We may lose a key constituency in the fall that we cannot afford to lose.
So, someone comes up with a separate article about Tucker in which she made an offhanded comment about Kerry, to prove that her opinions don't matter. I was not for Dean, BTW. I was STRONGLY for Wes Clark. All that doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that just because Tucker wasn't a Kerry supporter, he opinions do matter. And she's doing a great service down here in this part of the country by providing a liberal voice. So don't say she's not "one of us" because she's not a Kerry supporter. That's just not so.