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"Bernie, Paul Wellstone & An Immoral Vote for War ...... " Sen. Wellstone died 13 years ago today ..
I will never forget the tragic day when we learned of the small plane crash that killed Wellstone, his wife, daughter and five other people:
Bernie, Paul Wellstone And An Immoral Vote For War That Disqualifies One Democrat From Being President
Thirteen years ago today, Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash while he was campaigning for re-election. Each year, on this day, I write something about Paul as a small way to remember an astonishingly great Senator--besides Bernie Sanders, he's the only politician in the last 30-40 years I'd walk over hot coals to help.
And, today, it's worth joining Paul and Bernie together to highlight a key similarity: their opposition to the Iraq War contrasted with Hillary Clinton's embrace of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld illegal and immoral war--and why that vote should disqualify her from being chosen as the Democratic nominee for presidency.
And, today, it's worth joining Paul and Bernie together to highlight a key similarity: their opposition to the Iraq War contrasted with Hillary Clinton's embrace of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld illegal and immoral war--and why that vote should disqualify her from being chosen as the Democratic nominee for presidency.
'Wellstone, an astonishly great Senator' ~ I could not agree more! There were so few back then that we could count on to try to stop the lying, warmongering, traitors who started us down a path that THEY said would last 'months, weeks' which some of us, including Wellstone and Bernie did NOT believe and turned out to be tragically correct.
This was true of Paul, as it is true of Bernie:
``There are people who will not vote for Paul Wellstone because he's too nutty left,'' Lilly Goren, chairwoman of the political science department at the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota, said recently. ``At the same time, there are people who will vote for Paul Wellstone even if they don't agree with his politics because he's willing to speak out on stuff.''
That willingness to speak out, and to speak out courageously, was most evident in the war vote. Paul was killed (along with his wife, Sheila, his daughter, Marcia, Will McLaughlin, a campaign staff member, Tom Lapic, campaign staff member, Mary McEvoy, campaign staff member and pilots Richard Conry, captain, and Michael Guess, co-pilot) not long after he cast his vote against the war authorization.
I commend to you both Paul's speech and Bernie's speech, and how remarkably similar they are in touching on important issues--like valuing the lives of people who would be sent to war including the thousands of people who would be killed in Iraq.
I commend to you both Paul's speech and Bernie's speech, and how remarkably similar they are in touching on important issues--like valuing the lives of people who would be sent to war including the thousands of people who would be killed in Iraq.
As Bernie says today, he did not believe George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Stand up please: is there any Democrat among you who believed those three people, all of who should have been impeached and removed from office for lying to Congress and the American public and/or indicted later for war crimes?
There was at least one: Hillary Clinton. This was the most consequential vote she cast, as a U.S. Senator, when she had the power of a vote.
This wasn't just one vote--as people argue who want to cover up the devastation this vote caused for political gain.
At the cost of tens of thousands of lives, American and Iraqi, and at a financial cost of $2-$3 trillion dollars (and counting--based on the analysis by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz), Hillary Clinton voted for the war.
At the feet of Hillary Clinton, and all those who voted for the war, lies this reality: the war spawned ISIS. But for the war, ISIS, and the fracturing of the entire region into a landscape of carnage, would not have occurred. And because of that carnage, thousands of more people die in the region, and we pour billions of dollars more into more war and more war.
Today, she lamely, and disingenuously, says, oh, it was a mistake to vote for the war--but she never quite explains what the mistake was...
Was it that she believed Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld--which would, at the very least, disqualify her as being entirely incompetent to judge such a momentous policy decision of war and peace, a moment when it was her vote to cast, as distinguished from serving the policy of someone else in her role of Secretary of State (a role that remains, in my opinion, pretty hazy beyond the campaign hagiography about what she actually accomplished).
Was that she didn't bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate, which was available to Senators to view in a secure room, before voting? Former Sen. Bob Graham has publicly stated that he urged her to read the Estimate because he said it demonstrated the falseness of the Administration’s stated rationale for the war. He specifically urged Clinton to do so—and she did not bother to do so.
Hillary Clinton's war vote was entirely about one thing, and no matter how much fog and fraudulent weak papering over the sycophants want to do today, tens of thousands of people lost their lives and we lost trillions of dollars we could have used for schools, health care and a whole host of things for a simple reason: Clinton's future political career and the need for her "to look tough" if she wanted to stake a claim to what the Clintons view is their right to the presidency. If she wasn't incompetent in her believing the Bush Administration, then, there is no other explanation. You see the bind, the obvious conclusion that no one wants to say repeatedly until we get a straight answer?
Look, the traditional media seems to not dig very deeply into this and Anderson Cooper was more interested in red-baiting Bernie Sanders than pressing Clinton about her vote for the war.
And you can live in a fantasy world and believe all the other promises, and you can believe the flip-flops on TPP and Keystone are real (I'm looking for a bookie to place a bet that, if god forbid, Clinton is sworn in on January 2017, within a year, there will be all the moaning and whining about the "new" positions on trade, Keystone) and you can turn a blind eye to what the phrase "I get things done" and a pledge to working with Republicans means (uh, you think Erskine Bowles, the co-chair of the Catfood Commission, who held a one percent fundraiser for HRC, with the candidate in attendance, won't be trying to dust off that immoral Commission document and convince her to make a deal to implement that shit, which is effectively a cut in Social Security and Medicare) and on and on.
But the Iraq War consequences are fact, not debate.
Thousands of people wake up every day in this country still devastated by the loss of a father, son, mother, daughter or friend who was killed in that illegal war. They were sacrificed for politics. Their lives tossed away for political gain in the status quo global machinations of power and leverage and influence.
Tens of thousands of others will live to the end of their lives with horrendous wounds that will never heal. Personally, when I hear HRC and others utter that completely empty phrase "I support the troops and honor their sacrifice," I feel deep revulsion, almost to the point of wanting to puke, because it's a political phrase with not an ounce of authenticity.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and wounded in the war. The lives of those who survived remind me of that phrase "The living will envy the dead."
This is what a political revolution is about. It's the integrity inherent in the memory of people like Paul Wellstone, and in the integrity in what Bernie Sanders represents.
People who will not let people die for political gain.
The rest of them: it's all the status quo. And a status quo built on bloodshed and violence.
We cannot--CANNOT--let that status quote have the reins of power. ever again.
Stand up please: is there any Democrat among you who believed those three people, all of who should have been impeached and removed from office for lying to Congress and the American public and/or indicted later for war crimes?
There was at least one: Hillary Clinton. This was the most consequential vote she cast, as a U.S. Senator, when she had the power of a vote.
This wasn't just one vote--as people argue who want to cover up the devastation this vote caused for political gain.
At the cost of tens of thousands of lives, American and Iraqi, and at a financial cost of $2-$3 trillion dollars (and counting--based on the analysis by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz), Hillary Clinton voted for the war.
At the feet of Hillary Clinton, and all those who voted for the war, lies this reality: the war spawned ISIS. But for the war, ISIS, and the fracturing of the entire region into a landscape of carnage, would not have occurred. And because of that carnage, thousands of more people die in the region, and we pour billions of dollars more into more war and more war.
Today, she lamely, and disingenuously, says, oh, it was a mistake to vote for the war--but she never quite explains what the mistake was...
Was it that she believed Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld--which would, at the very least, disqualify her as being entirely incompetent to judge such a momentous policy decision of war and peace, a moment when it was her vote to cast, as distinguished from serving the policy of someone else in her role of Secretary of State (a role that remains, in my opinion, pretty hazy beyond the campaign hagiography about what she actually accomplished).
Was that she didn't bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate, which was available to Senators to view in a secure room, before voting? Former Sen. Bob Graham has publicly stated that he urged her to read the Estimate because he said it demonstrated the falseness of the Administration’s stated rationale for the war. He specifically urged Clinton to do so—and she did not bother to do so.
Hillary Clinton's war vote was entirely about one thing, and no matter how much fog and fraudulent weak papering over the sycophants want to do today, tens of thousands of people lost their lives and we lost trillions of dollars we could have used for schools, health care and a whole host of things for a simple reason: Clinton's future political career and the need for her "to look tough" if she wanted to stake a claim to what the Clintons view is their right to the presidency. If she wasn't incompetent in her believing the Bush Administration, then, there is no other explanation. You see the bind, the obvious conclusion that no one wants to say repeatedly until we get a straight answer?
Look, the traditional media seems to not dig very deeply into this and Anderson Cooper was more interested in red-baiting Bernie Sanders than pressing Clinton about her vote for the war.
And you can live in a fantasy world and believe all the other promises, and you can believe the flip-flops on TPP and Keystone are real (I'm looking for a bookie to place a bet that, if god forbid, Clinton is sworn in on January 2017, within a year, there will be all the moaning and whining about the "new" positions on trade, Keystone) and you can turn a blind eye to what the phrase "I get things done" and a pledge to working with Republicans means (uh, you think Erskine Bowles, the co-chair of the Catfood Commission, who held a one percent fundraiser for HRC, with the candidate in attendance, won't be trying to dust off that immoral Commission document and convince her to make a deal to implement that shit, which is effectively a cut in Social Security and Medicare) and on and on.
But the Iraq War consequences are fact, not debate.
Thousands of people wake up every day in this country still devastated by the loss of a father, son, mother, daughter or friend who was killed in that illegal war. They were sacrificed for politics. Their lives tossed away for political gain in the status quo global machinations of power and leverage and influence.
Tens of thousands of others will live to the end of their lives with horrendous wounds that will never heal. Personally, when I hear HRC and others utter that completely empty phrase "I support the troops and honor their sacrifice," I feel deep revulsion, almost to the point of wanting to puke, because it's a political phrase with not an ounce of authenticity.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and wounded in the war. The lives of those who survived remind me of that phrase "The living will envy the dead."
This is what a political revolution is about. It's the integrity inherent in the memory of people like Paul Wellstone, and in the integrity in what Bernie Sanders represents.
People who will not let people die for political gain.
The rest of them: it's all the status quo. And a status quo built on bloodshed and violence.
We cannot--CANNOT--let that status quote have the reins of power. ever again.
RIP Senator Wellstone! Our nation suffered a great loss that day!
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29 replies
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The way he spoke of Wellstone was very moving and inspiring, a great leader.
RIP, Paul Wellstone. I admired him so much.
Paul Wellstone spoke to, my union, the CWA's convention in Minneapolis. I remember being very impressed and hoping he would be running for president. I was very saddened by news of his death. I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, but it does seem that the good ones leave us so much sooner than the evil ones. I miss you Mr. Wellstone.
I know I am A day late, but thank you for your service.
R.I.P. Paul Wellstone
&
WIN, Bernie, WIN!
Kip of
Kip Humphrey
&
Carol Pompilo
