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The Stranger (Seattle)Top story this weekBy Eli Sanders and Dan SavageIs America ready for its first vegan president?
Please.
Maybe its first woman president. Perhaps a black president. Possibly even a Latino president. And, as Chris Rock pointed out, we've got a retarded president right now. But a guy who faults a cheeseburger on two counts, the meat and the cheese? A vegan president? No fucking way. Don't be retarded.
And most certainly not this particular vegan, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. This is a candidate who announces, on national television, that he would refuse to shoot a Hellfire missile at Osama bin Laden if given the opportunity; a guy who prattles on about the interconnectedness of humanity and his plans for creating a cabinet-level Department of Peace; a man who brags about the wonderfully low blood pressure his animal-cruelty-free diet has brought him (memo to the Kucinich campaign: Americans like their leaders carnivorous and on the verge of cardiac arrest, thank you very much—see, for example, our last two presidents: Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney).
Sure, it might be unfair, a cosmic and karmic injustice even, that Kucinich, who was more right about the Iraq war than most Democrats (and, for the record, more right than one of the meat-eating authors of this vegan-bashing profile), now has less chance of being president than U.S. troops have of stumbling across those alleged Iraqi WMDs.
But that's the way we roll here in America.
This is a country in which 41 percent of people still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. This is a country in which some people still believe that there is some sort of dignified way out of Iraq—"home with honor" is how the pollsters and strategists describe the widespread sentiment—and, delusional or not, these Americans don't see much "honor" in our troops marching out of the Middle East on the orders of a five-foot-seven, turn-the-other-cheek waif who flashes peace signs without irony and wouldn't eat a steak with the boys once they're back home.
... Kucinich, 61, has long been an "everyone else is wrong" type of guy, the type of politician who strikes a certain type of liberal as totally righteous for his unwillingness to compromise. But he strikes a lot of other liberals—a clear majority, as evidenced by his vote totals in liberal-dominated Democratic primaries—as obnoxious and inflexible to an agenda-hobbling degree. It's hard to find anyone, however, who doesn't see him as exceptionally driven.
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http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=413457