What in fuck's name happened to Dennis Kucinich?

[Ken Burch]

123. I agree with you on Bush's 2003 popularity and the role of the economy and of the running mate

(turned out we dodged a MAJOR bullet when we didn't nominate that running mate in '08...the story broke right before the convention. Christ knows how we'd have dug out of THAT one).

Looking back on that convention from almost a decade and a half later, do you still think that things like banning antiwar signs at the convention and penning off activists ten miles away in "free speech zones&quot which are the kinds of things only REPUBLICAN conventions should have, if anyone had them at all)

I grant that Kerry was a good conventional liberal, not sure how you figure he was more liberal or progressive or visionary than Dennis(who was backing single payer and a Department of Peace...don't remember Kerry having anything close to those). How progressive or visionary could he have been as president after insisting on keeping the platform as nonspecific and bland as possible? How can And how can anyone be progressive and visionary while basically support the status quo in U.S. foreign and defense policy?

Whose votes were we ever going to win in the fall by running on a "we'll slowly get out, unless we don't" position on Iraq? Is there ever any support for being halfway between war and not-war?

And why should we still have been defending the "humanitarian invasion" myth in 2004? We already knew there was no place we could send in troops into and achieve an humanitarian result. We could only achieve a mudane, conservative-notion-of-national-interest result.

None of the wars we've been in since 2003 have produced anything other greater reaction, greater repression, greater poverty, greater violence and death.

If nothing else, we now know that we our forces can never play a progressive, visionary or even mildly life-improving role in the Arab/Muslim world. The last fourteen years have proved that. Why even pretend any other wars can produce a better outcome?

Not saying this to attack you or John Kerry(who I did do what I could to support-I still lived in Southeast Alaska at that stage, and Alaska is pretty much going to go on being a dead zone for the Democratic ticket for the next few decades, no matter what) just noting the sad truths that have emerged.

We may disagree, but I wish you well.