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When I was a kid growing up I would wait for each new Beatles album to come out and then invariably it would be followed by a new Rolling Stones album. I liked the Rolling Stones don’t get me wrong but it used to bother me when the Beatles would use a Sitar on their album then the Rolling Stones would follow and put one on theirs. Even as a kid I understood the pressure put on the band by the record company but there also seemed to be a level of insecurity to do what ever the Beatles did. As it came to pass after the Beatles break up the Rolling Stones became a better band because of it.
For me that legacy of being an imitator and lacking the courage to just be who you are is always on my mind when I hear the early Stones tunes. When Al Gore lost the election in 2000 it was said he was finished done for washed up. Rather than just going away he worked on the things that were important to him, he didn’t reinvent himself the world caught up to where he was going. His movie An Inconvenient Truth was a hit and won him an academy award and suddenly Al is a white hot property.
Now in a move that appears to me anyway reminiscent of Springfield’s Mayor Diamond Joe Kwimbey John Kerry and his wife Teresa have come out with their own book on the environment. Oh please, or as Diamond Joe would say, “Let the err a word go forth to a err a new generation that I too have written a book err a about the err environment. I err a call it “This moment on Earth,” and I err a wrote it with my wife and err a my girlfriend helped on a couple of chapters.” Most of what I know about John Kerry I learned during the Presidential campaign.
Maybe that’s the problem, the young John Kerry was the brash outsider he was passionate and articulate he was the Beatles. Now he is the ultimate insider with wealth that makes Dick Cheney salivate and a carbon footprint that make you think Sasquatch. In Vietnam he was an honest to God war hero and if he had fought the swift boaters half as hard as he fought the Viet Cong he might have been too busy being President today to write a book. But Kerry was such an insider that on election night he appeared almost in a hurry to concede, in such a hurry in fact to have forgotten to tell his running mate John Edwards. He wasn’t even the Rolling Stones on that night he was Wham just going through the motions.
His campaign explained he was tired, I’m sure he was it’s tough to get up and go to work everyday when you’re a Senator. I’m sure the Kerry’s are great folks and wonderful people and a bad Democrat is better is better than a good Republican. But when you own two or three mansions and want to preach on the environment it’s kinda of like showing up for league night in Gucci bowling shirts with the limo parked at the front door of the bowling alley pretending to be just one of the guys.
I’m sure some of you thing I’m being unfair picking on Senator Kerry, but I have two very valid reasons. If you’re in a debate and someone make the point that you were going to make you have to say something else. You don’t repeat it and then say err a it was my idea too; you got beat to the punch so deal with it. Senator Kerry represents to me all that is wrong with the modern Democratic Party, quick to jump on the bandwagon if it proves successful and ready to get out of town if it doesn’t. But more than that ready to cash in on it personally to add to his own larder.
I admit it, I am cynical, when you grow up the only boy with older sisters you get that way. When you’re a Senator with a staff and a bottomless pocket book I tend to ask myself, how much of that book did he really write? Or maybe it was just his wife’s idea and he just put his name on it. Maybe the follow me political advisors told him it would rejuvenate his political fortunes. As I said I am cynical, I don’t believe George Bush went to Iraq out of concern for those poor people not having democracy either.
Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood or country music in Washington however it still called pandering. We need to build our party with a leadership of new ideas not recycling someone else’s. We need leadership to stand up and do what’s right not because it popular or profitable but because it’s right. Some one concerned about our place at the table not his own.
"Whenever we've had systemic and sustainable change in this country, it's because the grassroots has been ready... Top-down activity from the government cannot take root unless there's bottom-up acceptance. …I think we're at that moment right now."
John and Teresa Kerry
Oh Please! “The moon like a testicle hangs low in the sky,” (Robin Williams) both great lines of Bullshit.
Other great books I won’t be reading,
10 Ways to Make People like You by Richard B. Cheney
The Secret of my Success by George W. Bush
The Plain Truth by Alberto Gonzales
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