Want a reminder of why we still need more people in Congress who know what war really is, and the obligations we owe those who bore the burden of battle?

Just last week, Vice President Cheney was asked about the burden of the Iraq War on our military. His answer? George Bush bears the greatest burden of the war.

4,000 American troops who gave their lives? The Vice President summed it up: "They volunteered."

When I read the Vice President's comments, I was reminded of what Marine Corps 3-star General Gregory Newbold, the former Operations Director at the Pentagon, said about the war in Iraq:

"The commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results."

Vietnam isn't Iraq. But the two countries have a lot in common, even though Vietnam is mostly wet and Iraq is mostly dry. And the Mississippi River isn't the Mekong River, though Pete Seeger called them both "the Big Muddy" back in the day. The Mississippi River isn't the Euphrates River either, though if you ask the residents of New Orleans they'll tell you that the Bush administration has totally, arrogantly, callously failed to protect the lives and freedoms of the people who live along the banks of both. (The Hudson River isn't the Mekong either, though a good case can be made for Pete Seeger having had a lot to do with inspiring people to insist on cleaning up the messes along the banks of both of them.)

So, in another 40-year-flashback -- in this case, a 41-year-flashback -- here are the lyrics to a seminal, controversial song that one of the archetypical icons of American folk music wrote with the Mekong in mind, a song that resonates with today's realities far more closely than it ever should have had to...

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
by Pete Seeger

We need to grow our majority in the Congress to bring real change to our country.

There’s nothing our johnkerry.com community has done these last four years that I’m more proud of than our work to elect veterans – "Fighting Democrats" – to Congress.

In races the cynics said we couldn’t win, you gave early and often to elect some special candidates who shook up Washington and reminded Karl Rove and his Republican allies that patriotism doesn’t have a political label, and the flag of the United States doesn’t belong to a Party, it belongs to the American people.

And these vets have reminded the political class what patriotism really is: just a couple weeks ago, for instance, the House of Representatives stood up to George Bush on his illegal wiretapping scheme and refused to budge in the face of fear-mongering attacks from the right.

And some of the veterans you helped elect (people like Patrick Murphy and Tim Walz) were right in the middle of it, reminding America that there’s a way to safeguard our security without shedding our values.

And the word the Greeks had for it was hubris.

In modern terms, especially in political and governmental terms, the meaning of hubris has come to include the unbridled arrogance of power -- the elitist, egocentric, imperialistic insistence on having one's own way in all things without taking into account the facts of the matter or the feelings of others. And the actions of the Bush administration has come to embody all the worst aspects of hubristic, egocentric, unfeeling arrogance in the eyes of America and of the world.

The ancient Greeks, at least, did their best to try to keep democracy alive in a time when that was a very rare thing. However, their contemporary counterparts the Romans ending up taking the other road. The Roman emperors gradually came to define the kind of narcissistic, self-defined (and sometimes self-delusional) imperial arrogance that we still associate with the dictators of today -- and, unfortunately, there are far too many echoes of it in the White House of today as well.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is the chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies (www.heinzfamily.org). This essay was originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 23.


Election days are always special to me. I grew up in a land where there were no election days.

The Mozambique of my childhood was governed by a right-wing dictatorship in far-away Portugal. My father, a wise and good man, was 71 years old when he voted for the first time. I never cast a ballot until I became a citizen of the United States. But when I did, it was for a young man who spent years teaching me about the needs of Pennsylvania's working families and the good our government can do for them -- my late husband, Sen. John Heinz. He helped me learn how precious a right suffrage is -- as a weapon against tyranny; as an instrument of hope, progress and change.

That is why, this year, I will cast my vote in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

As has been widely noted, this past week marked the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unethical, immoral, and unwinnable war in Iraq. As the war enters its sixth bloody year, no end appears in sight. The fragile, fractious political situation in Iraq is no better now than it ever was. The public infrastructure is still shattered, with such basic necessities as electricity and potable water still widely unavailable in many regions of the country for more than a few hours a day. The so-called surge is stalled and its tenuous successes are failing to take hold. Everyday violence is still omnipresent, and the 3,000-year-old civilization of Iraq is still in shattered ruins. By any measure, George Bush's ill-advised Iraq adventure is an unqualified disaster.

Numerous comparisons have been made between the untenable situation in Iraq today and the equally untenable situation in Vietnam back in the 1960's. Not all of those comparisons are apt or accurate, but many of them are. America in the spring of 1968 was a very different place than it is in the spring of 2008, even though it's fundamentally unchanged in many ways today. Racial and political tensions were far higher then than they are today, with riots in the streets still in the news and bombings of banks and other public institutions still far too common for comfort. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were raw wounds in the shared psyche of America in 1968. And overseas, an endless war against amorphous insurgents continued to drain the hearts and minds and blood and treasure of our nation's best and brightest for the sake of a cause that no one could satisfactorily explain at home.

One thing that was strikingly different in the America of 1968 than the America of today was the power of the broadcast news media. Print newspapers and magazines were still the dominant source of information, but the combined influence of the three broadcast television networks was huge. In our current climate of multiple non-stop cable 'news' channels populated by pontificating pundits who eagerly substitute jingoistic bloviating for honest journalism at every turn, it can be difficult to remember that once upon a time, instead of today's 24/7 overload of endlessly-recycled talking-head talking points ad naseum, there were only a couple of hours of evening news coming from only a few sources that presented solid stories from real reporters in real time.

This week marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. It has also been a little over a year since the Bush Administration decided to increase the number of troops in Iraq. The logic of ’’the surge’ involved placing enough American troops into Iraq to buy the Iraqi politicians time to hold political reconciliation meetings to resolve their differences. The surge had a purpose, it was never an end in and of itself. The troops were there to bring some stability to the country so that the politicians could meet and resolve their differences enough to take the steps necessary to begin to govern their country.

The Washington Post ran a story by Karen DeYoung on March 19th quoting a Bush official’s lament about the dialogue on the war. He wants Americans to not dwell on what happened in the first four years of the war, but to think happy thoughts about everything that has happened since the surge started. Oddly enough, people still seem to think of the Iraq war as beginning in March of 2003. They don’t seem to want to think of the first four years of the war as a mere prologue to the surge. This Bush official seemed a bit down that the public has not fully bought into this revision of history.

Senator Barack Obama's much-vaunted speech about race may or may not help or harm his candidacy for the presidency in 2008. But that's not the point. Pro or con, up or down as far as the horse race is concerned, the words he spoke and the message he delivered in Pennsylvania this week had an effect that will continue to cast ripples for many years to come.
Like it or hate it, for better or worse, Senator Obama's taking the bold step to address these deep-seated questions head-on has encouraged -- no, not just encouraged, required -- us all to take a long, hard and very much overdue look at certain critical issues that have been with us since before this country was founded. And no matter how the 2008 horse race turns out in the short term, the discussion that he has both asked us and insisted that we engage in now is something that will continue to resonate for many years to come.

This is the text transcript of Senator Obama's historic speech on the issue of race in America -- a related transcript of his followup interview with ABC News about his reasons for making this particular speech at this particular moment in history is posted here as well.

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy.

Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

Today, Barack Obama delivered what I consider to be the most important speech about race relations in this country in decades. Well, let me restate that a bit … it should be the most important speech about race relations in decades, but “importance” is something that can only be measured in retrospect. But what it was was an incredibly honest, courageous and moving speech about a central fault line in American history.

It was perhaps the most personal, genuine speech I could possibly imagine coming from a Presidential candidate. You don’t get a speech like that coming out of a communications shop, no matter how good (don’t get me wrong … being one, I love political communications people). It’s just too individual.

And on a personal level, I’m white, I grew up in a neighborhood that was 90% African-American, and this is the speech that most reflected the America I know. The contradictions and complexities of white and black reactions to centuries of oppression and achievement, the rawness of anger and the redemption of forgiveness, the placement of individuals in a greater context without losing the view of each person’s essential humanity … it was all there in that speech. An incredibly honest oration reflecting deep integrity.

In honor of the day... this piece is cross-posted from the steadfastly snarkilicious www.RoadblockRepublicans.com website. Slainte!


One of the legendary saint's big claims to fame -- other than eventually becoming the nominal excuse for the eponymous feast day we're celebrating today, what a friend of mine once called "Mardi Gras for red-haired people with freckles" -- is that he is said to have chased all the snakes out of Ireland way back when.

Too bad he's not around today, because we could sure use somebody to chase all the snakes out of Washington. Our own national Babylon-on-the-Potomac is heavily over-infested with them these days, too.

Snakes to the left of us, snakes to the right of us. You can't cross the Mall in D.C. anymore without stepping over (or, preferably, on) some scaly serpent. You can't hit a K Street lobbyist with a wad of rolled-up benjamins without staring some spineless viper right in the eyes.

And if you happen to work for the VP's office or the DOJ, well, you'll have to look straight up just to watch one of those nasty aspies slither on by over your head. The place really is crawling with snakes, especially after the last six years or so. Those nine guys in the black robes couldn't figure out how to count votes, but they were still adders anyway.

Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes? We hate snakes.