Hi-Ho Kerry-o

Many Kerry supporters have by now received the emailed "letter from John Kerry." I did, too. All of the responses to it that I have read (at other sites, etc.) have been the same: those who received the letter are very unhappy. The letter was a disgusting reminder of Kerry's betrayal of his supporters in 2004, when he conceded the election when there were still hundreds of thousands of votes to count. Not only that, the letter rubbed salt in the wound by stating that Kerry would not support efforts to protest the election results or the voting irregularities.

Many supporters gave so much to this campaign... our time, our money, our loyalty, our faith, and our precious vote. We gave our all for democracy. We united to defeat the most dangerous, anti-American political power in America's history. We even overlooked one mistake after another made by Kerry, in the hopes that he knew what he was doing, as if he had some sort of strategy that involved saying stupid things and not fighting back against the republicans. Yeah, he had a plan alright... to lose the election. Skull and Bones my ass.

All this we gave, and what did we get in return? A political knife in the back.

And another thing about this: I spent the larger part of the election year living in a neighborhood full of idiot right-wingers... the kind who are ignorant, hypocritical, racist, misogynist, xenophoic, mindless drones of their limbaugh-hannity-coulter-ad nauseum neocon elite. It is absolutely MORTIFYING to face these idiots and admit that they were right about Kerry all along. And furthermore, now that Kerry has justified the republicans' characterization of him (and indirectly, of us), the democrats are saddled with a reputation of complete political ineptitude that will follow them, possibly, forever.

Kerry and the democrats have disgraced us all. Worse, they have handed America over to the neocons, the most wretchedly evil presence in American history. Goodbye, democracy. Hello, corporate plutocracy. Goodbye, civil rights. Hello, "Christian" Taliban.

Has the democratic party forsaken us? I don't know. I hope not. If JK represented the democratic party, then it has. John Edwards seemed to be sadly out of the loop regarding the concession. Maybe the democratic party, like the republicans, is led by a few power brokers who operate independently of the party's constituents. If that's the case, then the democratic party is in DIRE need of repair. If they are simply going to cave in and concede on every issue, if they refuse to run winning candidates in elections, then quite frankly, they're finished.

Hear me, brothers and sisters: the vote was the only thing we had to enforce democracy. Without the vote, democracy does not exist. Democracy in America was in a coma for four years. It died November 2004.

Thanks a lot for the letter, Mr. Kerry. Crumple it up and stuff it into the empty space where your heart or your brain used to be.