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Sept. 24, 2001 -- PALM BEACH, FLA. (APJP) - I'd like to share an excerpt from my personal diary:
September 11th, 2001
It's 7:45 PM on the Treasure Coast of Florida and, as is appropriate in September, it is raining -- hard.
As is my custom most mornings, I have my coffee mug standing on my wood-gray desk among selected memories of decades... pictures of my son; as a small boy playing ping pong on the French Coast of Lake Geneva; as a young teen during his first semester at Georgetown Prep in Washington, standing in front of scores of bookshelves at our Capitol Hill home, arms crossed promising to be an aggressive participant in life.
On the wall, his later photograph taken by a lost love hanging in a silver frame with eyes more knowing; and the latest -- pictures of his wedding to my beloved daughter-in-law, who for the past decade has been the lantern of his young life.
My friends traverse the desk as well. Mark, a gritty hockey-playing no-nonsense twinkling-eye lawyer married to one of the most elegant yet down-to-earth women in Washington, and raising future Washington Capital star Alex, who at nearly ten is already a multinational seed. Elliott, my business partner, ally and dear friend always with a ready smile and a complex, giving, ego; twin nineteenth-century nameless nine-year-old boys dressed in union suits during the Civil War and scantly framed in wood and faux ormolu so their father could carry their pictures through the mud at Antietem. My cousin Arnold, a surgeon, a father-figure, a brother to me who once saved my life and the only person worth a damn still alive in my family; a bust of Abraham Lincoln; the original photo of Jackie, Caroline, and toddler John-John Kennedy standing resolutely in tiny leather shoes, shorts and a knee-length camel hair jacket saluting his father's catafalque-drawn coffin as it slowly passed, horse drawn, down Pennsylvania Avenue so long ago.
We were nearly the same age then, John-John and I -- his uncle Bobby standing behind him at the left flank of the Kennedy family with his uncle Teddy on the right like two bookends in morning suits, closing around Peter Lawford and a family already bereft from far too much personal loss.
Bobby, later assassinated only feet from me at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, looks the most forlorn in that famous picture, and the well-designed Jackie with black toile over her angelic face appears almost as a phantom -- looking quizzical really, perhaps wondering how she would ever go on without her vital Jack, the President -- the son of a man with a whispered past who rose above it and shook the earth with the power of his issue.
They say America grew up on that fateful Friday before his funeral-- the day a fallen President, the target of who knows what, fell on the streets of Dallas. They say we lost our national youth that November morning when John F. Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington.
But that was a relatively gentle time compared to today in America.
How could we have known then? How could we have guessed that our cohorts would produce Timothy McVeigh, Kenneth W. Starr, Theodore Bundy, Pat Robertson, Paula Jones, Patrick Buchanan, Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, and a class of House and Senate members so cold and arrogant busy weaving a net of hatred around our country so soon after we stood grown, bloodied by campus police while trying to stop our leaders from feeding even one more boy to the meat-grinder we called Vietnam?
How could we see ahead nearly four decades, back when we ourselves were barely born as we lost our national virginity? Who were these people? One was Henry Hyde, the petty hypocrite who would decades later lead another assassination attempt -- on Bill Clinton's character for merely "raison politique" while hiding his own indecent and violent past, having carried on an affair with a married woman whose husband he beat on the stairs of his love nest for daring to beg his wife to come home, and all the while hiding his own corruption from constituents far closer to him than to the then-young President that threatened to bring us all back into focus after 12 years of continual right-wing abuseof our government in response to greed and the "Red Scare" of the 1950s.
I glance at the television monitors on the ceiling of my office, flashing now and then scenes of my own youth, much of it spent in Manhattan on an ego trip that rivaled the most self-important yuppie. I see an acres-wide pile of rubble and smoldering ash where the symbol of what America had become now lay in waste, covering the body of maybe ten thousand friends, comrades, enemies, acquaintances, waiters who served me, security personnel, and familiar faces.
No wonder my love is so confused, so neurotic, so undedicated to her feelings. How could she be anything but in a world turned so crass and insufferable?
It's two weeks since the attacks on Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. Our president hasn't done much yet to quell the hunger for Islamic terrorist blood, boiling slowly in the bellies of my fellow Americans. While he enjoys a high favorable rating -- some claim more than 90% -- he had better do something, and quickly.
I might suggest launching a few missiles harmlessly into the mountains of Afghanistan.
My mind turns to the rest of the world. Nearly every leader -- save Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan's Omar -- is publicly lamenting this, the first foreign attack on American soil since the British defended themselves against us more than two hundred years ago.
Stunning, is it not?
My suspicion is that a lot of foreign condolence givers are secretly and guiltily chuckling behind our backs. No, not about the thousands killed; only an evil person would do that. Foreign nationals are chuckling because they're fed up with our American pride, stubbornness and years of kneeling and heeling to money -- flashy automobiles, big new houses, salaries that outpace the rest of the world by an obscene ratio, and a penchant for exporting our way of life (above all others) to the rest of the world despite its lack of interest.
I, once in a great while, ponder the question of the best country in which to live. I always settle on the United States -- not merely because I am a born-and-raised 10th-generation American, but because it is the greatest place on Earth.
We are relatively free, and when I use the word relatively I mean that not pejoratively, but as a little reckoning toward taxation, restrictions on certain types of publications lawful or not, and a bunch of crazy little laws that do restrict our comings and going, musings, group-joining, protests, and other annoyances that most other people of the world endure on an hourly basis.
We are arrogant, but "aw shucks" arrogant. "We saved Europe," Americans always say. We "make the world safe for Democracy." We send out charities and missionaries to do good deeds. We give more per capita to the sick and underprivileged than any nation in history.
Speaking of sending out missionaries...
You know, people living abroad and practicing their own religions do not take kindly to our well-intended missionaries (mostly none too bright) who seek to bring the word of Jesus, or Abraham, or whomever -- usually a "Christian" god, saint or similar figure -- to the "less educated." We learned long along -- first from the Mormons -- that we had better ask the leaders of each nation whether it's okay to come and proselytize.
We also learned -- as American are all too often are disposed to do -- that money, food, clothing, medicine and anything else short in supply will go a long way to turn a Zulu into a genuflecting Catholic almost overnight.
This is wrong.
And this truly, and perhaps rightfully, angers many normal and decent Muslims -- along with members of Islamic Jihad, notorious for their sociopathic, even psychopathic tendencies. They are sick of being told that Jesus is the One. They are sick of being told that Democracy is the only "true" form of good government. They are sick of being told they need to modernize, or to bathe more often, or to floss. They are tired of our cars, our music, and (to them) our corrupting films and pornographic publications. They are tired of women telling them they want to break the glass ceiling.
I say we must -- very quickly -- begin drafting federal laws to make it a felony, punishable by a decades-long stint in prison, for any American individual, citizen or resident to run over to any foreign land and attempt to change those people's beliefs, especially their religious beliefs. If our chosen religions are so good, foreign men and women will adopt them soon enough.
And on the other side of the fence: just where the hell are the leaders of Islam?
I don't mean physically - although it helps to know that one place is at the Elazar in Egypt, the center of learning for the Islamic world. Another place is in Iran, and a third place is Mecca.
Specifically, where are these men (they don't have women in leadership roles) when someone needs to speak up, and why aren't they moving to kick out Osama bin Laden and his criminal cohorts? Where is a "Fatwa" -- a proclamation declaring this maniac and others like him an outcast?
Why aren't they warning other Islamic to steer clear of all who might tempt them to kill a few million non-Islamic people because their targets aren't faithful, or because they have too much money, or because they make foreign citizens work for too little only to enrich themselves?
Mullahs, Imams, Ayatollahs -- get off your well-padded asses! Stand up and expel from the midst of Islam itself all who misread the Koran as a license to murder innocents.
The World Trade Center -- called that originally not because it was for the world, but to feed someone's ego -- is still smoldering, and so few bodies, living or dead, have been found that it seems as if they vaporized. It's almost as if God pulled them up and out from inside and under those towers to guarantee no anxiety or pain. If only that were the case.
One guesses that someone -- probably "The Donald" -- will put together a coalition of state, federal and private cash to build a new World Trade Center -- even taller than the first -- and certainly taller than that built by those upstarts in Malaysia who outdid us a couple of years of ago. Problem is, few people have the first clue as to where Malaysia is.
The White House -- thank the Lord -- realizes that it can't really do a heck of a lot to stop terrorists this year, or even next year. Already, they are forced to overspend their budget on military and human resources for the New York and Washington disasters. They have no idea - not even the first clue - as to what to do.
It makes me sick. Washington. The Pentagon. So many dear men and women lost.
Privately, some say that military men and women who were killed at least went into the service knowing that they were volunteering to put their lives on the line.
Poppycock.
They were not volunteering to be blown up on a clear, bright morning without warning -- and by a passenger jet flying the U.S. colors, owned by a U.S. company, and hijacked by fanatics some say thought they would sit at the right hand of God, or Allah, or whoever, because they killed a couple hundred military personnel and did a billion dollars in damage to the world's largest (not tallest) office building.
Back to the White House.
Evidently, the White House string pullers think it's time for Bush to "lock up" the election in 2004. They may not be wrong, and they've already made some crucial mistakes -- mostly counting their chickens (and I use the term literally) before they hatch.
Some of our allies seem not to be our allies.
I won't even tire you with my thoughts on the dull, prefab speeches that George W. has "inspired" us with, and the even duller and dim-witted political pundits who called the speech "impressive" and "awesome."
Face it, Rove -- the speech before a joint session of Congress was only of interest because of the incidents it dealt with. In fact, most Americans were disappointed in it because Bush didn't say, "Let's blow up those m@+&rf@#in' rag-heads with a nuke! They want Jee-hod? Hell, we'll give 'em Jee-hod by the g*dd@%n megaton!"
But Bush's handlers are to be congratulated for keeping those sentiments within the walls of wherever they hang out these days. You won't hear any praise from me unless I mean it -- and they deserve it for keeping the lid on hot tempers within and outside.
The media - who look at last to be getting bored with cheering the President -- attacked his nasty, lying little press flack Ari Fleischer today en masse. Mostly they wanted to know how or why we were going to attack Afghanistan.
I wonder why too. Surely it is too late. Afghanistan is already a pre-bronze-age pile of rubble where half or more of its people are starving and roaming the mountains in search of food. Winter is coming there, early as always. So it's a fair question. Just what are we up to?
I suspect that Osama bin Laden is living in Australia, dressed like Sting -- with dyed fire-engine red hair -- no beard or moustache, a nose ring, seven earrings and wearing an "I survived the World Trade Center" tee shirt, posing as an aged surfer dude on some beach yelling "G'dai" to anything in a monokini.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong (thanks to you know who).
Now, the Bush team are indeed in trouble. Their sights keep focusing on new targets every three hours. First it was bin Laden himself. Then it was ANYONE who harbored terrorists.
Well, does that include us? We harbor them. Tim McVeigh is just one example. Are we going to war against ourselves? Under Bush's scenario -- which he claimed to lay out clearly on several occasions both last week and this -- we should also attack France, England, certainly Ireland, Spain, Italy, Russia... heck, nearly every nation on earth! They all harbor one kind or another of terrorist.
To give Bush a break, I assume he meant those nations who "knowingly, and with malice aforethought, support, harbor and continue to support and harbor terrorists who hate the United States."
It's clear we didn't care too much about the Northern Irish terrorists who were blowing up children, and still want to. We also haven't done much to stop the Palestinians for fear our Arab oil partners might get a tad miffed.
We didn't go after the Red Brigades or the Shining Path. Not really. Maybe we leant some intelligence, although our ability to do such is doubtful in convenient retrospect. I think we'll be improving on that.
And how about Oliver North -- one of our paid, and (can you believe it) respected terrorists who today has his own radio and television shows and had the absolute impudence to run for United States Senator from Virginia - and lose. North was all but running drugs to finance his own private war, helping Reagan violate the Constitution and the law because of what turned out to be an unfounded fear of Communism. Reagan, diminished by an assassination attempt, wasn't strong enough to know North and others were using him. Reagan was nice guy -- surrounded by snakes named North, Poindexter, and Bush.
Well, heck -- where are the Communists now?
In China -- where they're woofing it up with the New World Economy and Free Enterprise.
Oliver North is to my mind a pardoned felon (although he was never tried for his worst crimes because of higher-ups running to save their own skins), a loser, and a blot on our nation and my profession, and a terrorist himself -- terrorizing children in Central America to garner nothing but power for himself. He is a liar, plain and simple -- and now he's doing hour-long specials on FOX "News" Channel -- for another man just like him.
And don't you dare call him a hero. I am sick of people being called heroes just because they sign up for the Marine Corp. I know a lot of very sticky, bad and criminal ex-Marines, just like I know normal ones. A lot of them are in the Congress.
I see that financial "anal"-ist Neil Cavuto has found a home for himself on FOX as well. Suddenly, he has become a specialist in foreign policy, terrorism, and more. Yesterday he had a blonde bimbo psychologist named "Georgia" on his fill-some-time afternoon show, discussing the ways of "returning to spending" and how people should "handle" it.
What a joke!
Cavuto's sidekick, a handsome woman named "Karen", was caught off-guard looking at the aging moronic bimbo like a cat seeing a television for the first time. Then she slipped back into her FOX "character" and said she has already started pumping up the economy -- she had gone out and bought new furniture! Sheesh.
Notice how everyone on television is urging you to go out and buy stuff?
Wonder why? Because, thanks to lunatic terrorists, it is actually fashionable to tell people to spend gobs of money they don't have simply to prop up the executive salaries in America's boardrooms.
Last week they were telling you to buy stock that could be worthless in a few months. "Just buy a single share" urged cable and network "money" shows along with everyone on the staged political chat over on C-SPAN. Gee, that would be nearly $300 million in shares. Brokers, to trick you, told the news that you could do a single trade for "free" -- because they get paid from both the buyer and the seller.
Just buy more stock, said our nation's largest trading houses and major investment banks -- even as the bodies of their colleagues were still warm, and even as they began selling tens of billions in stock they owned.
Cavuto, not realizing what he was saying, I'm sure, confirmed on yesterday's show today that Mr. and Mrs. America did buy stock to prop up the economy, while all the time, the people that counseled them to it were selling all or as much as they could of that same stock -- assuring that these little investors would absorb some of their losses.
American and United Airlines today "retired" the flight numbers of the planes that crashed last week. Isn't that touching? Especially after they got a $ 15 BILLION payoff from us via Uncle Sam -- ostensibly to "bail them out" of the problems they were in long before this attack occurred. Where were their security people last Tuesday morning?
Where was the machinery that is available but "costs too much" that could have detected weapons and phony identification?
Not there.
And we all know why: it's more important to pay multi-million dollar salaries to airline executives than to protect the flying public, isn't it? Congress stopped that, but only after giving them the money, making part of the bargain that these execs won't get any raises until the $10 billion is paid back.
Yeah, right.
Ever heard of pay from stock options?
Luckily, Congress realized that the original $58 billion the airlines asked for was "too much." As I mentioned, Congress also foiled the airline execs who get paid millions for bankrupting huge companies employing tens of thousands of people in the first place.
A good example of this sort of corporate sleazebag is the guy who many hold most responsible for destroying great airlines like Pan Am, Eastern, and others. Marty Shagrue is his name. And if he's got anything to do with your airline -- switch!
If the airlines are hurting so bad, why don't they lower or raise their fares? Some business class fares are nearly $5,000. That's more than ten times price of the average coach fare -- just to get a wider seat and some "not-as-bad-as-coach" food (or what they laughingly call food).
What's wrong with these people? They are greedy -- they are living in the past. They are "moral." They are the Republican Party.
Airline foibles aren't the only thing in the headlines trying to break through the "war on terrorism." Another is the lie that there is no partisanship in America anymore. I heard the fool Republicans in the Senate today acting like little girls, whining over who had more minutes to speak -- five minutes, it turns out - but what more should you expect from old, tired, mediocre-minded, failed lawyers who couldn't get a real job if they begged for one?
Another is that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was thinking about staying in office after his term officially expires -- although it is against the law.
But he won't.
Any mayor -- even David Dinkins -- would rise to the tragedy and be out there encouraging the rescue workers, visiting the thousands of families who can't even find their loved one's fingers so they can burry something and have even a shred of closure. That's good politics, and if ever there was a politician, it's Giuliani. Let's never forget that Giuliani is a philanderer, an abuser, and a man who can't see a role for the poor except in the gutter -- just so long as that gutter's in some other city.
Rudy's getting even more press that Bush -- which raises the question: when are we going to investigate the incompetents who run -- and ran -- the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon's myriad military intelligence agencies for the past twenty years? They keep telling us about all the terrorist attacks they have secretly "foiled" over the past decade. I, for one, want chapter and verse about exactly what these attempted attacks were, where they were, who was attacking, and why. Is that too much to ask? Maybe they are doing a good job -- but it's my experience that when they say they are doing something, and move quickly onto another matter, that they are lying.
Don't hold your breath for the proof that I'm wrong -- although I hope I am.
Finally, damn it, I want to know, along with ALL Americans, just HOW these crazy people managed to hijack four planes and succeed in turning three into missiles that devastated gigantic buildings and leveled two of the most important addresses in the world - right here in the United States.
I don't buy that they were "jealous" of us -- as Bush Jr. wants us to believe.
And I don't believe that they were on a "mission from God" either.
Perhaps the idiots that were enlisted to perpetrate this evil thought they were -- but their handlers didn't. They were after payback fro something else.
What is it? Here's a possible list:
So, why don't we hold a meeting with a few of bin Laden's minions and find out just what it is that they and so many others in the world seems to despise about us?
It wouldn't hurt. I, for one, don't like traveling around the globe having to worry that someone might shoot or stab me just because I'm an American. How 'bout you?
Yesterday, that idiot Cavuto -- if you can believe this -- had Don King, another unindicted felon in my opinion, on his Fox show telling us how the United States should proceed against terrorists. He was wearing what appeared to be a size 68XXXX Hawaiian shirt strewn with diamonds that was making Cavuto salivate enough to ask King about it.
It made me sick.
I am weeping for those men, women and children who now lie dead crushed into ashes under those buildings for doing nothing but going to work.
I am weeping for our leaders who don't seem to know what to do -- and worse yet, don't see how we got here.
I am weeping for the executives of the largest companies housed at the World Trade Center who are even now appearing on camera and boasting about how they are still paying the families of their murdered workers' salaries -- but that they may not get the bonuses they had already earned.
I am weeping for my children who may not enjoy the freedoms I did as I grew toward old age.
What will they find just ahead?
It just so happens that my son and his wife live in Washington, D.C. -- and work there as well. For the past two weekends they have gone away to avoid the "rumors" that might be fact emanating from inside the Beltway that another attack was imminent. First they went to the Eastern Shore -- then, this past weekend, to the Virginia mountains. My daughter-in-law's mother just bought the whole family gas masks.
And I thought that was a very smart thing. Is this a scary notion, or what?
You know, I would love to roll back the clock to the 1960s and 1970s -- sans Vietnam, of course. After the Vietnam War, we had a couple of years there that were great -- everyone felt freer, was freer than at any time before. We weren't ashamed of our bodies or our sexuality. We didn't take crap from elected officials. We learned the truth, although it was hard. We demanded and finally got an end to the Southeast Asia sausage grinder that had consumed our friends and playmates. We had jobs and we loved to learn and we went into the Peace Corps and didn't care much about money.
What has happened to us? Now anyone watching from above would think we worshipped the Holy Greenback. They wouldn't find but a handful of kids on a college campus who were fighting for anything much more than a better interview with an investment banking house or a McKinsey and Co.
Have we made a mess of ourselves or what? We have Farm Aid fundraisers - but not for family farmers as claimed. There aren't but a few family farms left -- the rest have disappeared, gobbled up by huge corporate giants, with the help of our government. Did you know that the Census Bureau doesn't even count family farmers anymore?
I think family farms are good places to relax and have a vacation. They are not good places to raise anything much more than trendy and very expensive health foods.
The family farm makes about as much sense as the family automaker or jet aircraft manufacturer. It just doesn't work anymore. But we are having Farm-Aid fundraisers -- financed by ADM and other giant international agribusiness to MAKE DAMN SURE their piece of OUR tax dollar is preserved.
This morning, I caught a news segment featuring Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who was standing around looking awkward as George W. talked about how they, together, are going to make certain the Canadian border is secure -- when they both know that's impossible. How in heck are Canadians going to guarantee their borders to us? All 3,000 miles of it?
Then FAUX Entertainment News Network updated the "big story": the terrorists may have posed as pilots and been in the cockpit as guests (a usual thing among real pilots) when the planes took off.
The call for vault-like cockpit doors arises again. Huh? If the terrorist was already in the cockpit, how would the super-door have stopped him?
And what will happen when the first teams of ten, twenty or even thirty terrorists grab an airline hostess, or a passenger, or the pilot coming out to relieve himself and begin strangling them?
Fox reported -- yet again -- that all crop-dusting planes had also been grounded. Why? Because the intelligence services realize that they can be used to spread deadly gases and biological weapons -- many of which we invented! Wow. That's smart. So now what? Are we going to have all the guys who fly crop dusters checked by security before takeoff?
The Attorney General has been whining that he wants the power to arrest and deport even American Citizens whom he believes could be terrorists -- without due process.
Soon Washington will be talking about rounding up Islamic and other Arab-Americans and putting them in "camps" -- "for their own protection", of course.
Americans, showing their usual bad taste, have threatened on dozens of occasions to get off airplanes when Arabs or Arab-looking people are on their flights. Rednecks are shooting Sikhs, who are neither Islamic fundamentalists nor hate Americans, simply because they wear turbans.
Soon you will hear about NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION CARDS that the federal government has been slowly injecting into our consciousness -- for ten years or more. Now we are sure to get them -- complete with DNA samples, fingerprints and maybe retinal scan confirmations. Neat!
Already our great law enforcement agencies can listen to your telephone calls when you mention the word "bomb" "bin Laden" or Bush in the same sentence. They read our e-mail. Now maybe that's not all bad -- as long as the listeners and readers are deaf and dumb and cannot repeat what they hear or see. Otherwise, that seems un-American.
Be alert to the pathetic excuses that these creatures, lizard-brained terrorists, have given our governments and our business interests (really the same thing you know). You've already seen poorly run airlines weeping for billions of dollars using the terrorists as the excuse, and getting it. You've already heard the nation's largest insurance companies running to the government to be bailed out because they bit off too much "potential liability" for life and property in New York and elsewhere. You've already heard business requesting even a greater tax relief package to help flagging sales of wonder bras, makeup, fishing reels and jock straps.
But wait -- soon the window washers will beg for aid because the World Trade Center is gone.
Then the airlines, cruise lines and Amtrak will ask for more money to purchase new bomb, gun, drug, and gas detection equipment for every airport, harbor and train station.
That carries a price tag of tens of billions, my friends. Did you know that GE bought a company -- one I had invested in years ago -- that makes this equipment?
Jane Garvey, our new FAA Administrator, was busy yesterday hawking the airline industry and the Administration was saying what a wonderful flight she had, coming and going -- and how good she felt seeing how carefully everything was checked. That's Jane's job -- and she is doing as good a job as can be expected despite the idiots who surround her and have surrounded other FAA Administrators for decades now. Applause to her.
But are Americans, who wait for no man, going to stand for having to sit around while 5,000 jumbo jets filled with passengers take as long as 15 minutes each to be checked one person at a time? They have in Israel, for decades...
Nope.
Are we certain these machines can stop the insane ranting and machinations of the Islamic Jihad -- or the next group of nuts that target us?
I sure hope so, but I think not. I think we had better begin to understand our true role in the world.
That role is as a leader, not a master. That role is as a negotiator, not a dictator. That role is as a big economy with responsibilities to those who make it so big. That role is not to proselytize, but to learn about others, creeds, values, beliefs and religions -- and to respect them and not insult them with our own brethren's visits to "bring them the word of OUR Lord." Our role is peacemaker, not warmonger. Our role is to listen to our enemies as much, or more than our allies rather than turning a deaf or insolent ear to them. Our role is to find out why we have enemies - and get to the root of that "why" instead of turning to the arrogant, tired old standby: "They're jealous of our way of life."
Our role is to respect benevolent dictators and not put them down. I know, that may shock some of you, but look at the alternative: remember what happened when we withdrew support from the Shah of Iran, whose family we abandoned -- as Iran was delivered to extremists like Khomeni that make the Shah look like Albert Schweitzer by comparison.
Yes, our form of government, economy and even religious beliefs have spread, and are spreading with greater force since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "bad boy" of the Western world.
We are finest, bravest and most accomplished people that civilization has witnessed.
Let's not squander the legacy that is not yet ours to give. Let's be sure we don't become the thing we hate the most.
By the way: write the FCC and urge them to take away the broadcasting licenses controlled by News Corporation, parent company of the FOX News Channel, for the fraud they have perpetrated as "fair and balanced" journalism that is nothing more than ultra-right propaganda. Enough is enough!
The FCC address is:
Michael Powell
C/O The Republican National Committee
300 First Street SE
Washington DC 20003
I'm sure that the FCC Administrators will eventually get the message!
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