Whoops, I pressed [REPLY ALL] by mistake. Well, too late to fix it, I hope everybody will forgive me.
I probably won't end up voting for Ron Paul in November ''08.
But as I've listened to and read about nearly all the other candidates, boy, am I tempted.
I've always been uncomfortable thinking of myself as a "single-issue" voter. But if we get down to the wire, and my neighbors' children in uniform are still nothing more than bullseye targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, waiting to come home to Dover Air Force Base in flag-draped coffins, and lifelong substandard medical help from Walter Reed and the VA, the Iraq War is a Single Issue worthy of my vote.
And Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are the only candidates who flat-out, unequivocally say they'll end the Iraq War and bring our troops home immediately upon assuming the presidency.
To the best extent that I can comprehend the vague, qualified statements of the big-money big-media candidates most likely to win the nominations, that makes Paul and Kucinich unique.
Some candidates are positively FOR continuing the endless, foot-shooting, pre-lost ghastly war. Others fill their mildly non-pro-war statements with caution and slow conditional schedules -- during which more of my neighbors' daughters and sons will die.
I'll be happy to hear and consider your citations of a clear, unequivocal promise to end the war from any of the "serious, mainstream" candidates. I just haven't heard any yet.
I note in particular Hillary Rodham Clinton's jingo sabre-rattling Senate vote to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization -- which lame ducks Bush and Cheney will most certainly claim as Congress's Green Light to launch a military attack against Iran. She joins the perfectly sane Joe Lieberman in pushing us toward yet another American war in the region, as she tries to convince American voters that our first woman president can be as dangerous, violent and war-happy as any man.
(Obama criticized her for that vote -- but forgot to cast his own vote.)
I'm an Army veteran, the last of the Vietnam-era draftees. My two years were safe enough. But I lost friends whom I still miss and grieve for; their names are on the Vietnam War Memorial which I've never had the nerve to visit in my hometown of DC.
I never imagined the US would bumble into another lie-based catastrophic scoundrels' War Without End again, but as of today, 3830 flag-draped coffins of my neighbors' young children in uniform have been flown home, the wards of our military and veterans' hospitals are filling with the maimed and the shell-shocked, and the Iraq War has lasted longer than it took America to win World War Two against Germany, Italy and Japan. Iraq's civilian children, women and men killed, wounded and rendered homeless refugees since the American-led invasion -- practically innumerable.
Now we have to start designing a new war memorial on the Mall.
I take exception only to calling Ron Paul a nutcase. That slur implies that our officials in the White House, cabinet and Congress who permit this atrocity to go on and refuse even to discuss ending it are sane and emotionally normal.
When the candidates who promise to end the war immediately are dismissed as nutcases and marginalized moonbats and fruitcakes, and the public officials who enable and facilitate this genocidal catastrophe can pass our common notions of mental-health scrutiny ...
Ron Paul has a "day job" as an obstetrician, and boasts on his Congressional website of the thousands of babies he's helped bring into this world.
I've watched "right-wing nutcases" and marginalized left-wing moonbeams and moonbats come and go in the last four decades of American politics.
If this vile war keeps dragging on, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich deserve a little of your time and research and serious consideration. If you're feeling particularly wild and whacky, maybe even a little of your money. (Paul's fund-raising, all stuffed in envelopes from ordinary people, none from corporate mega-interests, has been startlingly strong.)
You may vote for a "sensible and serious" candidate instead. For almost every voter, that's how the game is supposed to play out.
That's how we got Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Nobody will accuse you of wasting your vote on a moonbat or a nutcase, and the war will go on and on and on, and the flag-draped coffins will keep flying back to Delaware.
Bob Merkin
Northampton Massachusetts
