The Daily Telegraph | Miami bomb plot suspects 'entrapped'

The Daily Telegraph | Miami bomb plot suspects 'entrapped': "From correspondents in Washington

June 27, 2006

SEVEN men charged with conspiring to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI building in Miami were entrapped by a federal informant, lawyers for two of the suspects said.

An indictment issued last week accused the men of pledging loyalty to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and seeking the group's support to 'wage war' against the US Government.

The person they thought was an al-Qaeda representative was actually an FBI informant, US Justice Department officials said.

Albert Levin, the court-appointed attorney for suspect Patrick Abraham, said he believes his client was ensnared by the informant.

There was 'a lot of talking going on by the the informant and more listening by the defendant and or the defendants', Mr Levin told Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly.

Nathan Clarke, a lawyer for another suspect Rotschild Augustine, agreed.

'With respect to my client, from what I can read in the indictment, there's going to be a question of whether there's even sufficient evidence to sustain the burden of proof on conviction,' Mr Clarke said.

'If by any chance there's a scintilla of that then, of course, there's going to be the entrapment issue,' he said.

'This thing took place over eight months, according to the indictment and at the end of the indictment, it says that this thing became disorganized and nobody had ever done anything or did anything.'

Abraham, Augustine and three other men arrested on Thursday in Miami appeared briefly in a magistrate's court on Friday.

Another suspect arrested in Atlanta made his initial court appearance there on Friday. The seventh suspect, arrested in the Miami area earlier last week on a probation violation, was scheduled to appear in court tomorrow."

The Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon: Laura Knight-Jadczyk

The Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon: Laura Knight-Jadczyk: "The Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon
Excerpted from
The Secret History of The World
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Copyright 2001, no part of this text may be copied, stored, or reproduced by any means
except by express written permission of the author."

Work to be heard, even without words | ajc.com

Work to be heard, even without words | ajc.com


Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ajc.com > Opinion
Work to be heard, even without words

By RANDY ARONOV
Published on: 05/11/06

Last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's speech at the Atlanta History Center was interrupted several times by protesters who yelled at Rumsfeld and unfurled banners, an event that drew national news coverage.

But in covering the speech, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman also mentioned another protester:

"But one man took a different approach. As showdowns go, it wasn't exactly two gunslingers face to face on a dusty street in Dodge City. But there was drama in it nonetheless. As Rumsfeld stood at the podium, starting to outline his vision of the American role in world affairs, a balding man in a coat and tie rose out of the seated audience, turned his back on Rumsfeld and stood silently."

My name is Randy Aronov and I am that silent dissenter.

Who I am is not important. What is important is that I am an American citizen who objects to the lies from the Bush administration that led us into the war in Iraq.

Turning my back to Rumsfeld was my way of showing my disapproval and my disdain for the policies of this administration, which so far has not been held accountable.

We've reached a point in our country where voting every four years is not enough to effect change. People need to become proactive: Write letters to elected officials, sign petitions, attend local anti-war meetings and demonstrations, and whenever possible practice acts of civil disobedience. We need to be doing more, a lot more.

It was unnerving standing there, facing Rumsfeld down with my back to him. It was hostile territory — the audience was packed with Bush supporters. I was very nervous, but this was something that my conscience told me to do. So as soon as Rumsfeld began speaking, I stood up and I stayed standing until he finished.

I was quite surprised that I wasn't hauled out like the other demonstrators; they just let me stand there. When the formal speech was over, I quietly walked out and joined the other demonstrators outside.

The galvanizing moment came later, during a Q&A session, when Rumsfeld was called down by CIA career veteran Ray McGovern, a man with impeccable credentials. McGovern's unrelenting questions concerning how the country was lied into the war in Iraq gave credence to our acts of civil disobedience.

It was an exhilarating experience and one I would recommend to anyone who opposes the illegal war in Iraq and supports responsible foreign policy from our government.

I took inspiration from Harry Taylor, another average citizen, who in early April at an open forum in Charlotte stood up and took President Bush to task for spying on Americans.

"I would hope from time to time, you would have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself . . . ," he told the president. "In my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of my leadership in Washington."

How many more Harry Taylors are out there who feel the same way but have never exercised their right to say so, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which mandates that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

More than a right, it is our obligation as American citizens to stand up and be heard in opposition to policies that have led to so much needless suffering in Iraq.

•Randy Aronov is an Atlanta parent and political activist.


Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/0511edman.html

Israeli rabbis awarded Japan peace prize - Yahoo! News

Israeli rabbis awarded Japan peace prize - Yahoo! News: "Thu May 11, 5:54 AM ET

TOKYO (AFP) -
Israel's Rabbis for Human Rights, which has built up a reputation for battling abuses by soldiers and settlers in the Palestinian territories, was honoured in Japan with a leading peace prize."

Critics of the Iraq War Put Rumsfeld on the Defensive

Critics of the Iraq War Put Rumsfeld on the Defensive

Published on Friday, May 5, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Critics of the Iraq War Put Rumsfeld on the Defensive
His speech in Atlanta is interrupted three times. In a Q&A, a former CIA analyst calls him a liar.
by Peter Spiegel


WASHINGTON — When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld goes on the road to deliver a speech, it's usually in front of a relatively respectful audience: U.S. troops stationed overseas, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation dinner have been among his appearances this year.

An audience in Atlanta on Thursday turned out to be a bit different.

Rumsfeld was interrupted three times by antiwar protesters during his speech, and during a question-and-answer session afterward he was forced to defend himself against charges by a former high-ranking CIA analyst that he intentionally lied to push the U.S. into war in Iraq.

Rumsfeld sought to make light of the flak during his address to the Southern Center for International Studies, a nonprofit educational group, telling the audience the protesters were just a few "close personal friends" of Peter White, the center's president.

Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who once gave then-President George H.W. Bush his morning intelligence briefings, engaged in what became an extended debate with Rumsfeld after asking why the Defense secretary had insisted before the Iraq invasion that there was "bulletproof evidence" linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.

"Was that a lie, Mr. Rumsfeld, or was that manufactured somewhere else? Because all of my CIA colleagues disputed that and so did the 9/11 commission," McGovern asked near the start of the 45-minute question-and-answer session. "Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary?"

At the start of the exchange, Rumsfeld remained his usual unflappable self, insisting, "I haven't lied; I did not lie then," before launching into a vigorous defense of the administration's prewar assertions on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

But Rumsfeld became uncharacteristically tongue-tied when McGovern pressed him on claims that he knew where unconventional Iraqi weapons were located.

"You said you knew where they were," McGovern said.

"I did not. I said I knew where suspected sites were," Rumsfeld retorted.

McGovern then read from statements the Defense secretary had made that weapons were located near Tikrit, Iraq, and Baghdad, which led Rumsfeld to briefly stammer. The Defense secretary recovered after admonishing a security guard who was trying to push McGovern away from the microphone.

"It is easy for you to make a charge," Rumsfeld said, recovering his composure and insisting U.S. troops believed they would encounter chemical or biological weapons.

Rumsfeld went on to field a dozen other questions, including from a woman whose son was killed in Iraq and who asked about help for the children of slain service members. Rumsfeld asked her to submit her name to Southern Center officials. "And I'm so sorry about your son," Rumsfeld said.

In an interview after the speech, McGovern, 66, who lives in the Washington area, said he obtained a ticket for Thursday's address through an acquaintance who had forwarded him an e-mail invitation. The invitation directed him to a website that asked for detailed information about his background.

"I filled it all out and, lo and behold, there was a ticket in the mail," he said.

White, the center's president, said he had sent invitations to a wide range of civic and business groups, noting the Pentagon had put no restrictions on who should be included.

"This was not any polished group," White said. "That's how you get credibility."

Rumsfeld has a long association with the Southern Center, which holds regular gatherings of former Defense secretaries and secretaries of State, programs that are later broadcast on PBS. White said Rumsfeld had been a regular participant.

"I don't think it caused him any discomfort," White said of Thursday's disruptions. "He's unflappable."

McGovern said his question was prompted by Rumsfeld's response to one of the three antiwar protesters who interrupted the Defense secretary's prepared address, accusing him of lying about prewar intelligence.

"That charge is frequently leveled against the president for one reason or another, and it is so wrong, so unfair and so destructive of a free system where people need to trust each other and government," Rumsfeld said after the protester had been whisked out of the room.

The two other protesters stood up at various points in the speech and accused Rumsfeld of being a war criminal.

A fourth demonstrator stood silently in the middle of the room, his back to Rumsfeld, with a badge on his suit jacket reading "impeach." The man stood throughout the speech and walked out on his own just before the question-and-answer session began.

Times staff writer Julian Barnes contributed to this report.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

###

"Galbraith for President"

One of my few heroes has died: John Kenneth Gailbraith

"Galbraith for President"



Published on Monday, May 1, 2006 by The Nation
"Galbraith for President"
by John Nichols


Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American century, would surely have been considered presidential timber. As it was, the man whose Canadian birth barred him from seeking the nation's highest office had to settle for shaping every presidency since that of Franklin Roosevelt – either as a trusted counselor to the occupant of the Oval Office, a wise critic or, as was frequently the case, both.

One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt's epic first term – during which he worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration – he would go on to advise FDR's National Defense Advisory Committee and then to serve as an administrator of the Office of Price Administration, where the man who was as quick with a quip as he was with economic charts and tables noted that he ''reached the point that all price fixers reach -- my enemies outnumbered my friends."

It will be his epigrams, his one-liners and his sharp asides that many of his friends will miss most about Ken Galbraith, who has died at age 97. The genius of the economics professor so long associated with Harvard and with most of the good – or at least tolerable – presidencies of the 20th century, was that he was never so impressed by his immense knowledge or his powerful positions that he could not find a humorous, and sometimes cutting, phrase with which to note the obvious.

When he was one of President Kennedy's most trusted aides – and, ultimately, the ambassador to India – Galbraith was dispatched to Vietnam to survey the country to which Kennedy was being advised by others to dispatch military forces. Galbraith, who tried harder than just about anyone else to avert the turn toward quagmire, sent back a memo in which he reflected on the difficulty of distinguishing "friendly jungle" from "Vietcong jungle" and asked, "[Who] is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to...ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age."

As Galbraith biographer Richard Parker noted in his essential review of his subject's attempt to prevent Cold War hawks from convincing Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson from expanding U.S. military involvement in southeast Asia, it was in the fall of 1961 that, "Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake. For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty. Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics."

(Parker's recent biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], is necessary reading, as are Galbraith's own books, particularly 1958's The Affluent Society, with its Keyneseian indictment of "private wealth and public squalor" in American life, and 1992's brilliant The Culture of Contentment, which offers what is still the best explanation of the contemporary crisis in its observation that, "The long years of high budget deficits when they were not needed made it seemingly impossible to initiate stimulating public expenditures when they were now needed. The celebrated tax reductions for the upper-income brackets and the accompanying economics in welfare distribution had substituted the discretionary spending of the rich for the wholely reliable spending of the poor.")

The wittiest and wisest of "the best and brightest," Galbraith broke early and publicly with President Johnson over what had become the Vietnam War and helped the influential liberal group he had co-founded decades earlier, Americans for Democratic Action, move toward an opposition stance that confirmed that even Cold War liberals recognized the madness of engaging in a long-term ground war in southeast Asia.

Galbraith would serve as a distinguished father figure for the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending his towering presence to student protests and the campaigns of insurgent Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Over the ensuing years, he would remain a steady critic of the imperial endeavors that would rob the U.S. treasury of the resources that could have built the great society.

Several years ago in a valedictory essay that drew together the vital themes of his long career as both an economist and as the Cassandra who warned of the overwhelming costs of misguided foreign policy , Galbraith observed, "We cherish the progress in civilisation since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The US and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilised life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death. Civilisation has made great strides over the centuries in science, healthcare, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilised achievement.

"The facts of war are inescapable - death and random cruelty, suspension of civilised values, a disordered aftermath," Galbraith continued. "Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure."

The clarity of his vision led several generations of insurgent political strategists to imagine a "Galbraith for President" candidacy, only to be jarred back to reality by the fact that, while Galbraith had been a U.S. citizen since the 1930s, the Constitutional bar on foreign-born candidates disqualified the most attractive contender from consideration. Few political realities frustrated Allard K . Lowenstein, the boldest advocate for a 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Johnson than the fact that Galbraith, his friend and frequent ally, could not be the candidate. George McGovern, who made no secret of his esteem for Galbraith, would have been delighted to make the former Roosevelt aide and Kennedy ambassador his vice presidential running mate in 1972 – a selection that surely could not have hurt, and might well have helped, the Democratic cause of that year. And how amusing it would have been in 1984 if the mentally agile 76-year-old Galbraith had been the Democratic nominee against his doddering 73-year-old contemporary, Ronald Reagan. As it was, he would be boomed by liberals now and again over the decades as a potential candidate for the Senate from his adopted home state of Massachusetts. But it was never to be, perhaps because Galbraith's healthy ego told him that he was best suited for the top job.

Galbraith professed to be amused by the "Galbraith for President" talk, as he was by Canadian suggestions that he might want to come back and serve as that country's prime minister. But he did, with tongue planted only slightly in cheek, imply an interest in presidential politics that was more than merely academic. When the 200th anniversary of the Constitution was celebrated in 1987, American Heritage magazine asked prominent Americans to suggest how they would amend the founding document. Galbraith's reply: "My answer is obvious: That clause that excludes Canadians and others of foreign birth from the Presidency and, possibly, from the Vice-Presidency as well. My whole life was altered, as also, quite clearly, was the history of the Republic. Henry Kissinger, I cannot doubt, vociferously agrees."

A quite serious law professor Jonathan Turley would suggest some years later that Galbraith provided the classic argument for elimination the Constitutional restriction that "denied the nation some of our best and brightest."

When Austrian-born actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in 2003, there was a flurry of talk about amending the Constitution in order to allow Americans who had been born beyond the nation's borders to be seek the presidency. It seemed at the time that the best argument for the measure was the fact that Galbraith, at 94, was still physically fit, intellectually exceptional and as committed as ever to the liberal ideals that had powered the most successful Democratic presidencies – a combination that made him far more qualified not only than the current occupant of the Oval Office but than most of the Democrats who aspired to it.

With Galbraith's passing, we are left with one less counter to his observation that, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Thankfully, we are left, as well, with John Kenneth Galbraith's wisest piece of political advice; his suggestion that: "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

When Democrats nominate a presidential candidate who is as capable as Galbraith was of articulating that sentiment, the liberalism that our late economist so loved will indeed be resurgent.

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. Nichols is the author of two books: It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for Buchanan.

© 2006 The Nation

"Invisibility Looks Good on You": The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney

Weekend Edition
April 7--9, 2006

"Invisibility Looks Good on You"

The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney

By DAVID VEST

A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: "Let's all play Get Cynthia!"

Let's get her for being too outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.

Let's get her because, hell, she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she's an easy target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans -- who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina and Iraq -- and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, "Oh, please! We're not responsible for HER!"

Rep. Cynthia McKinney has now apologized for her part in the face-off at Checkpoint Cynthia. It was not enough to stop the cartooning of the coverage. Already the news wires are spinning her statement as a complete about-face, an abandonment of everything else she has said about the incident. Look, she said there was racial profiling in Washington! Look, now she's apologizing!

Journalists are reporting this story as though it were their job to "get" her, breathlessly revealing that the woman who receives more hate mail than Teddy Kennedy employs a part-time bodyguard, as though it proved something about her mental state.

But note, please, Rep. McKinney did not take back anything she has said about racial profiling in the nation's capitol. And the fact remains that, while each day's mail brings a new wave of personal threats, some of the people charged with protecting her affect not to recognize her. A Republican colleague offered the suggestion that she could announce "I am a Member of Congress" each time she passes a security checkpoint. But McKinney has served for eleven years, not eleven minutes.

Here's a test of media fairness: how many times, over those eleven years, have you seen Rep. McKinney on CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, asked to explain her views on Iraq and the Middle East? Not once, you say? Read on for the "why come" of it all.

The leaders of her own party turn their backs while she endures the most vicious racial stereotyping I've seen, since the last time I looked at that old KKK rag called the "Thunderbolt" when a fellow college student stuck a copy in my face back around 1963. "I know it's probably racist," he said, "but it's funny," as if that would have made it all right.

It wasn't funny, it was disgusting, and I don't think what's happening to Rep. Cynthia McKinney is funny now. Much of the commentary seems to have been written by the same sort of people who say they don't agree with Rush Limbaugh, they just listen to him for "entertainment." (Anybody out there who listens to Rush for entertainment, please get your eyes off of my words, I've got nothing to say to you and I sure as hell don't want to "amuse" you.)

Two-party collusion in the destruction of a reputation is the story here, folks. For Pelosi, the affair is "not something we need to focus on." Judging by Dennis Hastert's comments, Checkpoint Cynthia was the biggest national security event since 9/11.

Rep. Tom DeLay called McKinney a racist. Nothing DeLay said would surprise me, and that comment was no exception. What did surprise me was that I couldn't find any stories quoting any Democrats saying, "Tom DeLay called somebody a racist? Tom DeLay?!"

Oh, I know. They didn't want to take the bait, fall into the trap, keep the ball in the air for another news cycle. But really, how can they stand this? How can anybody?

Right wingers, aided by Democrats, are spinning McKinney as "arrogant," "haughty," a "nut-case," even "the madwoman McKinney" -- a woman who, just between us pros, wink wink, doesn't understand how "the game" is played.

She understands the game all right. She just refuses to play it. When CNN's Soledad O'Brien, trying to take control of an interview, said to McKinney, "Let me stop you there," what came back on her was something spoken in a tone rarely used toward a TV personality: "You can't stop me, Soledad."

And you can't control me, she might have added, and you can't dictate your own framing of the issues with me.

How easy it is for people who don't have a history of having their right to be present challenged, to counsel others to be more "calm" and "sensible" when provoked.

How easy it is to imagine a senior party member sitting down with Rep. McKinney, patiently and paternalistically explaining that politics is the art of compromise, sweetie. We all know what's supposed to be meant by that, but what kind of compromise do we really want our elected representatives to make with racial profiling, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and a war founded on lies?

The Democratic Party has already compromised this country into desperate straits, going along to get along with Bush. It has been so long since one of them stood ground on anything, we're all shocked when it happens.

Cynthia McKinney is standing firm, with little visible support, but then she has stood alone before. Like that time when she actually voted to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, when given the chance. She was joined by only two other members of the House. The Republicans dared the Democrats to vote for withdrawal, and the Dems all frantically denounced the maneuver as a trap. McKinney seized the moment and called their bluff. Is that what her critics have in mind when they call her a "nut-case" or even worse names?

If she's a nut-case, then maybe we need to send some more crazy people up in there.

She stood alone in 2002, when power brokers in her own party recruited a Reagan Republican stalking horse to defeat her, after McKinney expressed support for Palestinian rights and was among the first to call for an investigation of the Bush Administration after 9/11. The party line at that time was that "we've all got to stand behind the president" in the Wonderful War on Terror.

And then, when McKinney rose from the political dead and returned uninvited from the oblivion they had consigned her to, and reclaimed her seat without anyone's special blessing, other than the voters of her district, the Democrats in the House celebrated her historic comeback by refusing to restore her seniority.

That was Nancy Pelosi's way of saying, "You will comply."

They wanted to keep Crazy Cynthia away from the microphone, of course they did. Out of sight, out of mind. Can't have our elected officials running around saying the same things the public is saying about the war on Iraq! Makes us look bad! And thus it comes to pass that we get news stories saying things like, "Since returning to Washington, McKinney has kept a lower profile until last week's incident," as if keeping quiet on public matters was her own idea.

The incident with the Capitol Police wasn't about her hair. It wasn't about the identity pin. It's about the fact that when you are female, black, antiwar, and militant, invisibility looks good on you, from where the pro-war Dems sit.

Some of us are old enough to remember that many Democrats accused Martin Luther King, Jr. of "ingratitude" when he began to speak out against the Vietnam War. That was the very moment when, in the eyes of many who had previously and publicly despised him, he was transmogrified into the Great Civil Rights Leader, who had now "gone too far" and "risked" damaging the wonderful "reputation" he had earned, not to mention all the "progress for his people" that (hint, hint) could be rolled back if a "backlash" were provoked.

Vestiges of this view persist today in some quarters. William F. Buckley has said (recently) that he regrets that National Review opposed Civil Rights. He has not, insofar as I am aware, expressed a hint remorse for not supporting King in trying to stop the war in Vietnam.

So now, today, we have Rep. McKinney calling Israel to account, demanding justice for Palestinians, questioning what happened on 9/11, giving no quarter on racial profiling, and voting against the war in Iraq.

How are the do-nothing Democrats supposed to get the benefit of the antiwar crowd, if there are people running around actively voting against the war?

They act as though they believe all the country really needs is not to end the disaster in Iraq but to let the "good guys" run it.

The noble John "Nobody Spins Me" Kerry writes an op-ed calling for not one but TWO deadlines in Iraq (top that, Hillary!) and the whole party has a conniption fit because all anyone can talk about is this uppitty Black woman who won't let security or anybody else, including party leadership, manhandle her.

Nancy Pelosi had her party theme all picked out: we were all supposed to be talking about Tom DeLay and this "Republican culture of corruption," and if anyone pressed us on Iraq, we were to demand, with one mighty voice (are you ready? all together now ...) "that 2006 be a significant period of transition" in Iraq.

The Democratic Party, in splendid unison, calling upon American sons and daughters to hurl their bodies into the immolating fire, for the sake of "a significant period of transition" -- who could resist?

How different from that other voice, that Black voice from Georgia, joined by a handful of others, saying "Bring the troops home. Stop this war. Now."

You begin to get a pretty clear idea why the Democrats have never asked McKinney to give the rebuttal after a Bush State of the Union.

And as for the Republicans, with few exceptions, they don't ever intend to let another person of color claim to be a victim of racism without attacking her credibility. Not one more. (Recall how patiently they explained to us all that what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina "wasn't about race.")

Let them convene their grand jury and push their polls. Maybe one day a polling agency will call you, to ask what you think about white folks telling people of color that they're wrong to feel that anything, anything, is ever about racism.

Before judging Rep. McKinney, ask yourself, what kind of person would still be in public service, after setbacks and sabotage attempts like these? What kind of person would keep reporting for duty after being consistently disrespected, and repeatedly challenged to "identify" herself after 11 years in Congress? And then to be mocked and attacked for her refusal to meekly "comply" when physically prevented from going to cast a vote.

You got a bit of the answer if you saw Rep. McKinney on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. I liked it when she refused to let him control the conversation, but I have to tell you, we stood up and cheered at my house when she told Blitzer, "Don't even begin to twist my words."

Among the comments at our table that evening was, "Why can't SHE be president?"

Singer-songwriter David Vest can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com.

His CDs includes Serve Me Right To Shuffle and Way Down Here (Live).