Freedom's Fire, Brightly Burning

Well, as I mentioned, I was on vacation last week. We returned from our excursion on Saturday, but I had company up until Monday morning, and then it was trundle back to the salt mine so I can keep paying the mortgage and the school loans. Not to mention, last Wednesday I started a grad school class (one more to go after this one!!) and so
my time has been rather stretched.

I am back now but just blown away by all the activity on my political radar over the last week. While I was gone, Light Up the Darkness, The John Kerry Group at DU, and DemBloggers were my lifelines for the limited time I could log on each day.

While the sites just mentioned have certainly covered it thoroughly, I wanted to just sum up one of the most important series of events of the last 48 hours: John Kerry's multi-pronged offensive to rebut Bush's attempted spin on the Iraq situation, on the anniversary of the official handover of power from the CPA to the interim Iraqi government.

John Kerry played the Bush marketing ploy of last night quite well, considering that it seems the sitting president will get ALL the media coverage and the guy who only got 48% (if you trust Diebold, Triad, and ES&S) will get zip unless he fights for every inch. Well our guy did fight and we got:

• a New York Times op-ed prebuttal - The Speech the President Should Give (pdf);


• an email to his supporter list describing similar points as the NY Times op-ed;


• a nice write-up in the Salon War Room;


• a Senate floor prebuttal (mp3 audio) | Transcript (as prepared);


• resulting in coverage on network newscasts;


• a Larry King appearance;


• a Today show appearance this morning;


• and a statement released on his Senate website: Rescuing the mission in Iraq takes more than a new speech, it will take a new policy.

Did I miss any?

Not only did JK stand strong for us yesterday, so did Pelosi, Reid, Biden... and I'm sure more that I didn't hear about.

All in all, yesterday and today have been great days to be a Democrat. At least, relatively speaking, considering that none of it will stop our nation's downward spiral in the clutches of the pretenders until at least January 2007. But this kind of work from our Democratic leaders will certainly help slow the bad stuff down, and maybe even enlighten some of those Americans who still haven't figured out what they lost on November 2, 2004.