"Nothing accomplished"
A challenge for my Kerry-supporting readers

Went to Nashville the other day for a funeral. On the way home I saw a Ford Fiesta emblazoned with a bumpet sticker on the lower-left, rear window. It said:

Mission Nothing
Accomplished

Anybody but Bush

That's it. I thought of this sticker when I read Matt Welch's piece in the Daily Star:

Whenever I'd ask [DNC] delegates what made them particularly excited about John Kerry, the average pause was four seconds, and the response was never convincing. After his triumphant speech, the chant outside the Fleet Center was not "John Kerry!" it was "No More Years!"

Kerry's campaign is more intent on convincing voters who Kerry isn't (Bush) than informing us who Kerry is.

And that's why the Fiesta's bumper sticker was ripe with double entendre. After all, "nothing accomplished" also describes John Kerry's record since he stopped trashing his country, after he returned from Navy service in Vietnam.

We know more - from Kerry and his campaign staff - about his four months in the Mekong than we do his 20 years in the Senate.

Hence my challenge: If you support Kerry for president, I invite you to write a guest post for this blog explaining why. Here's why it's a challenge:

To be published, you must explain why Kerry is to be preferred in terms that do not simply say he's not Bush. This is not an invitation to rage about Bush; it is an invitation to be positive about Kerry.

It will be insufficient merely to declare that Bush is wrong on Iraq, taxes, education, etc. You must explain why and how Kerry is right.

You must cite and provide links to Kerry's speeches or campaign releases to back up your claims. These cites can reach all the way back to when Kerry declared his candidacy for the 2004 race.

Citing the Dermocratic platform will be unpersuasive, since neither party pays a lot of attention to its own platform once the election is over, even if they win.

Length limit is 1,500 words. That's a long post, by the way.

I will not rebuild your html code, so when you email your entry to me, you MUST email it in plaintext format (not an html email) with html coding revealed intact. Do not email me asking how to do that. You may write the essay as a *.txt document and send it as an attachment if you wish, but I won't take responsibility if my security software alerts and sets phasers to kill.

Your subject line must read OHC KERRY CHALLENGE ENTRY. I get pretty well buried in email every day, and unless it's obvious your entry is there, I may well miss it and even delete it.

I do not have time to be your editor. If you can't spell or use good grammar and syntax, I won't help you. Your essay must be publishable in style and readability!

I am not promising to publish anyone's essay. I will publish no more than one essay. I will not fisk any essay that I do publish, I will present it unedited and unabridged with your byline. You MUST include your real name; I will delete pseudonymous essays without reading them.

I reserve the right to publish (maybe with attribution, maybe not) excerpts of any essay submitted.

No - "means no" - profanity. Using the first and last letters of a cuss word with *** in the middle counts as profanity. When quoting someone else, delete profanity used in the quote.

ABSOLUTE DEADLINE is Saturday, Aug. 28 at 7 a.m. CDT.

by Donald Sensing, 8/21/2004 07:52:41 PM. Permalink |