Along with my earlier post from 9/11 families, here are some more of my faves:
"Well, I think a lot more needs to be said about Karl Rove’s motives, because they’re not the people’s motives, and if the President really believed his own words of unity, then he should fire Karl Rove. If the President of the United States knows the meaning of his own words, he should listen to the plea of Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband when the Twin Towers came crashing down: she said, “if you’re going to use 9/11, use it to make this nation safer than it was on 9/11.
“And that’s not being done. If you’re going to use 9/11, if you’re going to be impassioned about the lives lost on 9/11, then do so by making us safer.”
“Karl Rove doesn’t owe me an apology, he doesn’t owe Democrats an apology, he owes her an apology—he owes an apology to every one of those families who paid the ultimate price on September 11th.
— John Kerry, via Lizard Queen
I’m devoting much of today’s report to Karl Rove’s vile comments denigrating half of the American public. My office overlooks Ground Zero, and I’m looking at the gaping footprint as I write this. My wife and I were in New York that day, on our way to the WTC for a morning meeting. A chance phone call dragged on a few minutes too long and most likely saved our lives. I lost friends in the towers, and when I walk past the site, as I do almost every evening, the pain is as real as it was on September 11th, 2001.
I spent my youth in Beirut during the height of Lebanon’s civil war, and I fought the Syrian presence in Lebanon long before the “Cedar Revolution.” I watched young boys give their lives and mothers cradle their dying children in blood-soaked arms. I’ve seen more bloodshed, war, and violence, and shot more guns than most of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists combined. I wouldn’t presume to question the strength or dignity of a stranger, and I pity those who blithely push the right=strong, left=weak rhetoric. It says far more about their inadequacies than it does about the target of their scorn. Today, Karl Rove took that rhetoric to a new, filthy low.
— Peter Daou of the Daou Report
Listen, I’m pissed as hell at Rove. I am a democrat and have been forever. (I’m 54) … my two kids who just happen to be in the US Army serving are also democrats. My son and daughter both joined as soon as they possibly could after 9/11.
So far they are both safe from harm (no thanks to Rove…).
My son and daughter both emailed me last night wanting to know just who in the hell the Rove guy is. They both want to plaster his face everywhere around the bases they are stationed. It seems that Rove didn’t know that a good percentage of enlisted folk were Democrats. They like to say around the bases that republicans don’t volunteer.
Ah, says [GOP Chairman] Mehlman, but those were Democrats. “Karl didn’t say the Democratic Party,” Mehlman told the Washington Post. “He said liberals.”
Well, that’s just great then. Can we now assume that Mehlman and his fellow Republicans have decided that they’ll no longer use the word “liberal” to refer to “Democrats” generally? From here on out, will Mehlman insist that his party-mates make a careful distinction between, say, “Democrats” like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and “liberals” like Michael Moore?
Don’t count on it: Republicans have put years of work into making “liberal” a dirty word, and they’re going to keep on using it to describe Democrats every time they can. Indeed, Mehlman’s careful distinction between “Democrats” and “liberals” didn’t even survive the duration of Rove’s slanderous speech. After charging that the comments of “Democrat” Dick Durbin were “putting our troops in greater danger,” Rove said: “No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
So, Karl, where’s Osama?
And I would think US soldiers have to worry about people shooting at them and blowing up RDX bombs from material we forgot to secure. Not Dick Durbin.
And my personal fave:
For the record, my motives aren’t to get more troops killed. If those were my motives I’d ship them off to a war on false pretenses without sufficient equipment to keep them safe.
— Atrios
Bonus: a call to Rove’s office by the Crooks and Liars folks (MP3 format)