Column: Salt & Light

Columnist: Kevin Slinger          

This Submission: Gleaming Endorsements

As we close in on the 2004 presidential election, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at just who is endorsing or supporting John Kerry in this year’s campaign.  Whether you choose to use this information merely as conversational “fodder,” or to take a good long look at just how your views compare with these groups and individuals supporting this candidate, I trust you will find it as interesting as I did.  Some are simply amusing, but many of these should be very real cause for alarm.                                               

First, let’s look at the unnamed “foreign leaders” Kerry speaks of.  He has stated, on more than one occasion, that these leaders prefer him to President Bush as the leader of our nation.

Why don’t we clear things up a bit and name the unnamed.  They include: socialist appeaser Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, who, like Kerry, views retreat in the face of evil as showing high moral standards; North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong II, who believes a Kerry administration would be much softer toward his country’s nuclear weapons program, has radio broadcasts air Kerry quotes and his communist regime newspapers reprint Kerry speeches; avowed anti-Semitic former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who just last year urged Muslim leaders to achieve “final victory” over Jews who he said “rule the world by proxy.” 

Yassar Arafat, terrorist and Chairman of the Palestinian National Authority, would likely also toss his hat into the supportive ring.  Kerry has referred to him as a “statesman” and a role model.  You could probably add Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, to the mix as well.  He recently interrupted Cuban state-sponsored television to air Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11" in its entirety.

Big media endorsements for Kerry include: Peter Chernin, News Corporation President (this may be a stunner for some, as they are behind the very channel liberals are calling Republican biased, FOX News); Sumner Redstone, Viacom CEO (can you say CBS?); Howard Stringer, Sony Chairman; and Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association President and CEO.  Each of these men pledged to raise at least $50,000 for Kerry’s campaign.

Other media endorsements include: Jeff Greenfield, CNN; Richard Cohen, Washington Post; San Francisco Chronicle; and Jonathan Alter, Newsweek.  And let us not forget the New York Times, Des Moines Register and many other liberal newspapers nationwide that continually run editorial after editorial backing Kerry, as well as CNN’s Paul Begala and James Carville who are now actively employed by the Kerry campaign.

Yet another media endorsement for Kerry comes from none other than Al Jazeera, the network Osama bin Laden chose as the venue for his propaganda tapes.  The “al-Qaida” network praises Kerry as “a popular mainstream Democrat with liberal tendencies, [who] has been widely seen as a good compromise candidate in a divided party.”  Who do you suppose Osama is pulling for?

Another group of supporters for Kerry are pagans.  A self-professed witch, Traci Laird, spoke with U.S. News and World Report before the Republican convention about her and fellow witches’ protest plans there.  “Because of the high energy from both sides, it is a potent place for magic.  There will be a private ritual... which will, hopefully, tap the energy of the convention for a spell to remove Bush from D.C.,” Laird stated.  Wow!

One rather strange endorsement comes from one of the typical Democratic strongholds, labor unions.  The head of the largest union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, says current efforts to restructure organized labor would lose momentum under a Democratic president and that both organized labor and the Democratic party might be better off if John Kerry were to lose the election.  Andy Stern, president of SEIU, stated in an interview with The Washington Post, “I don’t know if it would survive with a Democratic president.”  When asked if he thought a Kerry presidency would help or hurt the internal union deliberations about change, he said, “I think it hurts.”  Why on earth is this group spending $65 million to help Kerry get elected then?  It must all go back to either the “my daddy was a union man and he always voted Democrat” thing or they simply believe all of the propaganda spewed forth.

Last, but certainly not least, the Communist Party of the United States has implicitly endorsed John Kerry.  You can check it out on their website www.cpusa.org.  There you will find their “Top Ten Reasons to Defeat Bush” along with an article entitled “Just Being Anti-Bush is Not Enough to Win.”  The article calls for getting involved in grassroots efforts to mobilize the vote.  It also states that “the overriding political task is to defeat Bush and his counterparts in Congress and elect Kerry.”  The Communist Party itself has no candidate as it feels that doing so would “distract from the main effort of defeating Bush and the ultra-right extremist agenda.”  They go on to state, “We think that a socialist government could be elected under our current political structure...”  Indeed.  Simply look through the veneer and sugar-coated campaign ads and into his proposed policies, when he actually lays them out, and you’ll see that Kerry, himself, is not far off.

It’s interesting to see just who wants a Kerry presidency.  It gets even more interesting when one considers why.  All of his “official” foreign endorsements come from our ideological and political enemies, while his domestic endorsements come from the far left wing fringe.  Which of these mentioned groups or individuals shares your ideals? 

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