Once again: John Kerry, go Cheney yourself

Harvey Wasserman writes in the Columbus, Ohio Free Press:

[T]here was only one thing Kerry could have done to honor the work we all did---not concede. Instead, his campaign has a sacred obligation to consider the election not over until all allegations of electoral abuse are vented, investigated and put to rest. We now hear there is a call for evidence to be brought forward. This isn't enough. Many millions were raised by the Democrats to guard against the widespread fraud that defined this election. Where is it? Why isn't it being aggressively deployed?

During the campaign, the Kerry campaign spent unlimited time, money and effort on denying the public the ability to vote for Ralph Nader. The attacks were political, personal, procedural---and endless.

But after spending all that energy attacking the left, the Kerry campaign lost to the most powerful and dangerous crew of right wing extremists this nation has ever seen---and then had no time at all to make sure the vote count was fair or accurate. Kerry's hurried, feeble plea that George W. Bush heal the wounds of disunity in this country must have been greeted with gales of laughter in Karl Rove's White House.

At the grassroots, among those of us who labored long and hard to unseat that vicious, hateful, anti-democratic regime, Kerry's sorry surrender has evoked utter horror.

This election saw an unprecedented grassroots outpouring. Kerry was not an inspiring candidate. Until the last month, his campaign was a study in ineptitude.

But tens of millions of Americans were (and are) terrified of who and what now controls the federal government. Uncounted thousands came out to make phone calls, canvass door-to-door and drive likely Democrats to the polls.

But when it was so dubiously over, Team Kerry had no such commitment. Not to victory. Not to fair play. Not to the hard work of those who volunteered with such amazing energy and commitment.

Kerry's sad, premature swoon gave the Republicans a totally open field to claim victory for their hateful "moral" values, for infinite deficits, for environmental destruction, for an extremist judiciary, you name it.

If you've followed my blog for the last year, you know that I was suspicious of Kerry's nomination from the start. His ONLY support was from big-money pols, and he sucked miserably in every debate among the Democratic candidates. Still, somehow, with the help of a media blitz about "electability" (how ridiculous that seems now) and who knows what all else that went on behind the scenes, he won Iowa and New Hampshire and rode the absurd "anybody but Bush" vote to the nomination. I suspected then, and suspect even more now, that he was hand-picked by Karl Rove, or whoever it is that Rove answers to. Kerry somehow managed to run against an idiot with an abysmal record and not win. And when push came to shove, he didn't even try. Despite what his ads said, John Kerry did not defend this country as a young man (he said so himself as a young man), and he certainly didn't defend it this year.

Maureen Dowd has a slightly more polite sendoff than my "Go Cheney yourself" to give to Kerry:

Just as there is talk here that John Kerry may want to run again, there is also talk that Donald Rumsfeld wants to stay on to continue his transformation of the military. Rummy's stubborn need to show we could do more with less is what kept us from having the strength to secure Iraq at the start, turning our troops into targets for a ghostly foe armed with the explosives and missiles looted by insurgents from unguarded caches.

The president should say to Rummy what the Democrats should say to Mr. Kerry: "Thanks, you've done quite enough."