The ability to think through 9/11. The ability to change the president's feeble mind on having a 9/11 commission. The ability to freaking read and not depend on anyone to do your thinking for you.
Isn't it amazing that the people who live in the city that was attacked - along with the families of the victims who did their homework and all thinking knowledgeable people in general - are overwhelmingly for getting this little crackhead out of the White House?
LINK (Salon Daypass) - The Jersey Girls' political foil is Deena Burnett, widow of Thomas Burnett, one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Burnett, who lives in Arkansas, spoke to the Republican National Convention two weeks ago, giving an emotional account of her last conversations with her husband from the plane. "The heroes of 9/11 weren't created that day," Burnett told the convention. "Their actions were the result of virtues practiced over a lifetime." Delegates wiped away tears.
Watching the convention on television, Breitweiser felt not teary-eyed, she said, but frightened. She found the speakers angry and bellicose, and she worried that the Bush administration seemed to revel in war. "I am scared [by] the mentality that my daughter, who is 5 years old, is being handed a tomorrow that will be a war for a lifetime. My husband was killed on 9/11. I do not want to lose my daughter 18 years from now when she's walking or living in a large city, and it's payback for our actions in Iraq," Breitweiser said. Later she told me in an interview that she voted for Bush in 2000 because, well, she's a Republican. "I'm not a Democrat!" she said, when I asked if her endorsement of Kerry meant that she had switched parties.
On Tuesday I was unable to reach Deena Burnett, whose name is not listed in the phone directory, for comment about the Jersey Girls' endorsement of Kerry. But a telephone interview I conducted with her two years ago was revealing for her lack of knowledge about the origins and funding sources of al-Qaida. [...] I expected to talk with her about the substance of the case. Instead, she directed me back to the lawyers, pleading ignorance of such details as which Saudi prince made which overtures to the Taliban. She clearly wasn't a document hound.
The Jersey Girls are. They have read seemingly every scrap of information about 9/11 and al-Qaida, from news articles to affidavits to footnotes in obscure government reports. And their command of the facts is what has made them so effective. On Sept. 18, 2002, when much of the public was still sympathetic to the Bush administration position that the attacks could not have been foreseen or prevented, Breitweiser gave a statement before the joint House-Senate investigation into intelligence lapses; it may have changed the course of history.
In a concise, straightforward manner, she laid out the facts far more effectively than had any senator or representative on the panel. She asked how, for example, the CIA could fail to locate hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who had entered the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and both roomed with an undercover FBI informant. The day after her presentation, the White House -- once firmly against an independent commission -- reversed itself and endorsed the idea. And it was the 9/11 commission that would later find no operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, one of the key reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq.
On Tuesday, the widows cited the invasion of Iraq as one of their top reasons for supporting Kerry. [...]
The women said they approached Kerry about the endorsement, not the other way around. Their requests to meet with Bush were rejected. Breitweiser and Gabrielle plan to campaign actively. In Breitweiser's case, it will be difficult, because she hasn't traveled in an airplane since her husband died. "I have serious anxiety about getting on a plane," she said. "But that's how committed I feel."
