Friday, Sept. 17, 2004 | 8:57 a.m.
As a lifelong Democrat, my hat is off to the Republicans. They have managed to take an ill-prepared man who spent the first 40 years of his life as a failure and turn him into a man they call the president.
Of course, to accomplish this, it took five of the most conservative jurists in the history of this country to concoct the only Supreme Court decision in its history to be held to its facts (meaning it can never be used as legal precedent).
Many of us knew that this legal contrivance was fiction. Several of us mildly protested. We should have done more. But in our defense none of us knew the dire consequences of our relative passivity.
I am now reminded of a time during the Vietnam era when protests were in full bloom and a friend of mine told me that Thomas Jefferson, had he been alive, would have accompanied us to protest the war, and that even he, in modern times, would have marched for civil rights. The last time I saw my friend was before he left to go to war in Vietnam. A flag is now tucked in his mother's drawer as a tribute to his having gone to a war that we all know was wrong.
So when I am told that John Kerry spoke out against the war, I think of him as a modern-day Thomas Jefferson. And when I am told he went to war, I think of the 58,000 American troops who did not return. So when he is attacked for his service to this country, it is an attack on all of us who yearn to remain free.
LANCE T. WEIL
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