This week, my Get Afghanistan Right colleagues and I want you to flash back to 1967, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lashed out at the US government over the Vietnam War. We remember Dr. King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," not just to raise parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, which are certainly growing with President Obama's mission creep calls for military escalation. Dr. King's speech also illustrates how fighting a Long War abroad grossly depletes our government's wherewithal to handle (and our nation's ability to focus on) a more critical socioeconomic crisis at home.
Speaking at New York's Riverside Church, Dr. King made the connections between the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam for several reasons. He couldn't advocate peaceful solutions to the rampant racial violence in America when our government stood as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He couldn't ignore the fact that White and Black could die side-by-side on the battlefields of Southeast Asia more easily than they could sit together at a lunch table back home. But the primary reason Dr. King turned his attention to the war was because he saw it undermining President Johnson's ability to fight the "unconditional war on poverty." How could LBJ's poverty program help the destitute at home when our government was channeling so much national attention and so many tax dollars and lives into military escalation abroad?
This past Friday morning in Venango County all 3 candidates for the 5th Congressional District appeared at the Venango County Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Candidate Forum. During this event, the issue of fiscal responsibility, the $482 billion budget deficit and the $9.7 trillion federal debt came up several times. Fiscal responsibility is perhaps the single issue that clearly defines the difference between me and my opponents in this campaign.
Many already have written about the extremely sickening attacks on a 12yr. old young man, Graeme Frost, and his family.
You can find a reading of others thoughts Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here. And if you just search his name you'll come up with 41 other hits under Diary's.
Many may have caught 'Count Down', last night, and the interview with the parents of Graeme and his little sister.
