If you’ve got ‘em, smoke ‘em

I wish I could have voted for Dennis Kocinich, but by the time his name turned up in my red state he was lost in foundering Democratic Party thought. He voted against preemptive war. I was pushing for him to gain ground from Iowa onward. I had my arguments with fellow Move On members in his favor until the end of the primaries. I thought the stakes were too high not to follow the leader.

Kocinich is a vegan, a pacifist, and proposed a department of peace in his platform. We should have gone all the way in supporting a candidate who opposed the war in Iraq from the outset, who promised to end the occupation.

Now we’re left with the Marlboro man, courtesy of his commercial photographer:

Naomi Klein in The Nation, the mission statement of which is:

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.
-- from The Nation's founding prospectus, 1865

Maybe we’ll learn from all this.