I Love Dennis Kucinich - By Rothschild

I Love Dennis Kucinich

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, April 1, 2011

Can I tell you how much I love Dennis Kucinich?

I was almost asleep last night when my wife was flipping through the channels and landed on C-SPAN.

“Dennis Kucinich is on,” she told me.

So I opened my eyes and my ears, and I’m glad I did, because it was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.

Kucinich laid it all out.

--The blatant disregard for the Constitution that Obama showed in launching the Libya war.

Said Kucinich: “The critical issue before this nation today is not Libyan democracy, it is American democracy.” He added: the Obama Administration “has thrown caution to the winds and our Constitution to the ground.”

--The dubious claim that this is a humanitarian intervention.

Said Kucinich: “What is humanitarian about providing to one side of a conflict the ability to wage war against the other side of a conflict, which will inevitably trigger a civil war turning Libya into a graveyard?”

--And Obama’s ever-expanding justifications for war.

Said Kucinich:
“In two years we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.”

Kucinich also noted that the CIA has longstanding ties— going back decades—with the Libyan rebels, suggesting that the CIA may have provoked them into taking up arms, which occasioned the humanitarian crisis that Obama seized upon.

And Kucinich urged us, in this period of great transformations, to transform ourselves: to turn “away from intervention, away from trying to determine the leadership of other nations, away from covert operations to try to manipulate events, and towards a rendezvous with those great principles of self-determination which gave us birth.”

So check out Kucinich’s speech of March 31 for yourself. Google it. Watch it. Read it. Study it. There is more wisdom in it than on any Sunday morning show or cable talk fest or milquetoast editorial in The New York Times.

If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story "Walker and Cronies Are Lawless Bastards!."

Follow Matthew Rothschild @mattrothschild on Twitter