...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Wednesday, August 27, 2003
      ( 10:02 AM )
 
It's Getting Hot in the Pacific Northwest

Great article in the Seattle Weekly comparing last week's photo-op fundraising tour George Bush took through Oregon and Washington to Howard Dean's Sleepless Summer Tour that followed hot on W's heels.

It was hottest for Bush in Portland. That city has become
ground zero in this country for anarchists and radicals of
every stripe. To them, Bush is Satan. On Thursday, Aug. 21,
at least 3,000 protesters marched to the site of a Bush
fund-raiser, where a barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence and
hundreds of riot police hemmed them in.

But it wasn't just radicals standing in the blazing Portland sun
and giving the president a middle-finger salute. It was people
like Joel Spinhirne, a middle-class, unemployed high-tech worker,
who said he was "newly radicalized" as a result of Bush's handling
of the economy, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the wrecking of
the American health care system. "It's going to be people in the
middle class who turn this around," he said.

[...]

BUT THE STRONGEST SIGN that the Northwest's middle
class is mad as hell came when Howard Dean's "Sleepless
Summer Tour" swept through Boise, Portland, Seattle, and
Spokane, drawing thousands out to hear the Democratic front-
runner flay Bush and declare, "We can do better than this."

The excitement among the crowds in Seattle and Portland was
palpable, especially in Seattle on Monday, where an estimated
10,000 people gathered in and around Westlake Park. Despite
press accounts painting the Dean campaign as a youth
movement, the Seattle turnout was solidly middle-aged and
middle-class.

[...]

Listening to him, it's hard not to envision President Harry
Truman—short, combative, plain-spoken, truth telling, and
a pain in the ass for the Beltway crowd.

It's nice to know that the average Americans who are really mad about the way BushCo has abused and used this country are finally getting some acknowledgment in the press. It's about time BushCo starts feeling the heat.

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