Hearts and Minds

Rhetoric/Policy

1.The Senator needs some advice about his use of the term winning the 'hearts and minds' ... this is one of the many terms used by the Bush administration to define our policy in Iraq. Originally traced to America's campaign in Vietnam, the term actually can be traced back to the policies of the British occuppiers of Kenya.

During the 1950s, the British government imprisoned hundreds of thousands of proported Mau Mau supporters in interment centers, where they were tourtured, raped, subject to forced labor, starved, maimed and murdered. In reporting back to their countrymen about their campaign, they described their mission as 'winning the hearts and minds' of the Kenyan people ...

This information is from Caroline Elkins' shocking and terrifying expose of the gulag in Kenya.

"But it is the conditions of that imprisonment that reveal the depths to which the British sank to maintain the illusion of their great empire, and which would ultimately prove its undoing. Elkins has bravely done justice to that history." a Nation Review.

2. The Senator might also consider abandoning use of the fear-inspiring 'war on terror'

3. I have also suggested before that the one issue the Senator could safely develop on his campaign tours is a redefinition of the Presidency. What powers would he cede back? There is a great article in the Village Voice(Nat Hentoff) suggesting educating his audiences about the Military Commissions Act. Link him show it by taking advantage of the extraordinary national attention he is now getting and explaining to the American people the savage assault on the Constitution made by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals (the second-most-important court in the country) when it upheld the Military Commissions Act of 2006 on February 20 ( Lakhdar Boumediene, et al. v. George W. Bush).

"This law, one of the last acts of the Republican-controlled Congress (engineered with the "dark arts" assistance of Dick Cheney), is among the most dangerous pieces of legislation in American history, and its fate in the Bush-Roberts-Alito Supreme Court is, at best, uncertain."

4. The Joshua Generation: Searching for the term, I come up with information about Dominionists and how they are calling the group of children they are homeschooling 'the Joshua Generation." The Senator has to clarify that he is in no way associated with this group. I have read several posts suggesting the Senantor is signallling his connection with these theories.