Monday, March 12, 2012

Kucinich in retrospect

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting examination of Dennis Kucinich. I personally have always thought of Kucinich as no better than a killjoy, opposed to all those fun things like wars and bellicose behavior (yeah, I know, pretty immature of me), and perhaps a bit nutty. Greenwald raises interesting questions (at the very least for me) about Kucinich and particularly how his own party views him. Apparently I wasn't alone in thinking that someone who is consistently against war is kind of nutty.

Greenwald's basic point is that Kucinich has been surprising;y consistent, about things we all should support. I mean, what has going to war in the Middle East gotten us? I have to admit I was in favor on the war in Afghanistan, since I naively believed we were trying to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. But I thought it blatantly obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism or weapons of mass destruction (I did believe the UN weapons inspectors over President Bush, and by the way, look who turned out to be right). Kucinich opposed them all, and it seems pretty obvious we would have been better off if we had not go to war so many times (or even once). Apparently Kucinich was not very successful in getting legislation passed, I guess because anti-war and helping poor people is not very popular.

But shouldn't it be?

2 comments:

Maria said...

I could never fully trust him since he was anti choice right up until he first started running for President.

EdHeath said...

That is disturbing, although I suppose if you are going to flip on one position, that is the one and the direction to go in. And you should make only the one flip.