Rosanne Cash on the election

Rosanne Cash has a "monthly comment" at her Web page on the election, dated 10/03/04.  Rosanne is one of my favorite singers and songwriters and also one of my favorite prose writers.  She writes beautiful short stories.  She's published an anthology of her short stories called Bodies of Water, a children's book called Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale and an anthology of short stories by songwriters (including a very interesting science fiction tale by herself) called Songs Without Rhyme.

She's also a Kerry supporter and has played for at least one fundraising concert for him.  She writes:

I read that Bush said that "God wanted [him] to be president." This kind of comment makes my blood run cold. Anytime anyone, including the president of the United States, presumes to know the mind of God and uses that presumption for his own purposes, all my alarms go off. Red flags everywhere. As Lincoln said, and I paraphrase badly, "Let us not assume God is on our side, Let us hope we are on God's side".

The kind of thinking that leads one to declare that he knows what God wants and what God thinks and is certain that he is acting under divine Ordinance and Will, is exactly the kind of thinking that leads people to fly airplanes into tall buildings and kill thousands of people. Does that sound like a radical statement? Yes. Fundamentalism of any stripe is radical. Doesn't matter if it's Islamic, Christian, Mormon, or Judaic... fundamentalism is, by definition, intolerant at best, catastrophic at worst.

It is my opinon that we must get George Bush out of office. If he is given four more years, I fear that he will use it as a mandate to lead us to the edge of the apocalypse. As it is, our grandchildren will still be sorting out the disaster in Iraq, paying for the environmental regressions he has instituted, trying to extricate Halliburton from our energy policy, attempting to restore the finer points of the Constitution that have been trampled on by the Patriot Act, and still trying to get affordable health care. Just for starters.

Rosanne is one of my favorite writers, by the way. :) :)  And the best sort of Jacksonian democrat.