A THANKS TO JOHN EDWARDS

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EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON, NEW AMERICA MEDIA - America just lost its best
and brightest hope for real change when John Edwards gave up the
presidential ghost. Edwards did something that Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and certainly none of the Republicans would dream of doing: He
made poverty no longer a dirty word in the mouths of many, and that
included Clinton and Obama, for a minute anyway.

But Edwards didn't stop there. He relentlessly pushed the envelope on
America's next greatest crime and sin, the absolute refusal of the
nation to provide decent health care for more than fifty million persons
no matter whether poor, working class, middle class and even some with a
few bucks to spare. He didn't stop even there. He hammered corporate and
special interests for their shameless and unabashed pillage, loot, and
rape of American consumers.

Edwards was truly a modern day Jeremiah crying in the wilderness against
poverty, corporate greed, and the health care abomination, and
predictably was bum rushed by the gaggle of ultra-conservative slam
artists, the Fox network crowd, talk shock jocks, and the New York Times
neo-liberal bunch. They slandered, slurred, and ridiculed him, and
ultimately tried to marginalize him as a bare after thought, warm up act
to Clinton and Obama.

Edward's much needed and almost never heard populist message didn't mark
him as a threat. The fact that he could win and would have been in a
position to deliver on his heartfelt advocacy made him a threat. The
seeds of the attack were there from the start. . .

Edwards became the first Democratic presidential candidate to go where
no other Dem or certainly Republican candidate has gone in four decades
and talked up poverty disgrace, universal health and economic democracy.
. .

John, you have my eternal thanks for who you are and what you did. You
are truly the better angel of America.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/75479/

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