Howard Dean has Al Gore, Dennis Kucinich has Alice Walker:

Alice Walker Endorses Kucinich, Will Be Keynote at Kucinich Event

What: "A Celebration of Light: Harnessing the Power of Our Diversity" - Public Forum Featuring Dennis J. Kucinich, Alice Walker, and community leaders, activists and artists in the fields of sustainability, peace and social justice.

When: Monday, December 15, 2003, 5:30 p.m. PST fundraiser reception ; 7-10 p.m. PST Keynotes and public forum.

Where: Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, Calif.

Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award recipient Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple," and "Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism," has endorsed Democratic Presidential Candidate Dennis J. Kucinich and will join him on stage for a celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of his stand to save Cleveland's public power utilities. Then-Mayor Kucinich kept a campaign promise and refused to sell the Cleveland municipal electric system to a private company, CEI, the predecessor to the infamous Ohio First Energy, which earlier this year sent the nation into the largest blackout in modern history.

Kucinich plunged the city of Cleveland into bankruptcy with his immature, confrontational intransigence, but that's not the matter here. The matter here is that Kucinich is welcoming - nay trumpeting - the endorsement of Alice Walker, who may be a fine novelist but who borders on the insane when it comes to public policy.

This is what she wrote just after 9/11:

It is said that in the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and every man, woman and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, about all the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length.

The tribal ceremony often lasts several days. At the end, the tribal circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.

This will not be the fate of Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the attack on North America. In a war on Afghanistan, he will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people, most of them women and children and the elderly, are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems, in his spirit - from what I have gleaned from news sources - quite prepared. In his mind, he is fighting a holy war against the United States. To die in battle against it would be an honor. He has been quoted as saying he would like to make the United States into a shadow of itself as he helped make the Soviet Union, which lost the war in Afghanistan, become a shadow of itself. In fact, he appears to take credit for helping the Soviet Union disintegrate. I personally would like him to understand that the shadow he wishes upon us, of poverty, fear, an almost constant state of terror, is merely the America too many of us already know. It is certainly the shadow my ancestors lived with for several hundred years.

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