Well, I have to agree with you JB... On one point. It's all up to the turnout now...
Everyone no matter who you are voting for, please go vote or you will only have yourself to blame. Or that nice ole lady at the polling location who wouldn't let you vote twice, like you did last year in Florida :-)
Good Luck...
I don't know how anyone can be so pro-Kerry. Here's an excerpt from a NYTimes column today. I want Bush to lose, but Kerry is no great enlightened progressive. Please!
...The first is Kerry. He's been attacked for being a flip-flopper, but his core trait is that he is monumentally selfish. Since joining the Senate, he has never attached himself to an idea or movement larger than his own career advancement.
It's not for nothing that people in Massachusetts joked that his initials stand for Just For Kerry. Or that people spoke of him as the guy who refuses to wait in lines at restaurants because he thinks he's above everybody else. If the Democrats had nominated Dick Gephardt, this election wouldn't be close, but character is destiny, and Kerry's could be debilitating in the White House.
Second, for the next many years the madrassas will be churning out young men who want to kill us. In embarking on a generational challenge to transform the Middle East, Bush has a strategy to defeat their ideology. While many around him understand the challenge, Kerry has no strategy.
I fear his foreign policy would combine Carteresque pedantry with the cruel "realism" of the first Bush administration. Under the elder Bush, the realists paid lip service to democracy, but inevitably stood by whoever was in power at the moment: for Gorbachev and against the freedom-loving Lithuanians, for the Russian empire and against the independence-seeking Ukrainians.
That passive approach was tolerable in the face of a dying Soviet Union. It is not in the face of radical Islam.
Third, Kerry's Democrats seem to have no interest in reforming the entitlement programs that are asphyxiating government. Kerry merely promises to expand the status quo, thus punting on the central domestic challenge of our time.
I'm not allowed to tell you how I'm going to resolve these contradictory impulses (Times policy). But if Kerry wins, I hope he'll pick three things he wants to do - for the country, not himself - and stick with them. And if Bush is re-elected, I hope he will see his win not as vindication, but as a second chance to act effectively on the visions that inspired hope in the first place.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
Anyone who cites Brooks as an authority on Kerry needs his head examined.
I hear voting lines are long in Colorado already.
Hi Dan!
Brooks' worry-wart column is on the order of all the liberal Bush-intelligence bashing in 2000. Bush isn't stupid, and Kerry isn't weak. My wife has known him for years, and I've had some chance to get to know him, too -- the character bashing is a cartoon that doesn't reflect the man.
My biggest fear in 2000 was that Bush lacked the international experience to deal with the world as it is. He's justified that fear, in my view. Multitudes more madrassas men now then there would have been if we hadn't had Bush. Aggressively wrong and alone isn't right...
As to Brooks' worries about the 'Dems' behind Kerry, I'm sure Kerry will be much more fiscally conservative and centrist than Bush. And honest, to boot.
I understand why it's so painful for conservatives like Brooks to lose their confidence in Bush, but that doesn't mean their retro-fears of 'liberals' are valid...
