The Choice

Alright, folks. I've spent the past few months diligently avoiding the subject of politics on this blog. There are, I think, many good reasons for this, not the least of which is the simple fact so many other bloggers are doing politics quite well, and my voice would literally add nothing of importance to that chorus. However, it is now the last Sunday before Election Day, and so I thought I'd post my first and only message concerning the impending choice.

I am voting for George Bush. The main reason is, George Bush understands the threat we now face, and John Kerry clearly does not. Senator Kerry's critique of the President's policies, a critique upon which his entire campaign rests, has been constantly and grossly opportunistic. What he says, in other words, has lacked the restraint that moral clarity would give. His rhetoric is routinely riddled with falsehood, all in the name of one over-riding imperative: "Vote for me."

But columnist George Will said all this better than I can:

Tuesday's winner will not start from scratch but from where we are now, standing with the women of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Back in Washington recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said those women were warned that Taliban remnants would attack polling places during the Oct. 9 elections. So the women performed the ritual bathing and said the prayers of those facing death. Then, rising at 3 a.m., they trekked an hour to wait in line for the polls to open at 7 a.m. In the province of Kunar an explosion 100 meters from a long line of waiting voters did not cause anyone to leave the line.

Which candidate can be trusted to keep faith with these people? Surely not the man whose party is increasingly influenced by its Michael Moore faction. Surely not the man whose most important vote in his 20 Senate years opposed using force to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. Iraqi forces had crossed an international border to eradicate a sovereign nation, but Kerry does not regret voting to oppose the forceful reversal of this aggression. . . .

Bush sometimes confuses certitude with certainty, but he understands that to govern is to choose, and that some choices must make one lonely. Kerry constantly calls to mind a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan: "The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later."

So this column's conclusion is: "GEORGE! with all thy faults."

You may read the entire column here.