You might want to hop over to http://janegalt.net, where Ms. Galt has been asking for supporters of either candidate to make their case to her. She says she's undecided.

Well said Miss Attila!

I'm proud to say that my girlfriend and I voted for George W. Bush today, here in South Florida. It was our first time voting
and I'm feeling mighty good about it!

Excellent! However, I am very confused by anyone who claims to be undecided at this point.

The deapth of your self-deception amazes me.

Joy,
Very-well written. I would have to believe even the "undecideds" should be able to understand.
To echo Ogre's comments, I think people are over concerned about the undecideds. It is proven that undecideds are easily distracted by shiney objects and likely to forget to vote.
Got to your blog by way of John at RWN.
Later,
Bill

At this point, "undecideds" are the least of anybody's worries; from the townhall style Prez. debates, we were shown what a "real" undecided voter is: a pathetic left-leaning liar, and the only REAL thing they haven't decided is how MUCH they hate Bush.

Undecids will NOT affect this election, nor have they affected ANY election. This time around, the undecideds are around 1 - 4 PERCENT. That's it.

Your piece is precisely why I won't vote for Bush.

"Secondly, political thought is not an aesthetic issue, but one that requires reason and common sense." Of which, Bush has neither and is apparently proud of the fact.

That we should accept Iraq as a fait accompli is dangerous. How many more fait accomplis must we accept from Bush before we see the emperor as a naked idiot?

"Obviously, the way to create jobs is to cut the taxes of those who are in a position to hire people." - so why will Bush be the President who shows a net loss of jobs under his administration? The tax cuts only benefit the upper echelon of executives. Why should a company take the extra money to hire new employees when it can simply post a profit, pay a larger dividend, or spread the money as coporate bonuses? You need to get working in a large company and see what it's like out here.

"There was some bad intelligence before the Iraq war, but everything that Bush and his advisors thought before we invaded Iraq was believed by every nation around the world that has any intelligence capability at all. " Huh? Then why did Bush and his cronies sanitize and manipulate the reports that said otherwise? Get off it. You've been had and most of the world could smell it back then.

Race?!? Are you trying to pull an O.J. here? Race isn't an issue.

Fact is, you don't know as much about Bush as you think you do. The whole Administration is too secretive for the American good. If you want more of same and worse, vote Bush - plain and simple.

But if Bush wins and we have another terrorist attack, you won't be able to blame Kerry...start preparing your excuses now.

Race isn't an issue?

Meanwhile, in Missouri the Democratic front-group Americans Coming Together hands out fliers depicting an African-American on the receiving end of a fire hose blast. "This is what they used to do to keep us from voting," the piece reads. On the back are a list of alleged incidents of recent voter intimidation, with the line, "This is how Republicans keep African-Americans from voting now."

Note, that's alleged voter intimidation. I certainly think that someone is certainly making race an issue.

Ooops, my error. When I said race wasn't an issue I meant it in terms of debate topics.

The Republicans are not only targetting blacks but Democrats in general to keep them from voting - tearing up Democrat registrations (Nevada), having Dems use [disreputable] electronic voting machines while Repub majority areas use paper (Florida).

-----

Gosh, looks like Bush forgot to tell the military protect a few tons of explosives in Iraq. That's Bush leadership for you. Forgot to secure the borders after invasion. forgot to secure known armament sites but they did secure the oil ministry...you put 2 and 2 together.

Emma:

Thanks. I try to lie to myself a little every day, and just build up to this level of self-deception. It takes practice, but I believe I'm the woman for the job.

LMM:

A. The oil ministry has proven to be 1) the key to getting the Iraqi economy rolling again, and 2) the source of most of our good information about what was going on in Saddam's regime in the months and years leading up to the war.

I do think that in a project of this complexity it's easier to throw rocks than to recognize the amazing strides that have been made.

B. I hope you're just as outraged by the real efforts of Democrats to disenfranchise military voters as you are by the imaginary efforts of Republicans to disenfranchise black voters.

C. I also hope you were just as upset by Clinton's unilateral actions in Bosnia and Somalia as you are now by Bush's invasion of Iraq. No?

D. The unemployment rate now is lower than it was when Clinton was re-elected for his second term. Furthermore, a lot of the instruments we have for measuring things like job loss haven't kept up with the changes in our economy: a lot of people now are working as independent contractors by choice, rather than reporting to bosses at large corporations (taxpayer-funded and non-taxpayer-funded).

E. Most large corporations are interested in growth. It's unfortunate that some remain static, but that certainly isn't the norm. Most publicly traded companies see a huge loss in their stock values (and thus their own portfolios, in a lot of cases) when the company doesn't grow.

Thanks for stopping by.

I have enjoyed your blog site a great deal during the time I’ve been reading from it. The entertaining and often high-spirited discussions are always thought-provoking and respectful of the integrity of the contributors.

I’m writing this in response to your own “Letter to an Undecided Voter,� to explain to you why I cannot in good conscience support the president for re-election in spite of your fine essay.

I won’t argue the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, because we are there and that’s done. There is a disturbing continuum running through the operation however that I feel the need to point out. During the inspection period the soldiers within the administration who had experience in combat and command, including Powell and Shinseki, were ridiculed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they urged procedures and manpower levels different from those the politicians were promoting. It is common military knowledge that to control an insurgent population, an irreducible minimum of one soldier to fifty populace is required or the insurgency can be expected to gain strength through the carnage and by the opportunities created in the vacuum. That puts a minimum number of troops for Iraq at 460,000, either American or American + coalition. Unlike the first president Bush who listened to and followed the advice of his top professionals (and who has my unqualified respect and admiration), this president ignored and even denigrated that advice because it disagreed with his less-well informed political appointees.

To fight such a war the political courageous action would have been to make the same choice George Herbert Walker Bush made after his “read my lips� campaign promise - to raise taxes. The Clinton administration’s ability to abolish the deficit, if not the debt, owed as much to this responsible decision as to the boom of the 90’s. This president is playing politics in a fashion much more reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson, who clung to a ruinously expensive domestic agenda while trying to prosecute a war on the cheap. It took a quarter of a century to recover economically from that policy, and our economy is not as demographically robust as it was in the 80’s and 90’s. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for this deficit, if they have the jobs to permit it.

I abhor the intrusion of government into the affairs of citizens. This administration has presided over the single most massive increase in the power and size of the Federal Government of any administration since FDR’s. The department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and the Patriot Act, notwithstanding the interpretations on existing governmental powers being used by Attorney General Ashcroft, represent a bulking up of governmental power and a surrender of individual liberty such as no wartime president since Lincoln has instituted. Lincoln's at least was only for the duration. This looks permanent.

The attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. The agencies in place were adequate to accomplish that task; we don’t need bigger government to cope with it. We need leaner but more efficient government. Our leadership was not imaginative enough and the bureaucracy was not permeable enough to permit the intelligence information to have the needed result. As a consequence, 9/11 occurred and it happened on George W. Bush’s watch. This is not to say that it would not have happened if someone else had been president. The failure to prevent the attacks would then be the responsibility of that administration.

The words of this administration do not match its actions. It is not a conservative government, which would be trying to preserve status quo while exercising fiscal discipline. It is not a Libertarian government, which would be trying to promote liberty, reduce the size of government, and reduce foreign involvement. It is a big-government for big-business administration that has saddled all of us with a tremendous burden of long-term debt, loss of liberty, and international opprobrium. I cannot imagine a committed ideological Conservative voting for George Bush, given the actions of his administration; actions that are at odds with the values he claims to espouse. Don't just listen to what he has said. Look closely at what he has actually done.

I do not want to cast my vote for John Kerry. There is at least on item in his agenda that I can support though, and that is deficit reduction.

Wooo, Winning Non Council member post!

http://king-of-fools.com/blog/weblog/posts/council_10292004/

Douglas:

I have enjoyed your blog site a great deal during the time I’ve been reading from it. The entertaining and often high-spirited discussions are always thought-provoking and respectful of the integrity of the contributors.

Thank you for your kind words.

I’m writing this in response to your own “Letter to an Undecided Voter,� to explain to you why I cannot in good conscience support the president for re-election in spite of your fine essay.

I won’t argue the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, because we are there and that’s done. There is a disturbing continuum running through the operation however that I feel the need to point out. During the inspection period the soldiers within the administration who had experience in combat and command, including Powell and Shinseki, were ridiculed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they urged procedures and manpower levels different from those the politicians were promoting. It is common military knowledge that to control an insurgent population, an irreducible minimum of one soldier to fifty populace is required or the insurgency can be expected to gain strength through the carnage and by the opportunities created in the vacuum. That puts a minimum number of troops for Iraq at 460,000, either American or American + coalition. Unlike the first president Bush who listened to and followed the advice of his top professionals (and who has my unqualified respect and admiration), this president ignored and even denigrated that advice because it disagreed with his less-well informed political appointees.

I don't know the inner workings of the Administration that intimately, but I do believe there are changes brewing in the art of warfare, and that in future we will be relying less on foot soldiers and more on technology.

But I also think that it's important to remember that we were originally going to have double the number of infantry in Iraq than we ended up with: because Turkey changed its mind at the last minute, the 4th infantry division was unable to come into Iraq and our mechanized infantry was cut down to half the numbers originally allotted.

And Turkey's decision was about as political as it gets: whether you ascribe it to the fear of a Kurdish state, the Turkish government's perceptions of what the Turks themselves thought, maneuvering within the U.N. Security Council or Turkey's desire to please Europe so they can join the EU, it was clearly a political decision outside our control.

To fight such a war the political courageous action would have been to make the same choice George Herbert Walker Bush made after his “read my lips� campaign promise - to raise taxes. The Clinton administration’s ability to abolish the deficit, if not the debt, owed as much to this responsible decision as to the boom of the 90’s.

I've heard this line of reasoning before, and it was in the 80s. Remember Reagan? The rap then was that he was running the country into the ground, and we were headed for collapse from his deficit spending (most of it going toward defense, spent on weapons he hoped we'd never use, in a conscious effort to bankrupt the Soviet Union).

The result, of course, was an economic boom that lasted for 20 years--through most of the Clinton era. Reagan's scary tax cuts made the economy hum, and eventually erased his sky-high deficits.

And when George H.W. Bush raised taxes, the economy stalled long enough for Clinton to get elected. Because tax hikes create a drag on the economy.

This president is playing politics in a fashion much more reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson, who clung to a ruinously expensive domestic agenda while trying to prosecute a war on the cheap.

Well, you can't say GWB is doing that! Iraq and the WoT in general are any number of things are not cheap!

Johnson's problems in Vietnam were that 1) he didn't rally the nation behind the effort, but rather tried to make it a "painless" war. This was impossible, of course, because young men kept disappearing to go off and fight it. And: 2) he micro-managed the war effort, rather than taking the advice of his military men. (Yes--I know you think GWB is doing the same thing, but I don't see it that way. My perception is that the military is in the process of a reform, and GWB is forward-thinking in that respect, listening to the new thinkers rather than being bound by the old bureaucracy. I certainly wouldn't compare GWB's advisors to Robert McNamara, for instance.)

It took a quarter of a century to recover economically from that policy, and our economy is not as demographically robust as it was in the 80’s and 90’s. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for this deficit, if they have the jobs to permit it.

It's not that I don't believe deficits matter, but I have tremendous faith in the American economy to recover the ground we've lost, as long as the tax base is kept relatively low.

I know, I know: I believe in what Reagan practiced, and what George H.W. Bush called "Voodoo Economics." But the economy did better under Reagan than it did under Bush I.

I abhor the intrusion of government into the affairs of citizens. This administration has presided over the single most massive increase in the power and size of the Federal Government of any administration since FDR’s. The department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and the Patriot Act, notwithstanding the interpretations on existing governmental powers being used by Attorney General Ashcroft, represent a bulking up of governmental power and a surrender of individual liberty such as no wartime president since Lincoln has instituted. Lincoln's at least was only for the duration. This looks permanent.

Lincoln's expansions of government powers were far, far greater than any that can be attributed to G.W. Bush. And I would submit that the long-standing War on Drugs and the continuing existence of the incompetent/superfluous BATF had already done far greater damage to individual liberties than anything Ashcroft has managed to accomplish in four years. (Basically, the Fourth Amendment exists only on paper, and that's due to an evolution that took place long before Bush II came into office--much of it on Clinton's watch.)

The attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. The agencies in place were adequate to accomplish that task; we don’t need bigger government to cope with it.

But the two main agencies that needed to put their information together to figure out what was going on didn't even have computers that could be networked together. They didn't even have a single system for translating Arab names so they could be recognized in computer searches. And they were separated by years of rivalry and restrictions that reflected the mentality of fighting terrorism as a law enforcement issue--and we know that that model has failed, since it brought us 9/11.

Somebody had to get all the agencies involved working together rather than against each other. Someone had to dampen the rivalries.

We need leaner but more efficient government. Our leadership was not imaginative enough and the bureaucracy was not permeable enough to permit the intelligence information to have the needed result. As a consequence, 9/11 occurred and it happened on George W. Bush’s watch. This is not to say that it would not have happened if someone else had been president. The failure to prevent the attacks would then be the responsibility of that administration.

The attack was planned on the watch of another administration, one whose response to a series of terror attacks in the 90s was so anemic that it emboldened the terrorists to envision bigger and grander things.

The words of this administration do not match its actions. It is not a conservative government, which would be trying to preserve status quo while exercising fiscal discipline. It is not a Libertarian government, which would be trying to promote liberty, reduce the size of government, and reduce foreign involvement. It is a big-government for big-business administration that has saddled all of us with a tremendous burden of long-term debt, loss of liberty, and international opprobrium. I cannot imagine a committed ideological Conservative voting for George Bush, given the actions of his administration; actions that are at odds with the values he claims to espouse. Don't just listen to what he has said. Look closely at what he has actually done.

I know: there are certainly plenty of arguments I have with George W. Bush, and he's no conservative. Certainly, that business of pretending to try to amend the Constitution was an egregious bit of pandering.

But I honestly want someone in office whom the terrorists fear, and other countries respect. (I do not mean respect as in "like." I mean respect as in "next door to fear.")

I do not want to cast my vote for John Kerry. There is at least on item in his agenda that I can support though, and that is deficit reduction.

But here's the question: what are the odds that he will actually go through with this plan? The only cost-cutting you can trust John F. Kerry to do will have to do with defense: as far as entitlements are concerned, he's going to be out of control.

He will expand entitlements, raise taxes, and give us a stagnant economy. Worse, he will go back to the reactive approach to the War on Terror, and we'll likely pay for it with thousands more American lives.

Meanwhile, he'll withdraw troops from Iraq before she's ready to defend herself, and the Iraqis will have been abandoned and betrayed one more time.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity. Unknown