For those of you who don't know my political views, I am a strong supporter of Dean. I am. Not I was, I still am.
If you are a Kerry supporter who was with him from day one, good for you. Your man won.
If you are a Kerry supporter who joined him after Iowa, good for you too. You climbed on to the right bandwagon.
Many Kerry supporters are trying very hard to tell me that I really have no reason to dislike Kerry. Prognosticator has written a very long diary entry about all the ways that Kerry is better than Bush. There is this new screed today, justifying Kerry's support for the Iraq War at the time.
It seems to me that you not only want me to vote for the guy, but to believe in him.
Let me make this very clear - and I am going to shout it out:
I WILL VOTE FOR KERRY IF IT LOOKS LIKE MY STATE WILL GO TO BUSH
There you have it. That is the extent of my commitment to Kerry, for now.
If you want me to
believe in Kerry, please tell me how Kerry is
unique among the democratic nominees.
For example, I can point to Kucinich and say that he is unique: he has specifically called for a speedy withdrawal of US Troops from Iraq, stop spending so much money there and turn it into infrastructure projects.
I can point to Lieberman who specifically supports the War as the right thing to do.
So, tell me what is unique about Kerry that differentiates him from Edwards or any other Democrat this side of Zell Miller?
If Kerry loses in the fall, don't blame it on Deaniacs. Kerry will win if he can carry Tennessee and Florida and win the battleground states. The hard-core Deaniacs are in the North East and the West. We cannot deliver Ohio to Kerry and we cannot take away Connecticut from Kerry.
If Kerry wins, it will not be because the hard-core Deaniacs voted him in. It will be because the Democrats who deemed him `electable' in the Primaries showed up in enough numbers to kick Bush out. Hooray for America.
Don't try and make me vote for Kerry in the primaries. He has the nomination sewn up and my vote for Dean on March 2 will not make a difference. So, let me vote my conscience on March 2.
If you want to believe that you supported the war (however reluctantly) because you believed Bush's lies, fine, that is your privilege. Don't ask me to understand that. I cannot.
I cannot understand a Senator who would get up on the senate floor and quote chapter and verse from the Administration's playbook and then claim he was voting for process. I would find that more believable if said Senator had stepped up to a microphone on March 18, 2003 and said: `President Bush has not tried hard enough to build a coalition. I withdraw my support for this war'.
If you want to believe that it was important to vote for the Patriot Act, compromise fundamental American principles and give up the right to due process in order to protect us from `those that hate our freedoms', you are free to do so. I hope that at some rational moment the contradiction of curtailing freedoms to preserve `Freedom' slaps you in the face.
If you want to believe, like John Kerry apparently does, that Osama Bin Laden does not deserve a fair trial, that is your prerogative. You have the right to argue that Nazis deserved the Nuremberg trials but Osama does not deserve his day in court. I will remind you of that argument the next time a John Lee Malvo shows up in the US.
You are free to argue that `John Kerry, as president, will not do X, Y or Z'.
I don't know about what he will do in the future.
All I know is what he did do when he had the opportunity. And I judge him harshly for that.
Make no mistake about it: if I vote for Kerry it is akin to a shotgun wedding - a second Bush term is the shotgun.
I will say `I do'. Don't expect me to actually believe it.