Toledo Blade op-ed piece:
This lifelong Republican won't be voting for Bush
I am virtually a lifelong Republican, partly originating from the fact that my father was one of the few Republicans ever to hold city office in the small, Democratic, Ohio town I come from. My mother was always a Republican poll-watcher.
As a career diplomat I worked for every American administration from Lyndon Johnson through George W. Bush, serving mostly overseas, in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, carrying out the foreign policy of whatever administration was in power.
That is a long prelude to saying that Tuesday I will vote for John Kerry. I will do so with a long, family Republican background because, as a longtime foreign affairs professional, I feel that George W. Bush has made an awful mess of U.S. policy.
That would be bad enough in itself but his actions in that area have also already killed more than 1,100 young American men and women in Iraq. But his reasons are even worse.
I believe that he came to office with the intention of transferring as much of America's wealth as possible into the hands of defense contractors such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton and the oil companies that were his background and remain his so-called "base."
He goes on from here, with nothing good to say about Bush and no reservations about backing Kerry. (All he says about Kerry is "John Kerry can fix all of this. George Bush couldn't, even if he wanted to.")
Wow.