I Voted

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I voted for John Kerry this morning. It's time for change. The current administration has not only made mistakes, but they've taken steps to avoid taking responsibility for those mistakes. In many cases, they've tried to distort the truth. In others, they've obnoxiously and arrogantly refused to even consider that they've made a mistake, even in the face of irrefutable facts.

I could fill a dozen pages here with a post about the things I dislike most about the Bush administration. Instead, I'll try to boil it down to basic points:

  • Financial enrichment of big business, the very rich and administration cronies at the expense of the rest of the country.
  • Economic policy that turned a huge surplus into a huge deficit.
  • Promoting a culture of fear in our country that encourages people to make important decisions based on their fear of another 9/11.
  • Knowingly making a plan for an unjust war a forgone conclusion, even with the knowledge that our country had other, more important strategic priorities.
  • Failing miserably to make Iraq safe for democracy
  • Doing the same in Afghanistan
  • Failing to finish the job of hunting down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • Insistence upon staying the course, despite strong, irrefutable evidence that current policy is failing us. And doing so arrogantly.
  • Attacking the separation of church and state.
  • Assaulting the personal freedoms of law-abiding Americans.
John Kerry is not perfect, but he represents our best chance to change our direction appropriately when we're confronted with evidence that the current administration has made mistakes. George Bush has, for the past four years, deliberately refused to make necessary adjustments in his policies to ensure that America is doing the right thing. When so many critical decisions face us as Americans, we cannot afford to have a commander in chief who insists on staying the course when the course he's selected is wrong. Moreover, we can't afford to have a commander in chief who willingly blinds himself to the facts and arrogantly insists that we should plod forward with no change to existing policies, out of fear that any change in direction represents weakness.

We have a weak leader currently in office. I've voted to change that.