I'm a pound up, but at least I did quite a bit of housework and got further along in the round robin, as well as sending out the Valentines.

We had our Election Officer class today. We'll be doing optical scanner ballots, and it's apparent the punch cards were much superior, thanks a lot, Florida! These are going to be really hard for old folks to see and to mark. We didn't have trouble with the punch cards.

The other interesting thing is that with the 8 parties (Republican, Democrat, American Independent, Libertarian, Green, Natural Law, Peace and Freedom and nonpartisan) we have a little wrinkle left from the open primary that was denied by the courts... if you're nonpartisan you can choose to vote in one of the three big parties' primaries (does it count? Who knows?) so there are different color ballots for nonpartisan-Republican, nonpartisan-Democrat, nonpartisan-American Independent. Of course, Green ballots are brown and A.I. ballots are green, in a bureaucratic twist one could predict. I think I'll comment on this next time.

So, with elections on my mind, let me get rid of some of the blogging stuff I've been collecting.

February 1998, when the Clinton adminstration was making the case for attacking Iraq. How things change. Clinton was arguing that Saddam not only had WMD, but that one day he might want to make more WMD, and this wasn�t acceptable. Interesting to read between the lines - the Clinton administration seemed to be arguing that the potential for future production was itself a valid reason to strike.

half a decade of Saddam on the throne and the dissidents in the shredders and the tots in the gulag and dead people heaped in ditches and oil-for-palaces deals and Uday and Qusay pleasuring themselves in Rapeland Incorporated and Abu Nidal putting his feet up in a Baghdad apartment, pouring a nice cool glass of tea, and thinking: ah. This is the life.

I�m so old I actually remember when the Democrats CARED about Iraq.

Kerry doesn't deserve Veterans' support.

Heh. Sour Grapes.

DYKWIA, that is, "Do You Know Who I Am?"

The John Kerry AWOL story (note, it's Scrappleface.) Hypocrites!

MaybeTHIS is the last on the stupid AWOL story. Or, next-to-last:

As for the AWOL, the story is crap. My father was in the National Guard in the early 70s, and he has no records of it whatsoever. He also only remembers only 2-3 guys he ever served with. The rest were just nameless faces. The Dems are making this an issue because there probably isn't a lot of paperwork "proving" Bush was there. I'm shocked they have as much as they've released so far. The pay stubs, dental records, and the discharge papers should be the only proof any reasonable person needs to show he did his duty in TX and AL. What most people don't understand is NG duty is really up to the individual, in the sense that you can take months off, then cram your duty in the final weeks of your duty-year. Bush wasn't AWOL for the simple fact he wasn't ever ordered anywhwre.
Christopher

Mickey Kaus asks: Why raise the "AWOL" issue now?:"...it doesn't make sense unless you view the AWOL issue as a primary election strategy, not a general election strategy. Its purpose is not to boost the Democrats (in November), but to boost Kerry (now). By getting the press talking about the chest-full-of-medals vs. slothful Guardsman issue, Kerry has helped convince Democratic primary voters that Bush is beatable--reinforcing the blindered Democratic focus on winning--and conferred on himself the Aura of Electability that is his only real selling point. Equally important, he's taking up valuable media time that might otherwise be spent scrutinizing him and inducing buyer's remorse--and which his rivals, especially Edwards, might otherwise use to get their messages out."

John Kerry Tosses Intern over White House Fence.

I think a bassett hound at least pre-Botox), but I like bassett hounds. Glenn comments. Victor Davis Hanson:

Throughout this war there has been consistently fuzzy nomenclature that reflects mistaken logic: WMDs are supposedly the problem, rather than the tyrannical regimes that stockpile them � as if Tony Blair's nuclear arsenal threatens world peace; we are warring against the method of "terror" rather than states that promote or allow it � as if the Cold War was a struggle against SAM-6's or KGB-like tactics; September 11 had nothing to do with the Iraqi war, as if after 3,000 Americans were butchered through unconventional and terrorist tactics the margin of tolerance against Middle East tyrannical regimes that seek the weapons of such a trade does not diminish radically.
...
I am sorry that the United States has established a hair-trigger reputation in matters of deadly agents of mass destruction � but apparently other rogue nations now believe that the burden of proof is no longer on us to establish that they have them, but rather on them to ensure the world that they do not. And that is not necessarily a bad thing if we ponder that the lives of thousands may hang in the balance.
...
The real outrage is instead that at a time of one of most important developments of the last half-century, when this country is waging a war to the death against radical Islamic fascism and attempting to bring democracy to an autocratic wasteland, we hear instead daily about some mythical rogue CIA agent who supposedly faked evidence, Martha Stewart's courtroom shoes, Michael Jackson's purported perversion, and Scott Peterson's most recent alibi. Amazing.

A Lieutenant's Story.

Steven denBeste starts out about George Dewey:

Dewey decided that it was more important to defeat the Germans and Japanese than to defeat Roosevelt. He decided that it was more important that the US be victorious than that the Republicans be. He made sure that the issue of intelligence failure would not be raised during the campaign. If he had used that issue, he might have won; as it was, he lost badly.

Or rather, he lost very well. I have an enormous amount of respect for Dewey because of the decision he made.
...
Dewey was an American first, a Republican second. I wish that Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) was an American first, but I am by no means certain.
...
I don't expect the Democrats to forfeit the election or to refuse to contest Bush. On the contrary, I feel they have a duty to try to win, even though I think they don't have a snowball's chance of doing so. But I also feel they have a duty to make sure that the election campaign doesn't threaten national security or the progress of the war. I expect them to be Americans first, Democrats second.

Or rather, I don't expect them to be.

Cold Fury contrasts and compares.

Remember (only 4 weeks ago) when it was going to be either Dean-Clark or Clark-Dean? Now Kerry's got an intern problem, and Clark first started these rumors then endorses him. Gore, meanwhile, joins Dean in the just-this-side-of-insanity pool. Christopher Hitchens asks "When did Dean go pear-shaped?" We could ask the same question about Gore. Best of the Web explains:

why should John Kerry, who is after all a serious candidate for president, want to involve himself in Gore's little psychodrama?
....
Longtime Dean watchers like columnist Mark Steyn and The American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell are convinced that Dean's whole angry act is phony. Not so Gore's. This is a man filled with fury and indignation over the world's injustice--which is to say, the injustice that was done to him when the U.S. Supreme Court prevented him from stealing the 2000 election.

Mark Steyn reports how to avoid a mountain lion attack. (Pagan, you might take notes):

it's a way of making a dull politician with no legislative accomplishments and two decades of shifty, flip-flop weathervane votes appear larger than he is.
...
The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself. And few men can claim as large a role in the loss of national will that led to that defeat as John Kerry. A brave man in Vietnam, he returned home to appear before Congress and not merely denounce the war but damn his "band of brothers" as a gang of rapists, torturers and murderers led by officers happy to license them to commit war crimes with impunity. He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne.
...
Senator Kerry has done a good job of enlarging himself but the reality is simple: George W Bush's America has won two swift wars and overthrown two enemy regimes; John Kerry was heroic in a war that America lost and whose loss he celebrated. [emphasis mine]

Also: (Steyn again)

A government with its fingers in every pie is unlikely to have enough left over for the handful of pies it should have its fingers in. It was summed up by Americans' only glimpse of the president on the morning of 9/11: the commander-in-chief being informed of the first attack on the American mainland in nearly 200 years while he was speaking to grade-schoolers in Florida. That image encapsulates everything that's wrong with both parties' approach to government.

As we learned in the days after, because of incompatible computers, the FBI was unable to e-mail pictures of the 9/11 killers to local offices. Yet there's money for rock 'n' roll nostalgia, and an "indoor rain forest" in Iowa. The president should not be the National School Superintendent, the Pharmacist-in-Chief, the Curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the Inspector-General of Janet Jackson's Breasts. And, if neither politicians nor the electorate understands that at a time of war, then republican government is doomed.

Well, that's enough. I have a lot more, but this is far too long as is. Too bad the blog is moribund, but I'll do this again on a slow day and maybe clean it all out.