Matthew Yglesias shockingly endorses John Kerry for President (yeah, like that was an office-pool bet across the land), and sums things up thusly:
We know that the current officeholder has done a bad job by his own terms -- "compassionate conservatism" has not improved the plight of the poor, tax cutting has not improved the economy or even the average person's disposable income, preventative warfare has not halted nuclear proliferation, crossing names off the high-value target list is not stopping al-Qaeda, pounding the table is not spreading democracy, unilateralism is not producing a pro-American bandwagon, the size and intrusiveness of government is not lessening, even the number of abortions has increased. It is time for him to go.
Indeed. Occasionally people will ask me why I would vote for Kerry as opposed to against Bush, and while I could go into some details about where I agree with Kerry on policy and such, I don't think I need to. I know what four years of Bush looked like, and I don't want four more of them. End of story.
BTW, the Buffalo News today endorses John Kerry:
If there is one overarching theme to the Bush administration, it is the triumph of ideology over judgment. Mitigating facts and educated opinions simply are dismissed if they conflict with conservative dogma.
When the National Cancer Institute wanted to say that abortion does not increase the rate of breast cancer, the administration refused to let it. When a report from the Environmental Protection Agency included a warning about global warming, the administration took it out of the document. When a Web page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said education about condom use does not lead to increased sexual activity, it vanished from the Internet. The quality that many admire in the president - his strong-willed conviction - too often turns into a liability when he refuses to reconsider his positions even in light of conflicting evidence.
This last facet of the President's character, coupled with his apparent belief that aside from a few appointments, he hasn't made a single substantive mistake in the nearly four years in office, scares me the most about him. I'm just Joe Blow with a blog, a guy who plugs away at producing unpublished prose and who spends his days sweeping the aisles in a grocery store, and I can name a bunch of things from this morning that I'd do differently if I could. That the President of the United States professes his own record to be error-free is astonishing to me.
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