Brain Fertilizer

While I'm on the subject of the table of contents of National Journal (didn't know it could be so fruitful, did you?): A nugget describing Jonathan Rauch's column says, "John F. Kerry should take a page from John F. Kennedy's 1960 playbook and run as a hard-liner on national security issues."

And this brings up probably my biggest pet peeve of all time, political-campaign division: No he shouldn't. No, Kerry shouldn't. He should campaign on whatever it is he believes. No pretending. He should say what he thinks, how he would govern, and let the electoral chips fall where they may.

This is what I can't stand about Democratic candidates, chiefly. They won't run Honest Injun; they get all artful and calculating and masking. They spend months trying to fool the booboisie, so as to get in and then be themselves.

You won't have this problem with George W. Bush. He can't be other than himself. He couldn't be obscure if he tried. Sure, he's a politician, and not without some political artfulness — but, pretty much, what you see is what you get. No surprises. Take 'im or leave 'im.

Advice like Jonathan Rauch's makes me sick to my stomach, and sours me on the American political system. John Kerry is a Massachusetts liberal who hated Reagan, hated the hawks, and who said — you know this is my favorite quote — that the Grenada invasion "represented a bully's show of force against a weak Third World nation."

Let Reagan be Reagan, Let Poland be Poland, Let Kerry be Kerry, Let Rauch be Rauch . . .

My prayer, for this political year, is what it always is: that the candidates will just run honestly, and allow the voters to decide. That's what I would do. I swear. (Not that I'm gettin' elected to anything, believe me.)

If Democrats don't have enough confidence their policies, platforms, and views will garner sufficient support from the populace, then the worst thing in the world would be to let them have power. That's exactly what I hated about Al Gore: he "reinvented" himself, and the non- liberal media never said anything negative about it at all. They enabled it, they abetted it, they encouraged it, they gushed over it. And Democrats, in their hatred of allowing people the freedom to choose for themselves how to spend the money they earn and experience the consequences of their own decisions, will back such fundamentally dishonest politicians if it means wresting power away from Republicans.

Look around the United States right now. Republican policies work. The only things from President Clinton's administration that worked were what he appropriated from the Republican playbook.

It disgusts and disheartens me that approximately 50% of the people in this nation could be so petty, short-sighted, and generally clueless of the way the world works. Sure, it would be great if visualizing world peace could bring it about, if welfare could eliminate poverty instead of sustaining it. But that's not reality, and it's not the way to vote. The supreme irony, to me, is that Democrats in Democrat states are blaming President Bush because their own Democrat policies have resulted in slower recovery than the Republican states with Republican policies. Democrats, as a group, seem to embody that classic definition of insanity: keep doing the same harmful action expecting beneficial results.

Oh, the blockquote came from today's Impromptus.