Far South of I-10

(-“The day will come when even this ordeal will be a sweet thing to remember.” -Virgil) For good or ill the non-lawyer part of the election will be over in a few days. If you scroll down to most of the posts below you can guess that I voted for Bush via absentee ballot yesterday. Here's why: To me, nothing is more important then the war on terror. Not the economy, the environment, flu shots, Medicare, Social Security; all that is peripheral to the war. That's because one nuclear bomb detonating in one U.S. city will undo all those things. I think the only way to avoid that near nuclear certainty is to drain the swamp, remake the middle east in some fashion. President Bush is the only one of our two choices that is credibly heading in that direction. You can say that Bush is stupid, but Clinton was probably the smartest president ever, and he nearly destroyed his presidency for a blowjob. Smarts ain't everything. People say Bush = Hitler. Those people should have...

Jane Galt over at asymetrical information has endorsed Bush. The writer is an economist, and they give a complete rundown on all the issues as a head to head competition. Here's the climax, go read the rest: http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004974.html 'Then there's the question of what message electing Kerry would send. Does it make the world love us, because we got rid of the president they hate, or does it make them despise us, because we've just held a referendum on the Iraq war, and Bush lost? Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change. "If you can't live with him exactly the way he is," she told me, "then don't marry him, because he'll say he's going to change, and he might even try to change, but it's one in a million that he actually will." Kerry's record for the first fifteen ...

Below is an excerpt from Victor Hanson column, probably the last before the election. Read the whole thing. If we choose Kerry, our enemies will see it as their victory, that we don't have the will to fight. It doesn't matter if that is true or not, it will apear true to those who wish us ill. http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200410290825.asp "In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about "fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional" conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a plan than George Bush — because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the pr...

Jerry Pournelle is one of my favorite Science Fiction writers who also is very well informed about both the hard and soft sciences. He recently wrote some interesting posts on his weblog that make sense: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail333.html "Actually, what I should have pointed out is that this is not the stuff of presidential debates. Presidents are not division commanders, much less the colonels of security regiments. As to why we didn't know, it's called friction; see Clausewitz for details. Will Kerry now personally take charge of military operations? At what level? It is legitimate to debate whether we ought to be in that war; that is a presidential level decision. Kerry did so for a while, realized that it was losing him votes every time he talked about it, and is now nit-picking the operational decisions. There's plenty to criticize. Much of the the operational level command in the war was dead wrong: no one expected the civilized people of ...

Victor David Hanson is an historian who can easily move from describing the current war to the origins of WWII to battles that built and destroyed ancient Greece and Rome. Always worth reading, here he lays out why Kerry will be a disaster if elected and why he may still win: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson102604.html "In sum, a Kerry presidency will lack either the vision or the resolve to finish the war, resulting in a defeat for the United States in Iraq — with calamitous consequences for the brave reformers there, an end to liberal momentum in the Middle East, a reversal in the conduct of Libya, Pakistan, and the Gulf, and assurance to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran that the United States is conducting not war but a criminal investigation akin to efforts against gambling or prostitution. Chamberlain-like, we will return to the complacency of the pre-9/11 days, regarding the telltale signs of the destruction to come as mere "nuisances." All the hysteri...

Bubba sent me this: ( http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041025-020600-3030r.htm ) "SECURITY COUNCIL MEMBERS DENY MEETING KERRYBy Joel MowbraySPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES----------------------------------------------------------- U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq. An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred. At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council. "This president hasn't ...

I guess one advantage of starting to write a blog, and continuing to write when apparently no one is reading, is that I can say what I want. Sort of like singing in the shower when nobody is around. Of course there is that small chance that someone is listening...the guy in the apartment upstairs is thinking "if that fucker starts singing Johnny Cash again, I'll hang myself". Or the girl in 3c is thinking "is that Frank Sinatra in my apartment building?...I'm wet with excitement". So even though I'm feverishly trying to convince people that they have to vote for Bush, to the point where I'm pissing off people at work who shouldn't be pissed off, I can still imagine with a little bit of pleasure what will happen if Kerry wins. (this is said much better by Christopher Hitchens http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=hitchens ) Kerry and the Dems will have to put up or shut up. They'll have to deal with reality in the present t...

The wife and I drove over from Houston to Lafayette this morning on I-10. I thought the trip was going bad enough when a big-ass rock hit the windshield and put a 2" star on it in Beaumont. Just an hour later we were coming down a bridge in Lake Charles, and it was raining hard enough that I couldn't quite see the bottom of the bridge. I could see the outline of the cars in front of us, and they were swerving all over the road, right next to a tanker truck. One car hit an SUV and they both went into the left shoulder, and the tanker truck swerved onto the right shoulder. I slammed on my brakes, and I thought; "We're good, I can stop waay before the wreck". Just then the truck behind me comes over the top of the bridge and locks up his brakes. I could hear his tires, then to emphasize the point he layed on the horn. I thought we were fucked, but I got off my brakes, since the farther down the brigde I got the less squished we'd be. Then as we got...

http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/2004/10/cant_take_any_m.html "Fine, I'll admit it. I couldn't care less about how Bush does in the debates or if he's wrong about some issues, or a complete Bible-thumping jerk about others. Couldn't. Care. Less. What I care about is whether or not whoever is president will take the fight to the filthy pigs - I mean, the psychotic mass murdering Islamic terrorists - or will hold....summits. (Like a statesman.) Whether or not the next president will give a flying squirrel's ass how France feels about anything on this entire planet. Because you know, we shouldn't. France is wrong and has been wrong for a long, long time. They took bribes from Saddam Hussein and if you think that's untrue, you're just not paying enough attention. Or maybe you don't care. Because after all, Saddam didn't have any WMDs!!! Ah-hahahaha!!! He was just a simple dictator with simple desires that didn't involve WMDs, and we h...