On Bush vs. Kerry
I just posted the following to the OWL discussion forum. I am posting it here with some trepidation, as I don’t like getting bogged down in political debates. I am going to leave the comments open on this entry, but take care that any comments are respectful and on-topic.
I disagree with Joe Duarte’s assertion that “Bush is just a power-hungry, God-driven, part of the machine. He doesn’t care about freedom in any category.” And that “Kerry=Bush and Bush=Kerry. There is no difference.”
Below are two examples of why I believe the differences between Bush and Kerry in this election are significant and worthy of attention.
1. By far the most important issue in this election is our national security, and specifically the capable execution of our war against radical Islamic terrorist factions. On issues of national security, what is at stake is not simply shades of political freedom, but potentially the lives or deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, in just one successful nuclear, biological, or chemical terrorist attack.
It is hard to obtain an integrated perspective on the war on terror through conventional news outlets. Fortunately, one has been skillfully provided by Steven den Beste in his Strategic Overview of the War on Terror. This document is well worth printing out and reading in its entirety.
While Kerry has flip-flopped repeatedly on how to handle the war on terror, and eventually become ham-strung by his own party’s extremists, Bush has been relatively principled and willing to stick to a long-term plan, even as the specifics come under continual fire from opportunistic critics at home and abroad.
2. Bush has also shown an openness to the idea of overhauling the United States’ huge, inefficient, and corrupt Internal Revenue Service. Specifically, he has expressed favorable interest in the Fair Tax Initiative, about which one can learn more from this recent article by Neal Boortz.
Kerry, by contrast, has responded to the Fair Tax Initiative with the usual class warfare bromides, complaining melodramatically (with complete ignorance or evasion of the facts) that it would represent history’s largest tax increase on the middle and lower classes.
Each of these issues — protecting our national security and overhauling the IRS — could, alone, have enormous consequences for the quality of life that Americans experience over the next few decades. To ignore differences in how Bush and Kerry view these two issues would be destructive and myopic.
Kerry’s inability to take a stand on any issue at all, to say nothing of these two key issues where Bush has been relatively strong, would be far worse for our country’s long-term self-interest. For these reasons, I will be voting for George W. Bush this fall, and I urge other supporters of the American way of life to do the same.
