No Honor

I never was much of a liberal. Not in the past, at least. The last four years have made me a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But that topic is reserved for another post.

This one is about our sitting president and the flap about his National Guard service. Do I worry about the documents CBS uncovered? Not really. Paranoia would dictate that Karl Rove is at work, but I'm going to ignore that issue at present. Where I'm not that particularly happy with John Kerry, I simply feel he's our best alternative. I fear what the next four years will bring under a Bush presidency.

So what led me to that choice? To sum it up, there are only a few issues upon which I judge Mr. Bush.

Reason #1: He jumped the queue to join the National Guard to avoid going to Nam. Because of his political connections, some other poor schmuck got sent over there and probably came home in a body bag. A honorable man would not have used his daddy's influence to jump the queue. That tells me a lot about Dubya. And even after he got into the Guard, he shirked his duty. You can't tell me some other guardie wouldn't have been crucified for pulling Dubya's stunts.

Despite Kerry's criticism of the war once he returned home, he did his duty. Folks have been snarking about his medal-earning 'scratches.' Bullets don't discriminate. One of those could have easily hit his heart or his head. He put himself in the line of fire for whatever reason and didn't stick someone else with the job. That gets my vote.

Reason #2: Dubya's frightingly eerie 'deer in the headlights' maneuver in the first seven minutes after the planes hit the Twin Towers. He was clueless as to what to do. He should have excused himself from the kiddies and started working through the disaster. Instead, it was Richard Clark who was orchestrating things at the White House, not our commander-in-chief. That told me that Dubya is not a leader.

All the rest is icing on the cake; the missing WMD, the curtailing of civil liberties, the invasion of Iraq.

Vote your conscience, people. We still have a democracy. Let's hope it's intact in four more years.

Later --

Jana