John Perry Barlow gets it exactly right in his latest missive, BarlowFriendz: Supporting Kerry Anyway...:
Please, vote for a president who won't rush headlong into unconsidered wars, alienate our allies, and eviscerate our Bill of Rights. Vote for Kerry because it's the only way to keep this country free for the next four years. Posted by Wendy at October 04, 2004 07:38 PM | TrackBackRight here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I'm having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.
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We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.
