I am what you would call an undecided voter.  But it's really more complicated than that since the choice for me isn't whether I would vote for Bush or Kerry but rather will I vote for Bush or not.  There is no way I'll vote for Kerry.  But that doesn't mean I'm willing to vote for Bush.  Unlike many neophyte ideologues, I don't imagine the end of the world coming simply because the "other guy" gets elected. Therefore, the side I tend to be more sympathetic to doesn't automatically get my vote.

I've read on-line where people think I'm some sort of Bush supporter simply because I support the war in Iraq/Afghanistan.  That's not the case.  I do find a great deal of amusement seeing the way Bush somehow turns his left-wing opponents into raving lunatics. Never in my lifetime have I seen the opposing party of someone become so hysterical. Most Americans are fairly ignorant on US history, what makes the left unique is that they try to claim an intellectual high ground even as they demonstrate their complete ignorance.  To history buffs, the spazzing about whether we should have gone into Iraq or not comes across as bizarre.  Just to recap, here is a link to a list of wars the US has been in and why we went in.

My two favorites have to be the Mexican American war, where we conquered Mexico (culminating with the capture of Mexico City) on the justification that we really really wanted their land. At least things were more straight forward back then. But the best one of all has to be the US war against Spain in 1898 where we declared war on Spain because one of our ships in Havana harbor blew up (turned out it was due to an accident on the ship).  That's it. That was the justification. Over 2,000 Americans died in that "war" and that was over a century ago when the US population was much smaller. No hysteria then. No anti-war protesters. No calls for impeachment. No international condemnation.

So seeing melodramatic articles about Bush and "casualties in Iraq" asserting that Bush is the worst President in US history or that he should be impeached or whatever just strike me as evidence that George W. Bush has a super power: He makes left wingers look nuts.

But like I said, having a low opinion of hysterical left wing rantings doesn't automatically make me a Bush fan. So let me tell you the problems I have with Bush:

1) Economic irresponsibility.  I really don't like deficit spending. I can live with it as long as I feel like the government is taking its spending seriously. But the pork has been record breaking.  Huge farm subsidies, huge increases in spending for both the EPA and dept of health and human services show that a) He doesn't take spending seriously and He's politically naive. Even at the time I was shaking my head knowing that even with these increases he wouldn't gain anything since Republicans automatically get tarred for being anti-poor and anti-environment regardless of the facts.

2) Incredibly inarticulate.  Every time he holds a press conference I cringe. I keep waiting for him to say something stupid. "Given the choice between trusting a mad man or defending America I will choose to defend America every single time!"  Ack. Who writes this stuff? You may not like Clinton but his intelligence was apparent and he really understood many of these issues even if he didn't do what I would have liked him to do.  Is it really asking so much to have a President who behaves as if he has a clue? Look at Tony Blair, regardless of what you think about him, he comes across as supremely knowledgeable.

3) Messing with the constitution. If the choice boils down to accepting gay marriage or messing with the constitution I'll choose to accept gay marriage. It makes me think that Bush is the same kind of fanatic who would have pushed through the prohibition amendments.  The constitution isn't a political toy. It's the closest thing I have to a secular religion. Don't screw with it over something pidly like this.  And yes, I'm aware of the full faith and service clause.

4) Crazy Projects.  What the hell was the whole Mission to Mars thing about? Here we're running record deficits and he's talking about going to Mars? Meanwhile, he proposes killing the Hubble Space telescope. Hello?

5) Afraid of leveling with us.  All the spastic left wingers who are, to some degree of success, able to retroactively claim that we went into Iraq to confiscate stockpiles of WMD would never be able to make that case if Bush had been more clear about why we went in.  We went in because a) We believed (correctly) that Saddam had WMD PROGRAMS (not stockpiles). That he was a declared enemy of the US in a region where we could no longer tolerate one and c) After 9/11, there was no way we were going to let Saddam stay in place to wait out the sanctions.  But Bush made a great deal of noise about nerve gas and other things. Nobody who supported the war gave a crap about chemical weapons.  We wanted Saddam gone because after 9/11 we could imagine very plausible scenarios where 5 to 10 years down the line in a post-sanctions Iraq that Saddam would either be practicing nuclear blackmail or covertly supplying terrorists with WMDs.  I didn't want my children having to deal with that.  But Bush, because of issue #2, couldn't manage to coherently put that together leaving a gaping hole for the leftbots to spew their latest reason for being against the war (because, you know, they would have been totally for going in if we had found mustard gas stockpiles in Iraq...NOT).

6) Totally incompetent post-war handling in Iraq. I don't care if it was Bremer's decision to decommission Iraq's army. It was still incredibly foolish. How does someone with such a basic management failing get into that position in the first place? If you walk into a corporation that needs to be rebuilt, you don't fire everyone and rehire from scratch. You reorganize it. This isn't complicated stuff.

The whole occupation was poorly run from start to finish. From a PR point of view, US troops should have totally secured Baghdad even if the hinterlands were less secure.  Want proof? Do you think Afghanistan is some sort of cosmopolitan land of peace now? Of course not. But the occupation has seemed a lot more successful because Kabul, where all the press are, is reasonably secure.  If you listen to the news, you'd think Iraq was some bloody quagmire.  As of June 21, we've lost 619 soldiers due to combat.  That includes the actual war and the subsequent year + occupation. In that time, nearly as many people in Washington D.C. have been murdered.  That doesn't make things any less tragic but Iraq isn't particularly bloody. 

But because reporters have seen so much violence because the Bush administration hasn't locked down Baghdad this perception has been allowed to grow. Sorry but if you can't control elementary perception, you're too inept to be President.

7) I'm not sure where he's hoping to go next.  What's the plan? War on terror? What next? Domestic policy? Whatcha gonna do?

So there's 7 reasons off the top of my head that Bush needs to deal with before I'll vote for him.  If he doesn't make a good on some of these, he won't get my vote.  I'll either vote for a minor candidate or not at all.  I know quite a few people in that boat with me and the result has been Kerry's gradual lead as mixed ideologists such as me, who are generally more sympathetic to Republicans than Democrats, migrate off the reservation.

Next: Why Kerry won't get my vote.