Back of the Envelope

I'm sure it will come as a surprise to all of you that I support Bush for President. Yes, yes, I know you all pegged me for a Nader supporter. But before you all go to vote, I'd like to lay out why I do so and do my level best to convince you that you should too. Bush has taken a lot of flak for launching the war on Iraq, and there are people in my own family who really dislike Bush for this. Now I explained why it was important to take on Iraq in a very early post on this blog. To immodestly quote myself:

...When making the case for war, the White House considered a number of reasons, which Wolfowitz elucidates:

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two...

Now all these things are true concerns. While the WMD reasoning has come under a lot of fire recently, there's no doubt about Saddam Hussein's barbaric treatment of his own people. His ties to terrorists are well-known, and there's good evidence, if not absolute proof, of his ties to al Qaeda. As for the WMDs, it's true that no large stockpiles have been found. That they existed at one point is not in doubt; he used them in the war against Iran and against the Kurds. Whether they've been destroyed by US attacks against Saddam through the years, destroyed by Saddam in secret (the least likely, I think), buried in the sand, or shipped to Syria, I don't know. The programs, however, were certainly there--Kay reported on many of them. None of them involved large scale manufacturing, but when it comes right down to it, we were never as worried about large scale manufacturing as we were about producing just enough to contribute to a terrorist attack. It does not take a large quantity of chemical or biological weapons to mount a terrorist attack--remember the anthrax letters? They involved an absurdly small quantity of anthrax. Imagine what could have happened with larger, but hardly massive, quantities.

These are not the only reasons, however. Another reason, largely unstated, is that we are embarking on a mission to change the whole of the Middle East, and that could not happen with Saddam Hussein in the way. Contrary to what Edward Said would have had us believe, the biggest problems in the Middle East are not due to poverty and ignorance, but to tyranny and oppression. To deal with that, we have to bring democracy to the Middle East. Now, since a large number of people in the Middle East already want democracy, it's not as if we're forcing it upon them, but they are currently living under oppressive regimes who are uninterested in the idea, or use it just for show. See Iran's recent "election." The way to start that change happening is to show support for these native movements, to demonstrate that democracy can work in the Middle East, and to demonstrate our own determination to follow through. Aside from being a strong candidate of where to first establish democracy in the Middle East, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a living example of US impotence. While we beat Saddam in 1991, he had routinely thumbed his nose at US and UN demands. What is probably worst of all, when a popular uprising occurred in response to his defeat in the first Gulf War, he crushed it ruthlessly, while the US did too little, too late. In doing this, the US failed to show support for the democratic forces in Iraq, and as long as the US did nothing, this was taken as a continuing sign that the US either could not or would not do anything against the tyrants of the Middle East who oppressed their people.

It should be self-evidently obvious why it's important to keep WMDs out of the hand of terrorists. Don't think Saddam could do it? We may not have found production facilities or stockpiles, but we have found the odd sarin shell. Even one of these detonated in downtown New York could kill tens of thousands. Those who support continued sanctions should realize that they couldn't last. The sanctions were already crumbling: Saddam was skimming off the Oil-for-Food program, controls over what could be imported through the program were loose and there was a thriving smuggling program with neighboring nations, and France, Germany, and Russia were all arguing for an end to the sanctions. In Boston, I would see posters and protests against the sanctions all the time. These protesters, and these nations, didn't have an alternative which would constrain Saddam--they were basically saying let's end the sanctions and let Saddam do what he wants. The choice was not between war and continued sanctions, it was between war and an end to the sanctions.

So that's why leaving Saddam in control in Iraq was not possible. Why is it important to democratize the Middle East? The underlying belief is that it is not poverty and lack of education that are the root causes of terrorism--the 9/11 hijackers were mostly middle class and educated in Western colleges--but tyranny and oppression. It may take generations, but if liberal democracy takes root in the Middle East, especially a free press and freedom of religion as opposed to state-run propaganda masquerading as news media and state-sponsored madrassas teaching hatred, terrorism will no longer be an attractive method for those seeking reform.

Another reason to continue is that we must show the world that terrorism does not work. Terrorism had been used for years, and in almost every case it was successful, causing America to retreat to protect itself at the expense of others, a pattern which arguably began with Vietnam. The unwillingness of Americans to accept casualties to achieve it goals encourages more violence. It is largely cited by Osama bin Laden as the reason he believed terrorism would work against us. Terrorism had killed an increasing number of Americans throughout the nineties, as I've pointed out earlier, and which appears in the graph below.

Our response was feeble at best. The more bin Laden could get away with, and force Americans to retreat, the bolder and more frequent the attacks became. If, however, America proves that it can stand firm in the face of the attacks, that it will not be deterred by casualties, the rationale behind terrorist attacks evaporates. And it is working, right now, in Iraq. Attacks against Americans are down, even while attacks on others are increasing, because the terrorists have found they can kill Americans, but it does not affect our efforts in Iraq. Zarqawi himself has said as much. So while they'll continue to kill Americans whenever they have a chance, especially close to the election when they think it will have an influence, they're slowly learning that it won't succeed. When's the last time an American was kidnapped and behedaded? Recently they've been focusing on Italians and British and others. Why? Because kidnapping Americans hasn't advanced their goals. They've had much more luck gaining concessions from other nations. This is, small scale, what we are trying to do large scale in the Middle East right now: show that we will not be deterred and we will not be intimidated. We will win even if we must make sacrifices, because we know we are, by our sacrifices now, making future sacrifices unnecessary.

Kerry promises to return us to the ways of the nineties, in which bin Laden attacks, and we respond, while slowly giving him more and more of what he wants. Perhaps Kerry will carry on in Iraq, but he'll go no further, and he does not fundamentally understand what the war on terrorism is all about. Bush promises to fight to win, even if it requires sacrifice. If Kerry wins, we may still see democracy in Iraq. If Bush wins, we'll definitely see it, and hopefully see democracy in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon as well, very possibly without requiring military intervention.

As a side note, there are some who say we should let the world go its own way and just defend ourselves. Who cares what they think if they can't attack us? We could try that, but we would not be successful. Defending ourselves a hundred percent would mean closing our borders, building walls between us and Mexico and Canada. We'd have to replace free trade with no trade, since shipments into the US present a risk. Since most terrorist attacks take place on Americans overseas, we'd have to close our embassies, bring our troops everywhere in the world home, and forbid our people from traveling to other countries. Become full-scale isolationists. Perhaps we could survive and even thrive that way, but would anyone of any political persuasion really want to pay that large of a price? And what would become of the rest of the world? Israel would be destroyed: it'd only be a matter of time. Taiwan would be absorbed by China. If South Korea didn't simply surrender to North Korea, there would be nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. Pakistan and India might very well do the same. I don't even want to think about what would happen in the Middle East. America's presence on the world stage ensures peace for billions. Perhaps we could ensure the lives of the few thousand that it will cost us to wage this war if we retreated, but are we willing to sacrifice that many in order to do it?

The war is the main reason I support Bush, although I will quickly mention a few others.

First, I fear for the state of the Supreme Court if Kerry wins. Liberals always appoint liberal activist judges. I think it is important to start changing the state of the courts, to return power to the people and their elected representatives rather than the unelected justices and the lawyers.

Second, I believe that to the degree that there is a healthcare crisis in this country (and I'm not too sure that a broader view supports this assertion), rising healthcare costs are due largely to lawsuits and overregulation. Liberals would have the government help subsidize this through government health insurance, giving us the wonderful healthcare that Canada has--cheap but ineffective. Enacting tort reform and deregulation, removing the waste from the system, is a far better solution than providing government subsidies to the waste. Not only that, but if you want any progress in healthcare, it makes more sense to support Bush. I think the tort reform solution has a better chance of getting through Congress, and it would definitely happen sooner, than Kerry's healthcare solution.

There are things I disagree with Bush over, but I'm hard pressed to think of any issue where I prefer Kerry's position over Bush's.

Update: I was up pretty late writing this, so if any of it is confusing, feel free to ask questions.

Like Dean Esmay, I cannot wait for the election to be over. I definitely hope Bush wins, and I'm even feeling a bit optimistic that he will, but more than anything I just want it to be done with. I'm not planning on staying up late Tuesday to watch the election returns--in 2000, that was an exercise in frustration, and those 10,000 lawyers the Democrats are employing are promising to do the same this year. Hopefully, by the time I wake up Wednesday morning it will all be over, but I intend to sleep late, just in case.

I have by now become used to the mainstream media's inability to determine the difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals, much less to understand what the religious right is. Heck, I'm not sure I understand what's meant by the term. Sometimes it's nothing more than a catch-phrase to describe all those conservative Christians who are also political conservatives, which would include my fairly moderate self. The mainstream media tends to lump them all together, which wouldn't be a problem except that they then ascribe the same beliefs to the far left of the religious right as to the far right. Thus we all want to see abortion banned, a ban on gay marriage, an end to stem cell research, and prayer in public schools. Of course, when they go into full demagoguery mode, Democrats accuse the religious right of wanting to round up gays in concentration camps, to keep women out of the workplace and legally subservient to their husbands, and to remove all trace of other religions from the public square--or perhaps just deport all the unbelievers. Now, there are probably some people who believe those things, but I've never met them, nor do they make up even a sizeable minority in the evangelical movement. Bush is an evangelical, and he's a fairly moderate one. His positions on embryonic stem cell research, partial-birth abortion, and gay marriage are not only middle-of-the-road for evangelicals, they're also middle of the road for America, which is why I find The Economist's complaining so annoying (Hat tip Megan McArdle at Instapundit):

If Mr Bush is re-elected, and uses a new team and a new approach to achieve that goal, and shakes off his fealty to an extreme minority, the religious right, then The Economist will wish him well.

Once again, by "fealty to an extreme minority, the religious right," The Economist means "openly religious and opposing partial-birth-abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage." So how extreme a minority is someone holding these positions? Let's check some statistics:

• 84% of Americans say that religion is very important or somewhat important in their lives (55% say very important)
• 70% of Americans agree or mostly agree that it is important that the President have strong religious beliefs (same link as above)
• 69% of Americans oppose partial birth abortion
• 57% of Americans oppose abortion on demand (same link as above)
• 47% of Americans oppose federal funding for embryonic stem cell research
• 62% of Americans oppose gay marriage

So much for the extreme minority meme, huh? Bush's positions are pretty clearly mainstream.

Democrats are angry. Angry enough that they won't accept losing this election, from the looks of it. Doc Rampage has a few thoughts on Democratic rage:

I know a Bush-hater who says he was glad the Florida challenge came out the way it did because he thought Bush supporters were angrier (I don't agree, but that's what he thinks). He felt it was better for them to win because that would calm things down. But this year he thinks Kerry supporters are angrier (clearly), so they ought to win.

I wonder if he hasn't stumbled across a premeditated strategy behind all the hatred and spite we are seeing from Democrats this year. Could it be that they think Republicans will back down and let them win from fear? That would explain the hateful rhetoric, the screaming and name-calling on news shows, the premeditated attack on a conservative, the violence against Republican campaign workers, and intimidation tactics against Republican voters [Lots of links in Doc's original post]. It is starting to look like an actual strategy rather than separate spontaneous incidents.
...
Of course fear and intimidation work. It can work on a small scale, as when someone asks someone for a dollar in a threatening manner. Not threatening enough to make it a robbery, but threatening enough that the victim might not want to take the chance of it turning into a robbery. It works at a larger scale as when threatened riots change university policies. It can even happen at national scales, as when Spain was bombed a few days before the election. And if Bush loses in November, it will have happened to the US as well.

What the Democrats may have miscalculated is that Bush draws a large part of his support specifically from people who will not be intimidated. While Kerry voters wanted to run to the UN for comfort after 9/11, while they wanted to find a way appease the bad people, Bush voters wanted to go after the bastards.

I suspect that Bush voters are going to feel the same about any Democrats that try to intimidate them at the polls, too.

Doc's been on fire recently any way you look at it. You ought to be reading him regularly.

Instapundit points out an article which says that based on military testing, Bush probably has a higher IQ than Kerry. His IQ is mid-120s, while Kerry's is about 120:

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

Now I'm not going to say what my IQ is, but I went to Grad school at MIT, where, based on my best qualitative analysis (a wild guess), 120 would be about average. Maybe a little low.

For the Undergrads I can be a little bit more precise, using this handy-dandy SAT to IQ conversion formula (see this page for more information). Thus, looking at the Freshmen admitted to MIT in 2004, the average SAT score is 724 verbal and 759 math, which gives us .095*759[math]+.003*724[verbal]+50.241=124.5. So either candidate would do okay at MIT, but they wouldn't stand out.

However, I can't think of too many MIT students who would make good leaders, much less Presidents. I know I wouldn't. In some ways, I think the smartest students I know would make the worst leaders. MIT doesn't produce a lot of leaders; it produces technocrats. If I were to pick the MIT alum who best demonstrates the type of leader the average MIT student would make, it'd have to be Kofi Annan. I bet you didn't know that he's an MIT alum. Yes, he graduated from MIT in 1972 with an MS from the Sloan School of Management. His thesis is online here. I don't think we want a President like Kofi Annan.

There's an AP article detailing some of the oil-for-food scandal revelations (Hat tip to Joe Gandelman). The AP article describes three lists: the oil voucher list, those companies and individuals who got vouchers good for oil and exchangeable for cash, the exempt list, those companies who automatically got deals without going through the usual approval process Iraq used, and the blacklist, companies whom Saddam refused to deal with, often because they dealt with Israel. From the article:

Companies on Saddam's special lists got vouchers giving them priority for deals in humanitarian goods under oil-for-food, or to act as middlemen for companies providing goods.

Some Iraqi officials confirmed the lists were crafted to reward companies from countries supporting Iraqi political goals, especially the lifting of U.N. sanctions, investigators said.

"These lists illustrate how Saddam Hussein cynically manipulated and corrupted the oil-for-food program," said Hyde. "The fact, disclosed in the Duelfer report, that some countries based their Iraq policies on these corrupt practices is shameful."

Anyone who's been following this can tell you that the oil-for-food scandal has been covered in great detail by Claudia Rosett. The basic idea is that Saddam was allowing companies to overcharge him by 10% for what they were supplying if they kicked back a portion of their profits directly to him. Aside from this, there's the sanctioned materials that were smuggled in through this program, oil vouchers used to buy political influence, and political blackmail made possible by being on the take. From Ms. Rosett's Senate testimony:

It must also be kept in mind that once Saddam had done a tainted deal, delivered a bribe, received a kickback, given a gift of those now-infamous oil vouchers; he had the goods on the other party to the deal. Along with the graft came ample opportunity for blackmail, a danger to which the U.N. was also, apparently, indifferent. Very likely, Saddam's partners in graft had more to lose than he did — especially as the program proceeded, and Saddam's regime, having tested the U.N. envelope again and again, discovered it could game the system almost any way it chose. I refer you, for example, to the establishment in 1999 of the Dubai-based trading group, El Wasel & Babel, one of the UN-approved suppliers to Oil-for-Food, designated last Thursday by Treasury as a front company — engaged in procuring arms — for Saddam's own regime.

Much of this is covered in the Duelfer Report. In short, a lot of people were benefitting from the oil-for-food program, with the exception of the Iraqi people, the only ones who were supposed to benefit from it. A lot of this money bought Saddam political influence at the UN and in France, Germany, and Russia, the allies whom John Kerry is so assiduously courting. I think it's fair to say that their opposition to the Iraq war was not from humanitarian concerns. The real coalition of the bribed and coerced is emerging.

On Monday, John Edwards promised miracles:

"We will do stem cell research," he vowed. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. America just lost a great champion for this cause in Christopher Reeve. People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research."

Now it disturbs me how people like John Kerry and John Edwards brush aside the ethical questions as if they're not worth considering. Sacrificing a human life to heal yourself is the stuff of thousands of stories, many of them stories of horror and black magic and science-run-amok. Western civilization (and, I hope, others, but it's the western literature I'm familiar with) has long recognized this powerful temptation to evil, while praying that such a morally repugnant practice would never become accepted. While you can in good conscience--I hope--argue that this is not what is going on in embryonic stem cell research, how dare Kerry and Edwards not even feel the need to make the argument! The greatest evils are those you never question, never think about, refuse to consider.

But is there any truth in what they're promising? From what I understand, embryonic stem cell research hasn't even been particularly promising. In at least one case, it backfired horribly:

A carefully controlled study that tried to treat Parkinson's disease by implanting cells from aborted fetuses into patients' brains not only failed to show an overall benefit but also revealed a disastrous side effect, scientists report.

In about 15 percent of patients, the cells apparently grew too well, churning out so much of a chemical that controls movement that the patients writhed and jerked uncontrollably.

The researchers say that while some patients have similar effects from taking too high a dose of their Parkinson's drug, in this case the drugs did not cause the symptoms and there is no way to remove or deactivate the transplanted cells.

(Hat tip Brain Shavings)

Read the whole thing. I'm sorry to say this, but it reads a lot like one of those cautionary SF stories. The responses of the doctors are enlightening:

For now, Dr. Greene said, his position is clear: "No more fetal transplants. We are absolutely and adamantly convinced that this should be considered for research only. And whether it should be research in people is an open question."
...
The one glimmer of hope came from assessments by neurologists before the patients had had their first dose of medication in the morning. By that measure, the 10 patients under age 60 who had had the fetal cell implants seemed better than those who had had sham surgery, with less rigidity, although their tremor was just as bad.

Dr. Freed hailed that result, saying, "It was a clear-cut improvement."

And, he added, the fetal cells survived in most patients' brains.

"I would be disappointed if people used a strict clinical trial approach," Dr. Freed said. "This study is about multiple phenomena."

Others were less enthusiastic, pointing out that finding subgroups after the fact who may have benefited suggests a hypothesis for future studies, not evidence of an effect.

"We try to teach everybody that you have to identify beforehand what's the primary outcome," said Dr. William Weiner, the director of the Maryland Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorder Center and a professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, referring to the measure of success determined before the study began. "In this case, they picked a subjective assessment by the patients themselves, which I think is a very good one."

And so, Dr. Weiner said, when the patients noticed no improvement, "the study was negative."

In addition, Dr. Langston said, even if a subsequent study confirmed that the surgery had an effect on the condition in younger patients before they took their medicine in the morning, and even if there was a way of preventing the terrible side effect, the operation would still hardly be a breakthrough. Parkinson's disease is almost always a disease of the elderly, he noted, adding that well under 10 percent of patients who would be candidates for the surgery are younger than 60.

The wiggling and writhing movements first emerged a year after the operation, showing up in five of the younger patients who had at first appeared to benefit from fetal cell surgery — three who had the operation in the initial phase of the study and two who had it a year later, when they learned that they had originally had a sham surgery
...
Dr. Freed said his group was now implanting less fetal tissue and putting the tissue in a different area of the brain, hoping to avoid the devastating side effects. But, he said it would be a mistake to stop doing the surgery altogether.

"To say that you can't do or shouldn't do human research because the research has uncertain outcome, I think would be a bad decision," Dr. Freed said.

I feel sorry for the patients, and I prefer to believe that even in their desperation they considered and resolved the ethical dilemma for themselves. Dr. Greene at least shows humility and a willingness to learn from his mistake. I feel less sympathy for Dr. Freed, who throughout the article comes across as unrepentant, even going so far as to grasp at straws to call this a partial success.

Why is it that everybody wants to vote in the US elections? We don't want to vote in their elections. I suppose they think that whoever is elected in the US has a large influence on them, and that means they ought to have an influence on us. Well they do; it's called diplomacy. And really, the US already allows itself to be hamstrung by our diplomatic commitments, else we could have gotten rid of Hussein and bin Laden in the Nineties and at least managed to slow down North Korea. International opinion prevented us from solving those difficulties then, and now they don't want us to solve them now. You'd think they'd be happy with the influence they've had.

But no, that's not the case. If the German national spamming people with the draft rumors wasn't enough to get you angry, then Captain Ed points out a new example. There's the British newspaper giving a tutorial on how to influence the US election, "on the following pages, we have assembled a handy set of tools that non-Americans can use to have a real chance of influencing the outcome of the vote."

Captain Ed also points out a Norwegian political group buying advertising space in the Washington Post to say:

Mr. President - we urge you to change your foreign olicy. To pursue a flawed and failed policy is a sign of weakness. We want the United States to be strong and creative enough to apologize to the Iraqi people for an unjust war, and to the Allies for having misled them. We want the USA to be generous enough to compensate the innocent victims of violence, looting and trauma inflicted by torture. We firmly believe that the quest for peace in Iraq is best led by the United Nations and a democratically-elected Iraqi government.

This isn't quite the same thing, and I would say falls under freedom of speech, but if they weren't trying to influence the election, they should have just had their 4,000 contributors sign a petition. Or at least waited a couple of weeks until after the election, so they'd know whom to address the letter to.

In any case, if they want a vote in our affairs, I want a vote in theirs. On second thought, not really. I don't care what the Norwegians do, and I trust the British to choose their own leaders and live with whatever mistakes they might make. No, the people whose elections I really want to vote in are Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Oh, I forgot, they don't have elections. Not real ones, anyway.

I guess that's what makes me different from those British and Norwegian socialists. I trust democracies to make their own decisions. It's the tyrants I'm worried about.

John Hawkins works out the rules:

Maybe we can come up with a drinking game by then? Let's see...every time Bush calls Bush a liberal, take a drink. If Kerry says he was a plan, take a drink. A Kerry mention of Herbert Hoover? Take a drink. If Bush says 1.9 million jobs created in the last 13 months? Take a drink. [Emphasis added.]

It's possible that John will correct the typos before this post goes up, but I kind of hope not.

Sinclair Broadcasting wants to show the documentary, Stolen Honor, on its stations. If you're not familiar with it, Stolen Honor is a documentary recounting the experiences of Vietnam POWs, especially how Kerry's Senate testimony was used by their captors to dispirit them. Anyway, the Democratic National Committee is not at all happy with this development, and they are of course trying to stop it:

News Advisory:

Conference Call at 1:30 PM ET Today

DNC Files FEC Complaint Against Sinclair Broadcasting

DETAILS:

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry McAuliffe and DNC Legal Counsel Joe Sandler will host a conference call today at 1:30 PM ET to announce the DNC's decision to file an FEC complaint against Sinclair Broadcasting's illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Of course, I didn't hear any complaints from them when Michael Moore was talking about broadcasting Farhenheit 9/11:

But 20 million people have already seen it — and the Gallup poll said that 56% of the American public has seen or plans to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" either in the theater or on home video. The DVD and home video of our film, thanks to our distributors listening to our pleas to release it before November, will be in the stores on October 5. This is very good news.

But can it also be shown on TV? I brought this possibility up in this week's Rolling Stone interview. Our contract with our DVD distributor says no, it cannot. I have asked them to show it just once, perhaps the night before the election. So far, no deal. But I haven't given up trying.

The only problem with my desire to get this movie in front of as many Americans as possible is that, should it air on TV, I will NOT be eligible to submit "Fahrenheit 9/11" for Academy Award consideration for Best Documentary. Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release (fiction films do not have the same restriction).

Although I have no assurance from our home video distributor that they would allow a one-time television broadcast — and the chances are they probably won't — I have decided it is more important to take that risk and hope against hope that I can persuade someone to put it on TV, even if it's the night before the election.

Therefore, I have decided not to submit "Fahrenheit 9/11" for consideration for the Best Documentary Oscar. If there is even the remotest of chances that I can get this film seen by a few million more Americans before election day, then that is more important to me than winning another documentary Oscar. I have already won a Best Documentary statue. Having a second one would be nice, but not as nice as getting this country back in the hands of the majority.

How do I feel about it? Well, being the free speech advocate that I am, I'm not against both of them showing on TV. But I would, as a matter of fairness, like to see equal time honored on whatever stations show them. So the stations could show both, and convince numerous voters that both candidates should be rounded up and shipped to Guatanamo. Heh, that should reduce voter turnout. I'd rather see a pairing of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "FahrenHYPE 9/11" and "Stolen Honor" with Kerry's home movies, or whatever war-hero-Kerry film happens to be available.

Update: Dang, it looks like I lost the link to Moore's post. Give me a moment... Got it! Okay, it's in now. Sorry about this.

It comes from Professor of Government John Pitney, writing in National Review Online:

The more he talked about the issue [abortion], the less sense he made. He claimed that "you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise." So it follows that if the Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms, the government must help poor people buy weapons. I do look forward to his Gun Stamps proposal.

So do I. I've argued before that Kerry's views on separation of Church and State, which he uses to justify his abortion views, are not just wrong, they're dangerous. A faith which cannot influence your most important decisions is dead (James 2:17).

Dean Esmay has an interview with one of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. He has this to say:

DW: If President Bush were to publicly call for your group to pull its ads and to stop campaigning against Senator Kerry, would you stop?

VO: No. No. No. We're not part of the Republican party, we're not trying to elect Bush, we're Democrats and independents and Republicans across the board. The Navy didn't send Republicans to Vietnam, they sent men.

All 60 of our group who served with Kerry in Vietnam, and the others who served there and have joined us, we want the American people to hear our story. Personally, I also want this story to be known to historians....

We're not tied to any campaign. We're a group of private citizens who've formed a 527. We're going to tell our truth to the American people up until November 2nd. We don't want his lies recorded as truth in the history books.

Who says bloggers don't do original reporting? It's a great interview, and well worth reading the whole thing.

I didn't watch all of last Thursday's debate between Bush and Kerry, but I did read the transcript. From the transcript, it doesn't seem like Bush did all that bad. He missed a bunch of opportunities to respond to Kerry in detail, but he did hit most of the major points. I wished he'd point out that the UN and those allies that Kerry's so fond of were apparently on the take, as the oil-for-food scandal is definitely not getting enough play. He'll have to quote some newspaper articles, preferably the New York Times. Heh, on the other hand, maybe it's not a smart diplomatic move for the President of the United States to call France, Germany, Russia, and the UN a bunch of corrupt appeasers propping up an enemy of the United States for financial gain. Dang, it'd be satisfying, though!

Kerry did say a number of things which I think he'll regret. He of course acts like North Korea was behaving perfectly well until Bush flubbed it, when in fact they were clearly cheating all along. The only difference is Bush called them on it.

One thing I've noticed is that Kerry's been getting a lot of flak for his statement about Iran:

I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren't willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.

I think people may be misreading this. This is a would-have-done statement, not a will-do one. He's not suggesting that we give them nuclear fuel now that it's clear they're intent on nuclear weapons. He's suggesting that we should have given them nuclear fuel before it was clear they were intent on nuclear weapons. Okay, so it's still a stupid thing to say. I'm just not sure whether it's less stupid or more stupid than what it's being interpreted as (i.e., let's give them nuclear fuel now). I wish I could read it as an honest confession, in the sense of "In retrospect, that would have been a mistake," but the way Kerry states it he sounds like he means "If only we had given them the fuel when they asked, they wouldn't be building weapons now," which is just idiotic.

I missed the Vice-Presidential debates last night, but it sounds like Cheney did well, at least according to the likes of Geraghty and Captain Ed. I'm sorry I missed it. Well, sort of. Like I've said before, these things bore me, especially when I've heard all the talking points before.

Hugh Hewitt is hosting a blogger symposium discussing whether nuclear bunker buster bombs are a good idea. This, of course, is in response to Kerry's statment during the debate,

You have to put the money into [nuclear nonproliferation] and the funding and the leadership.

And part of that leadership is sending the right message to places like North Korea.

Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.

You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.

(Borrowed from the Evangelical Outpost)

Since Hugh Hewitt is a hawkish conservative blogger, I expect most of his respondents have taken the hawkish position (I haven't had a chance to read all of them).

Joe Carter's post is especially good, and I think you should read it before continuing, because I think he is right. John Kerry's question about whether our development of new nuclear weapons encourages nuclear proliferation is secondary: a side issue at best, a distraction at worst. We aren't going to be giving away our nuclear weapons, after all, and frankly I don't care too much about setting an example. Everybody already knows we have plenty of nukes. The question is and should be whether we are willing to use them.

When it comes to our most destructive weapons, the ones that we can use to wipe the Middle East from the face of the Earth if we wanted to, the obvious answer is no, not unless we truly think the only other option is our own annihilation. If the US believes its existence is threatened, it will use its worst weapons, but the idea right now is to make sure we don't come to that.

So if we have these new weapons, the bunker busting nukes, would we be willing to use those? Ah, there's the rub. If we aren't willing to use them, we shouldn't develop them. I'm not sure I accept their value as a deterrent, as those likely to be deterred have a better understanding of the weapons than those political forces which would keep us from using them. And make no mistake, what would prevent their use are not tactical considerations, but those emotional political forces which oppose anything nuclear, the same forces which call depleted uranium a weapon of mass destruction, but magnified a hundred times. You can argue all you want that nuclear bunker busters are not the weapons of nuclear armageddon they're made out to be, but you will never overcome the raw emotional disgust people have over it, a disgust reinforced by popular culture and the mainstream media, fearmongers not just in the Green party, but closer to the mainstream. The question about their use is not one of cool logic, but one of emotional impact, and while people like Joe might say that we should logically consider the moral and tactical questions, to neglect the emotional political question would be illogical.

When it comes right down to it, I'm not certain we'd be willing to use those weapons. Perhaps I'm mistaken, perhaps someone with the moral will of President Bush could use the weapons and withstand the political blowback, but then again, perhaps not. That makes me question the value of developing these weapons. Call me undecided.

I watched the debates last night. All right, I'll admit, I only watched the first half hour or so, and then surfed past it a couple of times (hard to surf at all without seeing a lot of it). Frankly, they kind of bored me, mainly because, just from the part I watched, there was nothing new--it was the same old arguments.

Bush kept on his theme of resolution. I thought that was good, but my mother found it annoying when he repeated himself. I'm not sure how she compares to a typical voter, of course.

Kerry did better than I expected. I was expecting a meltdown, but it looks like he did okay. So I think he might get a boost from this, but perhaps most swing voters didn't have expectations for him quite as low as mine.

Overall, a draw.