out of curiosity, why is Kerry “killing you”?

I think the free trade thing is a red herring… The U.S. is protectionist already… ask any farmer.

Also, Bush isn’t much better if you want free trade… Bush set up tariffs on steel. He recently revoked them. In both cases (setting them up and revoking them) he considered his re-election possibilities… see here.

What’s my point? Simply that I don’t find Kerry any different than Bush in this regard… I don’t find it remarkable, in fact, that a politician would consider his own popularity when considering policy decisions.

On a side note, “free trade” means too many things… different people have different objections to the way “free trade” is being implemented (as in it’s not really free, or it doesn’t have the right regulatory framework, or it’s skewed toward certain outcomes, etc). It’s hard to argue that all of these concerns have no merit.

In other words, I’d rather Kerry be right than consistent (that goes for any politician). If he’s going to listen to people because they see a problem, we should encourage that… I wish Bush could say, “Geez, I’ve learned that my original position wasn’t entirely correct…”.

Granted, netierh Bush nor Kerry are saying anything like this, just changing their positions willy nilly, so it just washes for me.

Civil unions are a cop out, but I don’t know that it’s inconsistent with who he is and what he believes… i’ll leave that out, but as a policy problem I’m happy he’s not advocating an amendment to the constitution. (why is it that conservatives are always rushing to modify our core founding document… seems like they’re being awfully liberal with the amendments…)

Finally, I don’t believe that he’ll take us out of Iraq. First, he’s a military man and knows the mess that the guys on the ground are in. He might actually get the troops body armor and more troops. Everything I heard from him on this has been leaning toward increasing our presence and focusing on fixing our relationships with the outside world.

I KNOW Bush would be much worse on this issue because he’s proven that he’ll listen to political advice and ideology (we can topple governments for cheap said the Neocons) over the advice of good, smart generals like Shinseki. I just read comments from Zinni essentially saying the same thing. Woodward’s book, on the other hand, describes the President and Rumsfeld as interested in modernizing the military planning because we really don’t need all those troops on the ground. It’s sad…

fair enough. The short version of what I said is basically:

Douchebag is too strong, both are doing what politicians do. one is just more credible at this point (guess which one I think is more credible).