John Kerry for President

When it comes down to it, i can live with a President with whom I disagree on social issues, the environment, the role of government, etc.

However, what I can't abide is a threat to the basic freedom of our citizenship. The Bush-supporters often cried, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact!" - to which my response has always been the New Hampshire state motto:
Live free or die


The real reason I am casting a vote for John Kerry is because I see the GOP as a party of extremism. George W Bush, though the standard bearer of that party, is actually quite moderate. He believes in civil unions, he thinks that teh war on terror can not be "won" in the conventional sense, he understands the need for immigration reform and public health plans. Were he ever freed from his cage (perhaps Wednesday...) he might well have been as genuinely moderate as ... Nixon. Who abolished the draft and created teh EPA, I might remind us all.

The GOP is dangerous. David Neiwert has been doing yeoman's work for the past three years documenting the slide of the far right towards the seductive allure of certain methods - unity of message, discouragement of dissent, public proof of loyalty, and one-party political dominance. His landmark essay on fascism is essential reading, as is his new series on the morphing of the conservative movement into pseudo-fascism and a recent Washington Monthly article on the K-Street Project. Republicanism has replaced conservatism, with great ill-effects to the tradition of debate.

Make no mistake - I reject the far left as utterly. But they wield no power, have no dominance, and lack the unity required for them to ever succceed in installing a communist framework over the Constitution. What level of socialism we have in our society is reaonable and the subject of consensus, not dispute, between left and right: welfare, social security, minimum wage, unions, etc. Communism no more discredits these benign forms of socialism than do tin-pot democratic "elections" garnering Tyrant A 99.99% of the vote discredit American democracy.

Terrorism is a real threat to us. But it is a threat that can be met and one that can be extinguished. That requires transformative change abroad as much as it does simple reliance on multilateral alliances. In that vein, I share at least one goal of the neo-cons, though I label myself a neo-wilsonian because of the very important way in which I disagree.

But what does it gain us to triuph over terrorism to find we have lost our soul in the process? If there is a lesson from history, it is that freedom cannot be extinguished from outside - only when it is willingly snuffed from within. We must preserve our liberal (in the classical sense) freedom, or there's no point in succeeding over terror. The fellow-travelers of the GOP today have no interest in maintaining that freedom. They would impose their own western sharia upon this nation instead.

John Kerry is not perfect, but he does represent the moderate center. That center is a broad tent, comprising of the mainstream of American politics. It covers Barack Obama and John McCain, it covers Chuck Hagel and it covers Howard Dean. And it covers me.

And to succeed against terror, and to help shape the world so that our classical liberal freedom spreads to the corners of the globe, we must make sure that we, the messengers of liberty, remain unsullied.

Stay tuned for changes at Dean Nation. New faces, new viewpoints, and a fresh outlook on our mission. It started here.

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