Does Anything Trump Defeating George Bush?

While listening to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch on The Daily Show Tuesday night, I suddenly understood something that had been a mystery before. I understood it...doesn’t mean I agree with it. I still wonder how any Democrat can vote for George Bush. And more to the point, how can any intelligent person vote for George Bush? A huge segment of voters, like me, are rabid in their zeal to either dump Bush or keep him in office. But apparently, not everyone views the upcoming election in those black-and-white terms. Ed Koch says he’s switching his allegiances to Bush because he thinks Bush is the most pro-Israel President since Reagan. And the New York Times’s Tom Friedman feels that winning the war in Iraq is more important than all other issues in this election. To Friedman, the big decision is, or should be, which candidate will accomplish this end? All right. I concede that these points of view may be valid. But, to paraphrase Jon Stewart on another topic, when we wake up on November 3rd, The Israel/Palestine morass will still be a morass and George Bush will still be a dick. There may be a desperate situation in Israel but it can’t take precedence over the desperate situation here at home. Bush has failed miserably to create decent jobs with wages a family can live on, he has failed to make Americans feel safer against the threat of terrorism, his lowered taxes do little to help the poor but make the rich richer and he has failed to solve the escalating problems of health care. Kerry gives us hope at home. The war in Iraq is a swamp. We can no more win in Iraq that we could win in VietNam. The real question before us about Iraq is: Which candidate is capable of bringing that disaster to an honorable conclusion without further damaging US credibility abroad? And the answer is Kerry.