In a nutshell: Why I voted for John Forbes Kerry

A reader over at Andrew Sullivan nails it. I encourage you to follow the link to read his full commentary.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?No. It wouldn't. That city flooded in a day. ... They wouldn't have had a whole week to sort it out and know what's coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, "Hey, what if..."And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.I've had it. I'm done. And if the other bunch of assholes can't figure out that what's important is that babies don't starve to death here (and I'm not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm's way, we'll get rid of them too. And so on.Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one's in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor's performance, or bragging that we've sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that "we had no idea the levees would break."Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.No more."

Now, substitute Katrina fallout with Abu Ghraib; no WMD; not enough boots on the ground; not sealing the borders, the Jay Garner-Paul Bremer switcheroo; extraordinary rendition; blown UN diplomacy; disbanding the Iraqi military; $9B vanished amidst a Keystone Cops routine; no responsibnility taken by senior officials for, well, anything; etc. and you'll understand why I simply could not extend Bush's contract, no matter how loathsome I found Kerry.

It boils down to this: particularly in the realm of foreign policy I believe that George W. Bush has the right objectives. But if you cannot execute againt them, then it is incompetence. Kerry's objectives seemed to be 70% of Bush and while I was not sure that Kerry would be any more competent, I knew that Bush had his shot. And now, almost a year later we are seeing that Bush is no more competent, and perhaps even LESS competent in responding to the second 9/11-type disaster of his presidency. We've created a Department of Homeland Security which seems no better prepared to deal with these matters. At what cost? And how much confidence does this inspire about the "revamp" of our intelligence community and other vital initiatives started under this administration?

Unfortunately, we've got three more years of this presidency to go...