I feel like I am coming apart right now. I am hoping for things to happen that almost certainly will not, but the thought of them happening makes me so happy, I don't know that I want to accept reality. Something happened yesterday. I tried to reconnect with someone from my past, and they literally could not hear me. But that incident, and a whole lot of thinking over the past week has made me realize just how unready I am, how much I am still mourning over what happened three months ago. Its like a viscious cycle.

Jonathon Alter appeared on Air America last week and talked about this column which I just find utterly fascinating. Any time you can bring up one of history's two great historian/traitors (Thucydides or Josephus) is a good one. But the general tenor or what Alter says about Bush, and about what the conservative dialogue in the country is saying is absolutely dead on.
What John Kerry needs to do is make George Bush look like Pat Hopple. Now I love Pat, but he could be extraordinarily hard headed, especially when it came to potentially admitting he was wrong. That is this president's problem. He is so obsessed with his own intellectual and philisophical consistency that he can't reverse, or even change course on issues. I learned in Washington that ideological consistency is great, and could be an admirable quality, for those never seeking higher office. Paul Wellstone liked Jesse Helms because he knew what he stood for. But a president needs to be more nuanced. He needs to be able consider all points of view, and if one course isn't working, to change it. This is the great fault of the administration. They cannot admit when they are wrong or have been wrong. This is seen as weakness. The one thing George W. Bush has not wanted to be is his father. His father lost, the logic goes, because the conservatives didn't see him as conservative enough. But what scared America more was Pat Buchanan at the convention, talking about a culture war, making the Republican Party the party of the intolerant. Bush will not be accused of not being hard enough. The problem is that he has an incredibly soft underbelly when it comes to eerything else, America doesn't seem to believe it is headed inthe right direction, even if it admires the President for being unflinching. Being uncompromising can be an admirable quality, but , to paraphrase Shelby Foote, our whole system of government is founded upon compromise. Uncompromising people shouldn't head the government.

Elect JFK 2