Its amazing how you can go away for three weeks and not really follow the news and when you come back the exact same insignificant issue is front page every day. Is this nation really going to select its president on a single issue that irrelevant to the daily lives of virtually all of it inhabitants and certainly to the 6 billion other people on this planet which it, by defacto assertion, is the sole "superpower" of?

If America is a superpower what kind of super power does it have? Super obsessive compulsive disorder power is my guess - that is the ability to divert the entire nations focus obsessively on minutiae that are irrelevant to day to day existence. First it was Clinton's peccadilloes which should only have been an issue between him, his family and Monica. Now it is the details of Kerry's war wounds and aversion for preemptive war, which for some reason have managed to outshine Bush's self selected program of "military abstinence".

Unfortunately Kerry has run himself into a side road of mediocrity and hence can no better than run to the FCC to complain. As Dave over at Chicken or Beef put it, if he was half the candidate we all wanted him to be he would have come back shooting from the hip with "Even the nay sayers place me on a swift boat in Vietnam, where the f**k were you George AWOL Bush?". Similarly he should be fearless in defending his post Vietnam anti-war statements in the same way as someone can "support the troops" but be against war in Iraq. If Kerry cannot do both these without fear of tarnishing his reputation he shouldn't be standing up there pretending to represent half (or hopefully more than half) of the country.

Which brings me back to the title...

Are we once again going to see this country select its President based on a narrow set of issues that really have no relevance to the lives of most of its people? Today the news has hit that this year there are 1.3 million more Americans living in poverty. You would think that those 1.3 million would surely be voting for a democrat like Kerry instead of a candidate who's one goal is to pander to his rich benefactors with massive tax cuts?

Unfortunately it is quite likely that they will decide that issues that hardly affect them at all in their day to day lives. Like tax cuts, gay marriage, the "war on terrorism", school prayer, or something else is a higher priority than having a higher minimum wage in their pockets, food on their plates, health insurance and motivated well paid teachers teaching their kids in school. When you're in the poverty trap selecting the president based on the exact circumstances of how he received war wounds thirty years ago is like divorcing your wife because she told you she lost her virginity to her high school sweetie on the back seat of a Buick, but found out it was actually in motel with a one night stand. At the time it was a big deal, thirty years on its pretty much irrelevant.

What's more galling is that there is so far no evidence that Kerry's story is anything but true and his only mistake ever was to divert from his originally safe plan of not using his war record as a campaign issue. If only he'd only stuck with "I served and was awarded three purple hearts and still believe that war is wrong except as a last resort". Instead someone persuaded him to jump on the war hero band wagon and the rest, as they say, is history.

Naturally Kerry was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. We all know the consequences of him using his war record, but if he hadn't the swift boat people would probably still have seized on the opportunity and chastised him for not being a proud soldier. Naturally they would do it without the finesse to distinguish between being proud of serving, and laying one's life on the line for country and comrades vs. just going out to kill people because you are forced to.

In serving one's country it stands to reason that doing so "with honor" is a distinction must be earned, you don't get it for just showing up - or not as the case may be. George AWOL Bush did his best not to serve and clearly never achieved even a passing grade in the honor department. Kerry, apparently inspite of objecting to the reasons for the war, went out of his way to be in the line of fire and served with honor. Furthermore at the time he did justice to his own conscience by continuing to support the anti-war movement and speaking publicly against war. If only he was brave enough to continue to do so now he might actually be a candidate we could all support with pride and confidence that he's the right person for the job, and more importantly one that can actually beat Bush - with honor.

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