CJC.org

This post on Hack-A-Day has instruction for getting to FireFox’s “advanced” configuration page. You can then make changes so that network pipelining is turned on, i.e., the browser will then make HTTP requests in parallel, greatly speeding up performance if you have sufficient bandwidth to handle the multiple requests.

I’ve set the number of parallel requests to 10, and it seems to make a noticeable difference.

Note that there are a number of servers that don’t cope with HTTP pipelining correctly so you may have some blank or messed up pages if you enable this “unsupported” feature.

Update: One site that noticeably doesn’t work well with network pipelining turned on is Google Maps. About half the map tiles take forever to load, or won’t load at all.

One unexpected side-effect of living in a car-centric city that gets a lot of snow is that people don’t do a good job of clearing the sidewalks. Down W. 6th Street and St. Clair, one of Cleveland’s premiere night life spots, there are wide stretches of ice and packed snow in front of restaurants and bars, with half-hearted attempts to create pathways visible in the layers of old snow fall. There’s little foot traffic here, even in Downtown, and there’s not much need to keep the sidewalks clear, especially near the parking lots. That there are few pedestrians, that you pretty much have to drive a car to do anything: these are things I’m getting used to.

Grace and I were actually in Cleveland for the first time just over a year ago, for the just-before-Christmas residency interview for CCF. We stayed at the Clinic’s cheap hotel, arriving on Saturday for the Monday appointment. There wasn’t much snow then, and New York was actually colder; Cleveland was almost balmy in comparison. I spent that Monday driving around the Clinic area to get a feel for the place — the immediate neighborhood is crappy (Not four blocks from the hotel, I actually saw something I had only seen in movies: a flaming oil drum sitting in front of an abandoned house. No one was there, warming his hands, though. Strangely, within sight of the flaming oil drum was new housing construction going up.) — because all the museums around University Circle were closed on Mondays. (I still haven’t gotten to the museums yet, but plan to in the next month or so.) Seeing that the immediate neighborhood was crappy served a purpose: if we matched at CCF, we weren’t going to live that close to the hospital. I tried to do similar neighborhood scouting trips for all the other interview trips I tagged along on.

The residency interviews at the end of last year and the beginning of this year took the two of us from coast to coast over the span of a few weeks. A few days in Cleveland, and then off to Seattle for University of Washington. Greenwich, CT for the first-year internship by train (I haven’t taken that route since working for Newgate almost ten years ago. Grace went by herself to Boston, Rochester, Baltimore and New Haven, as well as the various New York City hospitals. We were also in Sacramento for Davis, but we were also there to get married the week before. Four years of medical school climaxed in March for residency match: everything between then and the start of residency is coda. Match Day puts everything in motion: the journeys at the beginning of the year now have a clear destination.

From mid-March to the beginning of June (just before the start of Grace’s residency) was the time to find a place to live in Cleveland while selling the apartment in New York, and, of course, moving. The first part took one weekend in April, and landing this apartment was perhaps more a matter of luck than good planning. The New York apartment sale took about two months from listing to accepted offer — which came when we were heading to Cleveland ahead of the moving van — and wasn’t the worst thing in the world, if only because of the massive arbitrage opportunity between Cleveland and Manhattan housing assets (though this was more a cash-out than a buy; we’ll need an accountant for this tax season to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted for the somewhat unusual real estate capital gains exemptions we’re applying).

To sustain the cost of carrying both apartments, I stayed and continued to work in New York until just before closing, which didn’t happen until early October for various reasons. These were the months of the air mattress, with a lot of time spent on the phone with Grace. (Vonage was great for this, though we had a few set up problems with the the premises wiring interfering with the ATA.) I think I was also saying goodbye to New York City, though I never did ride that double-decker tourist bus, snapping photos of landmarks and grinning silly. (And the New York Times had a summer reading supplement, where they serialized a number of novels, so regular readers could follow a whole novella from Monday through Sunday. That month, they had Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and Holly’s line about coming back to New York years and years from now with her nine Brazilian brats, “because, yes, they must see this, these lights, the river — I love New York, even though it isn’t mine,” struck me as true. “Years and years from now….”)

Somewhere in the midst of all this, we managed to have belated wedding receptions for friends and family on the East Coast (seeing many people we hadn’t seen in a while), as well as celebrate Grace’s graduation — a large Doctor of Medicine diploma now hangs in a black frame on the brick wall of the home office. And there was wrapping up work at Random Walk: I’ve been there since just before Y2K, and I was there for longer than anywhere else I’ve worked. But part of the job was to prepare the way for my eventual replacement, and I’d like to think that was something I did well; Barry’s now my boss, and he’s doing great.

I’ll probably start seriously looking for work in Cleveland in a few months, but the immediate plans are to live off the arbitrage gains for a while: catch up on reading, watch a bunch of DVDs, learn how to bake, practice aikido and judo, and, yes, go to museums. This was a year in motion, and I’m going to take it easy for a little while.

This past week’s New Republic’s cover article was Peter Beinart’s “A Fighting Faith”, a post-election call for American liberals to confront Islamic totalitarianism, or else fade into irrelevance. Though these ideas have been floating around for a while, at least in general, this is a significant article, as it comes from one the flagship magazines of center-left opinion. Beinart begins by going recalling the efforts of the anti-Communist Left in organizing themselves against Soviet totalitarianism in the early days of the Cold War, and wonders why there haven’t been similar efforts among today’s Left in organizing itself against Islamic fascism, three years after 9/11.

He finds an answer in the world views of the most prominent “Softs” of today’s Left, represented (willinging or unwillingly) by Michael Moore and MoveOn.org, who apparently view Islamic totalitarianism as a scare tactic by the GOP to drive fearful Americans into the arms of conservatives. Moore says, “There is no terrorist threat,” and MoveOn argues that the “war on terror” (their scare quotes, not mine) diverts resources from domestic policy initiatives. The prominence of Michael Moore, MoveOn and similar groups among Democratic Party circles can be noted by the seats that they took at the convention and the money they raised during the election.

Kerry’s candidacy, Beinart argues, was a “compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11 world.” Early Kerry votes that were hawkish were reversed when Dean’s candidacy looked strong (Dean was speaking directly to the Democratic base). After moving leftwards to quash Dean, Kerry couldn’t convincingly move back to the center and advocate a more aggressive war on Islamic totalitarianism. And this is what broke him in the end.

And so we have The New Republic’s article calling for a liberal mobilization against Islamic totalitarianism. Basically, liberalism’s voice must be taken back from the Moore faction of the Left. Beinart leaves out the details on how this is to be done, but it clearly involves a change in modern liberalism’s mindset about America’s role in the world and the morality of using American power. This struggle for the meaning of liberalism is deeply important, for both practical and philosophical reasons. Practical reasons, because liberals should be able to undertake the tasks in this war better that Bush’s conservatives, which will include nation building, the creation of multilateral instutitions, and so forth. That I voted for Bush in this past election was because I did not believe the Democrats did not see or understand this struggle with Islamic totalitarianism, whereas Bush got it. I believe we Democrats will do a better job once we, as a whole, get it. And doing a better job is vitally important.

And there are the philosophical reasons on why all this is deeply important, for what do we mean when we say we are liberals but oppose efforts to change totalitarian regimes? Consider that

when the Times asked Democratic delegates whether the “United States should try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, or should the United States stay out of other countries’ affairs,” more than three times as many Democrats answered “stay out,” even though the question said nothing about military force.

What about feminist groups who should be support the spread of liberalism to the Muslim world as the way to change for the better the plight of Muslim women? Why should we ignore the illiberalism of supposed allies, merely because they dislike Bush? Whatever happened to liberalism’s humanitarianism, at least in terms of the big questions on the governments people live under?

Since the article’s publication, there has been a storm of reaction, positive, negative and in-between. The New Republic has published two pages of reader responses. Most interestingly is Kevin Drum’s piece for his Washington Monthly blog, which, at the end, asks if Islamic totalitarianism is the overwhelmingly dangerous threat we face today. Beinart’s response is that, yes, Islamic totalitarism is less of a threat that Soviet Communism, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t today’s paramount threat (his analogy is that segregation was the biggest issue in 1954, even though it pales in comparison to slavery; but by 1954 slavery wasn’t an issue). He takes Drum to task about the expansionist aims of Islamic totalitarianism, noting the ambitions of Al Qaeda vis-a-vis Nigeria (far from the Middle East, and only 50% Muslim) and Al Andalus. Beinart doesn’t note that Islam, particularly in the way its interpreted by bin Laden and his ilk, is a universalist movement, and that totalitarian movements, if not confronted, will grow in confidence, strength and violence. Lastly, Beinart notes that, while the Soviets had far great capability to kill Americans than the Islamists possess, the Soviets were constrained by intent and deterrence. In contrast, the Islamists are constrained only by capabilities.

WindsOfChange.net has a nice piece on the Beinart article, as do many other places. WoC also has their own responses to Kevin Drum. Jonah Goldberg notes that if Drum hasn’t already been convinced about the threat of Islamic totalitarianism by the wealth of articles that can be found by a casual web search, by the near incessant discussion on this topic since 9/11, then he can’t be convinced at all.

As a sort of side note, Michael Totten has an interesting post on modern liberalism’s unwillingness to study military history. This unwillingness, born from the 1960s anti-Vietnam War protests and its descendents, seriously hampers liberal critique of how the war on terror is being fought today. Trivially, we get a bunch of crappy anti-war slogans these days that show ignorance on, and indifference to, how wars are fought; there is no credibly alternative policy being proposed that doesn’t, say, lead to abandoning the Iraqis to their own fate. More seriously, Democrats can’t be credible about national security in a time of war; this will lose elections, and will also reinforce the problem, as liberal institutions that do serious thinking about national security are becoming fewer and fewer, the longer Democrats are away from the White House. And with fewer such insitutions, there are fewer places where a liberal interested in such matters can work for, and so on.

I really should be reading all those books in the unread pile, now that I have some free time. But I’ve instead been sucked into Far Cry, which I picked up just before Thanksgiving. The single-player mission took a bit less than a week, but I’m deeply engrossed in the multiplayer, in particular the “Assault” game. It’s the first game of this type — first-person shooter — that I’ve played in a long time (I guess since the Quake 3 days), and I really sucked in multiplayer to start with, but I’m getting better at it. Gone are the twitch reflexes that made Q3’s railgun so amusing on certain maps.

Grace’s parents stayed with us this Thanksgiving and did most of the cooking, more or less making everything from scratch. I pitched in with some pumpkin pie making (mainly because I wanted to give the new KitchenAid a spin in crust making) and cranberry sauce. This is basically a post-mortem on how everything got put together.

For my part, I basically used the ingredients list from the KitchenAid pie crust recipe and Alton Brown’s technique of putting the dough in a big Ziplock for rolling. This was almost a no-mess exercise and took very little effort, as compared to the mess I made when I tried to do pie crusts by hand and without a good rolling surface some years ago. The crusts weren’t that great to look at, but came out fine. The pie filling was off the back of the pumpkin puree can, and nothing special. Will try variations next time, now that I know crust is easy.

The cranberry sauce was a variation of this allrecipes.com version, with peeled orange rind instead of orange, no pear, and a bunch of dried cranberries instead of mixed dried fruit. It came out great, much better than the pricey Citarella stuff from a couple of years ago.

Grace did a big spinach salad, while her parents made baked yams, mashed potatoes and the turkey with stuffing. The turkey was seasoned the previous night with garlic and butter over the skin, and roasted under the usual aluminum tent with a couple stalks of celery. We used one of those cheesecloth bags to allow easy extraction of the stuffing, which was microwaved before serving to make sure it was up to temperature. (We used a probe thermometer for the turkey itself, though the bird came with one of those pop-up doneness doohickeys)

Everything came out yummy, and everyone ate into tryptophan comas (or not) while watching DVDs. It was a good meal.

I wonder, though, about whether we can do better than standard home cooking using techniques from books, FoodTV and so on. These techniques are basically derived from restaurant work and/or food science, with refinements made over many more iterations than any home cook will manage, not matter how long-practiced they are. For example, the potatoes could have been baked and pushed through a ricer. As the oven was already on for hours to cook the turkey, this would have been cost free and should have yielded fluffier mashed. For the turkey itself, no garlic butter was pushed underneath the skin, the old chicken roasting technique writ larger. (I didn’t realize this until after the stuffing (the stuffing bag was used for the first time this iteration, actually) was already loaded in the turkey (put the bag in first, next time), so the skin was stretched out as is and tore a little when I tried. It’s possible turkey skin is more delicate than chicken skin, or the circumstances were wrong for me to try.) There were probably a few other things that could be tried — brining?, aromatic vegetables underneath the turkey to lift the bird up and later help with the gravy making? — but I can’t think of them all right now.

One thing to note: I will be buying proper pie plates and a roasting pan in the near future, because the Wal-mart-special disposable aluminum one just didn’t cut it. They’re basically too flimsy to be useful, buckling under the weight of the pies and turkey when removed from the oven. And for the turkey, the disposable pan precluded any sort of deglazing for proper gravy.

This past Saturday evening, we went to Cleveland’s annual tree-lighting/carriage parade. This was for the million-or-so holiday lights strung around Public Square as well as the tree just in front of the Terminal Tower building. Here’s the Plain Dealer article on the event, as well as the American Legion parade that took place earlier that day, unnoticed by us.

The event can be divided into three or four parts. First there was waiting, as we had gotten there about half an hour early. Fortunately, it wasn’t that cold, and there was a Starbuck’s promotional van there, giving away free samplers of their holiday drinks. The Plain Dealer noted that there were about 25,000 people there; certainly it was sparser than the July 4th event, where we couldn’t get closer than the northern edge of Public Square. This time, we were standing on Superior and W. 3rd, more or less in the middle of the action.

Next came the speeches by Santa, dignitaries, the high school band, and Dan Aykroyd, who was in town for the grand opening of the Cleveland House of Blues. We had walked by the HoB earlier and noticed the sold out show for the Blues Brothers, but didn’t think Ayrkoyd would really be in town (I suppose I assumed it would be a tribute show of some kind). Disappointingly, rather than appear in person, the mayor chose to do a pre-recorded speech that was broadcast on the big screen. I actually had no idea what the mayor looked like until then, as the official site does not have a picture.

The main part of the event was the parade of restored horse carriages. There were about fifty, drawn by everything from Shetland ponies to Clydesdales. Dan Aykroyd was in the first carriage, but I missed it because I was busy fiddling with camera settings. Santa was at the end, actually in a fire truck rather than a carriage. This was an idiotic way to present him, mainly because he sat in the cab and was almost invisible, especially to anyone on the driver’s side of the truck; most of the crowd therefore missed him.

After the parade wound north on W. 3rd, there was a small fireworks show behind the grand stand in the middle of Public Square. It wasn’t bad for what it was, though nothing compared to the big show fired off the Terminal Tower for the 4th. Anyway, photos are below:

(Quick note: the white balance for the sodium lights approximates incandescent, though not perfectly)

This past Sunday, Grace and I went to FoodTV’s Great Big Food Show at the IX Center near the airport. Tickets buy entry to the floor, wine-tasting vouchers (which we didn’t really use and had remainders) and a reserved seat in the “Celebrity Theater” for one of the shows. The celebrities there included Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali and the Unwrapped guy.

Most of the floor exhibits were local food vendors — restaurants, purveyors, markets — as well as a few national brands with large booths, such as Starbuck’s and Viking. This was actually more an afternoon of grazing free samples while waiting for our 5PM Alton Brown tickets as anything else, though we’ve realized that Starbuck’s has yummy holiday cookies, and local chain Mustard Seed Market (closest of two locations is in Solon) can give Whole Foods a run for its money. I also want silpat baking mats or something similar, but the food show items were way overpriced.

Interestingly, the convention center’s food court was open, filled with greasy hotdogs and fried cheese products. I don’t think they did much business, except possibly selling beverages (Poland Springs wasn’t there giving out free samples). The bar in the food court did have a crowd at most times, though I think it was because smoking was allowed in that area more than anything else. The convention center is huge — the food show only occupied a fraction of the total space — and a trip outside to smoke may have taken half-an-hour.

Alton Brown came on stage like a rock star being announced at a noisy arena, and did a quick show on foams and how they work in egg nog and ice cream. The stage show was similar to Good Eats with the wacky sense of humor and science demonstrations (fat molecules clobbering protein chains, etc.), though this time using audience volunteers as the molecular props. No autographs, though: the lines were too long.

Here are photos from the show (the Alton Brown stage show is at the end):

I had about half a dozen earlier photos that didn’t come out too well — Alton Brown and Rachel Ray doing their book signings (I saw an insane fan wearing an autographed T-shirt that self-referentially read “Rachel Ray Signed My T-Shirt”. He may have Rachel Ray’s face tattooed to his stomach for all I know.) — because I has the camera set to ISO200, when I should have bumped it to something much faster. The human eye is an amazing thing, able to compensate for differing light levels without us consciously noticing.

The new television led to a cascade of upgrades as older A/V equipment turned out to be not up to snuff. As noted, the receiver was actually replaced during the summer, before we got the TV, because the older Yamaha RX-V393 wasn’t really built as a modern A/V receiver — it didn’t have S-Video, for example — and I wanted something that could switch progressive component video.

The main replacement, however, has been this new Humax DRT-800 Tivo DVD-Recorder. In one box, we replaced the older Philips 12-hour Tivo, the old 2nd-generation Panasonic A110 DVD player, and, effectively, the VCR. We’ve had it for a bit over a week now, and it’s a nice box.

This is an 80-hour Tivo, which is a bit of an improvement over the hacked 60-hour Series 1 we were using. Since we’re now recording everything in High quality because of the larger TV screen, the extra space is appreciated. This is a Series 2, so the Home Media option is available, but I haven’t set it up properly yet: the Netgear MA111 is in place and recogized, but it hasn’t been able to pull an IP address. I haven’t done the troubleshooting yet — I suspect it’s poor reception from the other side of the apartment, and I’m waiting for a longer cable, so as to better position the directional antenna. But once it’s done, I should have a way to play MP3s from the computer to the stereo.

The progressive-scan DVD player works very well with the TV. The old DVD player was hooked up by S-Video and could not be properly configured to display anamorphic DVDs, but video from the new one is a sight to behold. I’ve mainly looked at various Star Wars DVDs and parts of Fellowship of the Ring. Best of all, the DVD player is controlled through the Tivo user interface, so that DVDs appear as just another available media type. This cuts down on the number of remote controls — and moving everything into the relatively ergonomic Tivo remote cannot be a negative compared to clunky universal remotes. The interconnects with the receiver are also drastically reduced, as only one box is connected to the receiver now, through the component video cables and the digital audio cable. No more switching the input source on the receiver when changing from Tivo to DVD and back again. The DVD player is also supposed to be able to read CD-Rs and CD-RWs, and play pictures and MP3s off these, but I haven’t tested this yet.

The DVD recorder capability itself has been finicky. (Note that you can watch Tivo while DVDs are being burnt) I’ve been able to record single shows to the supplied DVD-RW without issue — the DVD menu in fact replicates the Tivo interface — but have had problems recording multiple shows. On the first two attempts, I got an “internal error” at the start of recording. This post on the Tivo community forum suggested rebooting the box, and I was able to get to the point of the DVD being finalized before it apparently hung, requiring a reboot. The DVD seemed to be fine, and was able to play content after restarting. I was also able to finalize a DVD after this reboot (thank goodness for DVD-RWs). Of course, I’m not sure if it’s the case that consumer DVD recorders suck in general, or if it’s just this Humax unit.

Overall, this is a large improvement over the previous setup. The only hitch has been the somewhat touchy DVD recorder, though that seems to clear up after restarts. I shouldn’t have to restart, though.

Update: I’m an idiot. I had forgotten that I have MAC filtering set up the router. After I found the configuration page (and remember the password) on the router, the Tivo established the wireless connection without any problems. After installing Tivo desktop on the main PC, I was able to see pictures and hear music. With the exception of video (from the Internet), this is basically what I had been looking for, in terms of playing media from the PC to the stereo. There doesn’t seem to be a mechanism for playlists, but I generally set up shuffle play and skip to the next track if I don’t like what comes up, anyway. The photos look good, despite being only 1280×720 (HDTV resolution). We have basically 30″x20″ photos being displayed, and viewed at about 9′ away. The shots off the D70 actually look pretty good, and encourages me to try printing large poster sizes.

Exit poll results released on Wednesday indicated that a plurality of voters considered “moral values” to be their top concern in this election. Democrats immediately seized on this as the main explanation for Bush’s victory: it fits their pre-conceived notions about the red states being populated by ignorant Bible-thumping rednecks, easily led against their better interests by evil Republican operatives, and that the election was won because of Rove’s machiavellian placement of gay marriage as a ballot measure in a number of states. There are two problems with this thesis: a technical one that touches on cooperative game theory, and a general one, on what it means to be a national party.

The technical one is something I suspected after hearing these results earlier in the week. Common sense and cooperative game theory would note that the election does not swing on core Republican voters, anymore than it swings on core Democratic voters. Neither of these constituencies are much influenced by campaigning and will vote with the party they identify with, regardless of what the candidates say or do. Barring vast demographic discrepancies in these constituencies (of which there’s little evidence, as most people now identify themselves as “independent”), the election swings on the persuadable middle. This much is common sense, even though this was apparently ignored in the immediate analysis. Slate, however, did just present an analysis of what actually motivated the swing voter to choose one side or the other:

A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.

The handling of the war on terror (or whatever one calls it) is a persuadable issue. Despite the crap I saw coming out of the Michael Moore-wing of the Democratic party, I was willing to be persuaded by strong policy positions and concrete plans of action. I was left utterly befuddled by Kerry’s notion that terrorism can be treated as a prosecutorial matter. I believe that eventually a Kerry Administration would “get it” (ceteris paribus, states facing the same circumstances will tend to respond in the same ways, given time), but I fear that it would have been years before they realize that they were wrong and need to come up with another way to think about it. And these would have been bloody years, leading to more delay and heartbreak decades from now. But I had remained persuadable until that point in early October. This piece has a perfect-hindsight campaign strategy that would have persuaded me before then.

The larger issue is the Democratic claim of being a national party. This claim is under threat, as the party is now only capable of reliably delivering only the Northeast and California. Further, its members appear eager to dismiss 60 million fellow countrymen as just so much rabble. Listening to NPR, one rarely hears criticism for the election loss directed inwards, but towards Christian fundamentalists, Diebold, Ohio conspirators, the great unwashed of the middle America who simply don’t agree with the Democrats message in 2004. How is this a national party? I am reminded of Garry Wills 1990 book, Under God, his account of the influence of religion on the 1988 election. Back then, the Democrats appeared to be simply clueless on how to speak to middle America. With Clinton, they appeared to have solved this problem. In 2004, they appear to regressed into contempt for middle America.

I would have loved to feel able to vote for a Democrat in this past election. I feel that a liberal hawk would have been better suited to wage the war, that we could have someone far better than Rumsfeld, to say nothing of Ashcroft and the like. And I would have felt better about how domestic policy would have been carried out in time of war. Concerns about the larger issue put aside or deferred until later, it would have been possible for the Democrats to have carried the White House in 2004, even with ignoring middle America, as enough swing voters, those whose main concern is the war on terror, could have been persuaded to come over or come back with a credible position on the war and what needs to be done. Sadly, this was not the case this campaign season. Hopefully, it will be the case in 2008.

Update: Michael Totten, as usual, has a couple good posts on similar themes. Also, this open letter that was referenced on instapundit is interesting to read. To highlight the Democrat’s burning finger of blame, I’d just like to note that this week’s Prairie Home Companion had Garrison Keillor humorously referred to getting over the election by leading a committee to pass a constitutional amendment barring born-again Christians from voting. Humourous, but somewhat horrifying as it reflects the sentiment of the audience.

Update2: Via Winds of Change, Norm Geras has this point writing about Iranians and Kurds celebrating Bush’s victory:

One of the questions, then, that might usefully be asked on the liberal-left is why people struggling for democracy in their country, and others who were the victims of a genocidal assault in theirs, should hope for and be happy about the victory of a man who is so reviled by all ‘right-thinking’ – i.e. most left-thinking – folk.

I meant to put this up yesterday, but was busy and distracted, and had the mild fear that no one I know will ever talk to me again. The man I voted for won, but I feel no particular joy or despair over the outcome; Bush was not the man I would want in the White House at this time, but he was better than the alternative. Elections are a time for decisions, and my month-long fantasy of writing in Lieberman, Tony Blair or someone like that was just that: fantasy and not making decisions.

Basically, for this election, I was a single-issue voter, casting a ballot for the candidate who I thought was better suited to lead this country in what I see as a decades-long war against Jihadi terror, the spawn of the social pathologies of the Middle East. The Bush Administration has a mixed record in these first years that we’ve realized that we were at war: the fast campaign in Afghanistan that routed Al Qaeda from its state sanctuaries, the decision to go into Iraq that brought American power into the heart of the Middle East, the underlying theory of this campaign and its attendant reassessment of American foreign policy — these were all successes. The paucity of boots on the ground (for which Rumsfeld should have been fired), the bungled occupation, Abu Gharib (for which Rumsfeld should have been fired, again) are notable failures. I think I had already stated that the Bush Administration may have been the worst people to start on this campaign, but, in a real sense, they’ve been the only ones that were able to do it: at some level, Bush gets it.

The fundamental problem I had with Kerry is that he and large segments of his party did not believe that apocalyptic terrorism is larger in scope than a law enforcement problem, that we are at war in a larger sense than the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, that this war will only be concluded decades from now when large segments of Middle Eastern states are transformed so that the murder of thousands of people are not an occassion for celebration, that Iraq was a necessary first step. I’m unconvinced that Kerry would not withdraw from Iraq before 2008 because a significant fraction of Democrats expect this (after all, it reverses Bush’s policies), long before our work there is done. This would be a disaster for both us and the people of Iraq, and would delay the project of transformation by bloody decades.

On other policy issues — economic, domestic, social — we are Americans, and these issues will sort themselves out over time, either on their own (the economy) or because we Americans will come to a better consensus on how to deal with them, if not now, then later. I dislike the Democrats protectionist rhetoric on economic matters (Fingerhut’s NPR interview), but voted for the party on the rest of the ballot. I see that I’m not alone.