In the Words of James Brown: Please, Please, Please

By Crispin Sartwell

It is very important to get rid of George Bush and his knot of greed-ridden fatcats and fundamentalist theocrats. Rarely has the US been governed by people as obviously and deeply evil, though one might mention in this regard their Satanic majesties LBJ and Tricky Dick. And (what the heck) James Knox Polk and William McKinley. Oh, forget it.

But if you're thinking about voting for Kerry, I want to remind you: you're voting for the war, albeit with complete incoherence.

Kerry on Iraq is insufferable, impossible. In what amounts to a kind of dimestore surrealism or perhaps unmedicated psychosis, day after day, hour after interminable hour, the Democratic party presents John Kerry as a man of absolute integrity and courage.

Meanwhile, to the extent he says anything at all, he contradicts himself, often in a single sentence. In Boston, he complained about Bush trying to do Iraq "on the cheap." Then he said he'd reduce the high cost to the American taxpayer. He threatened - a bit vaguely to be sure, though with a tone of total passion and commitment - to increase the force dramatically and to pull our people out.

He said he'd call in the allies, turn the place over presumably to the French and Germans (or the Spanish, maybe the Filipinos, the Costa Ricans). Now picture this. Bush is committed to Iraq. But Kerry thinks it is a pure mistake. He said so, over and over. So now he's going to approach the French and say, "I know this is an idiocy, a disaster. Send your kids over there to die for it."

If you are willing to vote for this, both for war and for cowardice in war, what would make you jump ship? Forget Kerry for a second. What do you believe, if anything?

Kerry doesn't have to repudiate his own positions. He doesn't have to make any sense at all. He can contradict himself continually on issues of fundamental human concern, on issues of life and death, freedom and oppression: on Iraq; on Sudan; on abortion; on civil liberties. He can act like a coward and talk like a fool. You will vote for him anyway.

There's no reason he should repudiate the war. You will vote for him anyway. You will. He will send people to die in Iraq, swearing betimes that the whole thing is a mistake.

If this is the way Americans continue to conduct themselves as voters - if you're actually willing to go to the polls and vote straightup for the positions you most deeply repudiate, or for a series of inyourface contradictions on matters of the utmost human import - then this system will never change. And people will keep dying because of it.

The reason Kerry can run this campaign of complete dishonesty and deep stupidity is because you will keep doing what you're doing. Every election, you vote for people who say nothing, everything, anything, and say it tones of the most absurd simulated passion.

I beg you. John Kerry will not have to be coherent or decent until Ralph Nader starts polling in double figures.

In Boston, Wolf Blitzer asked Michael Moore who he was going to vote for.

'Well, I'm not going to vote for Bush.'

'Okay. Nader or Kerry?"

'I'm not going to vote for Nader, What was my last choice?'

That was it. That was Moore's endorsement of John Kerry. When Michael Moore votes, he's going to betray everything he actually cares about, and he knows it.

What Nader is doing might throw the election to Bush. On the other hand, I'm going to vote for Michael Badnarik, and the libertarians might throw the election to Kerry.

But I'm telling you, if you don't jump off Kerry, you vote for our political culture of cowardice and lies and contradiction and emptiness: they are your own cowardice and lies and contradiction and emptiness. Yours.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives."