Ya know it's funny, people make so much of a deal about the individual candidate when really for the most part they've already made up their minds simply along party lines.

It would be far easier and less subjective to pick a few issues that you disagree with one party or another, or with one candidate or another, than to pick them apart with subjective nonsense such as "he flip flops on decisions," "he lost jobs and messed up Iraq," "he corrupted the moral fiber of the office of the president" or whatever.

Furthermore it would be far more useful to realize that most folks are rather set in their ways. Everyone has their pet issue(s) and that is yet another area where it is utterly impossible to make an absolute declarative statement.

This is, by the way, exactly the reason why we vote...to pick a candidate that most closely represents our own views about how the country should be run. We, and our elected officials, pick views based on logic, in the absence of logic, or with the illusion of logic, but really it's just whatever means we choose to justify that decision to ourselves and it would appear that no one here is able to recognize that simple reality.

I'm not suddenly going to convince a bunch of gun toting, war hawking, deficit spending, bible thumpers that we need to limit fire arms, shouldn't be in Iraq, balance the budget, and get rid of religion in government any more than they will convince me those things are necessary. The only way I can deal with what I believe very strongly is wrong, is to vote accordingly and to get as many like-minded folks to do the same.