Hello -

Asking around why anyone would run for the office of president, most of the answers seem to be self validation.

Kerry feels guilty about
1) obeying his orders in Vietnam - the VC regularly use civilian occupied locations
2) criticizing those who gave him those orders, and got us wrongly involved in a colonial war of libertaion

Kerry's indecisiveness has been well noted before - most likely it is the result of this experience. Kerry's looking for approval of his earlier actions.

Bush Jr, on the other hand, is trying to prove that he did not completely waste his life in a hedonistic binge of alcohol and drugs - that he's not a complete wastrel. That was run one, and now there's the additional element of his seeking to validate that he did a good job as President.

The problem here is that those around Bush Jr use his insecurity to get him to question his decisions, and then present their own supposed intellectual superiority to get him to adopt their favored courses of action. This happened with regard to deployment of National Guardsman onboard aircraft after 911, the need to attack Iraq without UN backing, and his thinking that taxes needed to be raised to pay for that war.

Make no mistake, this flaw is as systemic as is Kerry's. Which is worse is the question before the voters.

Our final third "candidate", Nader, is an unmarried man who tries to keep himself so "pure" that he is unable to compromise enough politically to get anything done. Ralph has never had to negotiate with his wife about who's going to change the diaper.

The whole question and outcome is not exactly academic for me, as people I know will be trying to implement the US portion of a planetary defense system against asteroid and comet impact under one of the two real candidates - that is, assuming nothing major happens first, adn it damn well may.

Assuming nothing major happens first, the Cassini datasets will be coming in during the next administration, followed soon after by firm estimates on the comet impact hazard. Right now we have the $60 million Air Force telescopes, of which $20 million is paid. That leaves $40 million yet to go, in a real tight and increasingly tighter fiscal environment. The European interception test program is proposed, but firm commitments have not come in yet.

So far, Kerry has shown on the space frontier the usual indecisiveness he has shown elsewhere. Kerry went to Kennedy to launch his campaign, but talked of other programs - the usual indecision. I don't think Kerry will know what to do when the comet impact datasets come in.

It looks like Bush Jr wanted to put Mazanek's program into deployment, but under "pressure" (see above) gave in to the omniprescent and vocal Mars nuts. Also, there's the small problem that Saddam's WMD stores have not been found to date, which makes Bush Jr talking about the impact hazard neigh impossible. The impact data is going to have to be real hard before Bush Jr will be able to act on it.

What this election will come down to will be the economy and the war. The real underlying issues, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, oil dependence, unions and industrial policy and the lack therof, will be studiously avoided, despite Nader's attempts to raise them.

I have my own work to do, piles of it before me. I don't know how it will turn out - my guess is Kerry, but that's from a real limited sample. The one thing that I'm certain of is that Israeli intelligence will have carefully infiltrated both camps and the Nader campaign, and the government of Israel will be using that information and those contacts to further their own agenda.

Very few will have the inclination or the guts to talk about it.

ep