It's not enough for an election to be vindicated after investigation; better if there's no room for doubt in the first place. I'm not optimistic, because so many of the House races are on the knife's edge, and both parties plus a lot of allied groups are deploying pollwatchers. Maybe with enough pollwatchers there won't be room for shenanigans and extra motivation to avoid mistakes under the glare of scrutiny. Considering the dangers of the alternative, unexamined/unmonitored elections, I guess we'll have to grin and bear it.

What should be bookmarked, I think, is the spirit of what I promise. The goal is to reduce the partisan polarization, rediscover common ground as Americans, and take back control from party machines that are pursuing their own agendas of power. Those entrenched interests benefit from keeping us at each others' throats, which is a good reason to stop and consider, should some electoral outrage occur, whether in fact it isn't being engineered to stir up trouble and sabotage attempts at rapprochement. Just when it's most tempting to transform into partisan monster mode is when it's most necessary to stop and consider restraint.

At the moment, after 12 years in power and on the verge of collapse, the divergence between the interests of the GOP machine and the Republican people are most vivid and visible. There's a clear battle line drawn between the rank-and-file and the machine. But that principle should be generalized, because I think that in the long run it's us against the political machines, both of them, in a battle for America. I look at the coming election as elevating today's lesser evil to achieve some improvement, but it's not enough by itself just to throw out one party and put in another. We should be reexamining the basic premise of letting party machines dictate our choices and thus effectively override our right to control our own government.

If you could have picked any Republican to run for President in 2000, would you have picked George W. Bush? It's one thing to defend him now because he's all you've got, but was he the best Republican available? If not, then how did he become the GOP's candidate?

And Haysus H. Cristo on a stick, how the hell did John Kerry become the Democratic Party's choice in 2004? Did somebody in the Machine make a strategic decision to throw the election to wait for 2008? I sure as hell wish they'd asked me, thank you very much. That was my vote they threw away!

Basically, we're in for a change, and while normally the thought of change should raise Conservative hackles, admit it, don't you think that we're overdue for any kind of change that'll get us off this treadmill?