Election issues

Election issues? Well, maybe Orson Scott Card is right:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror. And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election. If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Maybe. Or maybe Tom Barnett is right:

United we stood, but divided we'll stand taller Whatever your political affiliation, you should be pulling for the Democrats' return to majority power in both houses of Congress. I offer no partisan plea. I'm just convinced that a split government would be better for President Bush, our troops overseas and the world.

It happens that I disagree with both of them about a lot of stuff. Barnett has thought more about the SysAdmin concept, his pistol-packin'-Peace-Corps, that I think is central to the War on Terror...but Barnett is much more optimistic than I am about working with Iran, and substantially more optimistic than I about working with China. Maybe more important, it seems to me that neither Republicans nor Democrats are talking about SysAdmin development, but as Barnett himself has noted, there have been developments in that direction within the US military. Those have seemed to me to be the most hopeful developments we've had. Will this election affect them? Yes, I think it might: if Rangel becomes chair of Ways and Means, we do have evidence of how he'll try to use it: Anxious Dems eye power of the purse on Iraq:

But when pressed on how he could stop the war even if Democrats control the House during the last years of President Bush’s second term, Rangel paused before saying, “You’ve got to be able to pay for the war, don’t you?”

Would Murtha become Majority Leader? Murtha's the guy whose seriousness on Iraq policy was established on Meet the Press:

we don’t have to be right there. We can go to Okinawa. We, we don’t have—we can redeploy there almost instantly.

This was not encouraging, and his comments afterwards didn't encourage me much either.

I suspect that we'll have a major shift in foreign policy two years from now. I hope it will be in the SysAdmin direction. If Congress stays Republican, then many bad things will happen and the current little bits of SysAdmin will go on, serving as a basis for future developments. If the Congressional majority is Democratic, then many bad things will happen and...well, I don't know.

In my own Congressional district, I've disagreed with Republican rep John McHugh about nearly everything, ever since redistricting brought him to us. I want to vote against him. But challenger Bob Johnson believes a whole lot of stuff I don't believe -- and his plan for Iraq is withdrawal.

Whenever I look at a website for one side, I want to vote for the other.

Update: On the same orientation quiz scale I checked out on recently, I see that John McHugh is a "hard-core Conservative", almost diametrically my opposite, and going down the list I've got to say: yup, he is almost diametrically my opposite. Is it possible for Johnson to be even more opposite than that? I dunno. I really, really, really dunno.