Yeah, so I watched it. So what. Anyway, I didn’t mean to watch the whole thing, but then I got interested after a little while. I think it was because Kerry got Bush up on the ropes pretty quickly. I guess I was sitting around waiting for him to deal the death blow. He never did. Instead he just made some intelligent statements, and let Bush blabber on and on repeating himself endlessly.

Bush’s biggest mistake was that he repeated John Kerry’s criticisms of him too often. It was almost like he mentioned them so frequently that it gave credence to them somehow, with all the attention. Kerry’s biggest mistake, and this is always his biggest, is that he gives the American people too much credit. He makes rational statements and logical arguments, and expects that Americans are intelligent enough to decide things on their own from there.

I mean, I have all kinds of faith in people and in innate intelligence, but Bush has spent four years making “security” a strictly emotional issue. You can make all the sound arguments you want, but when the other side is arguing from an emotional standpoint, logic isn’t going to win out. Especially if they are the ones with their finger on the button.

The two scariest things I saw in the debate… actually no, three. First, was that I think (I’m not 100 “percentible” sure) Bush actually used the phrase “in the long worm” when he was trying to say “in the long run”. Did anybody else hear that? Was that some kind of Freudian slip?

But actually, the things I thought was the most frightening was each of the candidates comments on the future of the military. Kerry said that he wants to increase the size of the army by a full two divisions. But how is he going to do that? The reason we’re so thinly stretched right now is because we do not have enough troops. Merely “increasing the size of the military” on paper does not actually do it. You have to get the troops from someplace. If they aren’t signing up freely now, I don’t see why they would later on. Which leads me to the scariest thing that Bush said. He made that remark - in his closing statement, no less - where he said in no uncertain terms that the military is going to remain an “all volunteer force”….

Uh oh, do you know what that means? That means that there has been so much talk about there being a reinstatement of the draft, that Bush’s underlings ordered him to put that line into his speech in order to quell the rumors. That means this idea has been getting some serious airplay. And that’s bad. I mean, I’m more or less convinced that the draft is not only coming, but it’s coming soon. And I’m also about 85% sure that no matter who wins the election, it’s going to come.