Not Everyone in San Francisco is Crazy!

Link here to read a great column in the San Francisco Chronicle. The journalist makes her case as to why she will be voting for Bush. Here's a tidbit:

Still, Bush was right in his belief that Hussein was a threat. As intelligence analyst Charles Duelfer found, Hussein had used the Oil for Food program to begin rearming. His top people believed that as the U.N. sanctions against Iraq eroded, Hussein would begin to build a nuclear arsenal.

Bush also understood that Hussein's very survival sent the message that a madman could fight a global giant, lose and still come out on top. Or as bin Laden once told Time magazine, the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia after the brutal 1993 murder of 24 U.S. troops in Somalia on a humanitarian mission made him realize "more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."

Did the Bush administration make mistakes? Of course. There is strong reason to believe this administration sent too few troops to Iraq. And it doesn't help that the top Bushies have a way of freezing out those likely to tell them news they don't want to hear. Also, Bush so overvalues loyalty that it leads him to overlook incompetence.

The flip side of those traits means that he doesn't dump people -- or long-range plans -- because of bad polls.

Enter Sen. John Kerry, who spent a great deal of the last year claiming Bush "misled" him. That is, Kerry's vote in favor of a congressional resolution authorizing force in Iraq was made in the mistaken belief that Bush would go to war as "a last resort."

Nonsense. Before the vote on the war resolution, Bush told the United Nations that it could either be "irrelevant" or a real peacekeeping body that held Hussein accountable. The war resolution echoed Bush's insistence that "the U.N. Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable." When Kerry heard "last resort," the drum was already beating "war."

Read the whole thing.