If there’s a wall of separation between church and state, why did I vote in a church? 

As I’m going into vote, I see a sign about no cell phones. So I figure what are the odds I’ll get a call. You guessed it, my phone rings just as I’m signing my name. You’d think from the reaction I just offered 50 bucks for a vote for the Socialist Workers party. I mean really, what’s the big deal. The Fruit of the Murphy Loin’s pediatrician has a sign please don’t talk on the cell phone during the examination — that I understand, although since it’s a nice practice in the heart of West St. Louis county it makes me wonder what’s wrong with people in a way that no election does — but what is the burning problem with getting a phone call at a polling place. Somebody is going to tell me how to vote? I just don’t get it. But I’m not about to get into an argument with a bunch of nice old people who have an ounce of authority once a year, so I turn the phone off without answering. Turns out it was my wife calling to ask how bad the lines were. I should have ignored the old people.

Once again I was able to vote using a butterfly ballot and a punch card without any problem, just like I have for the last 20 years I’ve been voting in Missouri.

What amazes me about polling is how people try to use them like a scalpel when really they are a club. If a candidates poll numbers change by 1% between two polls that have a quoted margin of error of 3.5%, you know exactly zilch. This statistical noise is invariable quoted as a sure sign that a candidate’s message is working if an increase or support is ebbing away if a decrease. If a candidate is up by 5 percentage points in a poll with that same margin of error, then we know that either candidate could be winning. You ever see a poll reported that way? Only if it’s a Republican that is up and it is the New York Times doing the reporting. 

And polls are never as accurate as the quoted margin of error. The margin that’s quoted is the mathematical error of a random sample compared to a full population based on the size of the random sample. Mathematics has a wonderful neatness to it that real life rarely obtains. The sample is never random and people lie. There have been very few presidential elections that weren’t inside the polls’ true margin of error, and yet like lie detectors, which aren’t, we follow polls with great fanfare and fascination. I have to admit though, it takes rare talent to screw up exit polls as badly as they did this election.

Why do people sit glued to the TV on election night and watch the returns like it’s the Superbowl? Yes, the election is more important than the Superbowl (as long as the Rams aren’t playing), but it’s not like you miss anything by just turning the TV on the next morning and finding out the results. It’s not like you get to watch the ballots being counted or anything; what you get is the same old people saying the same old things (with the exception of Brit Hume, Michael Barone and the occasional guest who actually has something to say despite the best efforts of the media to keep those people off the air). I understand all you people who tuned into CBS to see if Dan Rather would talk his own style of gibberish, or better yet, have a complete emotional breakdown on air. Understand, but not approve.

I, like my fellow Americans, was so looking forward to November 3 so that I could watch the idiot box without announcers telling me how awful some politician was over menacing music (or worse, how life would just be perfect if only I voted for some politician over saccharine music). Now if we could just vaporize the yard signs when the polls close, life would be complete. Except for the breast beating of the losers. I know the word was out for Bush supporters not to gloat (you’ll notice this blog was a gloat free zone despite the fact that I voted for more winners than losers this election, a pretty rare event), but I wish the word had gone out to Kerry supporters to keep the wailing and gnashing of teeth private. Instead, I was treated to more insults by people who don’t know me and have gone out of their way to not understand me than I’ve gotten since junior high. Can’t we just insult the politicians before and after the elections, and leave me and my fellow Americans out of it?

To all those priests, pastors, and bishops who urged their flock to vote for George Bush:

I hope you enjoyed your foray into politics, the Kingdom of this World.

From you I heard several non-Biblical claims during the course of the 2004 campaign:

1. That opposition to abortion is the greatest commandment, that it should take precedence over all other considerations when selecting a candidate to vote for.

Why not elect Jack Ryan as U.S. Senator from Illinois? He’s against abortion. He just has this little problem of taking his wife to strip clubs.

Apparently the directive to oppose abortion takes precedence over the Pope’s strong opposition to invading Iraq.

2. That it’s okay to withhold Holy Communion from politicians who don’t oppose abortion in public policy, and from members of your congregations who don’t vote for anti-abortion candidates. (I wonder, are some parishioners required to tell who they voted for?)

3. That the ongoing presidency of George Bush will somehow overturn Roe vs. Wade; despite the fact that he has no plan to ban abortion, as he stated in the Tempe, Arizona debate: “no, I will not have a litmus test. I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution, but I’ll have no litmus test.”

Well, you got what you wanted: George Bush is president for four more years. If you are correct then we should expect to see Roe vs. Wade overturned by Election Day 2008, or the abortion rate drop significantly, or at least substantial progress made in those directions. Put up now or shut up the next time around.

The calling to Christian ministry includes accountability by the leaders. I will be watching.

I’m aware that overturning abortion depends on more than just the president. Another principle of accountability is this: You get credit or blame for whatever happens on your watch. President Harry Truman had a placard on his desk saying, “The buck stops here.”

We need one of those tire-ripping devices that they put on the entrance to rental car lots, to keep people from backing up.

The official FunMurphys endorsement for President goes to George Bush. While I don’t think there would be much difference in the outcome domestically between Bush and Kerry due to the wonderful apparatus of divided government, I think there would be a huge difference between Bush and Kerry in how the War on Terror is fought.

The war we are fighting in not against a single man, or a single organization even. Iraq is currently the central front on the War on Terror because it is the struggle for the future of a nation in the heartland of Islamofascism. Afghanistan is on the edge – it’s importance derived from being a nation fun by Islamofascists. Now that the Taliban is on the fringe, so too is Afghanistan. Instead, Iraq is front and center because it holds the ability to demonstrate that Islamofascism isn’t the future, but the past. And it borders the hotspots – Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia – of the Middle East.

Bush will stay the course in Iraq, Kerry would find a way to cut and run. The fate of Iraq isn’t in our hands; it’s in the hands of the Iraqis. But the best chance for moderate democrats to come out on top there (or at least come out somewhere other than another mass grave) is if the US stays committed and the Iraqi people feel that commitment. 

We would return to the years of watching and waiting – as we did when we knew that Al Qaida was running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan but did nothing. We were content to hold high level meetings in Washington to talk about fighting terrorism, but we only acted in limited response to attacks against us. 

We would return to the years of only doing the easy. As near as I can tell, Kosovo was good because it was easy, but Iraq is bad because it is hard. But you can’t just do the easy stuff and get done what needs to be done. 

We would return to pretending that the UN is something other than a failed institution, a snake pit of self interest, and non-corrupt.

We would return to a foreign policy of acting like the parent who nags their child but never does anything about their behavior. We would be deeply disappointed with Syria, Iran, North Korea, and the other evil dictatorships that are still too plentiful, but we wouldn’t actually do anything other than sign another check to try and appease them.

I don’t want to go back to those days, and that has been John Kerry’s foreign policy for as long as he’s had one. To marry a man and expect him to change is the folly of women; to elect a president and expect him to change would be an equal folly for the electorate.

The War on Terror is going to end with a lot of dead terrorists; the only question is how many they take with them. They are equal opportunity killers, as you can see by how many Iraqis they kill for trying to make Iraq a country for Iraqis. Our war is with Islamofascists, and if it goes well then they will be killed mainly by other Moslems; if it doesn’t go well, they will be killed mainly by us, and sadly we will kill other Moslems with them.