Jordi expresses his concern that the American public could've voted this chucklehead in for a second four-year term. While I certainly voted for Kerry, and think that the vast majority of Bush backers should be sterilized along with their children, it's important to remember that the best that can be said about Kerry is that he's the lesser of two evils.

Kerry is a career politician, and in that sense is no better than any of the other alternatives out there. The only candidate in the Democratic party's primaries who didn't reek of politics was Kucinich, who stood a snowball's chance in hell of taking the nomination — let alone beating Bush. Voting for Kerry was very much a question of the lesser of two evils; these were votes against Bush, not votes for Kerry.

And the main point of differentiation between Bush and Kerry is that Bush has gotten us into a war we shouldn't be in; on many other issues, as people have pointed out, Kerry is likely to be worse than Bush, not better. When so many Americans — including my father — still buy the administration's line that this war was necessary, getting a sufficient majority of Americans to understand the war was wrong to the point of actually voting the slime out of office is quite a challenge — and one we failed at in the 2004 elections.

The bright side in all of this is that four more years of Bushocracy may be just the wake-up call the American public needs in order to advance some real reform in 2008. Assuming that Bush doesn't attempt to declare martial law at the end of 2008 and try to make himself dictator for life, that is. :P

As long as the US is beholden to a self-sustaining, two-party political system that no one believes can be changed, real reform is impossible. The dollar signs behind Kerry are the same as the ones behind Bush. It doesn't surprise me at all that Nader stayed in the race, in spite of the possibility that his candidacy could negatively affect Kerry.

One tantalizing suggestion from an NPR commentator, though, was that the 2008 elections would be the year we could see a genuine Internet candidate emerge courtesy of the blogosphere. So, who wants to make the first nomination?