Well, since every blog seems to need its own presidential endorsement, I’ll declare here: Bush.

I don’t get to be a cool, maverick, independent free-thinker this way, but that’s just too bad for me I guess.

In all seriousness, I came into this election (let’s say that happened roughly after John Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination) eager to be convinced that I could trust the challenger with the War on Terror.

I am not a Bush fan in any way. He epitomizes an evil I’ll call Weekly-Standard conservatism, the idea that Republicans need to co-opt the Democratic agenda by winning the race to see who can give away the most government money. Pared with traditional Republican strength on defense, this strategy is supposed to consign the Democratic Party to permanent minority status.

Put aside the political arrogance of this idea, it doesn’t appeal to me for a pretty fundamental reason: I’m only a “conservative” (really a classical liberal) because I favor the limited federal government spelled out in the Constitution. Limited government, of course, is not what we’ve gotten from the Bush administration. There’s no reason to sweat the details here, they’re pretty well known: ballooning deficit, ballooning spending, betrayal of free trade, betrayal of the First Amendment, over-expansive view of executive power.

All of these things worry me greatly. The civil liberties issues — the concept that we can hold American citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants and the concept that no one has the right to free speech in this country unless John McCain says so — worry me the most, frankly. The spending questions can be brought into line today, tomorrow or the next day; but the erosions of the Bill of Rights are harder to reverse.

But John Kerry would not give us less spending (unless his hand is forced by the Republican Congress — divided government is grand) and he would certainly not undo McCain-Feingold.

I’ll admit that he might be better on the enemy-combatant question, but there I ultimately count on the courts — where even the Republican nominees, such as Justice Scalia, are appropriately skeptical of government power.

So, this leaves me voting on the War on Terror, and despite all of the arguing, I hardly see a need to defend my vote for Bush in this respect.

Going back to where I started, I was eager to be convinced that John Kerry took the War on Terror seriously. The day I decided I could not be convinced of that was when I read the profile on Kerry’s foreign policy views in The New York Times Magazine by Matt Bai. Kerry made quite clear in the interviews he did for that piece that 9/11 did not change his view of the world and that he wants to go back to a time when we can forget about terrorism and worry about health care.

Now, I know that this doesn’t mean he would plan to ignore terrorism, but it means that he doesn’t understand the magnitude of the struggle we are in.

This man was wrong on the Cold War and wrong on the first Gulf War. Why some commentators — most prominent among them Andrew Sullivan — feel that he should now be given the benefit of the doubt now, just because he’s said a few tough words on the campaign trail, is utterly and completely beyond me.

Iraq hasn’t gone nearly as well as some would have hoped, of course. But we’re only a year and a half in. For all the Bush administration’s alleged incompetence, would we rather stick out the next few years with a president committed to helping the Iraqi people, or would we rather go with the guy looking to hand things off to the Germans and the French — despite those nations’ protests — and who complains that every dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar not spend in Ohio?

In Afghanistan, well, the recent elections there speak for themselves, don’t they? And Kerry still wants to paint that liberation as a disaster.

Bush’s Republican Party is not one in which I feel comfortable (in fact, I registered as a Democrat just this year because of it). It’s pro-big government, pro-anti-gay bigotry (how’s that for a phrase?) and pro-theocracy to an extent that I find truly disturbing.

But the Democratic Party is approaching isolationism and the Carteresque blame-America-first policies of its past.

I’d almost — and if they come, I will — relish the Republican wars that would follow Bush being thrown out of office.

For now, though, I don’t think American can afford it. I hold my nose; I vote Bush.

To put Al-Qaqaa in a broader context, however, there’s this story from Wednesday’s New York Sun, which points to the larger problem with “monitoring” Saddam’s weapons:

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq’s interim government said this month was looted due to poor security.

The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing.

Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced the presence of the HMX, RDX, and PETN explosives was directly related to Saddam Hussein’s programs to amass weapons of mass destruction.

So, the IAEA could have demolished these weapons in the mid-1990s, but it’s the Bush administration’s fault that they were swiped in 2003?

Right.

So, speaking of Sullivan, I know his endorsement of Kerry wasn’t a surprise, but it still puzzles me.

Here’s the passage that troubles me most:

[Kerry] got the Cold War wrong. He got the first Gulf War wrong. His campaign’s constant and excruciating re-positioning on the war against Saddam have been disconcerting, to say the least. I completely understand those who look at this man’s record and deduce that he is simply unfit to fight a war for our survival. They have an important point - about what we know historically of his character and his judgment when this country has faced dire enemies. His scars from the Vietnam war lasted too long and have gone too deep to believe that he has clearly overcome the syndrome that fears American power rather than understands how to wield it for good.

Now, first, I do understand why Sullivan feels he can ignore all of this. Bush is who we needed right after 9/11, he says, but now Kerry’s the lesser of two risks.

At the same time, I understand the argument intellectually, but, as a gut reaction, I can’t imagine getting past Kerry’s — well, there’s no other word for it: wrongness. The man has been wrong about every single major world crisis of his adult life. How in the world can anyone look past that (if they accept the premise anyway, as Sullivan seems to)?

I just can’t.

If we assume that nothing unexpected will happen in the next four years — that our challenges will be the foreseeable: finishing Iraq, stopping Iran and managing North Korea — then maybe Kerry would do an acceptable, or even superior, job.

But why should we assume this? If the past four years taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming. Who believes, honestly, that if another major, unforeseeable crisis came along, that Kerry would have the right instincts — the instincts to defend this nation, to show American strength where necessary and to act without France, Germany and the United Nations if necessary?

I think Kerry considers any war the wrong war, any time the wrong time and any place the wrong place.

First, John Kerry knew exactly where Osama bin Laden was.

Then, he knew where 380 tons of explosives were.

I sure hope, for his sake, that this wasn’t his October surprise — since he’s probably more surprised than President Bush.