I draw your attention to the following articles (part 1 and part 2). Written by one of the many people who are more eloquent that I, they cut to heart of why I still support President Bush and will be voting for him on 2 November.

September 11th, 2001. The second of two days where I can remember where I was when I heard the news (the first was the Challenger disaster). What I particularly remember is standing in the doorway between the tech bay and the imaging room in my place of employment, hearing on the radio that a plane had hit the Pentagon. All I could think of (and what I said then) was "My mother works in the Pentagon!" (She worked on the far side of the building, in the basement. She thought it was all a drill until she got to the marshalling areas.) Later on, there were rumors of a car bomb being detonated by the Main State Department building, where my father had worked (and at the time, I couldn't remember whether he was working there). A friend of mine works practically across the street from the World Trade Center complex; I thought to myself that it was lucky that she worked from 10 till 6 in the evening, so she would still have been in transit. (I found out later that she had gone to work early, and was caught in the dust cloud attendant on the collapse of the second tower). I myself had commuted through the transit station there, rode the escalators out of the PATH station. I wasn't working in the city at the time, but I had been there on other days. So I have a certain amount of personal connection to the tragedy (though to my knowledge, I knew none of the victims.)

Prior to Sept 11, I made the jokes about the Shrub. In the 2000 election, I couldn't be bothered to make sure I was registered, and didn't vote. I was worried about the Chinese threat to world peace. I read Tom Clancy, and other military fiction writers. But the world seemed to be more or less at peace, Y2K had come and gone, and the dire predictions of social breakdown, massive computer failure, etc had not come to pass. I had held my first post-college full-time job for a little over a year, been married for about that long. Nothing much was happening, I could fool myself into thinking we were in one of those periods of history where nothing much happens.

Then things changed. Alan Jackson wrote a song entitled "Where were you (when the world stopped turning)?" And that's what it was to me. Trite as it sounds, the peaceful world did stop turning for me - I woke up to find myself in a world where the people who hate America had found the means to attck her directly. And I realized that they had to be stopped.

Current events have not turned out as good as we could have hoped; but the dire predictions trotted out by the opposition have so far failed to emerge. And I would point out that the alternatives offered by Sentaor Kerry are either so unformed as to be laughable, or are provably non-functional (we went ot the UN once already, and got a resolution - see how much good it did us with the french? Or how about the french and german statements that no matter who is in the white house, they won't contribute anything material).

There remain plenty of things I don't care for with this administration, and with the Republican Party in general. I find their position on gay marriage to be backwards. I will NOT be voting for the incumbent representative for my district, as he cosponsored the federal marriage amendment. But I can find equally vile positions on the democratic side, such as gun control.

But for PResident, I am voting on Sept 11th. And I believe that President George W Bush has taken the lesson of Sept 11th to heart.