This is it, right here (Updated)

As you all either know or have surmised, I am interested in and feel strongly about politics.

Why? Because ultimately, it's about people. And I care about people. I've never been able to shrug off the responsibility of caring about people by ignoring politics. In the end, you never know when it'll be your ass on the line.

But I don't blog it as much as a regular "political blogger," because 1) that would turn this into a completely different blog, and 2) there are already some amazing political bloggers, and what I have to say here is mostly gilding the lily.

But if you want to see the most critical issue of our time summed up in a single political ad, here it is. Three thousand people, folks -- and those are just the Americans. Though estimates have gone as high as 655,000, let's just take Bush's numbers and assume that 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in this conflict.

Those 33,000 people had spouses, lovers, friends, parents and children. Some of them were children. Just like yours.

The Republicans say the stakes are high in this election. You're damned right they are.

They don't know what they are doing. And they're willing to lie about it.

I'm not asking you to become some left-wing diehard. I'm just asking you to think, hard, about what to do in this election.



UPDATE: Bloggerdad asked that I include Michael J. Fox's recent ad for Claire McCaskill in Missouri. Read here about Rush Limbaugh's slam on Fox, in which he claimed that Fox was acting, or had gone off his meds in order to exaggerate his symptoms. In reality, Fox's appearance in the ad is far more likely a side effect of the meds that he is taking.

Rush then apologized, but said it was still "exploitive" of Fox to make the ad. Oh, yeah, I forgot that rule of civil discourse where it's actually wrong to show the real life effects of policy -- in this case, the effects of a disease that could be alleviated with the help of embryonic stem cell research. Silly me.