Ah, my faithful readers. Both of you. Or is it up to three these days?

Back before the Democratic primaries, I determined I would give the Democratic candidate fair consideration: If they nominated someone with some substance, I'd strongly consider voting for them. Perhaps I'm an idiot for even considering such, since I believe the standard Democrat line on economics has long since been discredited, but I resolve to keep an open mind nonetheless.

I thought Edwards was probably the most promising. But sadly, for all the wrong reasons: (a) We knew almost nothing about him, and (b) he was reasonably good-looking, charming, and spoke very well. These are not good qualities, alone or primarily, by which to choose a leader. Perhaps in some cases it will work out well, but charm and charisma are quite another thing from morality or competence, and the former can all to easily be used to mask the latter. Not that it's bad news either: but you have to dig deeper.

At first, I thought Kerry was just a buffoon who couldn't go more than eight sentences without mentioning his war record. As part of my effort to give him a fair shake, I closely read his web site, looking for his economic policies. What I saw there convinced me that, far from his gold-plated promises of jobs and growth, he'd most certainly kill the US economy and drastically increase job loss and export, if he did everything he promises us there.

(For example, Kerry promises to increase the minimum wage, and require sixty days notice before firing someone. If that's not a formula for forcing American business to using temporary and foreign labor far more, I don't know what is.)

And if he didn't, then he was just another lying politician. Neither was an attractive option. A man promises to slowly saw your legs off. You hope he's merely lying, for if he's found to be honest, then he's something even worse. That's how I feel when politicians promise to do things which will hurt us. I don't know what to hope for -- for them to turn out to be calculating deceivers is, sadly, the best outcome.

But what's emerged about Kerry since then is far more troubling.

I'm not necessarily concerned that a politician has done some bad things in the past. Especially in younger days, we tend to do a lot of things we later regret. The key, when unearthing a candidate's history, is not just to look for dirt, but to figure out what it means in terms of who the person is today. Bad behavior, or mistakes in the past aren't always bad news. Some candidates change, and learn from such things. For example, Bush was an alcoholic. From the left-leaning sites, I read, I hear that's supposed to be a black mark. But aren't we ask to look -- in all cases, not just Bush -- at who the man has become today? If a man has done some stupid things in the past, and he's owned up to them and in fact repudiated them, that's actually a good thing in my book. It shows he's capable of learning from his mistakes.

But Kerry seems to view his somewhat spotty past in a different light altogether. Instead of writing off many of his Vietnam-era activities as being part of the struggles a young man may go through to find his identity -- ah, yes, I once threw away the medals, but it was easy to get caught up in such a movement then. It shows I have passion, but I'm far wiser today. Give me a break, and let's look at the present, or recent past... -- this man constantly holds up these times as being some kind of touchstone for his character.

Which is bad, because it's tell us internally, that's how he views them. Such actions, at such time, are not, in his mind, something to be ignored, or better, learned from as negative examples, but are in fact are the zenith, the epitome [he wrote, now completely exhausting his fancy-word vocabulary] of what he considers to have been good behavior, and are thus an internal model for how he should act in the future, if he does his best.

And the unifying theme we're seeing his is of a man who go to great lengths to think well of himself, and ensure others do too. A man who wants to be an intelligent hero, but doesn't seem to mind too much if he has to manufacture that history rather than live it.

Consider: Even back in Vietnam, he bought a camera so he could "re-enact" his various triumphs. And of course, he would never embellish for the camera, no? He wanted to be an anti-war hero, as was cool in those days, so, ta-da, he has these stories of rape, torture, and carnage to tell his willing followers. Later, when it's cool to be a Vietnam Vet again, he's a war hero, not a reformed and chastised baby-killer. And today, he envisions himself as the wise international leader who brings respectability to America, to whom foreign leaders look to as our best recourse against the medieval darkness which is the Bush administration.

What's shaping up over at QandO further lends to this impression. If what Dale Franks is discussing and implying there turns out to be credible, it looks like there might have been quite a bit of historical revisionism in the official Kerry record. For example, Kerry appears to have been given an impossible citation for his silver star. Many of the commending words on his official citations appear to date long after the war! Further, the long, long time between Kerry's return and subsequent honorable discharge raises questions.

Dale quotes the Chicago Sun Times, who appears to be one of the few newspapers willing to look into the matter:

Kerry, who should have been discharged from the Navy about the same time -- July 1, 1972 -- wasn't given the discharge he has on his campaign Web site until July 13, 1978. What delayed the discharge for six years? This raises serious questions about Kerry's performance while in the reserves that are far more potentially damaging than those raised against Bush.

Indeed.