Jim Kunstler is constantly harping on John Kerry for not confronting America with the hard truth, which seems to me to be painfully naive. I’m in the group of people that pretty much constantly obsesses about just how screwed we are (in the larger sense of things), but I don’t think that a politician that takes that approach has a snowball’s chance of actually winning. And what politics is about is winning.

Yesterday I was watching some footage of Dick Cheney on one of the morning shows, and he was blasting John Kerry for saying that there is some acceptable level of terrorism. First of all, that’s not what John Kerry said. But more importantly, you have to have the mind of a child to even accept Cheney’s train of thought.

Cheney isn’t alone in pitching this sort of fantasy. Democrats are expected to promise a way to end the migration of labor overseas. Republicans are expected to pretend like abortions will go away completely if we just make them illegal. Everybody is expected to pretend like there’s a way to make people quit using violence to promote a political agenda (a.k.a. terrorism). I can’t help but think that the reason politicians take this approach is that voters want them to act this way. So we may as well quit blaming the politicians.