I'm voting for Nader. Step off.

OK, I purposely made myself an independent and undecided voter for the past several months because I wanted to send the point, in my mathematically meaningless way, that I am tired of being taken for granted by the Democratic party and I would not sell my soul for whoever wasn't Bush. I gave John Kerry ample opportunity to prove me he had a modicum of integrity, just enough to say something meaningful at the risk a little political lashing, I might have hopped aboard that swift boat. His lukewarm, long-overdue suggested minimum wage hike looked like a step in the right direction, but he's barely touched that one since he brought it up.

Let's face it here: the country is so polarized (and I chalk it up in part to those dirty political spin machines) that a guy could easily take non-middle of the road positions on a few issues and not throw the election to the other guys. In fact, Bush has. But whether Kerry is a centrist or just playing one on T.V., it doesn't really matter. He's unwilling to take a stand on issues that matter to me. Contrary to what my Democratic-voting colleagues and friends seem to think, that's not going to be enough to stop this country's dangerous slide into imperialistic-styled militarism, extremist-dictated morality, watered down labor, tax, and other economic policies, and abject ignorance for the physical state of the planet. I hope I'm proved wrong -- I hope Kerry wins and turns out to be a big liar, a liberal president who really has been just saying the things he thinks he needed to say to pad his coffers and become head honcho. But I'm not going to support him. And I think more likely than not, he will win, Republicans will retain both houses of Congress, Kerry will prove a rather mediocre centrist and wind up passing some rather conservative legislation, and John McCain will whoop his ass in 2008.

Well, my prognostications are no good when I get specific like that, but for the communal sense of election-eve fabrication, I'll leave that one for the ages. I endorse (and will vote for) Ralph Nader, and you will suck my balls.