"Americans love war"

Shouldn't that be "Americans love winning wars." Or are you including certain people's fetish with reliving the Viet Nam debacle as a form of "love"? (The same could be said about the losers in the War Between the States, too.)

And I think I was one of the first around here last night to point out that we almost had someone win an absolute popular majority and lose the Electoral College. When the E.C. has tended to amplify narrow margins in the past , why is the map essentially unchanged from the previous election where Bush didn't even have a plurality?

W lost Gore states by smaller margins this time. See David's third from bottom.

David - I was impressed by how well the polls did. I thought Bush would win by 5% and thought the RCP poll average that showed him with a 2-3% lead must be underestimating him. They turned out to be closer than I was.

What was the line from the opening speech in "Patton"?

"American's traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle."

I think it's more like: Americans love winning a war so that -- as soon as possible -- they can go back to drinking beer and minding their own business.

the overwhelming popular vote majority, yet the fairly close electoral vote victory has gotta make one shake their heads. Along with that it seems silly that we do not have a universal and standard electronic voting system that accounts for all votes and promotes a high percentage of the voting public polling, with little margin for cheating. Finally, true campaign finance reform and time of offical campaigning needs serious reform, no?

The fact is, who knows if we suppressed vote, who knows how many unregistered and illegally registered people voted, who knows how accurate the vote actually is, and who knows if people are voting for the issues properly or are misinformed due to an overly zealous campaign machine.

David:

Love war, or do not fear war? And is there a meaningful difference?

I just looked up the 2000 vote totals. Bush received 50 million then, 58 million yesterday. That 8 million difference apparently eluded the pollsters (along with the major media).

And speaking of 'serious reform' as neil does above, what could possibly be in more need of it than the never-give-up-your-point-no-matter-how-often-you-are-clearly-made-out-to-be-an-idiot New York Times. Sheeeeeeeesh...."earn the right", indeed!

"Democratic Underground betrayed me by requiring registration for their discussion forums. Rats."

Get a throwaway yahoo or hotmail address and register with that. Then post away!

That Patton speech wasn't made up for the movie. If anything, it was cleaned up.

The Famous Patton Speech

"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle..."

Don't forget the Incumbent Rule, which went down in flames.

PJ -- It depends on which poll we're talking about, I guess. It turns out that Gallup probably did a pretty good job until the end when they lost their nerve. But the whole idea of the campaign that we had from the polls could have been completely fictional.

Raoul, et al. -- I meant that we love war. If we didn't, we wouldn't do it so often or so well.

In a endorsement of the President I never posted, I wrote that one unintended consequence of electing John Kerry would be to teach politicians that, while Americans won't accept the deaths of relatively few American soldiers, there is no political price to be paid for the death of foreigners in their thousands.

What ray said. Reluctance followed by resolution. Even Lindbergh followed that path.

Southerners, however, really are somewhat more warlike than the rest of the country.

Early political poll results are the answers of people who have sat still for up to 90 minutes of questions about toilet paper and room fresheners.

So they do not reflect the views of voters, registered voters or registered likely voters. They reflect the views of lonely shut-ins with nothing to do.

As the election gets closer, the pollsters start taking politics-only polls and expanding the sample size.

This should, in principle, increase the accuracy as the campaign goes along.

However, it does not work out that way. Was Hawaii dead-even, as 2 local polls claimed; or was it 54-45 Kerry (60-38 in my county)?

Orrin jeered at my methodology of counting bumper stickers, but I did better than Gannett.

We won, they lost. It's just that simple.

Harry:

Given ancient Hawaiians' warlike nature, why aren't they warlike today? Or are they?

Been wasting my time reading piles of "analysis" articles from the "experts" today. Without exception they think Bush "must" move to the center now. Misunderestimated once again...

They are warlike, Fred. One of the highest rates of military enlistment of any group in the nation.

Notwithstanding that, in personal relations, most display a somewhat exaggerated gentleness.

You almost never encounter a Hawaiian carpet-knight.

"... I meant that we love war. If we didn't, we wouldn't do it so often or so well."

David,
I think that we hate war but understand that sometimes, fighting a war is better than the alternative. Because of these two reasons, when we choose (or are forced) to fight a war, we go whole hog for the win so that we can end the war and go back to our real lives.
The one time we failed to do that (VietNam), we more or less lost the will and hence lost the war. But in many ways, VietNam was not really a war. We had this proportional response thing going (i.e. kill one of ours and we'll kill one of yours). That's not war - that's a game that got a lot of our soldiers killed for no apparent reason and caused the general populace to reject the war as a valid war. If we're going to fight a war - fight it to win, not lose or tie. We should have bombed/marched over the North, removed their capability to wage a war against the South and ended the stupid thing.

Um, have you guys ever noticed that, while we've fought a lot of wars, none has actually been necessary for national survival?

World War II, the Civil War, the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War weren't about survival.

Maybe you should read some history and then give us a call.

Bart: I agree with your first statement. Did you mean to end with a question mark?