Dan Drezner drops the fan-dance, gets shrill, joins Reality-based community.

Welcome to the club, Dan.

I posted earlier in the week (Dan as Gypsy-Rose) about Dan Drezner's silly "should I or shouldn't I?" strip-tease over voting for Kerry. Well, I guess the tips weren't as lucrative as he thought. He's run out of excuses. He's given up: He's voting Kerry.

I've made up my mind

So I'm voting for Kerry.

In my two threads on the subject (here and here), I've been amused to read suggestions by fellow Republicans that I'm overanalyzing things and should just trust my gut. If I had done that, I would have known I was voting for Kerry sometime this summer because of Iraq. To put it crudely, my anger at Bush for the number of Mongolian cluster-f**ks this administration was discovered to have made in the planning process in the run-up to Iraq was compounded by the even greater number of cluster-f**ks the administration made in the six months after the invasion, topped off by George W. Bush's decision not to fire the clusterf**ks in the civilian DoD leadershop that insisted over the past two years that not a lot of troops were needed in the Iraqi theater of operations. No, if I was voting based on gut instincts, I would have planned on voting for Kerry and punching a wall afterwards.

Reading the New York Times recap of the postwar planning by Michael Gordon just brought all of this back to the surface. The failure by Rumsfeld and his subordinates to comprehend that occupation and statebuilding requires different resources, strategies and tactics than warfighting boggles my mind: [more]

Kubler-Ross',The Five stages of Grief:

1. Denial and Isolation
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Only from 5 does possibility spring, like a daisy in the concrete. If you let it. A tough journey from one tribe to the other. Welcome, Dan. Sorry for the snark.