We are so lucky, we Americans, that we have a chance to change policy and set the course of history in the right direction. Needless to say, the rest of the world is lucky that we can do this, too. Now we just have to get out there and do it. All it takes is a vote.

It seems to me this war isn’t going well. It appears we weren’t prepared for the Iraqi people’s resistance to U.S. occupation. It looks as if we thought we’d be welcomed a little more than we actually were. Chaos, disorder and lawlessness are the way of life in Iraq, and I’m not sure that’s what we were going for.

We’re losing ground, we’re losing track of explosives, and we’re losing lives. There’s no end in sight, no way out, nothing to show for all the sacrifice.

And yet, when asked in the town meeting debate to name three mistakes he had made, George W. Bush couldn’t think of any, except a few appointments. It seems he had accidentally appointed people to key posts without knowing that they had minds of their own. They didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, and they were fired. It turns out they were right.

Being right hardly matters if you have a president who makes up his mind before he has the facts. When you have one who actively resists hearing the truth, you’re in big trouble. And we are. But we have the opportunity to fire the man who got us (and the world) into this mess, throw the rascal out and replace him with someone who actually thinks things through.

Bush is proud of his instincts. He doesn’t want to be confused with any facts that contradict what he’s already decided to do. That’s why he has to invent an alternate reality, in which Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and John Kerry isn’t a hero. He sold us the former, and led us into a quagmire. I don’t think he’s had much success making us believe the latter.

John Kerry will be a better steward of the nation’s security. He wouldn’t have rushed us into a disastrous war without any rationale to back it up. That should go without saying. He wouldn’t commit the majority of our defense capability to an indefensible country for an indefensible reason.

Bush is guaranteed to keep us on the road to calamity and debacle. If he had promised four years ago that we would be in this position now, he would not have been “elected.” Now that we know what kind of president he is, we can’t give him another four years. Lucky for us, we don’t have to.