Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change. "If you can't live with him exactly the way he is," she told me, "then don't marry him, because he'll say he's going to change, and he might even try to change, but it's one in a million that he actually will."

Kerry's record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. Combine that with his deficits on domestic policy -- Kerry's health care plan would, in my opinon, kill far more people, and cost more, than the Iraq war ever will -- and it's finally clear. For all the administration's screw -ups -- and there have been many -- I'm sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.

UPDATE: David Hogberg presents the wonkish, example-filled version of the "don't marry a man expecting him to change" argument.

The philosophy behind such sentiment is determinism -- the idea that men don't so much control events as they are controlled by them. The circumstances at a given point in history force a president to take certain actions. This theory tells us that since the war in Iraq and the War on Terror will still be going on when Kerry would take office, he would have little choice but to make a strenuous effort to ensure our national security. It makes me want to throw up my hands and say: "Have we learned nothing from history?"

[many examples]

. . . it is absurd to the point of lunacy to assume that electing Kerry will force him to take terrorism seriously. If we were to assume that, what is the point of voting for a president? For that matter, what is the point of having an election at all? We can just put 50 people in a circle, spin a bottle, and put in charge whomever the bottle points to. After all, current events would compel him or her to approach the War on Terror with grave concern.

UPDATE: Short non-agonized version by Jonah Goldberg.