Support John McCain

Rafique has made his case for Obama here; it is the 11th hour and I find myself too exhausted and dispirited to add anything to the case for McCain made by Sir David Frum here (Rafique noted that one here) and that made against Obama by Mark Steyn here. I disliked Obama from at very least December 2006, when I dismissed him as a liberal George Allen, an "unoutstandingly mediocre Senator with an undistinguished career." Time and again since then, he has failed to live up to even those modest expectations. Having made clear that his only touchstone is his own self-interest, Obama asks us to believe -- despite no record to back it up and many indicators to the contrary -- that he's a kind of John McCain type. He isn't, and even if he were, the real thing is running.

A separate but not incidental consideration is that the media's campaign to tear down Sarah Palin must not be rewarded. After 8/29, the media's behavior resembled nothing so much as a lynch mob riding around Palin County in an urgent hunt for a rope and a conveniently perpendicular limb. If they are allowed to get away with it, if this systematic campaign of utterly undue mockery, slander and personal destruction they have waged against Palin is allowed to be seen as having paid off, I worry that it will have the net result of serving as a warning to female conservatives thinking of running for office. What will be the message to other women who might be inclined to follow Palin's path? It could not be plainer. If you risk thinking for yourself, if you deviate from the orthodoxy, unless you kowtow to the old order of the liberal establishment, you're next. What was done to Palin is will be done to you. It would, pace Justice Thomas, put them on notice that they too will be destroyed, caricatured by the mainstream media, hung out to dry by the feminists who would have been first in line to decry your treatment were your politics different.

As I said a month ago, "I look at Obama's grimly depressing sunset logo, and I feel very much that we are in the last dim moments of twilight before a very long, very dark, very cold night." Tommorow, I implore America not to go gently to that fate. Go out and elect John McCain. If we lose, we lose, but do not make yourself complicit in this catastrophe.