Debate Wrap-Up

I’m very grateful to have avoided blogging my way through perhaps the most frustrating of all the presidential debates. It wasn’t the most boring – that was the last one – but this one demonstrated, more than any other, why John McCain is easily the worst Republican presidential candidate to get the GOP nomination in my lifetime.

McCain was “feisty,” according to Tom Brokaw in the follow-up, which is a nice way of saying he was cranky, testy, condescending, and argumentative. Plus he blinked too much and smiled like Igor from all the vampire movies. He moaned and whined about Obama’s friends calling him nasty names. He then tried to link Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and the voter fraud machine known as ACORN , but his heart wasn’t in it. Instead, he boasted, again, about what a disloyal Republican he’s been, even managing to compromise himself on the one issue that might have persuaded me to vote for him: the judiciary. Over the weekend, he stated that Obama’s potential Supreme Court nominees would be just dandy, and tonight, he trumpeted his support for judicial tyrants Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and bragged about cutting off the GOP at its knees with his dumb “Gang of 14,” which undermined the Bush administration’s judicial nominees.

He also let Obama get away with murder - i.e. infanticide - on the Born Alive Act and partial-birth abortion.

In the meantime, Obama looked like a grown-up and, once again, sounded like a conservative. He promised a “net spending cut” after implementing all his new federal programs, which is either a freakin’ lie or the biggest, dumbest demonstration of ignorance possible. Mathematically, it simply can’t be done, especially while entitlement spending continues to consume a metastasizing share of the federal budget. He also, again, promised a tax cut for 95% of all Americans, overlooking the fact that 47% of American PAY NO INCOME TAXES. yet McCain ignored that completely, because he doesn’t understand it, either. He ran to the left of Obama on his asinine “let’s buy everyone’s mortgage!” plan, and he was unable to articulate, in any coherent fashion, a single conservative idea, beyond a nebulous support of tax breaks for his pal Joe the Plumber.

And you know Joe the Plumber’s going to show up in the Saturday Night Live sketch, don’t you?

I just stand aghast that this is the man my party has decided represents me and what I believe. He doesn’t. He doesn’t even come close. If he’s elected, the GOP will lose any connection to the principles that first attracted me to it. How can I vote for that? How can anyone vote for that?

I cannot stomach Obama, either, but I will say this: if someone put a gun to my head and said I had to vote for one or the other – instead of throwing my vote away, which is what I intend to do – I’d have to accept that there are essentially two Democrats in this race, and the right thing to do is to cast a ballot for the only one who is honest enough to put a D by his name.

Obama’s going to be the next president. That’s a terrifying thought. The only thing more terrifying is the idea of John McCain as our next president.

Heaven help us.