If you read newspapers, watch TV, and stay away from the blogosphere, the radio, and Fox News, it looks like it’s all over. And it probably is. Even Christopher Buckley has come out for Obama.
I will not vote for a Democrat for any office. The Democratic Party collectively did everything in its power to lose the war against Islamic jihadism. They did so for domestic political gain. Abraham Lincoln would have thrown a few Democratic leaders in jail, but such behavior is no longer treasonous in a legal sense. However I consider it to be treasonous in a de facto sense.
When the evidence began to mount that the surge was going to succeed, and General Petreaus testified, oh so carefully, with the utmost restraint, to that effect, he was savagely attacked by Hillary Clinton, the entire Democratic leadership, and, yes, Barack Obama. He was accused of being a liar by Hillary, and a traitor by a major Democratic source of funding, moveon.org. Events subsequently proved him right far beyond the muted optimism of his Congressional testimony. The closer we came to victory in Iraq, the more the Democratic leadership redoubled its efforts. Obama called for all troops to be out of Iraq by last March, in a desperate attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It was cynical. It was cold-blooded. It is unforgivable.
I have been a Democrat all my life, as were my parents before me, but I will never again vote for a Democrat until the Party makes amends, and I do not expect that to happen for a long time, if ever. Of course this means nothing to those who believe that we are not at war, or that the war is over, or that the Islamists were never a serious threat. Good luck to them. I hope they are right. I doubt very much that they are.
Setting such considerations aside, which apparently a majority of the electorate is quite willing to do, there are other reasons why I am not inclined to coronate First Citizen Obama. We don’t know him. The mainstream media have become part of the Obama campaign apparatus. No investigation has been done into his past. We are aware of every conceivable, real and imaginary, skeleton in Sarah Palin’s closet, but the details of Obama’s relationships with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Pfleger, and ACORN, remain murky, obscure, unexplored.
Barack Obama could be anything, from a Manchurian candidate to the coming Messiah. He is a carefully maintained blank slate. He is being dragged over the finish line by CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Associated Press. I don’t trust him, and I certainly don’t trust him working in concert with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
I may be wrong. Obama would not be the first unsavory character to become President and rise to the occasion. There are ample precedents from Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon Johnson. And there are ample precedents of men of honor and integrity being terrible Presidents, from Ulysses S. Grant to Herbert Hoover. So let us hope that it is true, as Otto von Bismarck or Winston Churchill or somebody said, that God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.