"It's Always Darkest Before It Goes Totally Black"

Before I got so consumed with this election, this blog used to have stuff on it that wasn't about politics! I guess it goes to my overwhelming concern about the election that I can't seem to post about anything else. My readership isn't high enough to actually change any minds, but I do get the occasional random visitor and if nothing else, it helps me feel like I'm doing some small, tiny thing to help my candidate. Ah well.

Sitting here with my coffee this morning, I was checking my daily sites and editorials and there were two that just nailed what I've been thinking this week. The first one was the Investor's Business Daily editorial which is part of a series they are running on the divide between Obama and McCain. It absolutely nails the Obama tax plan and gets it down to pretty simple language. A quote:

Look at just a few of the things he and congressional Democrats have in mind: Higher taxes on successful entrepreneurs (anyone earning over $250,000), higher taxes on capital gains, higher taxes on dividends, a possible raid on Americans' 401(k)s, a takeover of America's private health care industry, strict new limits on what CEOs can make, and the reimposition of the death tax.

Add it up, and Obama will usher in a new era in America — one where capital, the engine of our economic growth and success, is punished severely through the tax code. If Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, it'll be the only form of capital punishment their party will support.

The article concludes by pointing out that the top 5% of earners already pay 60% of all taxes and Obama's changes skew that even further. This should worry everybody; it doesn't matter if you make that big salary - it's going to affect us all in a big way.

The second editorial was Bill Kristol's at The Weekly Standard. I love Bill Kristol. The first line of his article is "It's always darkest before it goes totally black." He, of course, supports McCain/Palin and he points out what has been my biggest deal with Obama which is that he has never accomplished anything but a disciplined campaign. He also criticizes those Republicans who are jumping off the McCain ship just because of Obama's calm temperment. Hunh? What's that about?

Kristol cites a moving moment at a McCain rally in which Marine Sgt. Jack Eubanks gave his Purple Heart to McCain.

"I just gave John McCain my Purple Heart," Marine Sgt. Jack Eubanks told me a few minutes after McCain finished a speech at a campaign rally in Woodbridge, Virginia, Saturday. "I said, 'I want to give this to you, sir, as a reminder that we want you to keep your promise to bring us home in victory and honor, so it will mean something.' "

The 22-year-old Eubanks has been injured twice in Iraq. He's now teaching Marine recruits at Quantico--and walking with a cane. York explains that Eubanks saw remarkable progress in Iraq between his 2005 and 2007 tours and is concerned that it might all be for naught. "I think Obama's just going to pull everyone home as soon as he can, despite what's going on over there," he told York. "I just don't want it to turn into another Vietnam or worse where everything we fought for, and all my buddies who died over there, it was just for nothing."

If you saw the Military Times poll, you know that our military fully and overwhelmingly supports McCain.

Kristol concludes with a great Lincoln quote.

"But for now, we can only echo the words of the 30-year old Abraham Lincoln. On December 26, 1839, responding to the confident prediction of one of his political opponents 'that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next Presidential election' and that Lincoln's opposition to the Van Buren forces was therefore bound to be in vain, Lincoln responded:
'Address that argument to cowards and to knaves; with the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true; if it must, let it...The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just...Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But if after all, we shall fail, be it so.'

As it happens, the Whig ticket Lincoln supported won that 1840 election. So might, against the odds, the party of Lincoln win this year."

In nine days this election will be over and life will go on either way. In the meantime I will be trying to understand why half our nation seems ready to throw our country away - some for no other reason than that they don't like George W. Bush. Some because they want "Change." I'm not convinced the change that is coming is the change they want.