It’s not every day that you can wake up and say this is a day that for good or ill will live in history.

The pen scratch has been made, the oval filled, the line drawn, so to speak. And to me the line you draw when voting for Obama is the border line between hope and hatred, between reasoned judgement and mindless prejudice. We have such a chance in this country to erase the ugly defacement that the Republican Bush years (and it’s seemed like a century) have scrawled on our flag and the constitution. We have a chance to stop this endless war on all other countries and the planet itself. During the campaign Obama has shown himself to be an eminently reasonable, honorable and logical leader who never stooped to the Rovian tactics McCain was only too quick to embrace. The McCain campaign has tried every slur possible – radical, Muslim, terrorist, at last scraping the bottom of the barrel to trot out their stale postwar staple socialist, communist being presently out of the pale even for them. McCain and Palin have consistently claimed that, contrary to stated facts, Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes for everybody, while Obama has held off saying that McCain would, in all likelihood given his bellicose nature and philosophy, embroil this nation in another war. In the biggest decision a candidate has to make, choosing a running mate, Obama selected a seasoned vet who will help him govern while McCain was bullied by his handlers into nominating a publicity stunt who is unfit to lead. It’s very telling that the candidate who was insisting on the importance of experience went for someone with hardly any experience at all.

It’s also really pathetic when a party’s plan for victory rides on people NOT voting and the hope that people will vote for your candidate because they are too racist to vote for Obama, apathy and racism being two qualities the Republicans want to encourage in the American character.

And what’s the Republican response going to be should McCain lose? Looks like it’s shaping up as the standard fascist response to defeat — the stab in the back theory. In this case the treacherous blow is supposed to be inflicted by the "media," which somehow showed a liberal bias while reporting the news. Of course the most biased television operation in the history of the media, Fox propaganda, has been trumpeting the party line and nothing but for years, but never mind that, because the conservative temperament is allergic to any kind of contradiction, even if it’s reality itself that disagrees. Get used to the sneering, hate filled visage of Sarah Palin, folks, because that’s going to be the face of the Republican party for some time to come.

But, of course, my comments don’t mean a damn thing and my vote hardly does either. I knew Bush was a dangerous fraud eight years ago, but the electorate had to be beaten over the head with proof before finally coming around to see it. The vast herd that doesn’t like to think about much has been relentlessly manipulated by experts in direct marketing if not governing, and when that fails the Republicans have no qualms about lying, cheating and stealing to achieve power. Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re all so nervous about this election being stolen too, because that makes us all so determined to go out and vote and to guard our votes and to get really mad this time if we’re fooled again.

But in the end all I can really do is to hope that sometime in the near future there’s a United States Government that considers every citizen to be a real American, that doesn’t equate dissent with treason and isn’t controlled by religious wackos. Can that really be too much to hope for? I guess we’ll find out…..