From the Sublime to the Absurd
This post by Hugh Hewitt, who claims McCain will close and win:
Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time.
A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed.
The world’s financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times.
The cost of energy has soared and will continue to climb. The entitlement trap has only grown worse in the three years since George Bush asked the Democrats to work with him on Social Security and they said no. The corrupt, self-dealing culture of the Beltway has poisoned the decision-making of many bureaucracies and in ways only the burdened know, and the credibility of the big media is shattered even as their audiences shrink and many of their news rooms come close to shuttering.
So, despite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years.
I feel the need to remind Hewitt that John McCain is the gambler, not Barack Obama. He gambled with Sarah Palin, he gambled with his grandstand non-play of the week last week when he said he was suspending (but not really) his campaign, and he wants to gamble with the lives of our sons and daughters in a zero-sum foreign policy game.
John McCain’s campaign has been an erratic array of ups and downs, mostly based on high-stakes grandstand plays like the Palin gambit. Those plays have resulted in lagging polls and lackluster response to his policies, his presence, and his candidacy.
The bottom line is that we are where we are because we elected Bush and handed him a firm majority in the Congress through 2006. Those chickens are coming home to roost, and now is no time to gamble what future we have on the shoulders of a man who chose a completely unqualified neocon as his running-mate. As a gamble for the women’s vote, I might add.