An Open Letter To A Friend On The Eve Of Election 2008

This is the text of an e-mail I sent this afternoon. Tomorrow we vote. God help us all.

Dear Rob:

Well, tomorrow it all ends. Two years of this crap. I think we're all about to collapse from campaign fatigue.

You know, when we were debating last week about McCain versus Obama, there's one thing I didn't bring up. And I should have.

Aside from the fact that having to choose between those two guys is kind of like having to decide whether you want to swallow lye or swallow battery acid, I don't know if I made it clear that it isn't really so much Barack Obama himself I'm leery of. If it were just a question of sticking him in the White House so that all of those aging hippies from the 1960s, who remember being at Woodstock even though they were at home in Oxnard that day, can hum a few bars of "We Have Overcome" and feel young again, well, I could see a set of circumstances under which that wouldn't be too intolerable. Like if Newt Gingrich were still Speaker of the House, for example.

And there you have it, as my niece Alicia used to say. It's not so much an Obama presidency that scares me as the prospect of an Obama presidency with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy running Congress, with all opposition swept away. Boy, if this doesn't scare you as a conservative, you're not paying attention. This is going to be the ultimate case of the weasel given a key to the chicken coop. Obama's little politboro is going to have a free and untrammeled hand to ram through any program, any bill, any tax hike they want. Nothing will stand in their way. The first thing they'll do is appoint and confirm a few hundred ultra-liberal court judges. That way the Democrats will be in complete charge of all three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. If THAT doesn’t scare you, you’re really not paying attention.

And after that, Jenny Bar The Door, as my mother used to say. In four years they'll have turned this country into England in the 1950s -- all initiative squashed, free markets suppressed, welfare rolls swollen, thousands of newly-created federal bureaucrats sitting on their fat asses collecting benefits and waiting for their pensions to kick in, half the population on the dole and the other half paying for it. And with the New York Times and the Washington Post jumping up and down like a couple of squealing pom-pom girls, cheerleading for the whole sorry spectacle. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no doubt rubbing his hands with glee at this moment as he orders more enriched uranium and draws big X’s over Israel on the map, while Hugo Chavez must be kissing his picture of Che Guevara and peeing his pants with joy as he schemes to make Latin America Marxist again, fearing no opposition from an American president who thinks he can deal with thugs like Chavez by inviting them over for tea and schmoozing.

If the Orkney Islands were within my budget, I'd be gone by Wednesday and I wouldn't even take a shortwave radio with me. Instead, I’ll be locked in my study reading Edmund Burke, De Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn. Come get me when it’s over.

And, finally, here you have my last word on the subject. Bring on President Obama and the United Socialist States of America. And when, in a year or so, you find out you’re working for the government until June 28 to pay your taxes, not April 30 as is now the case, well, as Billy Joel put it, “Go on and cry in your coffee but don’t come bitchin’ to me.”

Ave atque vale.