What Really Matters As We Vote

Here is another great post by Orson Scott Card from The Ornery American.

What Really Matters As We Vote

By Orson Scott Card    October 26, 2008

Sometimes it seems like this election is one big pillow fight. The air is now so full of floating feathers that it’s hard to see the furniture, and the media isn’t helping, as they blow the fluff around.

But there are solid issues in this election, and how we vote will have lasting effect on our future.

1. National Defense

Without ensuring safety for America and its allies, nothing else a president does matters at all. And on this subject, Obama has promised us that his regime will be even more disastrous than Clinton’s was.

We have been at war with radical Islam since the Iran hostage crisis during the Carter presidency. Reagan’s and Clinton’s spineless inaction and GHW Bush’s failure to follow up the Gulf War with support for Iraqis who tried to oust Saddam encouraged our enemies to be even bolder.

But the attacks on 9/11 came when we finally had a president with the kind of resolve and courage that Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt brought to the monumental struggles they led us through.

Bush made mistakes, but he never lost resolve and he never backed down. Bush had been a governor and not much of a soldier when he took office as president; McCain will be the best-prepared president we’ve had since Eisenhower to lead us in a dangerous world.

Why, if you thought Bush was inept, would you install as Commander-in-Chief a man whose ignorance of world affairs and military strategy make Bush look like a genius?

It’s not just that McCain instantly understood what Russia’s invasion of Georgia meant, while Obama naively thought that we should turn to the UN Security Council — on which Russia has a veto.

It’s not just that Obama’s idea of facing the threat of a nuclear Iran is “aggressive diplomacy” and more “threats of economic sanctions with direct diplomacy opening up channels of communication so we can avoid provocation” — as if Iran needed any more provocation than our existence, or the existence of Israel, to start a nuclear war.

Both the Democrats and the press have been ignoring the Iraq War during the run-up to the election, as it became clear that the American people recognized what they wanted to deny: the success of the surge and the probability of victory in Iraq.

Continue reading right here.

Posted: 2300PT 10/30/08
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