I was intending to write on the US raids in Syria today, exploring the implications and extolling the boldness of American armed forces.  Then Christmas came early.  My favorite center-right magazine, the aptly named The Economist, endorsed Obama.

I was a bit surprised, I admit.  The flagship issue of The Economist is globalization, and they worried about the potential protectionism of an Obama presidency.  But as the article indicates, the qualities of competency and integrity trumped any one issue in this race.  I post it here, in entirety, for your benefit:

It’s time

Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition

America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world

AP

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Thinking about 2009 and 2017

The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

He has earned it

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

As a political junkie, I’ve been put into the equivalent of a K-hole by this last week of politics. Between the high hopes and the dire stakes, my veins are pumping pure, pixelated China White.

On the off chance you’re feeling the same, I thought I’d share this soothing session between Obama and Charlie Gibson. It displays the earnest, visionary bi-partisanship and prudence that drew me to Obama’s campaign nearly two years ago.

McCain’s appearance on ‘Meet the Press’ was a pleasant Sunday morning experience, akin to tea and crumpets. The genial affair was like one would visualize an after-dinner political chat between the kindly uncle and the wound-too-tight uncle.

Geniality took a sharp dive, of course, when McCain felt the heat on his feet. As soon as Brokaw brought up the perks and tax adjustments of his plan, McCain decided instead to insult Obama’s.

In classic form, he lied at every turn – so many turns it felt like ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.’

Obama would fine small businesses on health care. Lie. Obama would fine people with children who don’t get health care for them. Big lie. Obama voted to raise taxes. Little lie; at least a substantial and slanderous crimping of the truth. Obama loves raising them taxes. Lie.

This kind of soiled the air, and Brokaw was not afraid to wade into the muck. As soon as McCain floated out his quavering jab about “spreading the wealth around,” Brokaw threw right back into his face two facts that wiped the color right out of it:

One, Reagan raised taxes during a recession, and scholars believe it saved the economy. And two, McCain’s own plan “spreads the wealth around” plenty, with massive nationalization plans, buying of failed mortgages and bailouts that would have Lenin winking approvingly right back at Sarah Palin.

McCain just continued to lustily beat the red baiting drum. But I think any creature with higher brain function and an honest heart got the point – by his own definition, he’s as much a Commie, if not more, than Obama.

Of course, the real point is that such characterizations are almost as insipid as they are unhelpful. Socialism – get your gasps out of your system, as I’ll be saying it alot – is a vital part of our nation. It been since Das Kapital and similar tomes inspired people to such radical movements as:

Public fire departments. Public education. Public law enforcement. Public roads.

And of course, the huge elephant in the room is that every medicare, medicaid, social security, disability or unemployment recipient has Karl Marx as the Godfather of their livelihood. If it hadn’t been for hordes of unwashed and fiery-headed intellectuals marching in the streets against the billy clubs and mercenaries of the 19th and early 20th century rich, the state wouldn’t be dropping so much as a penny for the sake of the wounded, the helpless or the elderly.

So McCain’s snide remarks are dumb, and a barb in the shoe of any path to policy in this nation – whether to the left or the right. Without giving due humility and appreciation to the contributions of the state to the free market and society, nobody can think in the appropriate terms to run a country.

For the road we walk was paved by revolutionaries and all manner of unsavory characters. And even if we had a flat tax and paid for the barest of our entitlement programs, we would still be “spreading the wealth around.”

We are guided with that honesty, or, like John McCain, we’re getting in the way.

I’ll just say this, to begin:

The notion of equivalence in all instances is not only a political danger, but a grave moral one.

I’ll leave the rest to Rick Sanchez:

Alexander, so frustrated by the incessant rebellion in the people of Sogdiana, sank into dark dreams of conspiracy, butchered friends for the sake of his paranoia, and finally slouched his unstoppable army off to the south in search of conquests that might stay conquered.

Not much has changed in Sogdiana, save for the name. It is still factious, conniving, bleak, arduous and ruthless. It just happens to be called ‘Afghanistan’ these days.

Afghanistan is miserable for America. There is a myth that Afghanistan was “the good war,” and that we bestowed some noble gift of liberty on its people by invading. That myth is rapidly withering on the cold slopes of the Hindu Kush.

Women’s rights are appalling – the reports of women only taking their burkhas off for the western media’s cameras were largely true, and the “bee-keeper suit” is still going strong. Suicide, honor-killing and punitive gang rapes are not only common, they are stronger than ever due to the lawlessness and poverty caused by America’s half-hearted war against the Taliban.

A particularly nefarious byproduct of the war was the re-emergence of the Afghanistan opium market. Virtually annihilated by the funless Taliban, our new regime has turned a blind eye to poppy cultivation, and Afghanistan is back on top of the world for drug production.

Afghanistan dominates the drug market, with the highest production of opium in the world–93 percent–and ranks last in terms of human development.

Human development isn’t helped by the fact that many rural Afghans – and Afghanistan is mostly rural – have to take out loans to buy poppy crops to plant, and the only people handing out loans for that high-yield, high-profit harvest are the drug lords. The farmers have nothing to use as collateral, save their daughters. So when the US comes along and napalms a poppy field, it usually directly leads to some pre-adolescent girl being sent to a life of sex slavery under a drug lord.

Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. [10 year old] Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. “It’s my fate,” the child says.

Even without the element of loans involved, the abduction of children for sex slavery or organ harvesting has become epidemic.

Toppling the law and order that had been suppressing such activities has had little return for America. After all, we’ve spent the last seven years putting the most hazardous country in the world on a back burner. What did we think would happen when we refused to go into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan after bin Ladin?

Al-Qaeda is stronger than ever in Pakistan, in terms of organization, recruitment abroad and funding, and is pouring money into. Across the virtually nonexistent border, their Taliban forays control half the country.

This permeation of the Afghan society allows them to employ a nifty new tactic: Using our air strikes to commit their terror bombings. Given that we rely on Afghan militia intelligence to direct our Special Forces air strikes, the Taliban has been masquerading as friendly militias, or using proxies, to call in air strikes on civilians – usually on groups comprised largely of children.

…the Afghan interior ministry issued a statement declaring that “76 people, all civilians and most of them women and children were martyred… 19 women, 7 men and the rest children all under 15 years of age”.

So, the end result of the usual cost-cutting, over-reaching, debt-dependent philosophy of the administration in Afghanistan?

We have success, but it’s only anecdotal.  Our Special Forces can still succeed at narrowly defined missions, just not affect the overall battlefield.  Kabul may be under siege, but it’s getting wealthier.  On the other side of the scales, however, is catastrophe:

Worse treatment of women than ever. Rampant lawlessness and poverty leading to the most depraved practices against children. An al-Qaeda stronger and more global than before 9/11.

The conclusion I draw from this is that occupying Afghanistan is not something to be done by halves.

You don’t just stick an oil company good old boy in power, stifle the press and call it done. You don’t let your enemy have safe haven while underfunding the shoe-string forces you leave in place – just enough hold back the flood. Above all, you don’t stay longer than you have to.

You get the job done, make sure it’s done, and get out. If you stay at the table too long, the house will win. It always wins.

Just ask Alexander.  Just ask the U.S.S.R.

Looking at the factors going into this election, Obama supporters find themselves in a curious position:

We have every proven reason to worry, and every theoretical reason to be optimistic.

What I mean by this, is that every factor Obama depends on for success has, in the past, been proven to fail: The youth vote, the minority vote, new Democrat registrants – they dropped the ball in 2000 and downright fumbled in 2004. No matter the grassroots organizing, the celebrity endorsements, Democrats have failed by relying on those on the margins of the establishment. The elite knows how to get out Rove’s vaunted “base.”

But this year, we’re promised by polling data and registrations, that a flood of activity in the key Democratic Party constituencies has been seen: Perception of the candidates aligns for Obama. Registration aligns for Obama. Public fundraising – meaning from private individuals, rather than Political Action Committees or lobbyists; a gauge of general support – is vastly for Obama. Key demographics, especially youth and minorities, are strong for Obama.

All the pieces are set up, but will they all come into play like they need to when need be? Or will they fail to appear, like before?

Over the last few days, that question has been put into play. Astoundingly, the omens for strong Obama support have been tested and triumphed. Those tests have been in early voting.

Early voting is traditionally dominated by Republicans, by a lean but consistent margin. This year, however, Democrats have been taking over this crucial voting population. By a ratios ranging from a 6-point spread to a whopping 3 to 2 in places like Florida, and even higher in Nevada, early voters are going Democratic. In short, the early vote is turning out to be a battleground landslide for Obama.

This is an even bigger boost than the theories above might have hoped for. Why? Because no one had predicted that the early voter bloc – a largely older, whiter population – would be going so powerfully for Obama. The very demographics he is thought to be weakest in, he is pulling remarkable levels of proven support from.

Obama supporters should, of course, run this race as if we need to sprint just to secure a photo finish. In order for this momentum to continue, let alone be consummated, everyone will have to sign up for phone trees, write e-mails to friends and donate – not just the engaged; everyone.

Still, there is now some amazing developments suggesting that all that hard work might not, for the first time in eight years, be in vain.

Today, McCain received the endorsement every American candidate cringes from: Al-Qaeda’s.

On a password-protected Web site, behind encrypted protection, a message in Arabic urged those that knew of this secret extremist enclave on the ‘net to do what they could in supporting McCain’s presidential bid. This included terrorist attacks which, they noted, would vastly increase McCain’s chance of winning, as he would be seen by the American people as a better instrument of vengeance than Obama.

“It will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against Al Qaeda,” said the posting, attributed to Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the password-protected site. “Al Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America.”

This is not nearly so significant to the race as a statement as the underlying strategy of it is. It underscores the principle that every guerrilla fighter understands and that many Americans tragically ignore or fail to grasp: That an Empire is not defeated by decisive battle, but by being drained to death.

And this is key when facing an opponent like al-Qaeda, if one seeks to actually achieve victory, and not just look like it: Your enemy wants you to fight them with all that you have; to get hysterical, compromise values, make shaky alliances, tie up vast numbers of troops on inconclusive missions and, above all, spend. Spending without the cash to support it is what cuts the throat of empires – not military defeat in the field.

It has been the same through history. Let’s blow dust off the books and look at the all time greats – the empires that not only hold a candle to America in scope and resources, but surpass it in longevity.

We can start with the Assyrians. They were unmatched in warfare, but mighty Ashurbanipal took it a few steps too far – he got involved in two wars at the same time, Babylonia and Elam, while spending like a mad fool at home on luxury goods and art. As soon as he “left office” by keeling over, his empire slid into economic decline until it was picked apart a few decades later. Ashurbanipal never lost a fight, but by pouring money into the shadow boxing in Egypt, Elam and Babylonia while not looking to his budget, he lost an empire 300 years old.

Then Rome, the classic example. Rome collapsed under its own weight – a bloated giant engaged in bigger and bigger spending projects, teetering on a foundation of abysmally unequal wealth and catastrophically uneducated, hopeless immigrant populations. It had been masterful at spreading economy, organization and opportunity; in its decline, it shunned education, shunned integration, and was constantly at war. Like the Assyrians, it seldom lost on the field, but ultimately crumbled by spending too much and getting too little in return.

Even a modern example is present: Britain. Britain won World War II, but lost its empire in the process of playing the bulwark against fascism in the West. It didn’t crumble because, ever the clever investor, it sold off its Empire in the nick of time. But winning World War I and World War II meant going all-in and losing its chips, leaving America and the USSR to run the table. A dominance of nearly two centuries came to a close gracefully, but to a close it came – thanks again to “victory.”

So when McCain talks of “victory” in the nebulous, bottomless terms he does, I cringe. I cringe not as an anti-war activist – I’m all for projecting our military might abroad to fulfill ends both selfless and selfish. But it’s because I love to be able to annihilate our enemies and throw our weight around politically that I deplore McCain’s comic book talk.

For that way, dear reader, lies collapse. With $1 trillion dollars paid into Iraq for no appreciable strategic gain, and Afghanistan going from a mere catastrophe into a full-blown apocalypse, we don’t need to just snarl, “All in” whenever our bet is called. We need to realize that in order to last as an Empire, we need to have a strategy that’s focused on lasting. And we need to realize just how fragile our dominance is – and what is a threat to it.

“Victory no matter what” while breaking the pipes of government revenue is a threat – a far, far greater threat than a planner who looks to cut losses in a losing venture.

It wasn’t the courtiers who counseled peace in Assyria that destroyed its unstoppable three-century reign – it was the “rah rah” crowd that cheered on a two-front war without end.

It wasn’t the Persians who destroyed Rome in some arrow-swarmed Armageddon in the desert; it was the Senators who kept chasing the Persians through the Iraqi desert with massive armies for decades, while raking in the ducats and leaving the “barbarian” immigrants to educate themselves.

It wasn’t the Axis that destroyed Britain; Britain sacrificed itself.

And in the end, it won’t be man with a prudent eye and a frugal time table that gives al-Qaeda a chance to exhaust us to death.

It’ll be the man who always says victory’s over the horizon, and leaves the record travel expenses to the credit card.

A lot of funny people aren’t finding a lot funny about these last, venomous throes of the election. Fortunately for the viewing public, they have excellent senses of humor about it.

John Stewart, for instance, doesn’t find it very funny at all that the McCain campaign decided to divide America into the “real,” “pro-Americans” of the small towns, and the rest of us. He devoted a show to the subject; one of his better ones.

And older comedians – from Danny DeVito to Carl Reiner – have put together a spot urging voters to get serious and embrace Obama.

On a yet more serious note, I offer another scaled-down installment of my study of the tectonic shift by GOP mainstays away from the deranged direction of the Party and toward Obama:

No less than 26 of the papers that endorsed Bush in 2004, have endorsed Obama this year – many of them conservative.

Not every GOP prominent is lumped with Limbaugh, sneering at Powell’s endorsement as “race patriotism” and swiveling spasmodically on policy positions. Just as we continue to see the violent bent of McCain’s loyalists spike higher, we see the moral and the moderates in their ranks showing spine.

A particular point of contention has been the infamous McCain “robocall” – the ones that claim Obama “works with” a murderous terrorist organization and threaten the annihilation of America’s democracy by a socialist regime.

McCain isn’t backing down on those; he says they’re true. But GOP officials in the states whose populations have had the calls inflicted on them – much to the dismay of parents, let me tell you – are neither support of the McCain camp’s claims of truth or their tone.

First to speak out were Maine’s two Senators – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Collins resigned from McCain’s campaigns and Snowe, McCain’s co-chair, roundly condemned the tactics and urged the campaign to stop them.

“She feels they are regrettable and inappropriate, and these tactics should be suspended immediately,” said John Richter, Snowe’s chief of staff.

McCain replied by insisting he was “proud” of the campaign, which to me sounds either like a knock against his honesty or against his morality. GOP State Senator Barbara Lorman didn’t cotton to either, and responded by a step stronger than mere denunciation: She endorsed Obama.

“While my admiration for Senator Obama has grown with his positive approach to addressing the challenges facing our nation, my disappointment with the McCain campaigned has deepened. The negative tactics are inappropriate, downright dishonorable and have no place in the State of Wisconsin.”

This is how movements begin. People’s minds change because their hearts sicken with the ways things are, and they can no longer tolerate the abusive din they’re forced to live in. In essence, people are forced to change.

The first, the bravest, are beginning to emerge. And yet, this is a form of division – separating those who will not stomach assaults on patriotism, fear-mongering and disgusting lies from those who embrace them.

And since this last weekend, when Palin, Pfotenhauer and Bachmann all began talking about the “real America” in terms of contrast, their supporters have become even more bold and vicious.

Rather than denounce, they yell louder. The most recent rally in North Carolina opened with these words from Republican Representative Robin Hayes:

“liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

In Virginia, McCain-Palin supporters tore up a 78-year-old African-American Baptist minister’s Obama lawn sign and replaced it with a Confederate flag, to show who the “real Americans” are.

And in North Carolina, where Obama was greeted with cries of “Socialist, socialist, socialist,” and told to get out by one woman, McCain-Palin supporters took it to another level.

They didn’t just hang him in effigy like in Ohio. They shot a bear cub to death in front of a university building, then pasted Obama’s name all over it.

…maintenance workers found the 75-pound bear cub shot to death in front of the school’s administration building at the entrance to campus. The Obama yard signs were stapled together and placed over the bear’s head.

So we are seeing a new kind of division in America. It is not the “pro-America” and “anti-America” that frames the minds of Palin and Bachmann.

It is between those Americans who speak, struggle, decide against what is wrong, and those who are “absolutely proud” of it – those who perpetuate it and commit it.

We heard which side McCain stands on. Now it just remains to hear from you on November 4th.

I just can’t find cause to promote John McCain. I was dared to by a friend, challenged to for the sake of more balance on a number of occasions, but it’s beyond me. I could do it as an intellectual exercise, like back in high school when you had to debate positions like keeping segregation legal, but not honestly.

I can, however, honestly compliment some of the people on his staff. Today, confronted with the rising tide of racial suspicion among the McCain crowd, McCain supporter Daniel Zubairi and some pro-McCain Muslims fought back. They and a couple of other outraged souls called to task a fellow supporter who was deriding Obama on the basis of the old “Manchurian Muslim” lie:

Good of him to stand up. The press, of course, took immediate attention.

The reaction by the McCain camp has been to shove Zubairi in front of the press as soon as they crammed him full of talking points.  It’s true love on the 24-hour channels – a party loyalist taking a stand for our nation’s proud legacy of diversity.

The media’s message: Some of the people on the fringe of the campaign deserve recognition for virtue. Not the tire-slashing, effigy-hanging, slur-yelling, voter-intimidating crowd, but this group.  They redeem, representing the McCain campaign’s beating heart.

Then again, do they?

Sure, they seem to shout down this particular pusher of the “Ayers-Islam-ACORN Axis”, but aren’t they putting their time, money and passion into a campaign that’s suggesting the very same thing – in oblique, if not direct, terms?

They are, we know from the McCain camp’s own statements, backing a run for the Presidency that insinuates no less than an active terrorist conspiracy with their opponent.

They do cheer for someone who just today characterized Obama’s 3% – gasp! – tax hike for the upper brackets as “socialism,” even when he’s as chock full of tax credits, tax breaks and big spending as the other guy.

From ACORN employees signing up “Mickey Mouse” to pad their paltry paychecks being cast as “threat to the very fabric of our Democracy,” to the callous admission that a “washed up old terrorist” has no real bearing on the race despite the campaign’s fixation on him, the McCain camp behavior has been nothing but a syringe of pure vitriol, shot right into the eyeball of the viewing public.

They peddle fear in place of logic, hate in place of hope, and deride any and everything about their opponent in the most grotesque of terms, turning what’s usually a rough-and-tumble process into an exploitation film.

So no, on second thought, I’m not sure praise is due.

Standing athwart the flood of poison and fighting with all you have to stop it – threatening withdrawal of support, calling for better conduct, struggling for even a glimmer of comity – that’s an earnest effort for virtue.

Tossing out a single gesture of moral rectitude, while otherwise slandering, inspiring fear and sowing confusion is something different. I see it all the time in corporate America.

It’s called CYA.

Too bitter by half?  Perhaps.  But not far-fetched.  Proof is on the tape.

The rabble-rouser in the red shirt is literally shoulder to shoulder with Zubairi for quite some time, able to sling it like he feels it.  This is clear through glimpses of Zubairi at the beginning of the footage:

So “Charlie CHANGE” up there goes on breathing fire about Islamo-Commies in ACORN-academia clothing, all under Zubairi’s silent sentinel.  Silent, that is, until the magic words are said by the Muslim girl:

“You know what?  You just changed my mind.”

And as she stalks off, seen below, time for Zubairi to step in like the cavalry with some righteous, press-friendly indignation.

In short, unless the Kurdish-American girl hadn’t been so incensed as to stalk off and cost McCain a vote, red shirt the anti-Bolshevik bigot would still be yelling “Fire” in the theater of many an explosive imagination, with Zubairi in loyal silence by his right hand.

One of my favorite “Old Soldiers,” Colin Powell, gave a full-hearted endorsement of Obama today.

His subsequent comments put a finer point on his insights and convictions:

I hope conservative minds that value prudence, intelligence and decency give weight to his opinions.

The campaign drags on – episodes like McCain accusing Obama of hating on Joe the Plumber merging with episodes like a reporter being kicked at a Palin rally, into a single tarry mass – bringing to mind the image from Yeats’ “Second Coming” of a “rough beast” “slouching” toward The End.

And as things veer increasingly toward the violent, the terrified, the siege mentality, another line from the poem echoes fearfully loud:

” The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Indeed, there is too much passionate intensity among the racists, brutes and bullies. But do the best lack all conviction?

No. In fact, if anything, this fierce reaping has cast the best into relief, as they’re the ones the worst are pointing fingers at. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Right.

First it was Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist for the flagship of conservative publications, The National Review. Parker made waves recently by roundly criticizing Sarah Palin after the Couric interviews, and being reamed by an alleged “12,000 e-mails” and counting – ranging from declarations that she should have been aborted to denunciations of her as not a “true conservative,” and those are the nice ones, according to her.

So it was with a bit more discretion that libertarian leading light and heir to National Review founder William F. Buckley’s estate, Christopher Buckley, endorsed Obama. In his article, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama,” Buckley writes:

“Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.”

For any unconvinced conservatives out there who’ve soured on Obama, this sage, caustic man’s revolutionary appraisal of the candidate is an indispensable read.

The same can be said for the article about his subsequent denunciation by the right-wing and tense resignation from the magazine his father founded: “Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired”

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance.

Has the modern “conservative” GOP abandoned its conservative roots, and with them, scholarship and intellect? Increasingly this seems so to me. And at the very least, Kathleen Parker argues in her article supporting Buckley’s self-sacrificing stance for his principles, it is separating those who suppress thought from those who champion it even in difficult times:

Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow “conservatives.” The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor. … Republicans are not short on brainpower — or pride — but they have strayed off course.

How many brightest sons languish in self-exile, or after being swept to the margins? Certainly Frank Schaeffer, pro-life activist, and Douglas Kmiec, conservative legal eminence and acclaimed scholar, come to mind. Both have endorsed Obama as the sole, best hope of reducing abortions available to us, and both have been denounced by the rabble for it – Kmiec even being denied communion one occasion on the basis of that endorsement.

If we can put aside the divisions that old-time partisans have stoked for so long to our disadvantage, more people might see abortion as a product of societal indifference and individual callousness: the former exemplified by economic conditions ranging from inadequate wages to evictions traceable to the subprime fraud; the latter typified by a self-centeredness that sees children as competitors or enemies to personal fulfillment.

And certainly there are the others I have referenced in past posts.

No brightest son better embodies this phenomenon than the man who many expect will, come the end of next week or the week after, capture the news cycle with his endorsement of Obama: Collin Powell.

For many, Powell represents the wise, humble voice that tried to steer the Bush administration away from war and was instead shouted down by the arrogant, self-interested apparatchiks like Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz. He sullied his reputation for many at the UN, was ignominiously cashiered come the end of Bush’s first time, and as since been out of sight – like an old trophy commemorating the intellectual prudence and moral involvement of the Republican party, now gathering dust.

If all indications are correct, that trophy will soon come crashing down to seal the fate of bullying, gut-based conservatism. I eagerly await that.

The brightest sons and daughters want their party back. With voices like Parker, Buckley and Kmeic, they deserve it.

And all of us deserve a better President than the man who, once as fierce a critic of those “worst” among the right, now fights for them with the “passionate intensity” of desperation.

* UPDATE * The conservative Chicago Tribune just endorsed Obama, their first Democratic Party candidate endorsement in the 161 year history of the paper.

* UPDATE II * In Philadelphia, conservative Talk Radio host Michael Smerconish endorsed Obama on his show today, “for the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago … voting for a Democrat.”

The vitriol has hit a high boil on the Wrong Side of this election.

Palin’s continuing rhetoric about Obama “palling around with terrorists” lances right into the cyst of racial, religious, anti-intellectual contempt harbored by many, especially those on the Right wing. It goads the suspicion such people have of those who look and believe different. It skewers together the idea that America’s enemies are a uniform bloc, hippies and Taliban one in the same in hating this country and wishing it harm. And it hits dead-center the notion that to listen to someone with different opinions, even radical or violent opinions, or to share a professional association with them, makes one no different morally or psychologically – the notion that is at the heart of hating and fearing ideas, banning books.

And the people who are vulnerable to such a message have, understandably, become violently angry. They were told Obama is associated with terrorism – and this keys in perfectly with the flocks of e-mails being dispatched, swollen with poison, from concerned local GOP offices, church communities and grandmothers like poor, earnest, ignorant Gayle “He’s An Arab” Quinnell.

It makes sense to them; they knew all along that the dark, calm, smart man numbered among the ranks of the America-hating enemy party was a terrorist.

It enthuses them; they don’t have to doubt the outcome of the Bush years, or fret about whether GOP orthodoxy about de-regulation led to this hideous crisis, or question the qualifications of their spasmodic, ailing candidate and his unschooled second-in-command and likely successor: They have more important things to worry about, like defeating that socialist terrorist.

More than anything, it angers them. It angers them that the media doesn’t repeat the facts as they understand them. It angers them that this “other” – this scholarly man, exotically named man, black man – might assume the post before now reserved for serious old white men. It angers them that despite how loud they yell, the wars their party conceived and executed, and the economic schemes they held as nigh-Biblical truth, might have led to as bad a disaster as America has ever faced – that they might be wrong.

So, angry and afraid, they call, literally, to kill Obama. This is no longer an election in their hearts. It is a war.

To some, a race war against “Arab” or “Black.” To others, against “socialist” or “elitist.” But in any case, they believe Palin and McCain – it is a “fight” as McCain says, against someone who is a liar, a masquerade, a closet terrorist.

And in a fight, we must realize, one doesn’t hold back.

That’s why, though surely you know a McCain supporter or two who is doesn’t call for Obama’s blood, we have heard the exceptions becoming more frequent, more vile.

Today, someone mailed a threatening letter with faux anthrax to shut down Obama’s Philadelphia office.

Rush Limbaugh casts Obama with a “movement” of “militant” America-hating, anti-capitalists, talking about the man’s campaign as if it was a racial-Communist war on the country. Listen below.

And the GOP Chairman of Sacramento, the California state capitol, proudly papers his party’s Web site with bumperstickers suggesting, “Waterboard Obama” and that Obama is the same as Osama bin Ladin, save that he’s a liar, and then blithely dismisses the notion that anyone would find that offensive.

This is not just “lowering the tone.” It is raising people’s emotions to a fever pitch and getting them angry.

And to say McCain is not a responsible party is ludicrous – though he kicked some dirt over this mess last week by suggesting Obama was decent, he still vows to bring these issues up in the debate tonight, he still has Palin yelling as stridently as ever, he still has yet to issue any firm condemnation and he still pours campaign funding into ads, talking points and operatives that foster it.

That is the real vileness of this end of the campaign season: That as bad as those who call Obama a monkey or claim we should set off a bomb and kill his daughters’ father are, worse are those McCain supporters who let that talk go without criticism.

That is how we get here – not only because of those who provoke it, but because of those on that side who tolerate it.

Those who don’t speak up when they hear a racist jibe, further the racism. Those who do not call for a reality check when Obama is called a Marxist, are friends to ignorance.

And to not speak up – to not do something – when Obama, a United States Senator with many, many good public works he struggled for, is called a “terrorist” or an “Arab,” as if that meant the same thing, is to give those who would believe this election to be a war, a killing time, license for their ideas and deeds.

John McCain is not going to stop this Frankenstein monster. Tonight, he has promised, he will “take the gloves off” about Obama’s “associations.” The criticism of the media, of the left, will not stop it.

Not even the election will stop this outrage. For the declining, hardening margin of Americans who believe the hate and fear in themselves first and their love of brother second, the “war” against the “terrorist” Obama will not end November 4th. Not until some bold action ends it.

Only those who stand right there next to them, listening to them yell, can end it. Only those who will break the silence and talk the monster down.

Before all roads led to Rome, as the saying goes, they led to Ephesus. And so it was appropriate that it was Ephesus that would be the final destination of my voyage, before the long stretch of daylight winging my way home.

The flight to Ephesus was from the high and dry vastness of Caesarea, at the foot of western Turkey’s tallest volcano – an abrupt and staggeringly huge peak named Erciyes. Waking up to morning in that sprawling industrial city was like waking up within a partially completed watercolor painting: Dawn was all long strips of glowing purple, blue and orange, rinsed of detail, floating below the sharp white triangle of the volcano.

It was a bracing setting, all wide dimensions and keen wind, sharpening my hunger for the flight’s momentum.

After shoving through a smoky shoebox of a Turkish flyspeck airport, we managed to figure out the weird, provincial methods of boarding and somehow got on the plane in a timely way. When we stepped off of it, we were in a different world: No cold, borderless high desert – rather a bustling place where the air tumbled in an invigorating blend of warm and cool, and all the close-in colors shone like new fruit. That is the place of the Aegean shore. We had reached Izmir, “Smyrna” to the ancients on account of its aromatic myrrh trees, the city near where Ephesus dreams.

The ride to Ephesus along the highway road was a chance to sip the cocktail of the seaside air and let my eyes meander over the intricate pastel work of the landscape. All the shades of hills and field, coupled snugly together, were rendered in vivid shades of ochre, taupe, jade and bone.

We glided through the sharp, rough shoulders of the hills, some vitality in them seeming to suggest they could rear up at any moment. And this was how Ephesus’ environs should look, as for over a thousand years – a span of time longer than the life of England – Ephesus was the pounding heart of Mediterranean commerce.

The Neolithic legacy of Goddess worship had been born from a timeless tradition of fire-lit cave rites into the day of the historical world with the founding of the gleaming Temple of Artemis here. The temple had drawn the interest and investment of the famed King Croesus – as in “rich as…” – who earned that honorific by founding banking in Ephesus. Banking had drawn the best sculptors of Greece, the great faiths of Asia and the all-important money of Rome.

Ephesus’ gleaming gravity had, at its apex, drawn over a quarter of a million free people, over a million slaves, to it. It sprawled, shining, within a circle of hills crowned by a 10 mile long wall built by Alexander the Great, and into that busy circumference flowed the height of culture and capital – and, come the time of Christ, some of the true luminaries of the gospel: Paul preached here, most famously in Acts 19. Saint John the Evangelist, author of the gospel, lived most of his life here. And the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus herself, spent her final days in a modest house just outside the sparkling, messy metropolis.

Now a town called Selcuk lounges on Ephesus’ outskirts – a warmly mellow beach village just out of the sight of the beach, with the surfer vibe of a Santa Cruz and the field-fresh food of a Napa or Cambria.

Our hotel was less than 500 yards from the low hill where the author who had written the history of the end of the world in ‘Revelations’, John, lay buried, and was as laid back as any Big Sur retreat. After spending an evening on its cushion-strewn roof terrace, surrounded by hookahs and plates of amazingly fresh food, we headed for Ephesus.

Our first visited site, though, had been the Artemision – the site of the Temple of Artemis – just down the road. There is no overstating how awesome this site was for the people of the ancient world, and how total its devastation in the opening chapters of Christian Rome was.

In the famed Seven Must-Sees of the World, better known as “Seven Wonders of the World,” the dusty travel writer Antipater wrote,

“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on anything so grand.” ”

It was the marvel of the ancient world – the Louvre and Great Wall fused elegantly into one form, where the greatest artists of the greatest age of art the world had ever seen worked with unlimited wealth and scale. The Temple itself swept over a football field in length over enormous gardened grounds, reared up nearly two hundred feet from its three-tiered platform, and kept safe the lore of a faith that was as old as mankind – Goddess worship. And in its time, tourists and pilgrims would flock there in daily tens of thousands.

The Temple was, however, not nearly so fortunate as it was glorious, and finally met its end after a chain of damaging catastrophes when Christian mobs consisting of boozed Goths and a violently intolerant Bishop annihilated the place utterly. Its bashed stones were crammed into a variety of other buildings, its art defaced and its pieces scattered, leaving only the description, “Destroying the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ.”

What one can today visit is the Temple’s vast foundation, stuffed and ringed with those chunks of marble that remain. A single reconstruction of a column, stacked to the historical height but still missing its ornate capitol, crowns it like a diadem.

Ephesus is far more intact, as no one in particular had a grudge against it. Its demise came when its harbor silted up, leading to a catastrophic drop in commerce and a vicious malaria epidemic due to the swarms from swamp where Ephesus’ lifeblood used to flow. Covered by dirt, it wasn’t unearthed until late in the 19th century – and they have still to unearth more than 30% of this gargantuan city.

Visiting Ephesus proved a two day venture – one day for the mind to wrap around it, another to savor it. There is truly too much to see and experience on a single day, if one tries to absorb the rich diet of history along with the deluge it offers the senses: The soaring 2,500-year-old theaters for crowds of 25,000…

…the library fronting drizzled with miniature leaves of pure marble…

…the looming edifice where a forty-foot tall Imperial statue stood…

…the detail bursting from everything

…the sheer, endless size of it.

This was the lower Manhattan of the ancient world, and it remains largely intact, preserving a sense of grandeur, sleaze, ambition and wonder that is thrives identical in our own time. Its urban landscape is scattered with dusty reflections of our own concerns, passions and issues: Fast food places, mega malls, culture wars, market regulation battles, class struggle, suspicion and embracing between faiths, and, above all, the presence of wealth – wealth driving, memorializing, evolving the world.

In a profound sense, walking as one among tens of thousands within the high and elaborate skeleton of this most-great city, I felt I was nearly in another time.

And in a profound sense, I felt I was already home.

Like millions of others did one hundred and twenty eight generations before, I picked up some souvenirs and was on my way.

Monasteries come in all shapes and sizes, including those that resemble a savory treat for a gigantic anteater.

The Goreme Open Air Museum, as its called, is one of several monasteries built in the cones of volcanic dust and eerie guts of this dusty land. It is the largest, the oldest and, with new circuits to its subterranean channels being discovered all the time, one of the strangest.

It is also one of the more crowded. Guides reciting wikipedia entries in over a dozen languages lead swollen cadres of up to three dozen through the tiny tunnels and steep spires. Expect to wait a good fifteen minutes outside each shoebox-sized chapel to get a glimpse at defaced Middle Ages masterpieces – the usual New Testament fare.

Then it was off to Uchisar, a place distinctly pre-Old Testament.

You’ve heard my description of the place before: Inexplicable; primeval; alien. On this day, I learned two other things about the Uchisar Castle.

It’s a breeze to climb compared to the Citadel of Amasya, and it provides an even greater view than one can imagine.

The span is astonishing. And yet more beguiling is the flurry of details that swarm in the landscape. As clouds transformed the light with their low passage, I found my attention diving into valley upon countless valley where cave dwellings and fairy chimneys flocked.

I spent as much time as I could atop the Castle. It had a mellow, ageless vibe that made it easy to ignore the baby wasps inexplicably hovering in vast numbers. Then it was time to amble down the termite hill and get back to town.

In town, we arranged a stunningly good dinner and a somewhat reliable trip to Caesarea – “Kayseri” – from where we’d be taking off for the Aegean coast the next day. Both worked out splendidly.

With the trip curling rapidly to a close, it was with a touch of melancholy that I left Goreme. For a tourist town, it was neither crowded nor overly commercial, and for a town in central Turkey – a “Koran-belt” flyover region much like in the US – it was advanced and prosperous. Overall, it’s all one might want in a small town – a place where people ride horses down the street on the way to their air-conditioned, plasma screen equipped fairy chimney houses.

With such a place as Goreme, the question is not whether I’ll go back, but how long I can bear staying away.