Sponge mode

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself reading obsessively. It really is getting out of hand. Maybe once the election is over ..., no, maybe once the financial meltdown reverses ..., no, maybe once Israel schedules new elections and they're over ..., no, well, it seems I'm in sponge mode, for the time being. Not very productive, I'm afraid.

The least I can do is share some of the most enlightening and elucidating essays and articles I've come across over the past several days. Some of them are more recent, others less, but these all focus on the upcoming presidential election, to varying degrees, and if you're still on the fence about it or wishing you had some lucid arguments to make to others who are, they may help.

Allies Want McCain by Richard L. Benkin

Poll after poll shows that respondents in every European (and Muslim) country want us to make Barack Obama president in November. On the other hand, those people who are on the front lines of our war against Islamist extremism feel just as passionately that an Obama victory will undermine their efforts.

TO THE UNDECIDED VOTER by Neal Boortz

The Republicans don't deserve power in Washington just as you don't deserve a boil in the center of your forehead. There are worse things, however. Complete Democrat control or, in the case of your forehead, a nice big melanoma. Pretty much the same things, actually.

It's not that the Republicans did everything wrong. They got the tax cut thing right, and they responded correctly, for the most part, to the radical Islamic attack on our country. They just did so much wrong at the same time. They got drunk with power, and the hangover affects all of us.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? by Orson Scott Card

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

Wright 101 by Stanley Kurtz

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.

McCain for President by Charles Krauthammer

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? [ ... ]

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Indeed. Well, as they say, I hope these help.

Shabbat Shalom.