Rebecca, you really stirred up the nut cauldron.

...how so many of the pro-McCain letters here are penned by people who've never posted on Salon before. Does the campaign pay you by the word?

if my running-mate was thought to be unqualified to be president by liberals and conservatives alike.

McCain brought out the nuts, not the writer. And just wait until Obama is President. It's going to be 1992 all over again. Gird your loins, folks. It's going to be Wing-Nut Day everyday.

So... the fact that McCain and Company is able to sell a continuation of Bush's economic policies to people who do not benefit from Bush's economic policies and make them so rabidly angry about change that can actually help them (so say the economists and policy leaders, mind you).... maybe the Republicans have a little hypnotism up their sleeves as well.

My head hurts. And if we liberal scums (apparently the descriptor of choice for people who prefer Obama, regardless of the reason) are, in fact, devastated on election day, I wonder how McCain is going to heal this country. I don't see the people voting Obama simply shrugging it off (or, as Malkin has claimed, simply rioting in the street).

It's going to be Wing-Nut Day everyday.

-- memphis bluz

Rational people might reflect on what went wrong and whether conservatives need to re-think the divisive use of the Southern Strategy and the Culture War to divide the United States while greatly increasing wealth disparity, but they won't. Not even for a picosecond.

I find it amusing to hear a working man like Joe the Pipe Fitter criticize Social Security and his fear of "socialism." Has his parents or grand-parents ended up in a nursing home the costs which usually end up being paid by Medicare or Medicaid when benefits expire? I would like to see him attempt to join a country club in which people like the McCain's are members.

Yesterday a very sad letter appeared in the Readers' Forum of my local newspaper. The writer expressed her dismay that the usually right-leaning paper had endorsed Barack Obama for president. There were several paragraphs parroting familiar anti-Obama talking points from the McCain/Palin campaign -- socialism, Bill Ayers, Joe the plumber -- plus perhaps an original argument that Michelle Obama's hotly debated "first time in my life". . ."proud to be an American" statement was clear evidence that the Obamas had agreed with some rantings of the Rev. Wright.

But it was her final advice that was most jarring: "Hold your nose," she wrote, "and vote for the best of the worst, John McCain."

Those of us who remember John McCain as a once-honorable man wonder if he will someday look back at this campaign with regret, even shame. Win or lose I can't imagine he'd be proud to know that even one voter has annointed him the "hold your nose" candidate -- the best of the worst.

I don't even like Arlen Specter. But what he said has nothing to do with race necessarily. You Rebecca, and Solon, have the problem. There are many reasons for people to say one thing to a pollster and vote otherwise, especially given the highly biased way pollsters phrase their questions, questions that make 'Yes' or 'No' answers impossible if one is being honest and is attempting to think about issues in a nuanced and thoughtful way; and such questions likewise make taking a position on a candidate very tough. In fact, in my experience, it may be the pollsters who're being racial (no racist, mind you, ***as if you'd know the difference***), when they ask a series of racially loaded questions, and then ask: "will you be voting for Barack Obama, or John McCain this Election Day? These things can catch normal, work-a-day people off guard, and they may say something they don't mean. The temptation, even over the phone "anonymously" is immense. You people read race into everything, every word, every policy, everything you can deconstruct ad absurdum. _________

How would you explain the past two general elections that had Bush down in the polls only to come roaring back on election day? I know, "Bush stole the election in 2000", and Osama Bin Ladin helped him win in 04, and yada, yada, yada... "Race", nonetheless, had nothing to do with it. You ought to be ashamed. You'll rationalize it, I'm sure. It's sad how you people capitalize, build careers, write books, lecture, teach, etc. on the superficial difference of skin color, and then claim a moral high ground. Sad... The whole "Race Industry" is just sad.

What I find hilarious and disturbing about some of the letters posted here and elsewhere is how the vilest, most destructive or most dictatorial acts of the Bush administration, the Neocons and the GOP are being redirected as "what we can expect" when Obama takes the oath of office.

Destruction of our freedoms under one-party totalitarian rule? Yeah, that's precisely what Bush tried to accomplish with warrantless wiretaps and the FISA bill, the PATRIOT Act, approving torture and having the NSA spy on and harass anti-war groups like the Anti-War Grannies from San Francisco. The intended 100-year Republican reign intended by Karl Rove, together with the policy of the unitary executive, would have had us living in a dictatorship in 10 years, had it not self-destructed under the weight of its own incompetence.

Economic wreckage? With their penchant for deregulation, their givebacks to the oil companies, their total neglect of schools and infrastructure and their castigation of science, the Republican Party has left us with a shattered economy and a broken foundation with which to rebuild it——namely, an undereducated populace that doesn't understand basic science, and an outdated electrical grid and factories that can only produce obsolete products. Way to go, GOP! And you're worried that Obama's going to come along and somehow do more damage by regulating things?

As for the cries of socialism...capitalism is an exceptionally successful system when it is properly regulated so that a) Those who create the wealth with their labor benefit to the same proportion as those who own the companies, i.e., you don't work for 20 years to build a company and then have your job shipped to India; and b) companies do not degrade the environment or the economy with illegal practices (dumping of toxins, default credit swap trading, etc.). Like personal freedom, capitalism and free markets are not absolute. You don't have absolute freedom in our country. you cannot walk up to me and punch me in the face without going to jail, and you can't publish something scandalous and false about me without being sued for libel. In the same way, markets can't do whatever they want; they require oversight and government involvement, and to some that is socialism.

But if you want socialism, as many have pointed out, just look at our current government handouts to AIG, the auto makers, and $700 billion in capital infusions to banks. That's as close to socialism as we get, folks, much closer than Obama's intent to return us to a progressive tax code. You remember that, right? Where the people who make more also pay more? Remember, the Bushies were also the cats who wanted to dismantle the best example of successful socialism this country has ever seen: Social Security, which has helped tens of millions of seniors survive in retirement (anybody know if John McCain has sent back his Social Security checks?). If Bush and the GOP and their banker buddies had had their way, the system would have been dumped into the open markets and managed by financial services companies—you know, the markets that are currently melting into slag and the financial services companies that are setting new standards for incompetence and corruption. Apparently, it's more important——more ideologically pure——to dismantle something that smells of "socialism" and works pretty well than it is to leave it alone and solve some of our other problems. But then when big GOP donors like Wall St. investment banks are about to go under, socialism is a big happy party with smiley balloons.

In sum, everything you folks accuse Obama of being about to perpetrate when he takes office (except for the 250,000 troops, which is just too batshit insane for comment) are depredations that Bush and the Republican Party have already visited upon this country in their incompetence, ideological insanity and greed, bringing us to the brink of economic receivership, intellectual bankruptcy and international irrelevance. The fact that some of you actually have the gall to accuse Obama of being about to bring on the exact horrors that the Republican/Neocon cabal has foisted on us these last 8 horrific years means you either a) have mastered the art of turning someone else's argument on themselves, such as accusing a girlfriend of cheating when she's the one who caught you in bed with the nanny, or b) you're completely delusional and unable to face the truth that the supposedly "America first," God-and-country party and its smirking frat boy figurehead have led the nation down the darkest eight-year rat hole in its history. John McCain has shown himself to be completely beholden to that party's ideals of war, tax breaks for the rich, and smear campaigning. Do you honestly think he'd have a single original idea to get us out of the messes we're in?

I don't think Obama is a saint. I don't think he's the messiah. He's a politician. What is it about him that makes people so excited? Maybe, just maybe, it's because he's young, hip, dark skinned (like so much of the country is now), well-spoken, and doesn't give off the creaky, fearful vibe of the rest of the political field. The guy doesn't seem like a Washington glad-hander. Also, he's brilliant, a marvelous orator, and has managed for the most part to stay away from character based attack politics. He makes people feel hopeful about voting again, like they're not just voting for the lesser of two evils.

Obama may not be all these things, and he may end up being as big a disappointment in the White House as the Democrats were when they took over Congress in 2006. I don't have a crystal ball. But I would rather take my chances with someone who MIGHT BE a great president and a transformational leader than with the certainty of John McCain, who WILL MEAN four more years of ugliness, war, homophobia, ignorance and attacks on the Constitution.