Okay, I’ll take the bait.

The reason I am voting for McCain and Palin, more enthusiastically than ever given the nature of the many insulting posts here, is that they are people of high character and personal courage. I don’t get that impression from Senator Obama.

You would have to agree that given Senator Obama’s track record in Illinois, he effectively endorses the notion that infants born alive following an attempted abortion should be left to die in a closet. His ghoulish stand in Illinois disqualified him from day one.

He has falsely suggested that our air force is “air raiding” villages, and would, if his past statements are to be believed, abandon the Iraqi people to civil war and genocide. He talks about people of faith, as many of you do, with arrogance and disdain, they vote only about of “bitterness” according to him. He rarely takes a cognizable position on anything controversial. And he has never reached across the aisle on anything of significance. Is he the smartest person in the room? Maybe. But is he the best person for the job? I seriously doubt it. It’s obvious he has never been much of a leader.

I would rather vote for someone who, when he had the opportunity to leave a prison camp after year of torture, chose to stay, and ended up there for four more years. I seriously doubt very many of you who bitterly call him McSame or worse are that brave.

I would rather have a mother who finds out her child has Down syndrome and who goes forward with her pregnancy as my vice president than someone who either selfishly or cowardly chooses to call unborn children, even they are his own potential grandchildren, “punishment for a mistake” as my president.

I would rather have someone who is good, over someone who is smart, as my president any day of the week. And oh by the way, I am not sure that the Obama-Biden policies are even smart at all. While talking vaguely about the middle class, most of what they propose, demonstrably, would cost people jobs, cost people lives and generally play to the lesser angels of our nature.

I've gone to the trouble to read a number of Zoltan's rantings and, assuming he isn't trying to be satirical, he must be more troubled than even the most extreme of conservative zealots I've read or encountered. He sounds more than a little like a mental case, perhaps paranoid schizophrenic ... the kind of person most people try to avoid if they see him coming. His postings are so outrageous that they don't deserve comment. There is a small little park called "bug house square" on the near north side of Chicago where people like Zoltan used to hold forth regularly. As far as I know, it is still available. Perhaps he would like to give it a rant.

You elect elites and other smart people who turn out to be failures too. It doesn't matter because it's the electorate that's so painfully stupid and incurious. 1 generation, 2 at the most, America will be a nation of retarded circus freaks with guns and trucks and lynch mobs. "Idiocracy" is a documentary.

Dear Edward 1978

Your already there. My I suggest renting or buying a DVD called the "Corporation". I.E. WTO or "1 world order". Ring A Bell? We've been in slavery for the last 100 years or so. That does not mean we stop Fighting to become better, or try to change the Powers that be.

Sarah Palin on stage with mic, camera, script, audience is

Shirley Temple!!! On the good ship GO-lli-Pop.....

Even Shirley Temple eventually grew up and got real.

Sarah Palin thinks a "culture of life" would be forcing victims of incest and rape to bear babies that result from that rape.

That is uncivilized. So is shooting wolves from helicopters. That's not courage. That's gross cowardice and excess.

John McCain makes jokes about bombing people, and doesn't think women should get equal pay.

He voted against raising the minimum wage like 23 times.

The minimum wage.

He didn't want to help people. Not with wages, jobs, benefits, consumer protections.

Look at reality.

He was selfish until his candidacy was on the line.

Ronald Reagan was not intelligent by any means. He could memorize lines fed to him by his handlers and that was it.

George Bush Jr., really- if he was in school with me he would have been made fun of for being the dunce of the school.

The GOP has been catering to the Joe sixpack for decades.

I don't know about you but I don't want a president who is less knowledgeable than me. If my president has to be a Joe Six, pack trailer park dweller than no wonder we are in the beginning of another great depression.

I could post this letter on any column on this site, and on almost any site I visit. It's the same over and over. Palin is mentally challenged. She's vicious. And—subtextually speaking—she's a threat that must be eradicated. She's the Frankenstein monster and the columnists and letter writers are the villagers bearing torches.

I won't vote for Palin. I'm diametrically opposed to her position on the war, women's reproductive rights, gay marriage (I'm gay, so that's a big one for me, even if the country in general is probably not hinging their votes on this issue). But I don't hate the woman. She doesn't mean that much to me.

In the early days, she looked like a strong candidate, and at a time when people laughed her off, I was worried. But having seen her and read about her history in Alaska, I'm not worried now.

So I look at the continual bludgeoning she takes here—look at the number of articles just posted today alone!—and I don't get it. This is the sort of drumming Nixon took at the height of Watergate. Why are people expending so much energy and so much hatred on this person? It strikes me as counterproductive. It strikes me as doing nothing but bolstering her chances. And, emotionally, I just don't get it. I'm not there. I don't hate her. I don't want the McCain-Palin ticket to win, I don't think it will win, and that's pretty much the end of the story for me.

I certainly understand Salon looking more in depth at her than other sites might. Salon is dedicated to feminist issues, and a woman VP on either side is certainly a feminist issue. But that has been exhausted by now. We know her politics. We know her background. We know how she's done in the interviews and the debate. Why do the attacks go on and on?