A friend e-mailed, worried that Texas would go Dem, wanting me to vote

My friend, if I did vote (and I didn't), it wouldn't have been for McCain. The only reason I would have voted for him was to be voting for Palin, and that's not nearly enough to make up for my opinion of Mad Bomber John.

He is everything I despise about the Republican Party. He is not from "real America." He gets props for his service, but he was a legacy, and the idea that the son of John Sydney McCain II, and the grandson of John Sydney McCain, would do anything but join the US Navy is simply laughable. He was a military aristocrat, an officer from a family of officers, in the most autocratic and aristocratic of services, the US Navy. The impression I've got is that he sold out the POW/MIA activists, repeatedly---the very image of why I pretty much hate officers (many, if not most, of them). That is, he doesn't value what the British call the "other ranks."

He was always happy to cross the aisle . . . and go to the left. When he crossed the aisle, it was always for, what, again? Immigration "reform" or campaign finance "reform" or horsetwaddle like that.

He chased women all the time. When you're a young man, that's a good thing . . . but when you stand before God the Father and say you will cleave only unto this one woman . . . and you keep on chasing other women, then you're not much of a man yourself. John McCain isn't much of a man.

We are in for hard times, we are in for bitter times. George W. Bush can skulk home to Crawford, ruined by listening to the wrong advisers, in part, because he could not make peace with his (earthly) father. I'd probably like W. more than George Herbert Walker Bush. But Poppy was the better President, by far.

Iraq is lost. Iraq is now a de facto colony of Iran, and the Iranians have been empowered by our stupidity. The surge did not work. It has not been working. The surge was stupid. Anyone with even the most elementary understanding of counterinsurgency knows that a limited "flood the zone" type assault does not work. The insurgents go home, clean their rifles, nail their wives to make more babies to win the next insurgency, and wait, and rest, and get better.

Afghanistan is looking the same way. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's anywhere close to becoming Arizona, or even Arkansas.

The GOP has turned its back on America, for a long time now. Time for America to turn its back on the GOP.

Note: This is the e-mail I sent back to my friend, nearly verbatim. I edited it to remove the bad language I sometimes, reflexively, use in private, and to clarify a point that wasn't quite clear.