“Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border…

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.”

“Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.”

Putting a sweater on someone with a cold can help. Putting a sweater on someone with leprosy…not so much. We want people to solve our economic problems, but aren’t willing to confront the fact that maybe, just maybe, our financial system needs changing. Even after we’ve lost 3 out of the 5 largest investment banks, even after we see Freddie, Fannie and now AIG get bailed out by the government (which does so, by the way, by printing even more money), with Morgan Stanley and Goldman apparently about to topple, we still laugh at people like Ron Paul who dare to suggest that printing money might not be the answer, that an imperialistic foreign policy is unsustainable.

“What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.”

This isn’t about issues – it’s not about whether someone wants to vote for a Republican. Republicans are great people, and generally have very cogent reasons behind their stances on issues. Hell, I’m a registered Republican myself (to vote for Ron Paul in the primaries.) It’s about whether someone can vote for this Republican.

There must be some point where ideology takes a backseat to a person’s character, right? After 8 years of the significant majority of the country being fed up with lies and deceit, why are we so willing to look the other way again?

“And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can — as he did in South Carolina — renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right — what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.”

“We are out here – the Republicans or ex-Republicans who will no longer tolerate the racist, despicable slime machine that the right wing and the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign has become. I know, for I am one of them. I am not your typical progressive, being an ex- Air Force officer (9 years), evangelical Christian, card carrying conservative, Rush/Hannity listener – an now an Obama supporter in John McCain’s home state of Arizona.

…

Nothing has shamed me more than the evangelical groupthink around the Sarah Palin pick. People I used to respect for their strong stand on the family and values have completely abandoned their principles to back someone whom they think offers a slim grasp at victory. I will not participate in it, nor will my church, for which I am thankful. Trust me, the groupthink on the right is not as rampant as you may think. There are those of us that recognize that our so-called conservative and Christian leaders in this country are almost universally bankrupt, and we are outraged and ashamed. “

That’s what’s amazing to me – not that republicans are voting republican and democrats are voting democrat, but that so many of us are uninterested in having a man like this in charge for a while.

I’m a stubborn guy, and it’s really hard for anyone to change my mind about just about anything. But how ridiculous does it have to get before someone is willing to even consider the other side?

And…