And what if McCain wins?

What if John McCain and his mindless, grinning pit bull manage to pull this thing out? Just suppose that their racism and their fearmongering and their pitting citizen against citizen and playing to the darkest fears of the American reptilian brain work. Suppose that enough canvassers are beaten, and enough college kids and elderly women and young aspiring urban hip-hop artists are removed from the voter rolls, and enough voting machines have their smartcards switched to change every "n"th vote for Barack Obama to a vote for John McCain.

What kind of a country will the campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin have left us with?

It will be a country that has told millions of young Americans whose future is being squandered by Republican greed and abetted by Democratic cowardice that no, there is no hope. There is no future for you. No, we can't. There is no change you can believe in, because the dice are loaded and the game is fixed and the cigar-chomping fat guys in the pinstripe suits in the darkened room above the playing field want it all for themselves, and they Will Not Let You Have Any Of It.

It will be a country in which millions of black children who dared to believe that yes, it was possible for someone who looks like them to become president and therefore it might be possible for THEM to become president, will know that no, it is not possible. They will know that in the eyes of a bunch of frightened, mean-spirited white people, all they are and all they ever will be are just niggers -- that terrible word that no one dare say, so instead they, led by John McCain and Sarah Palin, talked about "Arab" and "terrorist" and tried to refight the 1960's culture wars on the backs and hopes and dreams of Americans a century and a half removed from the Civil War who STILL can't get a chance to grab for the brass ring.

It will be a country in which hate has become legitimate; a country in which Rush Limbaugh can spend the next four years alternately gloating that "his side won" and screaming about how killer negroes are coming to get you and liberals want to take all your money -- because Rush Limbaugh makes millions of dollars a year whipping white people being robbed by other white people into a frenzy of blame against those who have less. That's how he earns his living. That's what he gets paid to do.

It will be a country in which the wealthy get tax cuts and children get deprived of health care and education. It will be a country whose leaders talk about the sanctity of human life and then feed America's youth into a meatgrinder in the Middle East because we will have yet another president with issues about his more successful father and a Vice President whose insane religious fanaticism requires that millions of people die horribly so that her religious fantasy of death and fire and horror can come true. It will be a country that gives lip service to freedom but sets loose private military contractors to squelch uprisings in a population that finally will know that America is dead -- murdered by John McCain and Sarah Palin and all those who worked on this disgraceful, inhuman campaign of theirs; people who simply cannot control their baser natures and therefore can't believe that anyone else possibly could either -- and so they insist on a nation in which authority is all-powerful and people are kept frightened so they can be controlled -- frightened of Arabs. Frightened of black people. Frightened of poverty. Frightened of women. Frightened by sex.

How on earth can any sane person want to live in that country? And why on earth would anyone actively vote to create it?

A side note: Our thoughts tonight are with Barack Obama, who has gone to Hawaii to be at the bedside of his ailing grandmother. Madelyn Dunham will be 86 years old on Saturday and her condition is deteriorating. I hope that Sen. Obama knows that the thoughts and prayers of millions of Americans are with him and his family at what must be a terribly difficult time for him. I also hope that the Usual Suspects on the right will have the decency to shut the hell up. But somehow, I'm not optimistic.

UPDATE: Yup. Right on cue.