Don't blame me, I voted for Jefferson Davis!

A reader responds:

Actually, I came to a different conclusion than the one reached in your fascinating and well-written piece, [ah, shucks! - MT] albeit one that basically accepts most of your premises and factual elements.

This past week I cast my vote for Hillary. While I totally accept your negative assessment of McCain (and he has done nothing recently to change that), I have come to the realization, based on various (and in some cases, fairly tenuous) factors, that, incredibly, Senator Clinton is now the "lesser evil." I never dreamed I would say this--my dear parents must be turning over in their graves!

I must admit that I never had the temptation to stray to Obama; his messianic, politically-correct Marxism, his quasi-religious commitment to remodel what is left of the USA (and the South), without recourse to any realistic understanding of history or our traditions---scares me even more than the worn-out liberal left nostrums of Hillary. At least with her we know what we would get; it's all there for anyone to see. And, perhaps even more significantly, when it comes down to it, the lady (if I may call her that) is willing to sacrifice just about anything (including some of her principles) to succeed. Is there any better comparison than with Lady Macbeth? In a sense, then, she is a wheeler-dealer. Perhaps that is not much, but for me that is preferrable to the messianic, unyielding ideologue that Obama assuredly is.

Our experience as a people with ideologues in power has not been a particularly felicitous one. One can certainly argue whether Lincoln was one, and the verdict of history seems to offer a lot of confirmation. Woodrow Wilson's intransigeant internationalism, it may argued, was the product of a warped Protestant messianism, and the results were disastrous for both Europe and the United States. And, then, there is a whole series of national leaders since World War II, some influenced by various socialist visions of utopia and egalitarianism, others, more recently, infected with neo-conservativism, who have continued to attack what was left of "old" republicanism, constitutionalism, and states rights. Obama seems to me to combine the very worst of these strains in American intellectual history, and that, very frankly, sends shivers up my spine.

In the end, if Obama is nominated (as it looks now), I suspect that I shall do what I did in 2004, the Bush vs. Kerry election. I wrote in the name of "Jefferson Davis," with the view that it is better to vote for a good president who is dead, than a bad one who is alive.

So, you see, I can indeed proudly sport that bumper sticker on my car: "Don't blame me, I voted for Jefferson Davis!"

Boyd Cathey

Everything you say about the Great O is true. He is indeed a HallMarxist, spouting off a revolutionary creed in the soothing tones of Grandpa Walton. The great threat here is that McCain also has a revolutionary agenda; it begins with amnesty for illegal alien invaders and ends with unleashing the fires of hell in the Mideast -- which will no doubt ignite similar fires around the globe, including here. If it could happen in New York, Madrid, and London, there's no limit to where such a malfire could reach. (Malfire may not be a word, but it sure wouldn't be a bonfire, now would it?)

I voted for Hillary, too (yes, like you, I registered to vote in the days when all Southerners were yellow-dog Democrats -- and was too lazy to change it). I think -- I hope -- that Southerners and conservatives will react to the socialist agenda the Democrats will attempt to force down our throats. While McCain could get away with pushing through his globalist agenda in the name of "conservatism," neither Hillary or the Great O could. So when they do it, people should react -- assuming there's any backbone left out there among the people. I think there is, and that's what I'm betting on.