Yeah, It's Election Day

...And I intend to drive down the hill into town, just as soon as I've finished my morning coffee. Drive down to the community center, hold my nose, and vote.

Like a lot of Republicans, I'm not terribly happy with the way things are these days. But I'm going to hold my nose and vote GOP, on the general theory that I've got a choice between (1) a party which is venal, spendthrift, and corrupt; and (2) a party which is venal, spendthrift, corrupt, captive to its own extremist fringe, and filled with loathing for America and all things Occidental.

As James Burnham once put it, "Liberalism is the ideology of the suicide of Western civilization." I'm not happy with the Republican party; with its drunken-sailor spending and its capitulation to big-government ways; with its acquiescence in the chipping away at our civil liberties and our personal privacy; but I'm not feeling suicidal today, thank you. Indeed I rather like the Occident, and most of what it's stood for these 2500 years. Ergo I'm going to hold my nose, vote, then go about my daily life. Someone let me know when the Democrats return to the party of FDR, Truman, JFK, Johnson, Humphrey, Jackson, and Lieberman.

Lifelong Republican that I am, I do look back fondly on the days when, agree with them or disagree with them, I could honestly view either of the two major political parties in this country as a credible real-life alternative. Instead of having to view one party as nothing but a bad joke, and the other party as being at least halfway toward being nothing but a bad joke.

Update: Well, I drove into town and voted. Thank God that's out of the way.