I can understand the logic behind a vote for McCain as a vote against Obama. I am even very close to applying that logic myself. However, much of what McCain has done recently as a Senator gives me pause.

This has nothing to do with his treatment of Romney during the primaries, which was mostly standard fare for a campaign. But I find myself in a real dilemma. In spite the need to keep Obama from making Supreme Court nominations, I’m just not convinced that McCain would do any better, especially with both houses of Congress run by Democrats.

I take my civic responsibility to vote very seriously, and will absolutely be voting in the down-ticket races. But this is the most difficulty I’ve had, by far, in choosing where to place my vote for President. Currently, “None of the Above” seems the best option. Only time will tell if it prevails. Romney on the ticket would be enough to tip the scale in McCain’s favor. Otherwise, I cannot adequately express the deep sense of foreboding this choice fills me with.

Now, I personally fault President Bush for leaving Rumsfeld in office a bit too long, and for giving a liberal lightweight like Christine Todd Whitman the EPA to play with. She did nothing there to give direction to the agency to redirect its rampaging bureaucrats, and used her pulpit to criticize Bush. Surely there are real Conservatives who are also expert in what EPA does and would not be reliant on the buraucracy to tell him or her what the issues are and how he or she should decide. But no.

Dirk Kempthorne, former governor of Idaho, leads Interior, but his decision to list the polar bear as “threatened” at the time of its highest population in history, based on a predicted threat that won’t come to fruition for 40 years, is suicidal for the Federal government. His claim that a couple of regulatory findings will keep Federal district court judges from using the Endangered Species Act as a bludgeon to impose limits on the greenhouse gases emitted by military ships and planes and tanks in the US and Iraq is simply naive. He has opened Pandora’s Box.

The Endangered Species Act is the most Procrustean statute in America, and has been held by the Supreme Court not to allow any considerations of social or economic cost or balancing to stand in its way. What a perfect instrument for the Natural Resources Defense Council to use to hack away at Americans’ freedom, in the service of the amorphous, invisible, and future god of global warming, which is still as uncertain and mysterious in its arrival date as the Second Coming of Christ.

Of course, once Obama is president, he will use the polar bear and other cold climate species as his authority to govern the air we breath, the food we eat, how far we can drive, and how warm we can keep our homes. Republicans can do things that are venal and dumb, but Democrats want to do those things because they think they are virtuous. Democrats have created a different standard of sin and virtue, derived from worship for the ideal of an Earth without mankind. Global warming is just the latest excuse for pushing America toward that condition, from a citizenry that is growing and prolific to one that is shrinking and poor, while those in the elite among the powerful are exempted, due to their virtue (e.g. Al Gore), from having to participate in the deprivation. It is the ethic of Soviet communism all over again, deriving from a belief in the inherent evil of natural human desires for material wellbeing, instead of from a belief in inexorable forces of social and economic development, down to and including the self-exempting hypocritical elites.

I respect your decision to cast your lot in the manner you’ve laid out. However, my analysis of McCain is that he is manifestly unfit for the office of President. In that regard, he is no different from Obama. While he definitely achieves that status in a much different manner than Obama, the final destination is still the same.

While I will be voting for the best candidate possible in all the other races in November, there is currently no candidate for President that has earned my support. Given the indirect method for electing the President, and my state of residency, all this is a bit academic anyway.