The election eve post

As is usually the case at this hour in an election cycle, interesting stray bits of information are blowing like November leaves onto the radar screen.  Ted Cruz says he'll only support McConnell as Senate Majority Leader to the extent that McConnell behaves as a conservative.  MSNBC talking heads are not happy with Tom Harkin's don't-be-fooled-by-Ernst's-attractiveness remark, as well as the Des Moines Register poll giving her a 7-point lead over Braley.  There's the general discussion about whether it's a bellwether or an outlier, given the new Quinnipiac poll showing the race tied. There's yet another sparsely attended stump appearance by the Most Equal Comrade, this time in Pennsylvania.  There's a southern-state campaign ad trotting out an unprecedentedly vile Hail Mary, equating the GOP to the Klan.

I'm a bit nervous - always am - but I feel pretty good.  Polls and early-voting data haven't looked this good for years.

What a message like this at a site like this ought to stress - and I'd like to find a condensed way to say it in a Facebook post - is that post-America's situation is dire, and the only possible way to turn that around is vote a straight Republican ticket tomorrow.

How to effectively state it and avoid sounding cliched is the challenge.  Pundits warning of the very real chance of Western civilization's doom are not in short supply.  Chances are, if you're reading this, you're reading similar expressions elsewhere.

But any of us pundits who are sincere are thinking of ways to hit you between the eyes.  We're way past the point of talking about a "choice between two fundamentally different visions for this country."  We're talking about having been ruled by a cabal for the last six years which is an enemy of the United States, every bit as much as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iran or North Korea.

 The "two fundamentally different visions" scenario was applicable when the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly and John Dewey were convincing way too many Americans that the executive branch needed more power because modern American life was too complex for the structural confines of the Constitution.  It was applicable in the days of FDR and Frances Perkins and Rexford Tugwell, and the establishment of huge bureaucracies in the name of addressing the national emergency of the Depression.  It was applicable when Johnson and his minions in Congress created Medicare and food stamps and Head Start.  It was applicable some ten years later, when the radicals had come back into the fold and combined their support with that of the older Democrat constituencies to give us the Carter years.

But the current situation is an exponential leap beyond any of that.  Take some time frame - a week, a month - and go back and read the posts here within it and remind yourself of the numerous fronts on which the pro-tyranny-and-decline crowd have imposed ruin on our culture, our economy, and our security.  The headlong rush to accommodate an Iranian nuclear arsenal.  The poisoning of our alliance with Israel.  The complete uselessness of our token efforts to stop ISIS and al-Qaeda.  The rampant skyrocketing of health-insurance premiums, and of doctors leaving the field of medicine.  The $17 trillion debt.  One in five citizens on food stamps.  The use of a fantasy - "climate change" - to hobble the nation's energy security and ruin the coal and oil industries.  The wholesale distortion of basic differences between male and female essences, with the aim of destroying the family structure as humankind has known it all over the world for thousands of years.  The ruin of all of our art forms.

We have an array of external enemies, and we have one enemy among us.  There is a chance - and it is only a chance - of defeating it by peaceful, political means.  It requires you.

After tomorrow's probable outcome will come the sorting-out among Pubs regarding how fast to move, prioritizing the issues on our plate, and the shaping-up of the ideological spectrum for the next two years.

But the first step is to stop the darkness, halt the ruin.

If we can.

The only chance we have is to give those who hate freedom no quarter.