John McCain's choice for Vice President is less fascinating than the means by which he apparently chose her--and the reasons people applaud him for it. Like Obama, she wasn't chosen because she was perceived as the best person to become Commander-in-Chief and protect the country. She was chosen because she is perceived as someone who understands and feels compassion for major sectors of the country--working mothers, blue collar "Hillary" or "Reagan" Democrats, and the like.

What has happened to America? This is not a commentary on Sarah Palin one way or the other. She may well end up as President, given McCain's advancing age, and she might actually be a good one--whereas we can know for certain Obama cannot and would never be an acceptable President. But she's not being selected for the right reasons. In a free country, a President is chosen who can best defend the nation against violent aggression; and who can (in today's context) do the best job at limiting and reducing government intervention in both the economy and in the private lives of citizens--since the nature of government is, unfortunately, to grow and try to violate the rights of the individual at every turn. Palin is a Republican, but that tells you little more than her under two years in major public office. Ditto for Obama, grandiose speeches notwithstanding. McCain and Biden are career politicians whose records are well-known but not reflective of what a President, under a limited government, was supposed to be.

If you select a Vice President--or a President--for the wrong reasons, you will probably make the wrong choice. If you end up with a good one, it's only by luck. If Palin someday becomes President, and if she's a pretty good one, then we'll be lucky. I'm open, because I have no other choice and because I will do anything in my power to vote against Obama. Jimmy Carter's policies? Karl Marx's ideology? Been there, done that. The 1970s were a disaster and Soviet Communism an even bigger one. At least Palin really is an unknown, whereas Obama will most certainly be a Western European-style socialist. But I'm tired of relying on luck. And I'm sick of living in a nation where the majority seem to care more about how a President feels towards their everyday concerns--doing laundry, getting dinner on the table, paying their cable bill, which SUV to buy--than how to simply stay out of the way and protect them from violence.

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." --Winston Churchill

Obama's proposals to sit down with overt killers and terrorists and "make peace" with them bring to mind Churchill's wise comment. Obama is not merely too young to be Commander-in-Chief. He's too wrong to be Commander-in-Chief. It would be paranoid to suggest that he's on the other side, and that he's anti-American--his prior associations with anti-American militants and his wife's open loathing of America notwithstanding. Yet, if he WERE overtly on the other side, his policies would be exactly the right ones to pursue: Pretend we have no enemies. Slowly dismantle our defense and instead spend it on national health care and other welfare state "goodies"--if you can call government services by such a name. Express outrage when a dangerous thug invades an innocent country or even detonates nuclear weapons on Israeli or American soil...but otherwise do nothing. Can you imagine a better set of circumstances for dangerous killers around the globe?

More dangerous--and more disturbing--than any suggestion that Obama secretly sides with enemies of freedom is the startling perception implied by Churchill's quote. It's possible that Obama really does believe that feeding a crocodile, rather than killing or caging it, will somehow save us from being eaten. If this is so, then Obama is simply too stupid to be President. The last President we had who was this stupid, when it came to understanding the nature of criminals, was Jimmy Carter. We still pay for his policies today. Is even one term of a President Obama worth it?

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." (Thomas Jefferson)

How true. How could Thomas Jefferson see this--all those years ago--while neither of our major political parties today do so?

A woman decides to adopt two kids. She decides to do so on her own, but fails to make plans for acquiring health insurance ahead of time. On top of this, the woman gets cancer. Now YOU and I must pay to buy that woman health insurance, according to Hillary Clinton and her cohorts. But why? To dare to even ask the question is to imply that you don't care about the plight of people with problems. But there's no law stopping Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or anyone else who wants to help from helping whomever they choose. How is the presence of difficulty--even tragedy--a justification for using the force of government to enslave 49 percent of the population for the sake of 51?

This question isn't difficult to answer. The difficulty lies in finding leaders brave enough to ask it.