To vote for John McCain is to exercise the very worst of bad taste. Yes the man is a serial liar and a purveyor of scurrilities, smears, and libels. True he chose an imbecile for a running mate. Undeniably he has a face like a rotten pumpkin, bad teeth, a grating voice, and if left out in the rain doubtless smells of old wet dog. But that's not why voting for him is in bad taste. The fact is that McCain is a deadly bore. There can be nothing more distasteful than to willfully inflict him on the world stage for the next four years.
Consider our planetary neighbors. As president, McCain must travel abroad, meet with foreign leaders, give speeches to their citizens. Is it fair to the English or the French, so careful of their dignity, so wary of over-familiarity, to foist upon them a man who will insistently call them "my friends" or, even worse, "mes amis"? How considerate would it be to the Japanese or the Koreans, who prize education so highly, to send among them a man who thinks Pakistan has a border with Iraq and that Czechoslovakia still exists? Eyes will roll wherever he goes, hands will reach skyward, people everywhere will look at each other and say "what a bore" or the local equivalent. If not something much worse.
For us here at home, McCain for four years will breach the boundaries of the endurable. Deregulation and trickle-down economics have destroyed our financial system and ruined our economy. McCain embraces both wholeheartedly. Only time will tell us how much more damage he can do. What could be more seriously boring than for all of us without exception to lose our jobs, homes, savings?
Continuing a longstanding presidential tradition, his profoundly irritating voice will pollute the radio waves every Saturday morning. As is his wont, he will address us as his "fellow prisoners." He will talk nonsensically and rudely, as he has done on the campaign trail, of 'interest rate cunts." He will fill our remaining open spaces with oil rigs and mines. He will keep us fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, and start new wars with Iran, possibly Syria, maybe even with Russia as well. A nuclear holocaust precipitated by a war with Russia would be just about the biggest bore possible.
So let us all vote for Obama on Tuesday. We owe it to ourselves, the rest of the world, the very future of the human race. A McCain presidency might somehow avoid catastrophe, but could just as easily destroy the planet. Lovely for the surviving cockroaches perhaps, but what a bore, and how very distasteful, for everything else.