it's kind of traumatic for me to admit, but i might end up voting for barack obama. i basically disagree with american liberalism (which has no solution to any problem but larger bureaucracies and decreased freedom), and in many ways bo is a conventional representative of the ideology. but american conservatism has become really, truly nauseating. i have a lot of sort of abstract respect for mccain, and i contributed to his campaign in 2000. but when he said that the idea of extending habeus corpus to gitmo detainees represented one of the worst supreme court decisions in history, he put himself on the side of the totalitarian streak in right politics.
i was a columnist during the 2000 campaign, and i really despised al gore, and i really thought it made no real difference who won. week after week, i just killed  gore (then, i killed him again ), which was all too easy. i was horribly wrong. what we got was war, torture, black site prisons, a mood of incipient fascism in "the homeland." now mccain's militarism can't appear to anyone to be merely a rhetorical stance or a fantasy: what happens if we go to war against iran? freaking disaster.
i would vote for ron paul (again) but he's not running (but i just joined and contributed to his campaign for liberty), but i can't see voting for bob barr, despite his apparent conversion to liberty. still seems like a grim rightist warrior against drugs and blowjobs to me.
now barack in my view can't be, let's say, mlk. the power he seeks rests merely on coercion, not on inspiration. nevertheless there are inspiring aspects: the idea that we could have a black president contradicts all the grim predictions i made about race relations in act like you know. race in america isn't over, of course, but this is a rather amazing moment. plus i like bo, think he's smart and cool, and i don't think he'd be a disaster in any dimension. and he'd certainly be less a basic enemy of democracy than these republican ass-monkeys.