Keeping things in perspective

The Ornery American has reprinted an excellent essay by Orson Scott Card about the upcoming election:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- the party I joined back in the 1970s -- is dead. Of suicide.

As difficult as it is to believe nearly all of the polls now suggest that the American people are poised to hand the planners of the 9/11 attacks a victory far greater than anything that they could ever hope to win on the battlefield. The American people seem on the verge of offering unconditional surrender in the face of Islamofascism.

Make no mistake about it. A Democrat victroy will be surrender in the face of men like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. If the party of surrender wins Tuesday the terrorists will know that they will only have to be willing to kill innocent people for a few years and our will to resist will melt away like a snowball in July.

And furthermore they will be right.