Remember the "Al Gore's a liar" campaign? The oft-heard accusation had no basis in fact, but sheer repetition caused it to lodge in the American consciousness.

Same shit; different party. Sarah Palin does not believe in "abstinence only," and she is not a Dominionist Christian. Nevertheless, those ideas have lodged in the left-wing brain, and not even a surgical operation will dislodge them.

Why is it suddenly acceptable to wear "SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT" t-shirts? No-one (thank God) would dare to wear a shirt emblazoned with the message "BARACK OBAMA IS A NIGGER." In fact, no-one would feel comfortable wearing a shirt bearing the value-neutral message "BARACK OBAMA IS AFRICAN-AMERICAN." Yet lefties now consider "SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT" to be high fashion. I'd love to hear someone offer an excuse for that exercise in hypocrisy. Strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor.

The left has turned into an emetic morass of human sewage. When you go into the voting booth, picture the faces of the smug, haughty young creeps seen in the photo above. They represent the new Democratic party. They are the reason why this lifelong Dem said adios. If you reward the Obots with your vote, you are saying: "I want the Democratic party to keep acting like that."

Obots would have us believe that Palin's alleged attempt to get rid of a bad-apple taser-happy state trooper is worthy of infinite investigation. Ah, but if you bring up Obama's efforts to change Illinois state law in order to give crooked cronies a chance to grab some taxpayer dough, we're told that that little matter is unimportant. Nothing to see here; move along. Kos and Josh Marshall would support Duke Cunningham for president if Duke were a Dem -- and chic-ly black.

This election is bizarre. The media pundits have ignored political sins that would have killed the chances of any previous Democratic candidate. I suspect that after the election -- if Obama wins -- the chicanery in Illinois will suddenly become an acceptable topic of conversation. It may even become an idee fixe, like Whitewater -- except in this case, the sleaze was and is real.

The Democrat have embraced a campaign that mixes low smears with a cult of personality, fanaticism, religious intolerance, unfettered and nearly psychotic sexism, naked appeals to racial solidarity, knee-jerk rationalization of obvious corruption, election fraud, a purchased media, Chicago-school economic advisers, contributions from shady sources, unfulfillable promises of low taxes and an implied continued reliance on our ever-growing debt to foreigners. Meanwhile, John McCain condemns the bailout of Wall Street fat-cats and damns the legacies of Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush. McCain proposes offering direct help to homeowners facing foreclosure. Obama, in a troubling display of ideological inflexibility, has consistently nixed that idea; he wants the bankruptcy courts to rule the day. Think about it: A man who has switched positions on many, many issues won't change his stance on that. Why?

The parties have completely reversed position.

I haven't changed. I'm still a liberal. But the political world has shifted around me.

Don't call my vote for John McCain a protest vote, although there will nevertheless be some pinching of the nostrils. For all of his faults, McCain is the better candidate -- and, no matter what the prog brainwashers would have you believe, he has run a far more honest campaign. Neither candidate is a liberal, but -- if we discount Obama's lie-filled rhetoric -- McCain is the more liberal of the two. I suspect that he may be another Eisenhower -- a get-things-done military man who will choose economic pragmatism over a strict laissez faire ideology, thereby infuriating the hard rightists.

Not many years ago, progs commonly observed that, on economic issues, Ike stood somewhere to the left of any current Democrat with a shot at the office. That observation remains true -- yet the progs don't say that any more, do they?