The Only Issue This Election Day
This lengthy piece by a Democrat nails the importance of this election:

The Only Issue This Election Day

It begins:

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.

and continues on for a few pages.

We stand on the verge of ceding vital authority over our nation's security to a group of people who don't understand the nature of the threat, and have demonstrated every willingness to use our own defeat in this war as a political tool by which to reaquire power. Please keep this in mind when your disgust over pork-barrell spending, and your distaste over other Republican shortcomings start to make you uncomfortable with again casting your vote in favor of the GOP.

The stakes here are as high as they have ever been for this country. A retreat from Iraq would be an open invitation for the rise of an aggressive, and unopposed Islamic threat to everything we hold dear in the West. Save your other issues for another election, and cast your vote in favor of continuing to fight the defining battle of our generation. - served up by Nomad @ 1:31 PM