John McCain will get my vote -- no question. He easily surpasses Barack Obama in wisdom, values, character, experience, judgment, truth-telling, and his positions on most of the issues. The decision is not even close.

The case for McCain is matched by the case against Obama. Go ahead and pull the lever for Obama if you want a president -- let's see . . .

-- Who has kept the company of radicals and the corrupt, is a product of the ruthless Chicago political machine, and in the mid-1990s was a member of the New Party -- an offshoot of the quasi-Communist Democratic Socialists of America.

-- Who regarding many of those early associations, and on most issues, is insistently vague, sketchy, and opaque. (For instance, as a regularly attending parishioner over 20 years, could he truly not have heard -- or sensed -- the unconscionable extremism of the spiritual adviser who married him and baptized his daughters?)

-- Who lengthily cites the need for bipartisanship yet can offer no substantive record of it, has on no major issue bucked his party, and speaks of his ideological adversaries with a smug, debonair, patronizing condescension.

-- Who on foreign policy is an isolationist, protectionist naif with essentially no experience, driven by the leftist conviction that he can schmooze even the meanest islamofascist or Iranian thug around to right reason. How successful is a dreamy-eyed untested high-schooler likely to be at mixing it up in the National Football League?

-- Who was willing to lose in Iraq, and even now remains unwilling to acknowledge that the U.S. surge of forces there achieved what might be construed as a win.

-- Who according to Army Times, Navy Times and Air Force Times surveys, trails John McCain among active duty military personnel by better than 2-1.

-- Who campaigns on "change" and "hope" and "yes we can" -- vapid inky nebulosities reminiscent of nothing quite so much as Richard Nixon's "Now More Than Ever" and "Nixon's the One."

-- Who hardly is a conservative reformer like McCain, but a tax-and-spend leftist more radical in (a) his approach to government and (b) his views on America in the world than any nominee for the presidency ever.

-- Who speaks nonsense on taxes generally, and in the midst of a financial maelstrom and slow-motion crash not only would end the Bush tax cuts (terming some of them "corporate welfare"), but also would impose a new redistributionist, spread-the-wealth system levying higher taxes on the most productive and allowing nearly half the voters to ride practically for free.

-- Who speaks equal nonsense on Social Security reform and health care.

-- Who in 2005 refused to join the effort -- in which McCain was a principal -- to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so enabled by sitting members of Congress (especially Democrats Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd) to do their subprime lending damage to the nation's financial system. (Two heavily compensated and bonused former executives of those agencies have been advisers to the Obama campaign, one of them, with Caroline Kennedy, responsible for fingering the undistinguished Joe Biden -- the Senate's No. 3 liberal, to No. 1 liberal Obama -- as the most distinguished prospect to become Obama's running-mate.) Continued...