I understand the arguments of, say, Bill Quick and Mike Rappaport, for being unhappy with John McCain. I can see why Stephen Bainbridge will be holding his nose voting for McCain. Accepting the conventional wisdom that McCain will get the Republican nomination, and recalling that his opponent will be either Hillary or Obama, you should start to get cheerful about voting for him. Leave aside the boring stuff about it being good for the country, because Hillary is a left-wing gangster and Obama is a loony leftist who will make Jimmy Carter appear grown-up. Let's get to the real reason you want to vote for McCain (or whoever else wins the Republican nomination: you want the sheer thrill of listening to the wailing of the especially fatheaded supporters of Obama and Hillary. I don't mean the hustlers who are looking for jobs; both parties have those. And I don't mean the tolerably normal people who will vote for the Democrat because, well, who knows. I mean the people you really, really want to suffer. On an academic email list I belong to, a professor at an Ivy League law school said the best part of Bush's victory in 2004 was walking the halls of his law school the next morning.

Today's Washington Post offers up two prime examples. The novelist novelist Michael Chabon praises Obama in ways that are just plain embarrassing.

Because Obama appears to be a patient, forbearing man with a gift for listening, I figured I owed it to him to play the thing his way. So I have nodded and looked into their eyes and hummed sympathetically as people gave their reasons and made their excuses and generally offered up, as if they were golden ingots of profound wisdom, the handful of two-penny nails with which they plan to board up the windows of their hopes for themselves, their families, their country and the world.

But now, with everything seeming to come down, at last, to the first Tuesday in February, and in the wake of an all-out, months-long push by the cynicism industry to cook up an entire line of bad reasons ready to heat and serve, I admit that I'm getting tired of listening to rationales from people who know that Obama is a remarkable, even an extraordinary politician, the kind who comes along, in this era of snakes and empty smiles, no more than once a generation.

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world's nature and of our own to break, ruin and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world's to find ways to mend what has been broken. We can do that. Come on. Don't be afraid.

C'mon. Can you possibly pass up the chance to make this fathead moan, seeing Obama lose, knowing that all hope has been extinguished in the world, that darkness and despair will evermore reign? Are you just dying to laugh at him after the election? Of course you are.

The Post digs up Erica Jong to praise Hillary. Funny how the articles reflect the candidates. Where Chabon was soaring, empty headed tripe, Jong is deceptive and nasty. Start with the self-promotion.

I, too, was a bluestocking from a woman's college, straight-A student, Phi Betta Kappa, who found my voice as a writer while exiled to the boonies with a husband who cheated.

With every book I published, I saw more clearly how uneven was the playing field for women. We were let into the literary world on sufferance. Unless we wrote unreadable academic tracts that nobody bought, or mysteries or romances or something called "chick lit" (whatever that is), or biographies of Great Men, we were booed off the stage.

In the 1990s, when they became "Billary" as president, she gave her all. When the White House beckoned, she was true blue. When he took the hardest job in the world, she helped. And when he rewarded her by letting some tootsie do whatever it was they did in the Oval Office, she got really mad.

But she was wise enough to know what it did and did not mean. She did what smart European and Asian women have done through the ages: She kept her marriage but changed her focus to her own ambitions.

As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American.

Noam Chomsky predicted all this 25 years ago, when he said that the concentration of the media would rob us of real news.

It certainly has. We can read all we want about Britney, Paris, Heath, Tom Cruise, the Spice Girls and all their buds -- dead or alive -- but we can't read about how many children have been maimed in Iraq, or their dead and legless or armless mothers and fathers who were shocked and awed. But we know it's happening. And we feel the great weight of our complicity.

[Obama] was lucky enough not to be in the Senate when the Iraq war resolution was floated after then–Secretary of State Colin Powell lied about WMDs. That was the true tragedy of race: a black man lying for a corrupt white administration that was using him as a token, much as they use Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice now.

So we get sneering bigotry, distortion, and praise for a genocide denier. This nasty piece of work ought to feel rotten the day after the election, and I will vote Republican partly for the sheer joy of helping her to feel rotten.

When you put the case that way, it seems compelling.

Actually, the democrats are just having a bad time all round. Look at their reasons for NOT voting: "One of the qualities in Hillary Clinton that scares me most is her lack of a fixed sense of self."

Right. A fixed sense of self. Lacking it. Really scary.