Some elections are routine, some are important and some are historic.
If Senator John McCain wins this election, it will probably go down in
history as routine. But if Senator Barack Obama wins, it is more
likely to be historic-- and catastrophic.

Once the election is over, the glittering generalities of rhetoric and
style will mean nothing. Everything will depend on performance in
facing huge challenges, domestic and foreign.

Performance is where Barack Obama has nothing to show for his
political career, either in Illinois or in Washington.

Policies that he proposes under the banner of "change" are almost all
policies that have been tried repeatedly in other countries-- and
failed repeatedly in other countries.

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? That's been tried in
countries around the world, especially during the second half of the
20th century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist
and communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of
the century.

The economies of China and India began their take-off into high rates
of growth when they got rid of precisely the kinds of policies that
Obama is advocating for the United States under the magic mantra of
"change."

Putting restrictions on international trade in order to save jobs at
home? That was tried here with the Hawley-Smoot tariff during the
Great Depression.

Unemployment was 9 percent when that tariff was passed to save jobs,
but unemployment went up instead of down, and reached 25 percent
before the decade was over.

Higher taxes to "spread the well around," as Obama puts it? The idea
of redistributing wealth has turned into the reality of redistributing
poverty, in countries where wealth has fled and the production of new
wealth has been stifled by a lack of incentives.

Economic disasters, however, may pale by comparison with the
catastrophe of Iran with nuclear weapons. Glib rhetoric about Iran
being "a small country," as Obama called it, will be a bitter irony
for Americans who will have to live in the shadow of a nuclear threat
that cannot be deterred, as that of the Soviet Union could be, by the
threat of a nuclear counter-attack.

Suicidal fanatics cannot be deterred. If they are willing to die and
we are not, then we are at their mercy-- and they have no mercy.
Moreover, once they get nuclear weapons, that is a situation which
cannot be reversed, either in this generation or in generations to
come.

Is this the legacy we wish to leave our children and grandchildren, by
voting on the basis of style and symbolism, rather than substance?

If Barack Obama thinks that such a catastrophe can be avoided by
sitting down and talking with the leaders of Iran, then he is
repeating a fallacy that helped bring on World War II.

In a nuclear age, one country does not have to send troops to occupy
another country in order to conquer it. A country is conquered if
another country can dictate who rules it, as the Mongols once did with
Russia, and as Osama bin Laden tried to do when he threatened
retaliation against places in the United States that voted for George
W. Bush. But he didn't have nuclear weapons to back up that threat--
yet.

America has never been a conquered country, so it may be very hard for
most Americans even to conceive what that can mean. After France was
conquered in 1940, it was reduced to turning over some of its own
innocent citizens to the Nazis to kill, just because those citizens
were Jewish.

Do you think our leaders wouldn't do that? Not even if the alternative
was to see New York and Los Angeles go up in mushroom clouds? If I
were Jewish, I wouldn't bet my life on that.

What the Middle East fanatics want is not just our resources or even
our lives, but our humiliation first, in whatever sadistic ways they
can think of. Their lust for humiliation has already been repeatedly
demonstrated in their videotaped beheadings that find such an eager
market in the Middle East.

None of this can be prevented by glib talk, but only by character,
courage and decisive actions-- none of which Barack Obama has ever
demonstrated.

www.tsowell.com

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell

Senator Fred Thompson will appear on Meet the Press this Sunday
morning. We urge you to watch the program. And, if there are any
undecided voters in your household or neighborhood, do what you can to
get them to watch too.

In a campaign that has been more intensely fought than any in a
generation, Senator Thompson has consistently cut through the haze of
diversions and clearly defined what is at stake.

When a video was released last Friday, the response was so
overwhelming our server crashed three separate times! Capacity has
been greatly expanded. So, if you were unable to view the video, I
strongly urge you to view it now at -

http://www.fredpac.com.

Please tune in to Meet the Press this Sunday to see Senator Thompson’s
closing arguments in support of liberty and First Principles.

http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com