In the week before an election…

…the various machines and organizations whose job is to gin up the vote go into overdrive to motivate people.  That’s because elections are won and lost, not by appealing to people’s cool cerebral natures in which platonic Athenians in white robes sit somewhere in the heavenlies deliberating abstractions about truth and justice, but because crowds of people in an American culture thoroughly debased by dedication to appetite are typically stampeded by fears or magnetized by desire for free crap.

Consequently, in the last big push, all bets are are off and you get all manner of lies, threats, promises, fears, cheerleading, and appeals to raw emotion.  So on the Left we get classy stuff like this.

Meanwhile, on the Right we get (for the fundy rank and file) the “Romney as Fulfillment of Bible Code” twaddle and (for the more thoughtful) attempts to yet again move beyond the one and only reasonable argument for Romney (basically summarized as “Sigh.  He sucks slightly less, so I will roll the dice and hope that he accidently does the right thing in response to prevailing winds“) to absurd claims that voting Romney is some kind of moral imperative.

No.  It’s not.  You *may* vote Romney if you like in the (I believe doomed and miscalculated) attempt to limit evil.  There is not a reason in the world you *ought* to vote Romney and there is absolutely no moral obligation to do so.  Nobody is ever morally obliged to support grave intrinsic evil.  And in this case, the damage being done to the voter and to Christian witness in rationalizing supporting this guy is, I think, not worth the vanishingly insignificant gain of casting a vote for him.  The immense boatload of lies, fallacies, non sequiturs and mind-muddying rubbish constantly being floated to try to varnish up “Romney Sucks Less”–“He’s prolife!”  “He’s God’s Chosen One!” “He’s has had a Conversion!” “He pledges to overturn Roe!” “Wanting to avoid mortal sin is perfectionism!” “The Church demands you support the lesser of two evils!” “Voting your conscience is a bizarre Protestant innovation!” “Voting for who you vote for is really voting for Their Guy except when it’s somebody else voting for somebody else, in which case they are really voting for Our Guy”–only demonstrates the huge and lasting damage that rationalization for Romney has wrought on the prolife movement and Christian witness as we seek to gain the world and lose our souls.

The one and only absolutely sure constant in Romney’s life is that he will say and do anything in the service of his will to power, and Christians who join him in that effort are inevitably corrupted (as Paul Ryan, formerly prolife congressman discovered when he suddenly decided that he was okay with killing certain classes of innocent human being who threaten Romney’s will to power).  If you clearly recognize that Romney’s sole core value is the will to power and roll the dice hoping prevailing winds will accidently blow him in the direction of doing a few things right with that morally rudderless power, I can respect that.  Obama is a steamship bent on war against the Church and the unborn.  But for the love of Pete, stop spouting lies about Romney’s “commitment” to anything beyond the will to power.  If he decides that the HHS mandate is too important to risk losing the “Sex and the City” demographic (as he clearly signaled in the debate) he will stab you in the back in a heartbeat (he did, recall, force Catholic hospitals to offer the morning after pill).  He has already made clear he approves of abortion for the health of the mother (i.e. always and forever) and has sent numerous surrogates out to make that clear to nervous pro-aborts while he lies to you about his “conversion”.  He uses torture as a laff line (oh, but I forget, that’s a feature and not a bug for a statistical majority of “faithful prolife Catholics”).

So roll the dice if you feel you must.  But don’t tell me I “ought” to vote for Romney.  I ought to vote my conscience.  And I will.  You do the same.  Don’t get stampeded by home stretch “motivational” rhetoric.  Keep a clear head, like Jeff Mirus.

My sole point in this election has been this: vote your conscience and not political expedience.