I further disagree with this year's choice of standard-bearer Bob Barr -- who has violated the Libertarian platform (both the real one and the current, "airbrushed" version) by putting people in prison for exercising their constitutional right to traffic in "controlled" plant extracts and subsequently done nothing to get them out.

Nonetheless, Mr. Barr's party has been right on the Big Banker Bailout, right on gun rights, right on medical liberty, right on school choice, part-way right on tax cuts, right on too many other issues to count.

You'll also watch local Nevada TV stations in vain looking for any prominent mention of the fact that Libertarian VP nominee Wayne Allen Root is Nevada's only favorite son in this race.

So, ticking off issues on my list, I should vote Libertarian, as usual.

The thing is, often in life we don't do what we "should." Remember that colorless, unexciting person your mom thought would be the perfect marriage match for you?

I'm viscerally angry at the way the shrill and vicious Democrat redistributionists and their puppets in the press have savaged Sarah Palin, a woman about whom they'd be making TV movies-of-the-week if her politics leaned "correctly" to the left.

I'm not a member of the "religious right." I'd be just as angry at the treatment of this upstanding American if she were Catholic or atheist or a Jew.

A former beauty queen (when did good genes become a bad thing?), star high school athlete who bravely played through pain to win the championship, married to a member of a defamed racial minority, who works summers on her husband's fishing boat, a charming, freedom-loving homeschool mom who took on the corrupt establishment of her own state party and defeated them to become a successful and popular state governor, Sarah Palin has accomplished far more in the first half of her life than 99 percent of her detractors ever have or ever will. Yet she's mocked as some rural Mayberry rube who isn't as "qualified" to be president as Barack Obama.

Oh, please. Though bright and talented, John Kennedy was underqualified for the presidency in 1960. He did so miserably against Khrushchev at their meetings in Vienna that the Russian premier was emboldened to test the obviously inexperienced young president with what became the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yet John Kennedy was a seasoned pro by Barack Obama standards. Kennedy had been in combat, performing heroically after his boat went down. Kennedy served 14 years in the House and Senate (Barack Obama has yet to serve four) and ran on a pledge to cut taxes -- which he actually did! Next to the experience of John F. Kennedy -- whose inexperience rendered him a not terribly effective president -- Obama is a mere short-pants schoolchild.

And no, I don't think his experience working for and helping funnel millions in foundation money to ACORN counts in Obama's favor.

Exactly how much "foreign policy experience" -- other than organizing anti-American rallies in London -- did Bill Clinton have when he left Little Rock?

Does flying a jet fighter make you a great commander of men? Not necessarily. But if war threatens, John McCain knows what it is to throw young men into harm's way. Yet their experience wheeling and dealing with crooked lobbyists inside the Beltway make Barack Obama and Joe Biden "better qualified" to judge a proper strategy to respond to a surprise attack on a U.S. base overseas?

Why do you think Democratic registrars so often put on a sad face and cry crocodile tears as they report, "Aww, some of the military absentee ballots came in too late to count ... again"? Why do you suppose the military backs McCain-Palin, 68-23? Because they're all fundamentalist Christian cretins?

(Note Barack Obama answered a 1996 candidate questionnaire -- which bears his own handwriting -- saying he supported legislation to "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns." He has since voted for a version of U.S. Senate bill 397 which would have banned virtually all rifle ammunition.)

What they really mean when they say Sarah Palin is "unqualified" is that she's a regular person who knows what it is to work a regular job and shop at a grocery store, not some bought-and-paid-for ivory tower Washington lawyer in thrall to the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations who thinks National Socialism can still work; we just haven't given it a proper try.

Sarah Palin ridicules federal funding of fruit-fly research, and the other side says she's so stupid she doesn't understand the medical usefulness of fruit-fly research. But she didn't ridicule fruit-fly research. She ridiculed the federal funding of fruit-fly research, which is indeed not authorized by the Constitution -- not even close. Opposing a federal takeover of medical practice and research does not mean you reject the usefulness of medicine.

The Mainstream Media have covered this race as though Barack Obama, the only flawless man since the Nazarene, had won the thing last spring, since which time he has been made to endure the pointless criticisms of this insufferable little troll John McCain, who was supposed to just go home and shut up as of Labor Day.

Unfortunately, John McCain did indeed look like he'd rather not have been there for the debates -- he had the same expression on his face as a young father dealing with his first dirty diaper when his handlers told him he had to detail young Mr. Obama's learn-at-their-knee relationship with every terrorist bomber and pinko street hustler to pass through Chicago in recent decades -- relationships that just might help us guess the plans of a freshman lawmaker with a curiously blank-slate legislative record.

Should the GOP pull off an unforeseen upset, despite their missed chance to nominate an actual candidate of principle in Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the very newspaper and TV commentators who'll be asking "What happened?" should take a good look in the mirror.

I have only one marginally effective way to tell those who have spent the past three months libeling and trashing Sarah Palin -- and with her, every "regular American" who owns a gun or goes to church and lives outside their oh-so-correct urban enclaves of Washington, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles -- where to shove it. And that's to vote against the communist sympathizer who would make legally owned self-defense weapons as rare as whooping cranes, and for a true American hero -- to vote a Republican presidential ticket for the first time in my life.

By the way, and finally, Barack Obama's campaign Web site promises he'll do more to "protect women from violence."

By championing the cause of allowing any woman to carry a concealed handgun without jumping through a bunch of unconstitutional hoops to get a "permit," that being the only way to "protect women from violence" that doesn't involve drawing chalk outlines on the sidewalk?

No?

I didn't think so.

Vin Suprynowicz (vsuprynowicz@reviewjournal.com) is the assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "The Black Arrow."