Closing in on a climactic election

Junkyard Blog details how the Abu Ghraib scandal has been seen by the left and the media as a "silver bullet" to win the presidency. They have raised the viciousness of the campaign up another notch.

He also points to the publishing by the Boston Globe of fake photos of American Troops supposedly gang raping Iraqi women.

Conservatives are raising the tone of the rhetoric themselves. Donald Sensing notes something that I thought about yesterday as I heard about the murder of Nick Berg, and something that Lileks wrote about. America can either listen to the left and bail out of Iraq and figure that as long as they only kill a few of us at a time, we can go back to our sitcoms and sports, and ignore the news; or it can react as the WWII generation did, and demand that the vermin who do such things as the murders of Mitch Berg and Danny Perle be eradicated and settle for nothing less than total victory. As this goes on, will our will weaken or stiffen? Will we hold on to our honor or become like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, "Kill them all!"? Or, perhaps worse, will we become like Theoden, King of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, bewitched and lethargic, unable to rouse ourselves to face the danger?

In Iraq, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:

We are confronted with the paradox that our new military's short wars rarely inflict enough damage on the fabric of a country to establish a sense of general defeat � or the humiliation often necessary for a change of heart and acceptance of change. In the messy follow-ups to these brief and militarily precise wars, it is hard to muster patience and commitment from an American public plagued with attention-deficit problems and busy with better things to do than give fist-shaking Iraqis $87 billion.

It's frightening to see the democratic control of the military being used as a political football, especially when the good guys seem to be falling in the polls as the media keeps up its Worm-tongue whisperings in our ears, and the left indulges in ever greater spews of hatred. Americans have been entrusted with another in a long line of vital decisions. Will we pass this test?

Update: Reid Stott seems to be suffering the same worries.