A huge percentage of independent voters is still uncertain about whom to vote for:

In the last week, more voters have come to believe that McCain would pursue different policies than Bush:

After three weeks of relentless Palin-bashing, her favorables have come down. What a surprise!:

The New York Sun may be out of business, but there are still some responsible journalists left who believe it is necessary to remind Americans that poisonous rhetoric isn’t “just words.” Here’s Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times:

Ahmadinejad’s evil words aren’t just talk

[We Americans] don’t expect public men or women to speak the truth from public platforms. When it comes to our own parochial affairs, there’s probably a bit of weary realism in that. However, this casual expectation of rhetorical hypocrisy has inhibited from the start our ability to recognize and deal with the threat posed by Islamist radicalism.

Time and again, the spokesmen for these movements have told the world precisely what they intend. Time and again, the scant handful of Americans who bothered to take notice have dismissed what was said as the product of political alienation, as the consequence of economic marginalization, as a hangover of post-colonial insecurity or as tactical bluster.

No. These people mean exactly what they say, and they mean it for precisely the reasons they say they do. They genuinely believe in the extreme and often heretical variants of Islam to which they cleave, that faith guides their actions, and their public statements are expressions of that faith.

Time and again, though, we willfully have blinded ourselves to this fact, partly because modern minds balk at accepting what is essentially medieval reasoning at face value, and partly because it’s the conveniently amicable thing do to.

Rutten cites Ahmadinejad’s recent address to the UN as words worth listening to for their strongly and classically pre-World War II anti-Semitism [e.a.]:

“The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premier nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.

“This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.”

Rutten concludes:

When the delegates to the U.N. General Assembly applauded Ahmadinejad’s speech last week, and the American media passed over it in silence, this is the sentiment to which they gave their respective explicit and tacit approval.

Shame on them; shame on us.

Indeed.