For some time now I have been trying to compose a post called “A Time for Choosing 2008″ in homage of Reagan’s famous Goldwater speech. I wanted to clearly define the choice we are facing Tuesday. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get it to work out right. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Kyle-Anne Shiver’s piece on The American Thinker Blog tonight.

In it, she very perfectly reminds us what’s really at stake here as millions of Americans prepare to lunge toward this “novelty” called socialism. She first deals with the issue of socialism’s novelty. Some folks, especially those my age and under lack an education in what socialism really was.

Earlier this year I read a column in which the writer rejoiced because the word, “socialism,” is no longer a scary bogeyman to Americans. When I Googled the writer and learned he was only 31 and graduated from Columbia, it wasn’t hard to figure out how he got it all wrong.

Since he had clearly been taught our “revised” history — the one that glosses over the 100,000,000-grave killing fields of the communists and makes high drama out of the “sufferings” of the Hollywood blacklisted and the McCarthy hearings — he didn’t have a clue about what actually happened. This pitiful, Ivy-League indoctrinated writer had reached the false conclusion that Americans used to be scared down to their woolies of the big bad commies, but weren’t anymore.

After explaining the difference in repugnance and fear, pointing out that

Americans weren’t scared of socialism, silly. They found it viscerally repugnant.

she says:

And the reasons for loathing socialism are as clear as the nose on anyone’s face.

No fully-grown human being with a single ounce of self-respect ever wants to be taken care of by others. No person with dignity will tolerate being told what to do, what to think, how to work or how to be an “acceptable” person. No free man or woman will tolerate the loss of liberty in exchange for material comfort.

Many generations of Americans vehemently rejected these notions over and over again, not out of fear, but out of the kind of visceral loathing that makes a normal person wretch, gag and grab for his religion and his guns.

She then deconstructs Obama’s promises and the natural end of his socialist policies.

Consider only these 3 areas of Obama’s collective plan for the redemption of American society:

• Obama wants to use a lot of taxpayer money to offer education to children from birth through college. Free to mommies and daddies. On the taxpayer dollar, rather than on the parents’.

The socialist lure: Give the state your children and the state will relieve you of the burden of educating them and teaching them values and knowledge. Parents, you’re off the hook.

The result: The state then makes all the decisions about what your children will be taught, how they will be brought up, what knowledge is important and what is not.

• Obama wants to bring the federal government’s involvement into healthcare to an unprecedented level.

The socialist lure: Give the state your money and the power to enforce healthcare for all, and the collective state will relieve you of your responsibility to provide this service for yourselves and your children.

The result: The state makes healthcare decisions. Healthcare is then rationed according to need, as decided by the state.

• Obama wants to enshrine positive rights to all citizens that include a guaranteed “living wage” to all regardless of individual work.

The socialist lure: No citizen will be without the means to live a fairly equitable life regardless of individual delinquency or extra effort.

The result: The poor and unfortunate become wards of the state and vastly increase in number. Work incentives plummet.

• Obama wants our politics to be nice, not mean or divisive. He wants unity. He wants us all to get along.

The socialist lure: Peace. Harmony. Goodwill to all. No good guys and bad guys. All will be nice and we will sing Kumbayah in perfect harmony all over the world.

The result: Anyone who dissents, who finds error, who sees things differently will be silenced. This is the only way collectives ever enforce their ideas of “unity.”

She concludes with the same hopes I have:

So, Obama got his ideas by palling around with radical communist revolutionaries of the 60s. Obama chose these radicals as mentors and friends. Obama’s own parents were from the same mold as well. Happy socialists all.

John McCain spent a good deal of his adult life with radical socialists too. Five and a half years to be precise. Only McCain got his education on the merits of communism from inside one of their “utopian” cells under force.

Perhaps never before have Americans had such an easy choice for our next President. Here’s hoping we’ve raised more freedom-loving patriots than fools.