Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama.

[T]he difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.
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I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

He concludes by pleading, "One only wishes that the election could be over now" so as to spare us further from "a low, dishonest campaign." I couldn't agree more.

Meanwhile, McCain's amazing implosion continues as his poll numbers seemingly sink with each passing day. What was a 6-8 point deficit now looks more like a 10-12 point gap from Obama's lead.

That said Obama still faces an uphill battle given racism, which could amount to 6% of his lead, and the newly reported evidence of massive voter registration purging occurring in key states. But even if Obama were to overcome these obstacles and land in the White House, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman reminds us that the next four years will be quite despicable.

Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage.
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We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.
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What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

It's not a stretch to state that for reasons mentioned above, Obama is risking his life by seeking to become president -- a notion that is incredibly horrific but unfortunately something that cannot be dismissed out of hand.