We never did get the text message from Barack Obama about his vice presidential pick. Both my wife and I had spent all of last Friday checking our phones every few minutes in vain. Friday night we watched CNN’s talking heads speculate for hours before we finally gave up and went to bed.

As we woke up Saturday to the news that it was, indeed, Joe Biden, we shrugged our shoulders and went along with our business. Biden is a good man and will be a great vice president. But we were each hoping for a more exciting pick.

I had my heart set on John Kerry or Al Gore, so that the election would become even more of a referendum on the Bush Administration. Picking Kerry as vice president would have focused the debate on the one question that really matters: Do we want four more years of war, the second Great Depression and suffering, or do we want a change?

History will show Kerry to have been prescient when he said during the debates four years ago that another Bush Administration would give us “more of the same.” And we’ve gotten it. More endless war, more people forced into poverty, more record corporate profits and more record deficits.

In 2004, we needed a leader who would stop the disastrous Bush agenda and move the country in the right direction. The situation is so bad now that we need another FDR to rescue democracy at home and abroad.

If McCain is elected, the same political hacks who have been urging war, corporate welfare and bailout plans for billionaires will stay right where they are, pulling the puppet strings and moving us even more towards a fascist state.

I fear it may actually be too late to turn the country around, even with courageous leaders like Obama and Biden in the White House. The corruption is so deep and the cancer so metastasized that we may have to work things out in the form of a good old-fashioned civil war and Soviet-style breakup.

Give the radical Republicans their Red State nation, where they can punish abortion with the death penalty for women and doctors, where millionaires can enjoy legalized slavery instead of the de facto slavery they now have and where Rush Limbaugh’s philosophy of nationalism combined with heavy prescription drug abuse can be a way of life.

Our only chance of saving the nation now is to purge the system of the criminals who’ve been running things for the last eight years, put them on trial and lock them in gulags. In order to do that, we have to have a sound strategy to win this election without the benefit of the rigged voting machines that allowed Bush to gain power.

Let’s start by doing a Swift Boat number on John McCain’s war record. Sure, we all know that he miraculously survived torture in a Vietnamese prison. But let’s take a page from the Karl Rove playbook and turn that around.

Did you know that McCain openly collaborated with the Communist government of North Vietnam and made many anti-American statements while in prison? That he admitted to deliberately killing innocent civilians during the war? And did you know that those statements were in direct violation of American law?

The Web site vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com has transcripts of many of those interviews, during which McCain made many statements that gave material aid and comfort to the enemy.

I’m not saying McCain was a traitor, only that his military record is not dissimilar to John Kerry’s and could be subject to the same misstatements and lies that Kerry endured four years ago. The problem is that Democrats have heretofore refused to lie, distort and cheat in order to win elections.

America will have to make a choice in the next two months whether it wants to heal its wounds and move forward as a respected leader of nations or whether we want to continue to lead the planet into destruction, famine and poverty.

It will not be an easy choice. There are many people who are perfectly happy with invading foreign lands. A lot of people have no trouble whatsoever with the response to Hurricane Katrina.

In January, Lord willing, the Bush-Cheney cartel will voluntarily surrender power and allow a freely elected democratic government to take control. Whether that new government will represent an actual shift or continue its current crash course with the apocalypse is up to us.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.