Mark Steyn’s daily pre-election column is vintage Steyn today.

But in Botswana everyone voted on Wednesday, the last up-country results came in on Thursday, the ruling party conceded and the new guy was sworn in on Friday.

That’s a normal election in a normal country.

Meanwhile, back in the greatest country in the history of countries, in twenty-four hours we shall be embarking on the usual folderol offour-hour lines to vote, malfunctioning machines, burst water pipes, court injunctions to keep polls open or close them down (according to taste), pausing the count before it’s completed, and the GDP-boosting quadrennial spike in plywood sales as storekeepers in DC and elsewhere board up their windows.

And that’s if it’s a “normal” election by American standards.

Read the whole thing, wherein Steyn weaves together multiple stories drawn from our rapid-fire headlines.  The picture he paints is of the mess we’ve allowed our country to become since we elected a community organizer to the Presidency, and no matter who wins on Tuesday (or whenever), we have to take our country back.  As he states in the key point of the essay: “it’s hard to calibrate the precise point at which the soft totalitarianism turns, instantly, into hard, psychotic, murderous totalitarianism … you never know it’s time to break for the border until it’s too late.”