Come on. Give an old man half a chance.

I speak for myself as well as for John McCain.

No more sneering talk of the sort we’ve heard lately concerning McCain’s ineptitude when it comes to computers — an ineptitude he’s striving to overcome.

There had better be something to this “divinely anointed” business, because if there isn’t, Barack Obama is setting himself up for the biggest political spill in recorded history — all the ways down the slopes of Olympus to whatever gunk lies below.

History’s humongous wheel turns and turns and turns again. Over time, mud and sludge accumulate on even the sprucest institutions. Take the 500-year-old Anglican family of churches, Christianity’s third-largest, after Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy.

“Nation of whiners”? I don’t know how you flesh out with mathematical exactitude ex-Sen. Phil Gramm’s famous assertion of last week concerning how we talk about the economy.

“New and Not Improved,” avers everyone’s favorite left-wing establishment newspaper, the New York Times, in an editorial page headline. The reference isn’t to John McCain. It’s to Barack Obama, whom the Times’ editorial writers and columnists have been suiting up for sainthood.

I interrupt the presidential campaign to bring you an important question:

Can we get serious here? About hyper-serious things?

Words not to remember in November 2008.

1. Wow — it’s Historic Election time!

Well, maybe, but also maybe not. The media always like to jump the gun on this “historic” stuff. We only learn what’s actually historic in looking back.

Frankly, some American with minimal regard for political correctness should consider chasing the so-and-so down the street, cracking an instrument of encouragement associated with Indiana Jones, crying: “Outta here, you bum! And don’t come back!”

As Archie Bunker, in “All in the Family,” used to affirm, “Nixon knows something I don’t know.” It was both a comical and a semilogical way of standing behind the President’s much-berated Vietnam policies.

Marriage isn’t just the chief underpinning of society or, for that matter, a raunchy comedy routine. In the minds of easily the great majority of Americans, marriage is an institution reflective of divine intent concerning human relationships and duties.

What was her name again — the woman in the pants suit, running for president? Never mind. The business before the house is getting ready for the most rumbustious race for the presidency since the one we keep hearing about with those interminable rehashes of 1968.

The Hillary Clinton-John McCain gambit on sky-high gasoline prices — suspend federal gasoline taxes for the summer — is a tactic sensible voters might constructively latch onto.

Politics is crazier even than we sometimes think. Half the time, it seems, instead of addressing issues of great solemnity with the attention they deserve — foreign foes, energy supplies, government overspending — we talk endlessly about ... would you believe, Jeremiah Wright?

Over in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama was saying of Hillary Clinton, “She seems to have a habit of saying whatever it is that folks want to hear.” And Clinton was saying of Obama, “He has sent out mailers, he has run ads, misrepresenting what I have proposed.”

Here comes the Pope, whose disposition for bad news, one may hope, is a strong one, inasmuch as the U.S. media keep dishing out the bad tidings. The media theme is that, whatever else His Holiness may find here, in addition to an endless diet of presidential campaign news, he will find a flock looking askance at him.

The sound bite presidential campaign of Barack Obama — working to transform itself into the sound bite presidency of Barack Obama — delivers a puzzling judgment on the Iraq war. It is that the war, to quote Obama, has “made the American people less safe.”

The emerging theme is regulation, as in, don’t we need more of it? Democrats certainly think we do.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to overhaul the regulatory structure for financial institutions gives Democrats a vested interest in disliking it, or appearing to anyway, on account of its birthplace — the Bush administration.

It being a free country and all, no one has to have a “conversation” he doesn’t want to have, a fact that explains our long-standing non-conversation on race: the one we’re going to continue not having, never mind the pundits and Barack Obama.

There is perhaps one advantage worth noting in having a long, looong presidential campaign: You get to see the candidates react to a variety of circumstances. Though, from Barack Obama’s angle, that’s not precisely an advantage.

The joke’s on the jokesters — the late-night comics punching away at John McCain for the unforgivable offense of having attained his three score and 10. (For kids, that’s a reference to a really, really old book called the Bible, and a “score,” guys, is 20.)

We may not know precisely, we Americans, what we want the next president to do about energy prices. What we shouldn’t want him — or her — to do is as plain as a gasoline pump primed to deliver at 3-bucks-plus per gallon.

God only knows how it came to this. Just 78.4 percent of Americans currently profess affiliation with a Christian body. And a quarter of Americans ages 18-29 disclaim membership in any religion. Meanwhile, 12.1 percent of adults describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” All this while Mormons and Muslims outbreed everyone else.

The Obama Express hurtles through the night, flattening skeptics and, with especial relish, Clintonites. But the Express's present fuel -- hope and change and whoop-de-do -- is going to run short once the campaign, not against Hillary, but against a generally united Republican Party, commences.

Americans will be learning a lot about themselves as six Islamist terror “suspects” (I guess we have to say, technically) held at Guantanamo Bay finally face trial on murder and war crimes charges connected with 9/11.

The impression takes root and grows. Say! The Democrats could lose this one. Could lose big, in fact.

On which premise no one should stake even his subprime mortgage. But boy, oh, boy, this Clinton-Obama thing, expanded now to compass the Kennedys and their mystique, must strike Republicans as the work of Providence.

Politicians tend to get serious when the economy turns suddenly and snarls. Well, semi-serious — which isn’t bad for people whose livelihood depends on saying things intended mostly to leave an impression.

So, why not a woman for president? Why not a black? Why not a sclerotic, left-handed tin-typist from Fargo, N.D. — so long as the individual in question served our national purposes while displaying the all-too-rare attributes of intelligence, judgment, decisiveness and patriotism?

Such is the state of modern society that the U.S. Supreme Court gets the job of deciding how much pain the victim of capital punishment feels — never mind what kind of pain the victim’s victims may have felt.

In the Atheist Age — the age of Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman and others whose verbal assaults on God bedeck the best-seller lists — it might seem barren to celebrate a stable, a star and a baby, these being the central figures of Christmas.

I’ve just now figured it out — the right conservative candidate for these confused and disturbing times. I’m voting for Barry Goldwater, and nothing can stop me. Save — I admit — the inconvenience of Barry’s residence in a venue other than the land of the living.