Downsizing American Expectations (4)~~Debating the Campaign Debates

The debate Wednesday was a “reset” of the presidential campaign.

~~ Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R,N.H.), Fox News Sunday

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

~~ Seneca

Luck is not always the residue of design, and Romney was lucky that the first debate concerned the economy . . . America can be . . . a society in which markets — the voluntary collaboration of creative individuals — allocate opportunity.

~~George Will, Romney hits a trifecta in Denver

 

If the debate can become an inflection point, a launching pad for the rest of the race, it won't be merely the end of the beginning of the general election campaign. It could become the beginning of the end of the failed Obama presidency. 

~~William Kristol, The Beginning of the End?

It is common knowledge that a politician would promise anything and everything just to secure the electorates’ votes.  A joke very popular in Philippine college campuses in the sixties I deem most appropriate to illustrate this popular belief.

 

The narrative goes: a politician in the campaign stomp pompously promised, “if I’m elected I’ll build you the most magnificent bridge you have ever seen in your lifetime.”  To which a heckler interjected: “but we don’t have any river hereabouts.”  Whereat the politician retorted, “I’ll build you an equally splendid river to go with it, you impertinent dolt.”

Unfortunately, “we the people” are more often than not taken in by every two-bit politician’s subterfuge and machinations.  Else, if such were not the case, no career politician would ever prosper on the taxpayers’ dime and retire from politics far wealthier than when he/she first entered the arena.  And there would have been far more politicians who would manage to earn the grade into being recognized and remembered as honorable statesmen, and/or stateswomen as the case may be.

Dictionary.com suggests that the labels politician and statesman may be deemed synonymous and interchangeable.  I strongly beg to disagree.  The simplest difference between the two is the statesman happens to be a politician with a conscience.  The statesman approaches governance and policy formulation with principled moorings.  On the other hand, the politician’s reckonings don’t go beyond expedience and leverage for future and more lucrative political gains.

 

Secondly, a statesman has the ability and intellectual fortitude to reach out for that much needed honorable compromise with the opposition to get one’s agenda implemented.  Pres. Obama bullied, bribed, and squandered the people’s money to get ObamaCare passed in Congress without a single vote from the opposition.

 

Colby Hall of mediaite.com, showcasing Pres. Obama’s statesmanship  skills, chronicled thus:

 

Mr. Obama had this to say about the GOP joining Democratic efforts for reform: “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” One can only imagine the imagery this comment will conjure for all parties involved.

 

The one factoid that was missed, nay, deliberately avoided noticing by everybody in pundit-land with the notable exceptions of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump was that Pres. Obama is a fraud.  He was built up by the media in 2008 as the “Manchurian Candidate,” and the nation had swallowed the goodies hook, line and sinker.

 

Contrary to the media narrative, I assert, contend and maintain that Barack Hussein Obama has been the dumbest individual to have disgraced the Oval Office.  Here is the compelling bill of circumstantial particulars:

 

1.           He is reduced to an incoherent blob when deprived of his teleprompter as demonstrated in last Wednesday’s debate;

2.           He spent reported $millions on a horde of lawyers to keep his college records~~transcripts, theses, term papers, etc. sealed off from the public;

3.           He is unique in being the President of Harvard Law Review without a single article, scholarly or otherwise, attributed to his by-line;

4.           He has never passed a budget in his first term because he could not persuade a single vote in Congress to support his agenda.

These are not hallmarks of leadership.  These are hallmarks of a loafer and a dolt.  He fiddled and hob-nobbed with celebrities in Las Vegas and Hollywood on campaign fund raising stomps while our sovereign territories were crushed and burnt in the four corners of the globe throughout the Islamic world.  How low can a President get before you recognize the symptoms and come forth with the proper diagnosis of the disease?

 

Contrary to liberal media spin, the debater who showed up last Wednesday night was the real unadulterated Barack Hussein Obama, a.k.a. Barry Soetoro, liberated from the protective cocoon of the Kool-Aid drinkers in the non-Fox media.  Sans the teleprompter, the Lord of the Realm proved to be indisputably as bare as the instant he was born, regardless of whether or not it was on United States territory.

 

The ultimate measure of a politician’s potential to evolve into a statesman is the way he handles the fallout of any debacle.  So far Pres. Obama has failed miserably this putrescence test, respecting last Wednesday’s debate.  Not only has he indulged ad nauseam in Argumentum ad hominem, as behooves a Chicago rabble rouser, he also had deployed the entire Democratic Party machine to foment at its basest abyss the politics of personal destruction.

Undoubtedly, this demeans the dignity of the Presidency as an institution.  Above and beyond that, it diminishes the pride and glory of history that has been the Idea of the United States of America. 

 

Considering that there are still two debates scheduled, for the sake of civility and to recalibrate his bearings, I beseech the President to heed the counsel of William Shakespeare in, Henry IV, Part II, to wit:

“Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Recalibration is absolutely necessary for the President shall be circumscribed by Agatha Reed’s standards for fairness in the movie “Goodbye, My Fancy” to “never play fair unless you respect the person you are dealing with.”  Ergo, as he continues to scornfully demonstrate his contempt for Gov. Romney in the campaign trail, his endless pontification on fairness would be reduced to an hideous exhibition of hypocrisy, putridly repugnant to a populace hungry for leadership.

 [Next~~ Downsizing American Expectations (5):

The Campaign Debates Part 2]

 

{Below catalogues remarks some in Pundit-Land has recorded for posterity on the first Presidential Debate as reflected in my short reading list}

 

 “. . . Political operatives say they hate oppo because they hate to lower the tone of the national discourse. The truth is, oppo is bad for business. The press goes into full Lascivious Puritan mode, spreads the dirt and then tries to nail the provider. When everyone knows a strategist won dirty, he becomes controversial . . .”

~~Peggy Noonan, Romney Deflates the President

 

“. . . Mr. Obama has skated by with platitudes, lies, misrepresentations and "cool," while the nation we love, still "the last best hope of earth," seemed to be sliding toward the drain.

“. . . Obama seems to be identifying a problem, except that his description is false. And if it were true, why did Obama do nothing about it when his party controlled both houses of Congress?”

~~Mona Charen, The Best Presidential Debate Performance

 

“America is not prospering economically. No matter what Obama says he's done, the facts are that personal income is down, good jobs are hard to get, the debt is north of $16 trillion, and everybody who has health insurance is paying higher premiums. And don't even ask about gas prices.”

~~Bill O’Reilly, The Debate Report Card

 

“It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. . . . With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.

“Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled against him — with a three-point rebuttal.”

~~Charles Krauthammer, Romney by two touchdowns

 

“As the president makes his case for four more years, he does so without emphasizing what he has accomplished or what he intends to do. Instead, he concentrates on the culture of personal celebrity.

 

“When backed into a corner, as in Wednesday’s debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney, he defaults to class warfare.

 

“If Obama wins re-election, he may claim a mandate to advance a class-based, redistributionist agenda — because that is exactly what he has run on.”

~~Salena Zito, Americans Still Believe In Our Unique Destiny

 

“The problem for Obama is not that his performance was disastrous, but rather that it was his normal workmanlike coasting. But this time, and for the first time, he was pitted against a skilled debater who had both the better argument and the better intellectual artillery to deliver it. . . . For Obama to win the next debate, Romney will have to be uncharacteristically bad, Obama will have to be uncharacteristically good, and the moderator will not only have to be engaged but also unashamedly hyper-partisan. All of the above can happen, but it is unlikely.”

~~Victor Davis Hanson,

The Problem Last Night Was Not Just Obama

 

“Sans teleprompter, he repeated the talking points of his television ads and, when Romney responded sharply, he had nothing to fall back on.

We saw the president who found it fitting to jet off to campaign in Las Vegas the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

. . .

Obama will surely perform better in his next two debates. Romney may not perform as well. But the first numbers suggest the firewall may be crumbling. We'll see if it holds.”

~~Michael Barone, Romney's Debate

Win Opens Cracks in Obama Firewall

Downsizing American Expectations (3): The Fallacy of Exit Strategy

 

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. . . . if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

~~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

~~Sir Winston Churchill,

Address to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940

 

Back when one of the most urgent national questions was whether to surge or not to surge our troop commitment in Afghanistan, President Obama publicly agonized over the issue of how to fulfill a campaign promise.  To wit, the “bad war” that was Iraq must end; the “good war” that was Afghanistan must be sustained.

 

Like the good Nobel Peace Prize Laureate that he is, he summarily withdrew from Iraq without leaving any vestiges of our investment in blood, lives and material resources that we could subsequently leverage to influence the next unfolding of events.  To add injury to insult, he deployed to Afghanistan a troop surge that was 33% the size of what the field commanders requested.  Simultaneously, he made the announcement to withdraw not only for the “surge” on a date-certain timetable, but also for the entire contingent.

 

In so doing, our deployment in Afghanistan was deprived of the element of surprise so valued by Sun Tzu for winning wars (emphasis added):

 

In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory. . . . Those who are skilled in producing surprises will win.

Above and beyond that, he ceded an undue advantage to the enemy who got the luxury of waiting out the announced schedule for withdrawal.  As Clint Eastwood astutely observed,

I think you've mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, "Why are you giving the date out now?  Why don't you just bring them home tomorrow morning?"

Recognizing the folly of the exercise, back then I commented in passing [c.f., p. 264 in chapter 20],

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

What was not sufficiently emphasized then was the basic fallacy integral to the template of war engagement adopted by the American policy-making establishment.  The conventional wisdom which evolved from the Vietnam debacle mandated that any commitment of forces abroad must be governed by a well-defined strategic objective, supported by some definite tactical missions necessary to attain the objectives, and an even more obsessively streamlined exit strategy.

Purged from the template was the notion of victory.  So we effectively went to war more obsessed with how to disengage from, than with how to prevail over the enemy.  With any kind of enemy, the mindset is faulty at best.  But when and where we are at war with the soldiers of the Quran, as we now are, Sir Winston Churchill had it on the money: “without victory there is no survival.”  The only acceptable exit strategy is total and complete victory.

 

That President Barack Hussein Obama has effectively vanished “victory” from the national lexicon except as pertains to his re-election campaign is yet an incontrovertible evidence of his immeasurable contempt for the intelligence and good sense of the American people.  Can the country really survive four more years of his medicine?   

In the movie, The Edge, Charles Morse, the character played by Anthony Hopkins, volunteered the statistics that a majority of people stranded in the wilds die of embarrassment.  They are embarrassed that they have put themselves into such a predicament that their very survival is at stake.  As a result, they forget to use the only faculty, viz., thinking, that could ensure their survival.   

Similarly, should President Obama get re-elected, the nation shall die of embarrassment that they can be so gullible.  In their reluctance to admit that they made a fool of themselves by electing him four years ago, they double down on their mistake and ignore the wise admonition of Clint Eastwood, to wit:

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you're libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let him go.

So beware America, the sanity you save shall definitely be your own.  It behooves to find a viable Exit Strategy from your own cognitive dissonance.

 

{Next: Downsizing American Expectations (4):

Debating the Campaign Debates}

Downsizing American Expectations (2): College Education, Redux

“Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.”

--President Barack Hussein Obama,

2012 Democratic National Convention Acceptance Speech

It used to be enshrined in the hallowed pantheons of conventional wisdom that as an American in America there are no formidable limits to what you can achieve as long as you set your mind to it.  This in a nutshell has been the traditional essence of the proverbial American Dream.

 

Ironically, while Pres. Obama aptly pointed to education as a valuable tool in pursuit of that dream, in the same teleprompter frame he denigrated the tool as nothing more than a gateway to mediocrity, the essence of “a middle class life.”  Pres. Obama being himself a highly educated man, I cannot divine for him to consciously diminish the value of higher education, per se. 

It therefore stands to reason that wittingly or unwittingly, he was setting the fetters that would circumscribe the domain over which the American Dream can be pursued without violating the unwritten protocols of “fairness,” one of the most invoked concepts by Pres. Obama himself.  He had given unmistakable notice that downsizing the American Dream is integral to the agenda of his second term.  This was the functional equivalent of the open microphone pledge of “flexibility” to Vladimir Putin when he

“told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that, after he is reelected, and never has to face the voters again, he will have the "flexibility" to make a deal with Russia on missile defense systems.”

There are compelling reasons for President Obama to advocate a damning down of the quality of college education, which in and of itself already desperately needs to be rescued from its less than sterling quality.  As Rush Limbaugh emphasized, in his ever so deliciously succinct patentable way, in order to get re-elected

“. . . Obama is trying to put together a majority coalition made up of the least-informed people in this country, and, in some cases, maybe the dumbest? He's not targeting the brains of our society. He may figure he has academia all wrapped up, but, I mean, his big electoral push is for the mental midgets in this country . . . He's really coalescing the Moron Vote. He's banking on the fact that of the universe of Americans who vote, that there's a winning majority of morons in there. . . .”

I have illustrated earlier elsewhere (c.f., e.g. pp. 220~221 & 284~285) the deplorable state of American education.  But in a somewhat different context William E. White of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in a provocatively titled piece proclaiming Education in America Serves No Purpose Today, went on to opine that:

 “. . . there is only one purpose for an education system in a republic: to educate citizens. Anything that distracts us from that singular objective is destructive to our children and the nation. . . .

 

“. . . Without active and informed citizens, the republic will fail. Over and over again the founding generation reminded themselves, and us, that an educated citizenry is the fuel -- the guarantee -- of a strong, vital republic. . . . But our twenty-first-century schools do everything but train our children to exercise their civic responsibilities. . . .”

 

My firsthand experience with American college education was limited to walking out midstream of an ESL (English as a Second Language) session in Columbia University, convinced that my skills in the language was far better than that of the instructor’s who was a Teaching Assistant of either an Indian or Pakistani descent, judging from his accent.  The event ended my attempt to land a berth at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory for a semester-specific Research Assistantship.  More importantly, it triggered my escape from the protective cocoon of academia into the rough and tumble of capitalism’s rat race in the open marketplace.

 

It was in this setting that I verified that the education I received before coming to this country was no slouch compared to what obtains in American colleges.  I interfaced with one graduate student from Brooklyn College finishing up her program for a Master’s degree in Education who asked me, on spying the book I was reading, “who, or what is Kant”?  The question was impressive because I was part of the first batch of 282 students in a just established state university in the Philippines where we were thought about the giants of Western Philosophy in the second semester.

 

I came to this country adequately educated after twelve years of sojourn in three government colleges, in Japan and the Philippines, splendidly spending other people’s money.  As a student, I was the recipient of one scholarship grant after another.  As a member of the faculty, I taught geophysical engineering with a relatively generous administrative operating budget of taxpayer funds, and a promise of ad valorem levy on nationwide gasoline sales to sustain my long term budgetary requirements. [C.f., chapter 1 pp. 5 ff at http://www.flirtingwithmisadventures.com/aboutthebook.htm].

 

Assuming that adulthood starts at age 20, (voting age was 21 when I left the Philippines in 1974) twelve years represent 25% of my adult life spent in colleges.  President Obama’s machinations aside, I claim to be sufficiently qualified to have an opinion about the value of a college education, in general regardless of the geographic and cultural setting. 

 

To wit, college education anywhere in the planet is designed to cater to people who don’t know what to do with their lives.  It serves as a staging domain to ease the growing pains of joining the society at large as a fully credentialed citizen member of the human race.  There is a long list of people who were hugely successful sans college education.  Bill Gates, Greg Norman, Rush Limbaugh readily come to mind to name a few.  They just were certain what to pursue and pursued it with passion from the get go.

Downsizing American Expectations

"It is dangerous to uphold freedom. That is the lesson we should take".
--Harry Roque, Law Professor, University of the Philippines

 

It is indeed a sad day in God’s green acres when a university lecturer in an erstwhile American colony exhibits more principled intestinal fortitude in defending the U.S. Bill of Rights than evinced by the White House and the Obama regime’s various tentacles of power from the State Department to the Justice Department. 

 

Prof. Roque, at the risk of antagonizing his employers and losing an ongoing gig on human rights, insists “during a lecture on constitutional rights . . . to teach his students about freedom of expression.”  It seems he understands better than our Lecturer on Constitutional Law in a President Obama that the First Amendment also protects the most dysfunctional expression of even the most idiotic and incoherent ideas, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt in the process for deeming it “insensitive,” Muslims definitely included.

 

The State Department puts out TV ads promoting by denunciation this so-called incendiary video. We spend borrowed money from China to proclaim that the United States government does not unconditionally support the Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution, especially if it offends Islam’s religious sensibilities.  Admittedly, this is par for the course for Liberal Democrats a.k.a. Progressives.  And some Americans want four more years of this regime? Go figure.

 

I can only conclude that either the pollsters are deliberately lying to promote an agenda of their own or the national polity has irretrievably gone dyslexic.

 

As I emphasized earlier elsewhere, [c.f., pp. 220~222 ff at http://www.flirtingwithmisadventures.com/orderthebook.htm]

 

“That Barack Hussein Obama ascended into the Oval Office is symptomatic of the political dyslexia that the country has sunk into, thanks in part to sustained assault on American educational institutions perpetrated by the so-called “Progressives,” that goes as far back as the turn of the last century, and the philosophical ideas of John Dewey, . . .

“The celebration of decadence and the sanctification of victimhood and dependency are two sides of the same currency coin which I dubbed as National Dyslexia. Not just in the context of literacy in particular, but in the context of perception in general, i.e., the difficulty if not outright failure to recognize and synthesize visual, spatial, and auditory relationships into a coherent gestalt, reliable and replicable perceptual representation of the outside world.”

 

That there are no “spontaneous” (to borrow the regime’s parlance) eruption of mass protests in the streets of Washington, DC and other metropolitan areas expressing outrage at the sight of the American Flag being burnt and trampled upon in the Islamic world, and demanding that the Obama regime, at the very least, honor its oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” has been proof positive that the Obama regime has successfully diminished the country’s expectation of what America can and cannot do.

 

It is a sad day in God’s creation when Old Glory is reduced to a groveling apology for what it used to proudly stand for by a constitutional scholar and community organizer to appease the sensibilities of his Islamic heritage.

 

[Next: Benefits of College Education, revisted]

Incompetence Bordering on Treason

 

 Most chances as begot of discontent

           Of others, prove best opportunities
           To probe the limits of your worth; else, vent
           Your umbrage at some worthless legacies:
           Such are the monuments of gross incompetence,
           Much shame well-hid in codes for else ill-hidden sins!

~~The Schuman-Spinoza Sonnets (C.f., p.140)

 

By its own admission, the Obama Regime was utterly clueless as to what ravaged the once awe-inspiring ethos of American sovereignty on the eleventh anniversary of the 11-Sep-2001 initial jihadist assault on American soil.  The effort to attribute the recent Egyptian and Libyan assaults on American territories to an obscure internet video non-sympathetic to Islam was pathetically long on chutzpah and short on credibility. 

That the regime even attempted to sell this narrative to the American people is yet another instance of the contempt that the Obama Regime holds vis-à-vis the intelligence and sensibilities of the American people.

Apparently, despite President Obama’s explicit claims to being sympathetic to the Muslim agenda because of his capacity for better resonance with Islamic sensibilities stemming from his father being a Muslim socialist and having spent part of his boyhood in Indonesia under the tutelage of his Muslim stepfather, the POTUS had not heard of Islamic Triumphalism.  He therefore could not even suspect that the jihadists would seek to celebrate the anniversary of their initial 11-Sep-2001 exploits with another successful assault on American sovereignty. 

He was too pre-occupied in his mission to keep his job.  He did not even bother to reinforce the security measures around our domains abroad.  This gross negligence took place notwithstanding explicit warnings from no less a reliable source than the Muslim Brotherhood.

Every American worth a grain of salt should seriously and deliberately ask: if President Obama can so audaciously flaunt about his blatant disregard for the security of the country at the height of his campaign for re-election, to which direction would he stir the ship of state once he gets re-elected?  What exactly was the nature and scope of the flexibility he pledged to Putin to be at his disposal during a second Obama term?

When the traditional media painstakingly avoided asking this question they abandoned their once exalted role as the voice of the national conscience.  They effectively became protectors and enablers of the recalcitrant mendacity that characterizes the Obama White House.

Thus it came to pass that after the Cairo Embassy perimeter was breached, the best response the regime could deliver was fifteen hours of deafening silence.  This was the historical equivalent of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt down.  In marine ballistics parlance, this was the logistical equivalent of rigging a torpedo for delayed detonation.

Americans should be weary and apprehensive of both the historical and the logistical parallels.  They should be acutely cognizant that the decadent recalcitrance of Nero was a prelude to the demise not only of just the Caesar Dynasty but also, and more significantly, of the grandeur that was the Roman Empire.

Likewise, deploying a delayed torpedo to a deliberately camouflaged target for the sake of confusing the American public respecting your real intentions, or to disguise the fact that you are absolutely clueless on what you need to do or what you are doing can backfire and reduce the ship of state to smithereens.  The fallout of such devastation would make the noonday landscape of a nuclear winter a veritable vivacious inspiration Shangri-La.

It behooves to emphasize that the targeted killing of Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi represents a qualitative escalation of the Islamic jihadists’ war against us.  The atrocities of 11-Sep-2001, horrific as they might have been, were vastly and loosely targeted assaults designed to inflict the maximum number of casualties.  In contrast, the Benghazi affair meant that the enemy’s specific tracking and targeting capabilities for high value assets prevailed over our own counter measures. 

It does not bode well for America.  If we continue to tolerate the myth that this was all provoked by a YouTube video that hardly anybody has seen, it would amount to a self-deception bordering on treason.

Drawing the Lines

The lines have been drawn; the battle has been re-joined.  Let the fight and the fun begin.

It is a battle between the takers and the makers, between the blamers and the dreamers, between the wreckers and the fixer-uppers, between Peter Keating and Ellsworth M. Toheey on the one hand and Dominique Francon and Howard Roark on the other.  If anyone out there does not have any clue what I’m talking about, I implore you, come November 6th, to please go fly a kite or go trout fishing.  Don’t bother going to the voting booth.  By being so clueless, you shall have forfeited your rights and privileges of citizenship, you are a disgrace to the idea of America, and you are not qualified to vote.

I of course refer to the GOP Romney/Ryan ticket.  It is a fitting tribute to the political acumen and decorum of Gov. Romney that in response to the most putridly vile barrage of falsehoods, calumnies, distractions and irrelevance hurled against his person by the Obama campaign, he elected to emphasize the difference between the Obama regime’s machinations and what is needed to revitalize the nation’s economic vigor by picking a veritable budget guru of financial wizardry as his running mate in Cong. Paul Ryan.

What the New York Times (c.f., http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120812 ) have failed to grasp is that for every non-inflationary dollar in the government coffers, a commensurate profit in the private sector has to be realized.  Taxes paid by private enterprises are the only legitimate source of government wealth.  You simply cannot bankrupt the private sector and expect the national economy to be viable.  Every dollar the government prints that is not backed by productive output in goods and/or services serves only to undermine the long term viability of the national economy.

By presenting the nation with a Romney/Ryan ticket, the choice is between plodding along as a country of government dependents or of self-sufficient productive citizens.  Good luck, America.  As I emphasized earlier elsewhere, cf, p. 262 at http://www.flirtingwithmisadventures.com/orderthebook.htm

“. . . without any exception, any nation invariably deserve the leadership that happens unto them, regardless of the process (or errors) they come by it.”